5 Million Gmail Accounts Hacked & Leaked Publicly!

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Written by Anonymous

Beware Gmail users, your usernames and passwords were probably leaked online! That’s right, approximately 5-million Gmail account credentials, both e-mail address and password, have been embezzled, then, made available for the public through an online forum, which caused a large number of users worldwide to change their Gmail password again. The website which published the links to the stolen e-mail credentials seemed to have been a Russian forum website. The credentials were also aforementioned to be old and likely sourced from consecutive data breaches beforehand. It is believed that the leaked passwords are not necessarily those used to access Gmail accounts, but seem to have been accumulated from other websites where users used their Gmail addresses to register.

Yes, It’s Russian!

The news was received with great shock the time when a user posted a link to the stolen e-mail credentials on Reddit. This particular section of Reddit was frequented by hackers, both amateur and professional. The archive file containing nearly 5-million Gmail credentials, both e-mail addresses and plain text passwords was posted on a Russian Bitcoin security forum known as btcsec.com on Tuesday night by a user with an alias known as “tvskit”, which is a Russian news outlet (C News). The user who exposed Gmail user’s credentials said that almost 4.93 million accounts allegedly affected belonged to English, Russian and Spanish users and claimed that over 60 percent of accounts are active. This means, there is a silver lining in this leak, i.e., 40 percent of the passwords are invalid or out of date, which could be a good news for those Gmail users who have recently changed their passwords and are concerned about their account’s security – there’s a chance that they’re not at risk at all.

“We can’t confirm that it is indeed as much as 60 percent, but a great amount of the leaked data is legitimate.”, said Peter Kruse, the chief technology officer of CSIS Security Group.

Google Denies Security Breach

Google, in its defense, believes that the usernames and passwords didn’t come from a security breach of its system. That means, the credentials had been stolen by phishing campaigns, keyloggers, and unauthorized access to user accounts.

“It’s important to note that in this case and in others, the leaked usernames and passwords were not the result of a breach of Google systems,” Google, which operates Gmail e-mail service, explained in a post on its online security blog. “Often, these credentials are obtained through a combination of other sources.”

“We found that less than 2% of the username and password combinations might have worked, and our automated anti-hijacking systems would have blocked many of those login attempts. We’ve protected the affected accounts and have required those users to reset their passwords.”, said Google.

The leaked passwords not only give access to users’ Gmail accounts, but other Google services as well, including Google Drive, and the mobile payment system Google Wallet.

Defend Yourself!

There are numerous things you can do to defend yourself from this information leak, if you are a Gmail user, that is.

• A website called com allows users to check if their email address is among those leaked. People who are concerned about the security of their account are advised to go ahead and change their password.

• Have Google two-factor authentication (2FA) enabled and recommend you same to do this for Google and other accounts. Many web services, including Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, Github and AWS, offer 2FA option, a security measure where users are required to provide a passcode sent to their mobile devices before any changes can be made to their account. This would prevent an attacker from logging in without access to a user’s smartphone.

Remove duplicate files the easy way

I have always wanted this kind of software. I have thousands of mp3 songs packed in various partitions of my hard disk. I have collected these songs from several places and keep them storing, but the problem while augmenting my collection is that I am never sure whether I have copied the set of songs before or not, so I just copy them irrespective of the fact that they may be already present. The consequence is that my limited 40GB hard disk space is almost full leaving me with no more space to store anything else.

That is why I always wanted a software that could compare the contents of two folders and remove the duplicate elements.

File Comparator is a program which compares any files by their contents. This utility allow you to quickly compare contents of any files in specified folders, and allow to show files which contain same data.

Isro to fire Mangalyaan into Mars orbit in a few hours; will India make space history?

India is on course to slip into Mars’ orbit on Wednesday after Isro scientists successfully tested the spacecraft’s main engine. Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be at hand to watch the space agency’s bid to become the first country to conduct a successful Mars mission on its first attempt.

