Electronics that Better Mimic Natural Light Promise More Vivid, Healthy Illumination

Devices for Lighting – Similar to Natural Light

Inspite of technological leaps in up-to-date electronics, the excellence of lighting which they provide still tends to leave much scope for improvement. A joint team led by an associate professor Jian Li, of material sciences and engineering in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University, intends to change that.

According to Li, the team is expecting to produce devices for lighting which would be similar to natural light than the earlier technology, allowing user to view things in a healthier, brightly lighted atmosphere. One section of the research with possibility of solutions is aimed on creating advanced organic light emitting diodes known as OLEDs.

The updated OLEDS will not be emitting ultraviolet – UV which will not enable clearer vision but also help in preventing eyestrain which is often the outcome of constant exposure to the UV light that is emitted by the present devices according to Li.

These types of OLEDs would mainly be advantageous to museum, art galleries and other places since the UV lights hinders the human eye in discerning colour variations clearly as well as the texture of objects. Over a period of time, UV light also tends to dull colours of painting, causing gradual decomposition of the paints together with the other materials.

Provision of Grant of $875,000 – 2 Years

Li who is on the faculty of the School for Engineering of Matter, Transport and Energy has informed that the most important developments in the technology would extent to `a big milestone’ in the potential of effectively lighting our world. Operation on OLEDS headed by Li in the past decade had drawn continuous interest from government as well as industry and the most recent aid is a grant with provision of $875,000 over two years from the U.S.Department of Energy.

This would make provision for Li’s lab to enlarge its research with further development in collaboration with Universal Display Corporation, which is a leading developer of electronic display and lighting technologies on organic materials.

Li had informed that the Department of Energy contemplates the progress in OLEDs as a great priority which is the main part of its attempt in helping the world to become more energy efficient, expand into renewable energy resources as well as discover ways of offering more affordable energy.

More Control on Brightness of Lighting …

Next generation of OLED technology can be anticipated in improving the lighting presentation in the various solid state electronics from lighting for streets, parks, sports facilities to cell phones, digital watches, computer screen, television and flexible electronic displays together with home, industrial and commercial lighting.

The advanced OLEDs would permit more control on the brightness of lighting together with provision of more choices in moulding the shapes of the lighting devices, to determine the direction as well as the intensity of light and to regulate the colour of light.

Li’s research team have been working in the development of OLEDs which tend to utilise single emissive material in the creation of a white emission instead of the more difficult structures that depend on the utilisation of a mixture of blue, green and red emissive material which are designed to produce a working stable as well as pure white light than the other lighting technologies.

The Benefits of Outsourcing Your IT to Other Companies

The ability to outsource to other companies and freelancers is a great gift to small businesses, who can’t always keep everything in-house. Even large businesses like to do this, as it just makes financial sense. IT, in particular, is a great one to consider outsourcing – so what are the benefits of doing this? Let’s take a look…

Full Control of Costs

IT bills can explode out of control. With a monthly, reliable expenditure, you can take back control of your IT costs, and limit the money flying out of your bank account. Knowing how much you need to spend per month (or year) is another worry off your shoulders. You will probably need to keep some form of IT personnel around to fix minor problems, but this means that your IT representative is less stretched, and that you hopefully won’t have to hire an entire team to take care of the many IT concerns (especially if your company is very internet dependent).

Your Staff Can Focus On Other Things

Your employees are one of your greatest assets and resources, but they are also one of your most troubling expenditures. So that everyone can do their job without interference, ensuring that your workers are focused on delivering great service to customers and clients, outsourcing your IT is a fantastic way to let your employees do what they do best, without being spread too thin. It should also save time in trying to figure out the problem in-house – make it someone else’s issue!

You Won’t Have To Provide Extra IT Training

Training and improvements will all be down to the outsourced company? New software or legal changes? They will have to adjust their skills and educate their employees - nothing extra will come out of your pocket. You also don’t have to keep abreast of all of the new developments either, which will save your teams a lot of time in trying to stay cutting edge – someone else can make sure that the software is up-to-date and competitive.

Staying Competitive

Often – especially for small businesses – it just makes sense to outsource your work. You can’t keep absolutely everything in-house and remain competitive. However, if you DO outsource a few parts of your business, you are remaining agile and fighting fit. Yes, the bigger companies have more flout, but you are versatile, new, exciting, and you can roll with the punches.

Risk Reduction

If ever there is an issue, it doesn’t have to drastically impact your business’ productivity. An outsourced company will have the responsibility to rectify the problem. There are plenty of companies out there that offer a wide variety of packages for IT departments – Exponential E is one of the more obvious choices for this kind of service – but look for something that will get you the most service for your payments. In order to make outsourcing feasible, you should ideally entrust the majority of the responsibilities to a separate set of professionals.

