Microsoft wants Windows to open into mixed reality !!!

Microsoft wants Windows to open into mixed reality !!!

virtual reality Unknown   07:43:00

The US technology giant on Wednesday announced that Windows software, already powering a wide range of devices including HoloLens :augmented reality head gear is open to partners interested in building devices for "mixed reality" experiences. ie, Devices built on the Windows platform will be inter operable, meaning that someone wearing HTC Vive virtual reality gear would be able to virtually visit and collaborate with someone using HoloLens virtual reality.

The list of partners already working with Microsoft includes HTC, Lenovo, Asus, and HP.

Microsoft said it built HoloLens to showcase the potential for the technology, which is based on the same Windows operating system that powers computers, smartphones, Xbox consoles and more.

Sharing the Windows platform will mean that augmented or virtual reality gear from various manufacturers will be able to work with one another, the same way Windows computers do.

"We are bringing the software that lights up HoloLens to the entire ecosystem of mixed reality devices—and inviting partners to join us in this platform," said Microsoft spokesman Greg Sullivan 

While virtual reality devices such as those from Facebook-owned Oculus and Sony's PlayStation unit which immerse users in fantasy worlds, HoloLens "augments" reality by overlaying holograms on the real world in view.

HoloLens lets users interact with virtual objects using hand gestures.

virtual walk on mars 

Microsoft would not disclose details regarding how it will make money from the move. But it is expected to pursue the kinds of licensing deals that negotiates with companies that make Windows-powered computers.

Creating a common platform for a wide range of companies to create and market mixed reality gear promises to bring down prices for altered reality gear while enriching variety in the marketplace.

Microsoft in March began its first shipments of its HoloLens to application developers, staking its place in what is expected to be an emerging computing platform.

At a recent Microsoft developer's conference, the company showed some of the possibilities for HoloLens—such as giving users a view of Mars, that up to now could only be seen by space vehicles, and an inside view of the brain seen by medical specialists aiming to deal with a cerebral tumor.

halolens official trailer

Aiming to encourage new applications for the device, Microsoft noted that developers can create "new mixed reality" with holograms to enable users to see and experience things in new ways.

The holographic capabilities in the Microsoft gear can open doors for developers to augment tasks from complex surgery to motorcycle design, according to the company.

Marketers predict virtual headsets will soon top wish lists for kids and young adults from Silicon Valley to Hong Kong. But some analysts say virtual reality will be eclipsed by augmented reality within a few years.

Is Technology Stealing Our (Self) Identities?

Is Technology Stealing Our (Self) Identities?

technology Unknown   22:43:00

Who or what is defining your self-identity?

Our self-identities, that is, how we define and see ourselves as unique individuals, play a vital role in who we are and the direction that our lives take. The self-identity encompasses the totality of knowledge and understanding that we gain about ourselves as we develop including our personalities, aptitudes and capabilities, intellectual and physical attributes, interests, and relationships.

We gain our self-identities in two ways. First, as we develop self-awareness, we observe and evaluate our thoughts, feelings, and behavior based on past experience, current needs, and future goals. We also look outward to the world in which we live, for example, social, academic, and physical, for feedback that also shapes our self-identities. Because we are fundamentally social beings and an essential part of our development involves finding our place in the social and cultural context in which we live, feedback from that social world plays a significant role in the evolution of our self-identities.

Because our social worlds have expanded dramatically in the last decade, from families, friends, neighborhoods, and schools to an almost-limitless universe of people due to the proliferation of the Internet and social media, it isn't difficult to see how external forces may now be gaining a disproportionate influence over our self-identities compared to previous generations. And these social influences, accelerated by the recent explosion of technology, is shaping our self-identities in ways in which most of us aren't the least bit aware. 

One of the most powerful ways in which technology is altering self-identity is through the shift from being internally to externally driven. Yes, as I just described, social factors have always had an impact on the formation of self-identity, but they had been, up until recently, partners of sorts with our own internal contributors to self-identity. But now the sheer ubiquity and force of the latest technological advances has taken that influence and turned its volume up to a deafening roar.