Disassembled View of the Mars Orbiter Mission spacecraft. Pic courtsey: ISRO website

If the Mars Orbiter Mission, popularly known as Mangalyaan, is successful, India will join the US, European Space Agency and the former Soviet Union in the elite club of Martian explorers.

The Indian Space Research Organisation’s (Isro) mission control centre at Bengaluru is scheduled to fire the spacecraft’s main engine along with eight smaller liquid engines for about 24 minutes starting 7:17 am, a tricky manoeuvre that involves slowing down the spacecraft.

Read: 5 things to know about India's Mars Orbiter Mission
Meet the men behind India’s Mars Mission

“The spacecraft is travelling at a speed of 22 km/second and it is important that it be reduced to a speed of 1.6 km/second for it to be able to work with Mars’ gravity and insert itself into the orbit,” an Isro scientist said.

Most of MOM’s Mars orbit insertion will happen in the dark because the spacecraft will be around the surface of the planet that won’t receive sunlight. The first images of Mars will be transmitted to Isro’s Indian Deep Space Network facility at Byalalu in Karnataka in the afternoon.

Read: CBSE makes Mars move a must-view
Even if everything goes as planned, scientists in Isro Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network (Istrac) at Bengaluru have to wait for a confirmation call from their Australian counterparts tracking MOM from Canberra, which is expected at 8:15 am.

In case the engine fails to ignite, Isro will be dependent on eight 22N thrusters which have the capability to insert the spacecraft into a Martian orbit. “Thus, we will have to compromise and put it into an orbit whose periapsis (distance closest to Mars) will be farther than 423 km,” Isro chief K Radhakrishnan told TV channels.

Scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory wished their Indian counterparts luck a day ahead of the spacecraft’s insertion into Mars’ orbit. “Good luck MOM. From your JPL family,” read the message posted on Isro’s Facebook page.

Google Closed Off in China

As part of a broad campaign to tighten internal security, the Chinese government has draped a darker shroud over Internet communications in recent weeks, a situation that has made it more difficult for Google and its customers to do business.

Chinese exporters have struggled to place Google ads that appeal to overseas buyers. Biotechnology researchers in Beijing had trouble recalibrating a costly microscope this summer because they could not locate the online instructions to do so. And international companies have had difficulty exchanging Gmail messages among far-flung offices and setting up meetings on applications like Google Calendar.

"It's a frustrating and annoying drain on productivity," said Jeffrey Phillips, a U.S. energy executive who has lived in China for 14 years. "You've got people spending their time figuring out how to send a file instead of getting their work done."

The pain is widespread. Two popular messaging services owned by South Korean companies, Line and Kakao Talk, were abruptly blocked this summer, as were other applications like Didi, Talk Box and Vower. U.S. giants like Twitter and Facebook have long been censored by China's Great Firewall, a system of filters the government has spent lavishly on to control Internet traffic in and out of the country.

Even as Google and other big technology companies have lobbied heavily for an easing of the restrictions, Beijing's broader scrutiny of multinationals has intensified. In late July, anti-monopoly investigators raided Microsoft offices in four Chinese cities to interrogate managers and copy large amounts of data from hard drives. Qualcomm, a big maker of computer chips and a holder of wireless technology patents, faces a separate anti-monopoly investigation.

The increasingly pervasive blocking of the Web, together with other problems like severe air pollution in China's urban centers, has led some businesses to transfer employees to regional hubs with more open and speedier Internets, like Singapore. And more companies are considering similar moves.

"Companies overlooked Internet problems when the economy was booming," said Shaun Rein, managing director of the China Market Research Group, a Shanghai consulting firm. "But now a lot of companies are asking whether they really need to be in China."

The chief technology officer of a startup in China said it had been especially difficult to use Google Drive this summer, making it a challenge for employees to share files and documents.

