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Beware of any email invitation to the Beijing Olympics. The malicious mails are supposed to be as an invitation to the Olympics but actually these are E-mail virus which once opened affects MS word, MS PowerPoint and MS excel applications on your system. The virus could allow the remote attackers to take complete control of an affected system, or cause the application to crash.

Experts at Trend Micro’s TrendLabs have confirmed that these mails are malicious. Country Manager – India & SAARC, Trend Micro, Niraj Kaushik said, “When exploited, the unspecified remote code-execution vulnerability could allow remote attackers to take complete control of an affected system, or cause the application to crash.”

“Among others, if you receive any email that has an attachment file named attachment .doc, appeal_letter_of_fttj.doc, attend_the_opening_ceremony_of_the_29th_olympic_games_in_beijing.doc, five_resolutions.doc, or lingotto_con_fiat.doc, be warned that opening it may make your computer vulnerable to attack,” added Kaushik.

Experts said that the malicious .doc files are spreading in the wild which are taking benefit of the ongoing Beijing Olympics in China, the popular event of the time. This makes the receiver to click on the mail and open the files. The samples that TrendLabs has come across are detected as TROJ_MDROPPER.ZT.

Kaushik added, “The Olympics event having such a big fan-following, the potential of people unknowingly getting lured into opening such Trojanized files is huge. With 10, 708 athletes competing in 28 sports for 302 gold medals, the Olympics is the most prestigious affair of its kind, and as such command a worldwide audience. It is thus expected that it will be included in malicious users’ arsenal of social engineering techniques.”

These files are zero-day exploits under vulnerability summary CVE-2008-2244 under the Common Vulnerabilities & Exposures (CVE) List of the National Cyber Security Division of the US Department of Homeland Security.

Besides TrendLabs has also reported Trojan samples of .XLS and .PPT circulating, all drawing correlation to the ongoing Olympics and the Tibet conflict. Trend Micro detects the malicious Excel file as TROJ_MDROPPER.ZY, and the PowerPoint file as TROJ_PPDROP.M. Unlike the Word file malware, these Excel and PowerPoint files are not confirmed to have zero-day vulnerabilities as yet.

If you are also getting these kinds of mails, do not take as an invitation. It is malicious mails which can damage your system. Avoid opening them and delete them at once.

Tags: Beijing Olympic, E-mail, Excel, MS Word, Olympic, Powerpoint, Trend Micro’s, Virus

Fuel prices are touching new heights every day and the only method to save your money is to change your motoring habits. Money saved is money earned. Take care of a few tips to save fuel. Here are listed some of them to help you:

1. Tire pressure: Tire pressure of your car affects the use of gasoline. Tires should be properly inflated. Check the pressure every month and inflate the tires whenever needed. Digital gauge can be used to read the pressure and can be kept in glove compartment. When shopping for new tires, get large diameter tires for rear wheels.

2. Right Oil: Right oil should be used for the car. It should be changed after every 30,000miles. Right oil means car is doing right. Check the grade of oil that is recommended by the manufacturer.

3. Car parking: Parking place should be chosen with care. A shaded area during summer will prevent excess hot inside. Car should be placed in garage when not in use. Avoid too hot or too cold conditions for the vehicle. Also park in way you can later begin to travel in the forward gear. Avoid reverse gear.

4. Spark plug: Engine should be kept in tune. Spark plug should be checked as needed. It will boost your gas mileage by around 4-5 %. The spark plugs should not work below the required efficiency as this may lower your car’s fuel efficiency approximately up to 30 percent.

5. Engine warm-up: Avoid prolonged warming up of engine, even on cold mornings. 30 to 45 seconds is enough. Also disengage the automatic choke after engine warm up. Chokes often get stuck, resulting in bad gas/air mixture.

6. Location evaluation: Evaluate the target location before leaving. Shortest way is not necessarily the quickest. Consider stop signs, stop lights, and traffic density when mapping out your travel route to save gas.

