Know.......How your email gets hacked

Joseph Bonneau, a security researcher at the University of Cambridge, insists that attackers can break into at least 1 in every 80 accounts if they get three chances to guess answers.

"The numbers were worse than we thought," the BBC quoted him as saying.

He recommends webmail firms to replace simple answers with more complex tests to confirm a person's identity.

Bonneau teamed up with Mike Just and Greg Matthews, from the University of Edinburgh, to check how frequently attackers can be successful in answering security questions.

The researchers claim that hackers are successful in getting answers to security-check questions correct every 80 accounts, as information people use as answers are often publicly accessible, such as US marriage and birth records which were viewable online for a long time.

He said, "We measured how hard it was to guess answers. Asking what was the name of someone's first grade teacher seems like a secure choice. The problem is that there may be many teachers out there named Mrs Smith."

Bonneau warns that cyber criminals maintain a long lists of e-mail addresses to attack. He added, "They have the big list and most of them they will not get enough access to.

"Webmail was never really designed for security but it is taking on a pretty important security role. Once you have an e-mail account you can take over a lot of other things with it."

However, the researchers believe Webmail firms can tighten their security. Bonneau explained, "They can make guessing a lot harder if they shape the answers that they allow. Such as not letting you register Smith as an answer."

“The chance of guessing three things simultaneously is pretty low.” Websites such as Google, are already sending reset passwords by text message in a bid to protect the account of its users.

Intel Corp has released its newest server chips

Intel Corp has released its newest server chips, as it seeks to maintain its dominance over rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc, and prepare

for an expected rise in demand.The new microprocessors, designed to power both servers and high-end desktop PCs, are the first of Intel's server chips featuring smaller transistors that have helped the company's laptop and desktop chips push stronger performance while eking out better energy efficiency.

Intel also built in security features the company says can encode and decipher files much faster, effectively removing the "encryption tax" or computer performance lost due to protecting files.

The chips will be released under the Xeon product line for servers, and Core i7 for desktop computers, which Intel hopes will gain traction particularly with the entertainment and video game markets.But the biggest opportunity rests with servers, said Intel's general manager of server marketing, Boyd Davis, where an estimated one-third of the market is running on chips made more than four years ago.

Although roughly nine out of 10 of the world's servers contain an Intel brain according to IDC, they are not the only ones vying for those potential server sales.Patrick Patla, general manager of AMD's server division, said the company's newest chips will also offer increases in speed pushed by a dramatic redesign.

"There will be no single bigger performance jump in the history of Opteron than the jump we are going to take from 2009 to 2010," he said, referring to the server chip's product name.AMD's newest chips are due in the next few weeks. It remains to be seen how they will match up against Intel's latest chips.

Data transfer to hit ultra-high speed.

High-speed data communication isn't so speedy by the time it reaches your video player or smartphone. Lasers may send information flying in tiny bursts of light through optical fibers across oceans and cities. But you're still in the electronic slow lane when you're transferring high-definition videos or other large files between devices.

Then the content travels only at the rate permitted by the USB or other cord. But soon, some data exchanges between consumer gadgets may travel at the higher rate of fiber optics, letting people transfer a Blu-ray version of “Gone With the Wind,” for example, or the complete family photo archive in less than a minute.

Later this year, Intel will introduce its Light Peak fiber optic link, in a bid to replace USB and other electrical cables that now connect computers with digital cameras, music players, smartphones and dozens of other devices, said Jason Ziller, Intel's director for the optical input-output program office.

Light Peak optical cable technology, which includes computer chips and miniature lasers, will be available to manufacturers later this year, he said, for installation in products next year. Prices are not yet available from Intel.

The first version of the optical cable will transmit 10 gigabits per second of data both ways, and is expected to scale to 100 gigabits a second in the next decade, Ziller said. By contrast, the high-bandwidth USB 2.0 cables now in wide use have a rate of 480 megabits a second. Optics may also get a boost from new technology that is still in the laboratory and is intended to integrate lasers directly into silicon chips as they are manufactured.

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a research group has achieved a breakthrough, creating lasers directly on silicon chips as part of their manufacturing, said Professor Lionel Kimerling. He has developed lasers made from germanium, a material used in advanced silicon chip manufacturing processes.

Cloud Computing

­Let's say you're an executive at a large corporation. Your particular responsibilities include making sure that all of your employees have the right hardware and software they need to do their jobs. Buying computers for everyone isn't enough -- you also have to purchase software or software licenses to give employees the tools they require.

Whenever you have a new hire, you have to buy more software or make sure your current software license allows another user. It's so stressful that you find it difficult to go to sleep on your huge pile of money every night. Soon, there may be an alternative for executives like you. Instead of installing a suite of software for each computer, you'd only have to load one application.

That application would allow workers to log into a Web-based service which hosts all the programs the user would need for his or her job. Remote machines owned by another company would run everything from e-mail to word processing to complex data analysis programs. It's called cloud computing, and it could change the entire computer industry.

In a cloud computing system, there's a significant workload shift. Local computers no longer have to do all the heavy lifting when it comes to running applications. The network of computers that make up the cloud handles them instead.

Hardware and software demands on the user's side decrease. The only thing the user's computer needs to be able to run is the cloud computing system's interface software, which can be as simple as a Web browser, and the cloud's network takes care of the rest.

Nanoscience

Nanoscience has the potential to become the sunrise sector in the years ahead. “From converting sunlight into power, to targeting a drug to a single malignant cell, from creating sensors in the form of biochip to the ability to produce garments which can act as a chemical shield, possibilities are immense in this (nanotechnology) domain.

In the field of nanoscience, it is material versus molecule. Nanoscientists operate from either of these major vantage points. Some are excited about the behaviour of materials, when brought down to nano levels. In other words, nanoscientists deal with reducing materials to nanosizes and observing the changes in their properties and behaviour.

A leading scientist, contends that, “material such as gold, which is chemically inert at normal scales, can serve as a potent chemical catalyst at nanoscales. Much of the fascination with nanotechnology stems from these different phenomena that matter exhibits at the nanoscale.”

On the other hand, another group of scientists are interested in using nanoscience to assemble individual atoms into a desired molecule so as to evolve molecular-level machines.

But research in this domain is very much in its infancy the world over, and India has negligible presence in the area.

One millionth of a millimetre or 10-9 m, is a nanometre, and study of matter at that level is nanotechnology. Initiated as an idea by Nobel Prize winning physicist, Richard Feynman in the early 1950s, nanotechnology caught up as a separate discipline only during the early 90s. The nanotechnology initiative set up in 2000, by the US federal government played a crucial role in providing seed funding for long-term research in the area. It has also caught up well in Europe. India was one of the early entrants in the domain, thanks to the pioneering work of Prof. CNR Rao, Linus Pauling Research Professor at JNCASR. As a field of study nanoscience is truly interdisciplinary in nature.

The nature and structure of the course depends upon the area of specialisation that the course focuses on. Normally, the three chief divisions of nanotech are nanomaterials, nanoelectronics and nanobiotechnology. And the concentration of courses would be a function of your specialisation