Want to contact a stranger on Facebook? Pay $1

NEW DELHI: Several months after Facebook started testing promoted status messages, the social networking website on Friday said it will start "a small experiment" around paid messages.

In a statement posted on Facebook, the website said that it is making several changes to efficiently deliver messages that Facebook users get. As part of the new measures, it is rolling out an experimental feature that will allow a Facebook user to send a priority message to other user even if he is not a 'friend' at a nominal charge of $1. The current rate for the message is not final and Facebook may change it in future.

The service will be initially available only in the US and number of messages that can be send to a user will be capped at one per week.

"We've heard that messages people care about may not always be delivered or may go unseen in the Other folder," the website noted in the statement.

It then explained that currently there are two kind of mail boxes Facebook users have. The Inbox is where they get messages from their friends while the Other is where the messages from strangers go.

"Facebook Messages is designed to get the most relevant messages into your Inbox and put less relevant messages into your Other folder. We rely on signals about the message to achieve this goal," the website noted in its statement. "Today we're starting a small experiment to test the usefulness of economic signals to determine relevance. This test will give a small number of people the option to pay to have a message routed to the Inbox rather than the Other folder of a recipient that they are not connected with."

The feature can also be used by the Android users of Facebook Messenger. To use Facebook Messenger on Android, users don't have to be a member of the social networking website.

Earlier Facebook had started an experimental feature that allowed people to promote their status message so that it reaches all their friends. Currently the feature is available to select users in several countries and costs $7 per status message.

-Javed Anwer, TNN

Wireless phone charging in cars planned by Toyota

Charging your smartphone while driving could soon be a simple process needing no cables or adaptors, but using a special wireless mat.

Toyota plans to introduce the system for mobile devices in 2013 in its new Avalon sedan, using a charging standard known as Qi (pronounced "chee").

Chrysler wants to offer a similar option in its Dodge Dart model.

One analyst told the BBC the feature was likely to become mainstream in the months to come.

The wireless charging option will be a part of Toyota's $1,950 (£1,200) "technology package", said to be available from next spring.

To charge a device, a driver will simply have to place it on the mat, though the handset has to have a Qi protocol integrated in it.

Currently, Qi wireless charging is supported by 34 mobile phone models, including the LG Google Nexus 4, Nokia Lumia 920 and HTC Windows Phone 8X.

There are also add-on systems for other smartphones.

"Pioneering the ability to charge with no wires or connectors by simply putting devices in the car console is an intuitive innovation which reflects Toyota's continuing commitment to improve the consumer experience," said Randy Stephens, chief engineer of Toyota Avalon, in a statement.

Magnetic induction

Qi works via magnetic induction that involves transmitting energy over a magnetic field.

Inductive charging plates have been around for several years, and have been integrated in some mobile phones, such as the Palm Pre.

But in 2008, the Wireless Power Consortium, which has more than 100 members, including Samsung, Nokia, HTC, Motorola Mobility and Sony, signed an agreement for an open standard for wireless power, called Qi.

This means that any Qi-enabled handset is compatible with any Qi charger, regardless of the brand.

General Motors announced in 2011 plans to introduce a pad using magnetic induction in its Chevrolet Volt, but so far it has not happened.

An Israeli firm, Powermat Technologies, is currently placing charging pads for mobile phones in numerous public venues around the US, including Starbucks.

There are companies investigating wireless charging via induction for electric cars, which works by having a charging pad on the floor of your garage.

The technology is finally becoming mainstream, according to Shaun Collins, an analyst at consultancy firm CCS Insight.

"Wireless charging is emerging after some years in the wilderness, and is now being adopted [more and more]," he told the BBC.

"The technology is starting to take on much more prominence with the devices [such as the latest] Nokia Windows 8 phone that has wireless charging in it.

"There's a slight dilemma for mobile devices though, as we're constantly striving to get thinner devices but by adding an infrastructure inside a device can compromise the thinness."

-BBC News

7 tips to create secure passwords

It is absurdly easy to get hacked. Chances are most people will get hacked at some point in their lifetime. The best they can do is delay the inevitable by avoiding suspicious links, even from friends, and manage their passwords. How do you come up with different, hard-to-crack passwords for every website and still remember them all? Here were some tips from Jeremiah Grossman, chief technology officer at WhiteHat Security, and Paul Kocher, who runs Cryptography Research.

Forget the dictionary

If your password can be found in a dictionary, you might as well not have one. Hackers will often test passwords from a dictionary or aggregated from breaches. If your password is not in that set, hackers will typically move on.

One site one password

While cracking into someone's professional profile on LinkedIn might not have dire consequences, hackers will use that password to crack into, say, e-mail , bank or brokerage account where more valuable data is stored.

Come up with passphrase

The longer your password, the longer it will take to crack. A password should ideally be 14 characters or more in length if you want to make it uncrackable by an attacker in less than 24 hours. Consider a passphrase, such as a favorite movie quote, song lyric, or poem, and string together only the first one or two letters of each word in the sentence.

Just jam on keyboard

For sensitive accounts, Grossman says he will randomly jam on his keyboard, intermittently hitting the Shift and Alt keys, and copy the result into a text file which he stores on an encrypted, password-protected USB drive. "That way, if someone puts a gun to my head and demands to know my password, I can honestly say I don't know it."

Store passwords securely

Do not store your passwords in your in-box or on your desktop. If malware infects your computer , you're toast. Grossman stores his password file on an encrypted USB drive for which he has a long, complex password that he has memorized. He keeps password hints, not the actual passwords, on a scrap of paper in his wallet.

Ignore security questions

There is a limited set of answers to questions like "What is your favorite colour?" Hackers use that information to reset your password and take control of your account. So, enter a password hint that has nothing to do with the question itself.

Use different browsers

Grossman says, "Pick one browser for 'promiscuous' browsing: online forums, news sites, blogs — anything you don't consider important. When you're online banking or checking e-mail , fire up a secondary web browser, then shut it down." That way, if your browser catches an infection when you accidentally stumble on an x-rated site, your bank account is not necessarily compromised.

-Nicole Perlroth, New York Times

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