7. Driving habits: Driving habits effects a lot on the gas saved by you. If driving is efficient it could be environment friendly as well as result into saving a good amount of fuel. For efficient driving tips visit http://www.inewsindia.com/2008/08/07/efficient-driving-tips-an-eco-friendly-drive/

Tags: Car parking, Digital Gauge, Driving habits, Engine warm-up, Fuel, Fuel Prices, Gas, Gas Saving, Gasoline, Location evaluation, Right Oil, Save Fuel, Saving Tips, Spark plug, Tire Pressure

While buying a used car there is a lot to consider before purchase. Price is the major issue. Your first question is always- how much is the asking price? But if it fits your budget, there are so many other things that need a careful enquiry to avoid any loss. Here are a few tips that can help you to get genuine thing out of your money spent:

No. of previous owners: Larger the number of previous owners of the car more will be the wear and tear. You should have clear information of the number of the previous owners of the car. Ask if the seller the original owner? Also this data will reflect the problems that have caused this vehicle to be sold and bought so many times. So before purchasing a used car, ask about the no. of times the car have been sold earlier.

Accident information: There should be a need to know whether the car ever been passed an accident or is there any frame damage? Carefully check every corner and body lines of the car for any gaps or damage including any ripples or paint differences. Give a look to the paint. It should be even and proper.

Mileage of the tyre: Before buying the car, care should be taken about tyre mileage. You should ask for how many miles are on the tires. This will tell the condition of the tyres of the old vehicle. Ask how many miles the vehicle has on the odometer. 12,000 miles per year is standard.

Know your history: Get the proper information regarding the services the car has gone. If an owner has kept meticulous service records, the vehicle must be in tip top shape.  If not, get a report from Carfax and check things out yourself.  A Carfax report should disclose the following information:

• Flood Damage
• Odometer Rollbacks
• Junked Titles
• Totaled/Salvaged
• State Emissions Inspection Results
• Lemon History/Service and Repair
• Liens

A single Carfax report will set you back $24.99, but you can get 10 for $29.99 or unlimited for 30 days for $34.99 – definitely worth it when you’re shopping for a solid, used vehicle.

Recalls: Recall information should be checked before buying. Carfax also offers open recall information for a number of automobile manufacturers. For older recalls or other manufacturers not listed, online research can help you. Visit any number of recall sites and plug in the car information.  If the vehicle has been recalled, it is important to make certain the recall has been repaired.  This can be done by speaking to the service technician at the dealership, who can obtain the records for the vehicle.

Service Info: An Oil change, checking fluids and other vehicle maintenance is important to keep your vehicle running as good as possible. Enquire about the next service scheduled for the vehicle. A private seller who keeps good records should be able to tell you when the next scheduled service is due, while a dealership has probably recently serviced the vehicle before putting it on the lot. Service information can give a clear picture of the condition of the vehicle.

Research your questions: You should also research for the reliability and consumer opinion about the specific make and model year of the vehicle. Speak to a service technician and do research on line for the answers.

Accessories: ask for the accessories if any in the vehicle. Does it have air conditioning, power windows, a CD player? More importantly, do they work properly?

Reason for the Sale: what is the reason behind the sale of the car? Is the owner relocating out of the area, buying something new – or something else entirely? It should be asked to avoid the pitfalls of buying someone else’s problem,

Test drive: Ask for a test drive and possibly to a local service garage for a once over to get a closer look on the condition of the vehicle.

Happiness Factor: last but not the least; ask whether the owner is happy with the car? You can get the real answer in owner’s tone of the word. If you don’t felt the happiness factor, the vehicle may trouble you later.

Tags: Accessories, Accident, car, Car Service, Sale, Used Car

An emotional robot! Unbelievable but scientists in Britain have developed human like robot which reacts and have feelings like human. Developed at the University of the West of England in Bristol was aimed to explore human reaction to machine that give emotional feedback’s.

The robot named Heart Robot have a beating heart, a breathing belly, and sensors that respond to movement, noise and touch, the robot reacts emotionally to being scared or cuddled. Actually it is half robot and half puppet. The Heart Robot is the star attraction of the ‘Emotibots’ exhibition at London’s Science Museum.

“Heart Robot looks like a cross between ET and Gollum and is about the size of a small child,” said Holly Cave, who helped organize the Emotibots event at the Science Museum where the machine was unveiled.

“He’s half robot, half puppet. You move him around by hand, but he has innate responses that appear emotional,” he was quoted as saying by the Daily Telegraph newspaper.

Telling about the reactions of children toward the Emotibots, Cave said, “They either want to hug and cuddle him, and look after him like a doll or baby, or they just want to scare him.”