"We were hooked on collaborative editing," said the chief technology officer, who insisted on anonymity for fear of reprisal from the Chinese authorities. "You can edit a Word document or spreadsheet together and everything is kept in sync - that way our management could track the status of the products we were working on."

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As Alibaba's initial public offering of stock in New York on Thursday demonstrated, China has produced many highly successful Web businesses. But many executives and researchers say that a number of homegrown Internet services are poor substitutes for the multinationals' offerings.

Jin Hetian, an archaeologist in Beijing, said it was difficult to do research using Baidu, a local search engine that has limitations for searches in English and other non-Chinese languages and that provides fewer specialized functions.

"I know some foreign scientists are studying the rings of ancient trees to learn about the climate, for example, but I can't find their work using Baidu," Jin said. "When in China, I'm almost never able to access Google Scholar, so I'm left badly informed of the latest findings."

Kaiser Kuo, a spokesman for Baidu, said the company focused on indexing websites written in Chinese, since most of its customers are Chinese speakers.

Access to some overseas academic sites has also been blocked. A Peking University professor was recently unable to file a letter of recommendation for a student applying to study at a U.S. university because China had blocked the school's website, said a physics researcher at Peking University who insisted on anonymity for fear of retaliation by the Chinese authorities.

Google's troubles in China have been building up for years.

The company shut down its servers in mainland China in March 2010 to avoid online censorship and began directing users in China to obtain unfiltered results from its servers in Hong Kong. The Chinese government then began intermittently blocking the Hong Kong servers as well, notably by halting the ability to reach the site for up to 90 seconds if a user tried to enter anything on a very long list of banned Chinese characters, including those in national leaders' names, and some English words.

Google began encrypting users' searches and results all over the world early this year, partly  in response to former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden's disclosures about U.S. government surveillance. That shift by Google - using Internet addresses that start with "https" - made it harder for Chinese censors to determine who was pursuing the types of inquiries that they discourage.

But the Chinese government responded on May 29 by blocking virtually all access to Google websites, instead of just imposing 90-second delays when banned search terms were used. Experts initially interpreted the move as a security precaution ahead of the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown on June 4. But the block has largely remained in place ever since.

"Internet security is being raised to a much higher degree," said Xiao Qiang, a specialist in Chinese Internet censorship at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Information. "It overrides the other priorities, including commerce or scientific research."

The Chinese authorities typically allow a tiny fraction of searches and other Google activities to go through normally each day, with a slightly higher percentage being completed from mobile devices than from other devices. The government even unblocks Google for several hours roughly once a month, before reblocking it.

Because censors permit a trickle of traffic to reach Google's servers in Hong Kong, many Chinese users keep reloading their Google pages again and again in the hope of getting through. This is creating an impression among many Chinese users, which state-controlled media have done little to dispel, that the problem must lie in shoddy Google service and not in the government's blocking of most Google activity.

"We've checked extensively, and there's nothing technically wrong on our end," said Taj Meadows, a spokesman at the company's Asia headquarters, in one of Singapore's most expensive harbor-front office buildings.

Meadows declined to provide any comment on the blocking, except to say that Google was still focused on selling mobile and display ads in China and on providing ads and other services to Chinese businesses seeking to attract global consumers.

China's crackdown on foreign Internet services coincides with two trends. One lies in the country's growing worries about domestic terrorism, particularly after a series of deadly attacks at train stations this year. The other is ever-rising nationalism, directed primarily at Japan but also at Japan's allies, notably the United States.

President Xi Jinping of China, who is also the Communist Party chief, has made clear that he wants to maintain the party's primacy. He has signaled the importance he places on controlling the Internet by personally taking the top position in the party's leading group on cybersecurity.

Internet users have tried any number of workarounds in China, with varying degrees of success.

Phillips, the energy executive, said some of his friends in China used Outlook email instead of Gmail because Outlook email tended not to be blocked. But he voiced reluctance to switch his own email account after seeing media reports of the government raids on Microsoft's offices. "What if they get blocked next? You can't keep switching services all the time."