In previous generations, most of the social forces that influenced our self-identities were positive; parents, peers, schools, communities, extracurricular activities, even the media sent mostly healthy messages about who we were and how we should perceive ourselves. Yes, there were bad influences, but they were far outweighed by those that were beneficial. These forces acted mostly as a mirror reflecting back on us what we saw in ourselves, resulting in affirmation rather than change in our self-identities.

But now, the pendulum has swung to the other extremes in a social world where the profit motive rules and healthy influences are mostly drowned out by the cacophony of the latest technology. The self-identities of this generation of young people and, in fact, anyone who is deeply immersed in popular culture and media, are now shaped by external forces in two ways.

First, popular culture, through both "old-school" and the latest media, no longer holds a mirror to reflect our self-identities. Nor does it provide feedback about how grounded our self-identities are in the reality of our lives. Instead, popular culture manufactures "portraits" of who it wants us to be. Tapping into our most basic needs to feel good about themselves, accepted, and attractive, popular culture tells us what we should believe about ourselves. The problem is that the self-identity that is shaped by popular culture serves its own best interests rather than what is best for us. Additionally, self-identity is no longer self-identity, meaning derived from the self, but rather is an identity projected onto us by popular culture and in no way an accurate reflection of who we really are.

Second, social media has caused us to shift away from expressing our self-identities and toward constructing facades based on the answers to these questions, "How will others look at me?" and "How can I ensure that others view me positively?" The goal for many now in their use of social media becomes how they can curry acceptance, popularity, status, and, by extension, self-esteem through their profiles and postings. Self-awareness and self-expression give way to impression management and self-promotion. As the writer Christine Rosen observed in her 2007 article in The New Atlantis, "Does this technology, with its constant demands to collect (friends and status), and perform (by marketing ourselves), in some ways undermine our ability to attain what it promises-a surer sense of who we are and where we belong? The Delphic oracle's guidance was know thyself. Today, in the world of online social networks, the oracle's advice might be show thyself." 



We come to see our identities as those we would like to have or that we want people to see rather than who we really are. We then feel compelled to promote and market these identities through social media. The line between person and persona, private and public self become blurred or erased completely and the so-called self-identity becomes a means of our acceptance and status.

Paradoxically, in striving for approval by our social world writ large through technology and in seeking uniqueness that enables us to stand out in the densely populated cyber world, we unwittingly sacrifice our true self-identities and shape our identities to conform to what the digital world views as acceptable identity. And, in doing so, we relinquish the specialness that we hold so dear. Notes Christine Rosen, "Indeed, this is one of the characteristics of MySpace [obviously before Facebook took off]...it is an overwhelmingly dull sea of monotonous uniqueness, of conventional individuality, of distinctive sameness." 


There are two really sad things about this unintended consequence of the use of these emerging technologies. First, most people have no idea of the dramatic changes that are occurring slowly yet inexorably within them (just as a frog doesn't sense it is going to die if placed in water that is heated slowly). Second, this shift in identity, from internally derived to externally driven, can't be good for us as (formerly unique?) individuals nor for us as a (formerly vital?) society.

Deep Text-Facebook's text understanding AI!

Deep Text-Facebook's text understanding AI!

technology Unknown   11:04:00

There is just way too much offensive content in many Facebook posts.You are frustrated and want to do something about it.But,reporting these posts can be such a drag!Don't worry!An AI is coming to your rescue!

Facebook has announced the development of a new artificial intelligence(AI) that can analyse what people are writing about in posts with near-human accuracy across 20 languages. It can automatically pick out hate speech from status updates that merely contain controversial terms, it could prevent a human from ever suffering the harassment and having to report it manually.Facebook already says that its AI systems report more offensive photos than humans on its social network.

The applications of 'Deep Text' are big! Facebook knows what your status update is about, it can show it to people who care about that topic. If it understands the difference between “I just got out of the taxi” and “I need a ride” messages, it can ask if you want an Uber. If it detects that you’re trying to sell something in a status update, it can automatically format post with the price and item details. And if Facebook can determine what kinds of comments on celebrities’ posts are interesting and not just “OH MY GOSH I LOVE YOU”, it can surface ones you’ll actually want to read.

