Forsaking Facebook - one slap at a time

LONDON: An Indian-origin computer programmer in the US claims to have increased his productivity after he hired a woman to slap him in the face every time she catches him looking at Facebook.

Maneesh Sethi placed an advertisement on the classified website Craigslist to recruit someone willing to monitor what he was looking at on his laptop, Daily Mail reported.

The computer expert and writer, from San Francisco, now pays a female employee five pounds ($8) an hour for striking him in the face whenever she spots him wasting time on social media.

Sethi claims the unusual motivational system has helped him boost his productivity from just 35 percent to around 98 percent in a working day.

Writing on his blog, Sethi said he felt embarrassed after calculating he wasted around 19 hours every week looking at Facebook or other social media websites.

-IANS

New, an app that can hack your smartphone camera and spy on you

London: US military experts have demonstrated a new smartphone app that can turn your mobile's camera into a spying tool for cyber criminals, secretly beaming images of your house, chequebook and other private information back to them.

The software can even build up a 3D model of your house, from which the hackers can inspect your rooms, potentially gleaning information about valuables in your home, calendar entries as well as spying on you.

The app 'PlaiceRaider' was created by US military experts at Naval Surface Warfare Center in Crane, Indiana, to show how cybercriminals could operate in the future, the Daily Mail reported.

The creators even demonstrated how they could read the numbers of a cheque book when they tested the Android software on 20 volunteers.

As long as the app could be installed on the users phone, it can instantly begin beaming back images from the phone when it senses the right conditions, and software on the other end can then re-construct maps of the visited room.

The team gave their infected phone to 20 individuals, who did not know about the malicious app, and asked them to continue operating in their normal office environment.

The team said they could glean vital information from all 20 users, and that the 3D reconstruction made it much easier to steal information than by just using the images alone.

Researcher Robert Templeman said their app can run in the background of any smartphone using the Android 2.3 operating system.

Through completely opportunistic use of the phone's camera and other sensors, PlaceRaider constructs rich, three dimensional models of indoor environments.

"Remote burglars can thus "download" the physical space, study the environment carefully, and steal virtual objects from the environment (such as financial documents, information on computer monitors, and personally identifiable information)," researchers said.

PlaiceRaider will silently take photographs, recording the time, location and orientation due to the sensors within most modern smartphones.

It will then delete any blurred or dark shots, before sending the rest back to a central server, which can reconstruct the user's room, based on information such as phone orientation.

Then the hacker can explore the user's property at will - for instance, scanning the room for calendars, private details on computer screens, and cheque-books or card details.

"We implemented on Android for practical reasons, but we expect such malware to generalise to other platforms such as iOS and Windows Phone," Templeman said.

-PTI

Twitter guide: Express yourself in 140 characters

Users of Twitter, the ultimate medium in succinct social interaction, have been coming up with some creative ways to express themselves in 140 characters or less. Below is a guide to some of the many terms and symbols you might encounter on the microblogging site.

Using the @ symbol

So you have set up your Twitter account, chosen a username and Twitter handle -- the name that is preceded with a "@" symbol (@twitter, for example) -- and you can get ready to send your first tweets. While tweets without the "@" symbol join the stream of millions of tweets being sent around the world, those with the symbol can be directed to specific people or lists of people. For example, to express one's love of Lady Gaga to the artist herself, one could type "@ladygaga I love your music" -- though the "@username" can be inserted anywhere within the tweet. To direct a message to more than one person simply use more than one "@" symbol -- "@ladygaga, @justinbieber I love your music" for example.

To check the celebrity you are tweeting is really who they claim to be look for the "tick" symbol next to the account name which indicates Twitter has verified the account; note regular Twitter users do not have this symbol next to their account.

Joining in with #

Want to join in with a conversation on Twitter? Then the hashtag (#) is your friend. The # ties tweets together around a common topic, allowing users to follow all the tweets about a certain topic. For example, if #LadyGaga were trending and one wished to join in with this trend, one would use the hashtag followed by the message -- for example "#LadyGaga nominated for an EMA." Twitter has a constantly changing list of the top ten trending topics along the left hand side of the site, many of which uses the # symbol and typically reflect current news topics or trends.

Basic abbreviations

DM vs. RT

DM and RT are probably the two most commonly used Twitter abbreviations, DM stands for direct message and RT for retweet. Sending a direct message makes the conversation private between two Twitter users and text shared in this way is not visible in the Twitter stream. In order to send a DM both users must be following each other. A retweet is a way a sharing tweets that you find interesting. Users can retweet other users regardless of whether or not they follow each other.

More advanced abbreviations

TBH

Those familiar with text message or IM speak are probably aware that "TBH" stands for To Be Honest and is typically used to express an opinion; the acronym is also popular among Twitter users.

OH

OH stands for "overheard" and is typically used by Twitter users to refer to an anonymous source; for example: "OH @ladygaga drops song with @justinbieber #exciting" (she hasn't).

+1

This spillover from Google+ is used on Twitter as one would use a "like" on Facebook, in that it indicates approval for a tweet or piece of news.

|

| is typically used to separate out statements in Tweets or to separate the retweeters' comments from the tweet they are retweeting; for example "Can't believe this | link to article."

A comprehensive guide to Twitter acronyms was published by thenextweb.com

-HT

Google Play now allows Indian developers to charge for apps

New Delhi: Smartphone apps are serious business, though developers of Android apps were left in limbo. In India, developers were only allowed to publish free apps, and this had limited the potential for innovative apps because of lack of incentive.

Recently, India has made it in to Google's official list of countries where developers can register as certified Google Checkout merchants, thus allowing Indian developers to put out paid apps.

"The move was overdue for some time now," said Ashish Sinha, founder of Pluggd.in, a website focused on local start-ups. "This will pave the way for creating business models around innovative Apps. Android is big in the Indian smart devices space, and this will help fuel development of the localised Apps, too."

P R Rajendran, Director of Next Wave Multimedia, a Chennai based company that has published more than ten apps on both Apple iTunes as well as Google Play, said, "We have lived with this condition for some time now where we literally run two companies, and are subject to dual taxation". He added, "This is a welcome move on the part of Google."

So far, Indian developers needed to go to a country where Google Checkout merchants are allowed, such as the US, and register a local bank account in the name of a US resident, in order to sell apps on the Google Play Store.

Google has been on a roll in India, with its recent launch of services that were previously unavailable in the country. Earlier this month, Google launched its voice guided turn-by-turn Navigation service in India. Google Maps Navigation makes good use of the long-standing features of Google Maps for mobile. The features include powerful Google search and voice search capabilities, which allow users to find local destinations by typing or speaking an address or business name.

Voice search on Google Maps Navigation is only available in English yet. Google’s search tools go a distance in assisting the user. For instance, ambiguous queries and words that are misspelled are corrected and clarified without requiring the user to enter an exact address, and the optimal route from origin to destination is quickly calculated.

Importantly here, although Google Maps app itself is a free download from Google Play and the access to navigation isn’t charged for either, the Google Maps app does require an Internet connection and users are responsible for any mobile data charges they incur while using the app.

Speaking at the launch of these services, Darren Baker, Product Manager for Google Maps, said, "Our goal in developing Google Maps is to provide users with the most comprehensive and accurate online maps in every country, and to share the features and benefits of Google Maps as widely as we can."

-IBN Live