These 7 Apps are among the Worst at Protecting Privacy

Free/Paid Apps Accompanied with Hidden Cost

While browsing through the various apps which are made available from Apple and Android app stores, one will observe that around 98% of them tend to be free for download. However, several of the various free apps together with the paid ones tend to be accompanied with hidden cost which is your privacy. When apps are installed on the gadget the user is prompted with permission to access certain information or phone features. At time they need this information and at other times it does not seem to be essential.

Messaging app for instance requires permission for accessing contacts and Wi-Fi connection to do its task. But a Flashlight app does not need to know the location or have total internet access. Often users tend to hit `accept’ to install apps without checking what they do.

Apple devices enables apps to approve or deny permission individually wherein one can go to Settings – Privacy and open a feature such as Camera to view and control which apps have permission to access it. Another option is to go to Settings and scroll towards the bottom and tap on a particular app to see and control its permission.

PrivacyGrade – Popular Android Apps

Carnegie Mellon University had a few years back, set up a site known as PrivacyGrade which analyses popular Android apps to check what permissions they ask and how they utilised the information with a grade from A to D for each of them. With the scoring system, the score of PrivacyGrade tends to change over a period of time. At times the app which used to be on the `D’ list would get a `B’ or even an `A’. That is because; at times the app pulled its permission though at other times it decided to be more open on what it tends to do with the information.

The following are the seven popular apps which PrivacyGrade a low score -

1. Draw Something Free – D

This app enables the user to play a version of remote Pictionary with their friends which is enjoyable. However, it comprises of several advertisers libraries and utilises the `Read phone status and identity status’ permission to allow advertisers your call log, phone number, signal information, carrier and much more.

2. Words with Friends - D

This well-known app is similar to a fast game of Scrabble and is good for brushing up on vocabulary. But it is from the same developer as `Draw Something’ and is not surprising that it has the same privacy, though it goes a little further with the `Precise location’ permission. Since it does not use the location for the game, it does tend to use it to indicate to you location based ads.

3. GO Locker – D

The app tends to act as a screen lock for the phone, promising to be more secure and smarter than the built-in screen lock on the device. It means that it needs to know a lot about the phone and needs all permission available right from location to reading the text messages. Though it does not have advertising libraries installed, it could send data to advertisers utilising its own first party codes. It does not link up to send information to app stores other than Google Play which could be dangerous since app stores besides Google have malicious app. These could get hold of information from your phone.

4. GO Weather Forecast & Widgets - D

This app from the same company which brought GO Locker, provides the weather and forecast, but like GO Locker, it tends to utilise plenty of its permission to direct data to app markets besides Google Play. After some bit of checking, it seems that each GO app inclusive of GO Battery as well as GO SMS Pro, seem to have the same design and should be avoided.

5. Camera360 Ultimate – D

The default camera app of Android is serviceable, but not fanciful. The Camera360 Ultimate has the potentials to add more camera modes, with filters, free cloud storage, real-time `touch-ups’ facial recognition and much more without ads.

6. Angry Birds - C

Angry Birds was the first modern `virus-related’ mobile game with over 2 billion downloads since 2009 and most of its sequels as well as by-products do not fare well with privacy. Several of them include targeted ad libraries which tend to grab the identify information of the phone including call logs, carrier, device ID and number, etc. Beyond the score of PrivacyGrade, Angry Birds also has the difference of being one of the apps which NSA and British GCHQ had targeted to get hold of user information from smartphones. The improved version of Angry Birds is not vulnerable and they have scored a higher `B’.

7. My Talking Tom - D

This app is a little game where one can adopt and take care of a kitten but its privacy settings are not so lovable. It comprises of an eight targeted ad libraries besides the phone’s identifying information which is sent to the advertisers audio from the microphone.

Can Making Seawater Drinkable Quench the World's Thirst?

Seawater Desalination Plants For Filtered Water

Generating fresh drinking water from sea through desalination has always been the best option to the water shortage faced during the year. Oceans tend to cover over 70% of the surface of the earth which contains 97% of its water. However the efforts essential in the achievement of this simple procedure seems to be costly. But now with enhancement in technologies, the cost has been reduced to half with huge desalination plants coming up all around the globe.

The biggest seawater desalination plant ever has just ramped up to full production in Israel’s Sorek plant near Tel Aviv which will make about 624 million litres of filtered water daily, selling around 1,000 litres equal to weekly consumption of Brit for 45p. The Ras al-Khair plant in Saudi Arabia tends to reach full production in December.

Created in the peninsula’s Eastern Province, it would be much bigger, speeding a billion litres a day to Riyadh where the population seems to be on the rise. A connected power plant would be yielding 2.4 million watts of electricity. The desalination plant in the US, San Diego’s Carlsbad, which is the country’s largest, would be in operation from November.