A six-legged metallic spidery robot called Hexapod was also displayed there who records people watching him and plays back video on a plasma screen.

Tags: Emotibots, Emotion, Emotional Robot, Emotions, Robot, Telegraph

After giving the cheapest car to the world, India is on its way to provide cheapest laptop at a mere cost of $10. Yes! It is unbelievable but Minister of State for Human Resource Development D. Purandeswari said on Tuesday that research was being conducted to develop the laptop, especially for use by students, which will cost all of $10.

She said that the development of cheap laptop will combat problems like the low computer literacy and e-learning not only in India, but also the world over.

“Research in this direction is being already carried out at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras,” she told the e-India annual summit on information and communication technologies.

At present, the cheapest laptop range not less than $100. It is at least 10 times costlier. The “Xo” sold by the Massachusetts-based non-government organization ‘One Laptop Per Child Foundation’ sells for $188.

However, India did not sign up for the ‘One Laptop Per Child program’ after officials in the education ministry decided that giving a computer to every child is “pedagogically suspect”, and may actually be detrimental to the growth of the creative and analytical abilities of the child.

But Reliance Communications has been doing pilots of the OLPC in India since last year.

Earlier this year, Tata group has developed Rs 1 lakh car, the Nano which get famous not only in India but all over the world.

Tags: cheapest laptop, Computer, computer literacy, Education, India, Laptop, US$10 laptop

Google’s ex-employees have unveiled a new search engine named ‘Cuil’ (pronounced as cool) on Sunday to challenge the world’s leading search engine, Google. ‘Cuil’ will outdo the Internet search leader in size, but faces an uphill battle changing Web surfing habits.

Founded by Tom Costello, a former employee at IBM, and his wife Anna Patterson, who worked for Google for three years is named after the mythical Irish hero Fin McCuil. The two are joined by two former Google colleagues, Russell Power and Louis Monier. Monier also used to work at AltaVista, where he got the automated machine translator Babel Fish going. He later went to eBay to oversee a redesign.

Cuil (www.cuil.com) covers more web sites than any other search engine – three times more than Google and 10 times more than Microsoft.

“Our significant breakthroughs in search technology have enabled us to index much more of the Internet, placing nearly the entire Web at the fingertips of every user,” Tom Costello said.

Cuil Inc claims can index, faster and more cheaply, a far larger portion of the the Web than Google, which boasts the largest online index. Estimates have shown Google Index at around 30 to 50 billion web sites while Cuil claims it has already indexed 120 billion.

Google saves user data while Cuil doesn’t. Cuil says it wants to analyze the web, not users. Also Cuil does not display search hits as in columns with a brief text and an image unlike Goggle which shows a list of links and short key words. The operators called this new way of presenting hits “organized results” and claim that the hits are more easily readable this way.

Search results are not sorted by popularity, but rather by content in Cuil. Madrone Capital, Greylock and Tugboat Ventures have already invested $33m in the project. Madrone alone has put in $25m.

Tags: Cuil, Google, Internet, search engine

Microsoft has launched Window Vista giving a sideline to the older Window XP, but it seems users are in love with the older one and are unable to accept the newer Window Vista.

According to a recent Forrester survey, less than 10 percent of the 2,300 companies surveyed use Vista. Forrester says 87.1 percent of companies surveyed continue to use Windows XP. The most disturbing point of the survey for Microsoft is that many of the pre-loaded Vista machines are being downgraded to XP in compliance with corporate licensing plans.

As told to a leading tech magazine, “it would be wise by Microsoft to consider following the lead of Microsoft’s important partner Intel and re-evaluating the case of Vista.”

The report contradicts Redmond giants claim that over 180 million copies of Vista have been sold. It seems that users are not interested in saying goodbye to one of the most popular operating systems. It is a bad news for Microsoft and seems very hard to digest but along with this the report also had a bit of good news for Microsoft. It found Vista usage among businesses going up by more than 40 percent since January and that the rate of adoption of Vista remains twice that of Mac OS X.

Tags: Forrester survey, Microsoft, Window Vista, Window XP

This is the world of faster communication and high profile gadgets has bring the world in your bedroom. One communication technology which has brought the revolutionary change in the communication is Unified Communication popularly known as UC.

UC is an evolving communication technology architecture, through the help of which we can communicate from one end to another in the form of data, sound or video. The protocol which work behind UC is session initiation protocol.