Frustrated users have often resorted to virtual private network, or VPN, services to evade China's Internet filters. But those services, too, have come under concerted attack from the authorities, who have interrupted service to them with increasing frequency. Many ordinary citizens cannot afford or obtain access to VPNs to begin with.

In the meantime, Google's business continues to erode. Its share of the Chinese search engine market fell to 10.9 percent in the second quarter of this year, as the stepped-up blocking began to take effect - compared with one-third in 2009, when it still had servers there.

Google's problems extend far beyond search. Its application store, called Google Play, is only partly accessible in China.

That has led to the rise of a number of locally run application stores, which analysts say will sometimes market pirated copies of software or charge extra to promote a new application. Companies are often forced to create versions of their apps for China that are slightly different from the versions distributed to the rest of the world on Google's app store.

"Because Google Play has low market share" in the Chinese market, "app publishers who have applications worldwide on Google Play don't receive the proportionate share of users in China without publishing to local Android stores, even if they have localized Chinese versions," said Bertrand Schmitt, chief executive of App Annie, a company that tracks global app distribution.

Google also hosts publicly available libraries of coding scripts and fonts on its servers, but China now blocks these libraries. The chief technology officer at the startup said his company had resorted to creating its own libraries and hosting them on its own servers, wasting costly computing power and space.

HTC to manufacture Google Nexus 9

In some of the recent rumors, it has been reported that Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) has partnered with HTC to produce Nexus 9 tablets, it will be the first time in so many years that the company is partnering with Google to produce tablets. HTC and Google were together when they first launched the Nexus One in the year 2010.

Since then Google has been working with LG, ASUS or Samsung to produce Nexus devices, however, this time  HTC has partnered with the Internet giant to manufacture the next generation of Nexus Tablets. It was reported that the HTC engineers are now at Google HQ and are currently working on the project. The company is expected to announce the product on Oct 16 and will launch it by the Halloween.

It is without any doubt that the HTC One performed very well and received regards from both the user and the market, however, for the past few days company is showing a continuous downgrade in the market, whereas this deal can become a game changer for the HTC.

There are no confirmed specs until but the device is expected to have a bit large screen this time. HTC will design the tablet that is equivalent to the size of the iPad. The same goes with the under the hood specs also, it being reported that the company will install a never been seen and most advance hardware in this tablet and just like the HTC One M8, Nexus 9 is also rumored to have a nice metallic body, which is easy to grip and is light weight.

The device will be running the latest Android L and will support most of the features that any smartphone should have.

Microsoft delays launch of Xbox in China

Microsoft, which was due to launch the Xbox One in China Tuesday, has said it will put back the "historic" event to later this year, slowing what was billed as the first game console to enter the market after a 14-year ban.

The company gave no precise reason for the delay in a statement over the weekend, saying only that it needed more time. It said the release would come before the end of the year.

The announcement comes as Microsoft faces a government probe for alleged "monopoly actions" related to its flagship Windows operating system and Office suite of software.

"Despite strong and steady progress, we are going to need more a bit more time to deliver the best experiences possible for our fans in China," Microsoft said in a posting on its official blog in China, an English translation of which was provided to AFP by the company.

"We look forward to launching in China by the end of this year," said the posting on Saturday. "The launch of Xbox One will be a historic moment for gamers and families when Microsoft and BesTV bring the first console of its kind to China."

BesTV New Media, a subsidiary of Shanghai Media Group, is the Chinese partner.

The Xbox One was hailed in July as the first gaming console available for purchase in China through authorised sales channels since 2000, after the government allowed foreign firms to manufacture them in the Shanghai free-trade zone (FTZ) for sale into the domestic market.

China set up the FTZ a year ago as a test bed for economic reforms.