Reverse Osmosis – Utilises Less Energy – New Lease of Life

The old style of extracting drinking water from sea or saline water was to boil it then collect the evaporated water as a pure distillate which tends to utilise lot of energy but works well when combined with industrial plants which can produce heat as a by-product.

The new desalination plant at Saudi Arabia tends to pair with a power plant for this purpose. But in recent years, reverse osmosis, a technology which has been since 1960s utilises less energy has been given a new lease of life. It involves pushing salt water at high pressure via a polymer membrane comprising of holes around a fifth of a nanometre in size.

A nanometre is said to be a billionth of a metre, and the holes which are small enough to block the salt molecule are big enough to enable the water molecule through. Profession Nidal Hilal at Swansea University, editor-in-chief of the journal explains that this membrane tends to strip all the salts and minerals totally from the water and get clean water coming down as infiltrate and the distillation on the other side is saline with high content of salt.

However, these membranes may get clogged easily and lose its performance but with improved technology and pre-treatment techniques, there is a possibility of keeping them working efficiently for a longer period. Sorek’s designers in Israel tend to save energy by utilising double sized pressure vessels.

Dr Jack Gilron, head of Desalination and Water Treatment at Ben Gurion comments that one would need less pressure vessels to generate water which means fewer pipes and less connection. The researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology – MIT in US had experimented with semi-permeable membranes which were made from atom thick graphene that need less pressure to function and thus saves energy even though the technology is not yet prepared for mass production.

With regards to forward osmosis, Professor Nick Hankins, chemical engineer at the University of Oxford is of the opinion that it is an alternative option of removing the salt from seawater. A highly concentrated solution is utilised to draw it through instead of pushing the fresh water through the membrane, which efficiently sucks it from the sea water. Thereafter the diluted solutes are removed producing pure water.

Crippling Linux Botnet Strikes Gaming, Education Sites

Botnet Plundering Linux Computers – Attack Powerful

The IT world has recently revealed that a botnet has been plundering the Linux computers and the attacks seem to be quite powerful. Several of the targets seem to be in Asia and the security experts are making efforts in tracking them and the botnet appears to be of Asian origin.

A network of Linux computers seems to be flooding gaming as well as education sites with about 150 gigabits per second of malicious traffic, according to Dan Goodin of Ars Technica, which in some cases is adequate to knock the targets offline.

This is a DDoS – distributed denial-of-service network and the discoveries are from Akamai Technologies. The Security Intelligence Response Team – SIRT, at Akamai reflected the botnet XOR DDoS as `High Risk’ in an advisory posted recently.

 It is said that the XOR DDoS botnet had developed and now has the potential of mega DDoS attacks at 150 plus Gbps and are utilising a Trojan malware in hijacking the Linus system. The first access was obtained by brute force attacks in order to discover the password to Secure Shell services on a Linux machine. When the Login has been attained, the attackers used root privileges in order to run a Bash shell script, thereby downloading and executing the nasty binary

SIRT Tracking XOR DDoS – Trojan Malware

Akamai’s Security Intelligence Response Team has been tracking XOR DDoS, which is a Trojan malware that DDoS attackers seemed to have used in hijacking Linux machines in building a botnet for distributed denial of service attack campaigns with DNS and SYN floods.

Some of the key points observed by Akamai were that the gaming sector had been the main target, which was followed by educational institutions. The botnet seemed to attack around 20 targets each day, 90% of which were from Asia.

The malware tends to spread through Secure Shell – SSH services vulnerable to brute force attacks owing to weak passwords. This could turn from bad to worse. The team at Akamai expect the XOR DDoS activity would continue since attackers refine and improve their methods, inclusive of a more diverse selection of DDoS types of attack.

Advisory Describing DDoS Mitigation/Malware Removal Information Available

As per the Akamai team, the IP address of the bot seems at times hoaxed though not always. The botnet attacks noticed that in the DDoS campaigns against Akamai consumers were a mixture of hoaxed and non-hoaxed attack traffic. According to Lucian Constantin of IDC News Service recently stated that this power to generate crippling attacks at more than 150 Gbps represent several time greater than a usual company’s organization could endure.

 In the meanwhile an advisory describing this threat inclusive of DDoS mitigation payload analysis as well as malware removal information is made available for download from Akamai. Eliminating the XOR DDoS malware seems to have a four step procedure wherein most of the scripts are provided in the advisory.

Senior vice president and general manager of Akamai, Stuart Scholly has said that XOR DDoS is an example of attackers switching focus and developing botnets utilising compromised Linux systems to launch DDoS outbreaks. This occurs more frequently now than earlier, when Windows machines were the main targets for DDoS malware.