The definition of UC given in Wikipedia can be read here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_communications

With the help of Unified Communication we can easily communicate and if we have the GPS system installed in our communication system then even we can see the location too. Courier system can utilize this UC. UC can help us to pick only one device and get connected to the world through all of your devices.

We need not to have carry all the devices like Laptop, Mobile phone, Desktop, or fixed land line phone etc. So UC can bring the World in your hand.

Tags: Communications, Courier, Courier System, Technology, UC, Unified Communications

Web 2.0 becomes the need of today as there is emerging a new generation of potential employees and customers that are accustomed to a variety of technologies being available. These employees expect to see and use the technologies in the corporate world.

These technologies are not only interesting for personal use but they also help the corporate world to search better employees for them. Whether and how we deploy these technologies likely will have an impact on our ability to attract new talent to our companies and to find and retain customers. All these technologies fall into the loosely defined category of “Enterprise 2.0.”

Rather than dismissing these technologies right out of the gate, these techniques can be best use in the right way. If neglected, it can lead you to a competitive disadvantage.

Here’s a sampling of these technologies:

1) RSS (Really Simple Syndication): It automatically feeds you information you want. RSS can be used to push order-status information directly to a customer’s company intranet.

2) Social networks: Facebook and MySpace like networks help the employees to introduce themselves to the company. These can also be a resource to help employees find a potential car-pool mate, someone with a background in product design or specific experience on a product you are thinking about launching. It extends your network to a wider zone and can be helpful to reach your target place.

3) Quick Messaging technology, Twitter: A quick messaging technology, such as Twitter, provides a wider reach of the message (a “tweet”) as compared to e-mails. It lets people know what you are doing at an instant. For example, if someone putting out a Twitter message that says, “I’m updating the marketing plan; does anyone have any info on X?” The tweet may have a wider reach and generate a better response rather than sending out an e-mail that gets lost in everyone’s inbox. Twitter and FriendFeed are communication and collaboration tools. And when your research project is done, share it via FriendFeed.

4) Social networking: Social networking technologies such as FriendFeed can be used to share a variety of information. The technology lets users share Web pages, photos, videos and music with friends and family. This is an easy way to exchange the data.

5) Instant messaging: Instant messages are exchanged for quick replies.  E-mail is so “last decade.” Instant messengers are available to give a better solution. This technique not only provides a better way of communication but reduces the wastage of space in Inbox on the e-mail server.

6) Wikis, blogs and mash-ups to share, collect and edit information: Wikis and blogs can be used for training and collaboration on large projects while Mashups provide a good overview of the operations. It can bring together production and operations data from a variety of sources, allowing a production manager to get a good overview of the operations.

7) YouTube-style videos: These videos can be used for training or distributing important messages such as the CEO announcing a new product launch or Joe, the IT help desk guy, receiving an award. This technique is providing visual trainings which is much better than textual one.

Tags: Blog, Collect, Company, Edit, IM, Instant messaging, Internet, Messaging, RSS, Share, Social networking, Social networks, Technology, Twitter, Video, Web, Web 2.0, Wiki, Youtube

The very plain textual chat on Google is now going to be a fun by embodying a cartoon style online avatar and have text-based conversations with friends and other Internet users in virtual chat rooms. The company announced this new online tool on Tuesday.

Google unveiled the new product in a post on its official blog and can be reached at www.lively.com which is officially part of Google Labs, an area of the company’s site where it showcases projects that remain in the beta, or experimental, phase.

‘Lively’ will make the conversation more interactive and fun. You can create your own Chat rooms. These chat rooms can be added to any blog or Web site and are two-dimensional — they include text, and sometimes voice and video. Up to 20 people can occupy a room and chat with one another.

Users can design their own virtual environments, hanging on the walls videos from YouTube and photos from Picasa, Google’s photo service, as if they were pieces of art.

The new product was headed by Niniane Wang, an engineering manager. Students at the University of Arizona have been testing ‘Lively’ for several months.

Ms. Wang wrote in the blog post that she developed ‘Lively’ as a “20 percent project,” referring to Google’s philosophy that employees should spend one day a week working on projects outside of their day-to-day responsibilities.

Tags: Blog, Chat, Conversations, Google, Google Lab, Gtalk, Internet, Lively, Picasa, Youtube