A joint venture of Japan's Sony, which makes the rival PlayStation console, and a local Chinese firm is planning to start operations in the zone from December, according to a document previously posted on the FTZ website.

An official at the State Administration for Industry and Commerce (SAIC), one of the bodies that enforces anti-monopoly law, said last month that authorities are also looking into "issues" with Microsoft's media player and browser.

Microsoft has said it seeks to comply with Chinese law.

The investigation comes as China heightens scrutiny of foreign companies in a range of industries, including the pharmaceutical and auto sectors.—AFP Relax News 2014

Upgrading to iOS 8 on an Old Phone? Prepare for Trouble, but Do It Anyway

Do you have an old iPhone or iPad? Have you been planning on upgrading to iOS 8, Apple’s newest operating system, which was made available this week? Are you excited about the switch, fancying a free way to have a better-looking interface with new features?

Well, tamp down your expectations. Turn your smile upside down. Your old phone or tablet probably isn’t going to run Apple’s latest operating system nearly as well as on the new iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. If you upgrade on an old iPhone, it might become slightly slower and more cumbersome. You might notice some frustrating visual stuttering, a poor old dog straining under the stress of learning new tricks.

And yet, despite all that: you should probably upgrade anyway.

This advice mainly concerns people who have the iPhone 4S or the iPad 2, the phone and tablet Apple released in 2011. These are the oldest devices that iOS 8 runs on — if you have anything older, you can’t upgrade anyway.

Upgrading old devices involves a cost-benefit analysis. Many of the headline benefits to iOS 8 are nice but not totally necessary. The operating system has a few better-designed apps, a new keyboard with typing suggestions, and Family Sharing, a way to legally share songs and movies between a small number of devices. The new OS also signals a new, more open Apple — it gives developers more access to create more powerful apps in the operating system, including support for third-party keyboards and password managers that rely on the Touch ID fingerprint scanner. Of course, if you have an iPhone 5 or 4S, you don’t even have a fingerprint scanner, so that’s no big deal to you.

What are the costs of upgrading? Performance. Ars Technica installed iOS 8 on the iPhone 4S and the iPad 2, and in both cases it found that apps opened up slightly more slowly under the new OS. It took about 2 seconds instead of 1 to open up Safari on a 4S running iOS 8 rather than 7. On the iPad 2, the Mail app took about a second longer to open on iOS 8 versus iOS 7. These may sound like small delays, but remember that they’ll add up — a second here and there as you move around the OS turns into valuable minutes of your day.

The problem isn’t just time, but also how the device feels as it chugs through your commands. Ars says that on both the iPhone 4S and the iPad 2 running iOS 8, the interface responded less than smoothly to commands. “Screen rotation is stuttery, and any time some part of the OS needs to slide into place (text centering, apps minimizing), it can’t do it smoothly,” the site says of the iPad 2. Anandtech, which conducts deeply technical reviews of new hardware and software, said that on an iPad 3 — that is, not even the oldest Apple tablet that will run iOS 8 — “the software feels like it’s not even finished.”

All these sites come down somewhere in the middle on the question of upgrading. Ars says that you should upgrade to iOS 8 if you have an iPhone 4S, but not if you have an iPad. Anandtech recommends against upgrading for older tablets.

But there’s one feature that that I think sways the calculation in favor of the new OS: iOS 8 is more secure than iOS 7, especially from the prying eyes of authorities. Apple says that when you set a passcode on devices running iOS 8, the phone encrypts your data with a key that Apple has no access to. This means that your photos, texts, email, contacts, call history and other data can’t be accessed even if Apple is served with a warrant to provide that data. Security experts say that Apple has addressed several other important software vulnerabilities in iOS 8.

This does not mean your iOS 8 device is totally secure from the government — there are other ways to get at your data, especially if someone has access to the computer with which you sync your phone or tablet — but it does represent a big leap forward in security and privacy. Big enough, I think, to switch — even if everything won’t go smoothly.