Facebook explains that “to get closer to how humans understand text, we need to teach the computer to understand things like slang and word-sense disambiguation. As an example, if someone says, “I like blackberry,” does that mean the fruit or the device?"

Of course, the privacy implications might rattle some people. Facebook is now highlighting that it scans the content of your private messages — something that made Facebook the target of a class-action lawsuit in the past.But I feel that the advantages of 'Deep Text' outweigh the concerns about privacy.

With 'DeepText' and its other image recognition AIs, Facebook could make huge improvements in how it routes content from authors to viewers. That could give it a leg-up over other social networks like Snapchat or Twitter without the know-how or product design to aggressively filter and suggest what people see.

The gap between the AI haves and have-nots is widening. If every News Feed post looks interesting, you’ll spend more time on Facebook, you’ll share more text there, DeepText will get smarter, and the Facebook AI feedback wheel will spin faster and faster towards becoming the perfect content recommendation engine.

Operation Darknet ; Vigilante Hackers Wage War on Underground Kiddie Porn

Operation Darknet ; Vigilante Hackers Wage War on Underground Kiddie Porn

news Unknown   00:49:00

Operation Darknet (also known as #OpDarknet) is the code name for a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks carried out by Anonymous on Lolita City, a child pornography sharing website that is accessible in anonymity via The Tor Project’s encrypted service. 

This campaign is not to be confused with two earlier Anonymous operations that have shared the same name, one from January 2010 to provide a solution to the censorship threatened by the ACTA (Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement) and another initiative from April 2011 to inform Anonymous members to start using I2P to protect their anonymity.

Background

The operation began in early October 2011 with a mission to expose the underground pedophile community known as “Lolita City”. The website was built via Tor, a software that allows users to host and browse websites anonymously. It is built to protect the anonymity of Internet users under regimes that do not allow free internet access, The program has seen its use in least four other forum communities accused of hosting child porn, as well as a drug marketplace known as “Silk Road” where users could buy illegal drugs with Bitcoins.

Notable Developments
October 14th – 15th: PasteBin Release

The major events of the Operation took place between October 14th and 15th, as archived in a Pastebin document. On October 14th, Anonymous hackers began their mission by removing links to pornographic images and videos on the Hidden Wiki, located on Tor’s Hidden Service Protocol. Shortly after the links returned online, the site became inaccessible entirety, presumably as a result of DDoS attack initiated by the group.

October 15th: Target Freedom Hostin

Following the initial attack, Anonymous members found out nearly all of the pornography had the Freedom Hosting digital fingerprint and thus issued the host a warning to remove the content from its server at 9 p.m.

 Freedom Hosting refused to comply and two and a half hours later, Anonymous completely shut down Freedom’s services with DDoS attacks that created a 1GB SQL and 100,000 ASCII files of Guy Fawkes masks every five minutes.

Around 5 p.m. (CST) the next day, Freedom was able to restore service completely via backup servers. Anonymous issued several additional warnings to the company, giving them 3 hours before taking down the server again, this time using an attack codenamed “Chris Hanson,” which uploaded episodes of “To Catch a Predator” labeled as “CP” on to the site.

October 17th: Anonymous Releases Communique

On October 17th, YouTuber Become Anonymous uploaded a video with the Anonymous manifesto, explaining the motivations behind Operation Darknet and its future plans.

October 18th: Userbase Exposed

On October 18th, Anonymous released the names of the 1589 users of Lolita City via PasteBin, including their username, volume of images uploaded, and age of the account. They invited Interpol and the FBI to investigate the records further.

October 20th – 24th: News Media Coverage

News of the operation spread quickly, with the earliest news story appearing on the Examiner on October 20th, Gawker on the 21st, the Huffington Post and PC World on the 22nd, and Geekosystem on the 23rd. The Examiner story was shared on Reddit on October 22nd, where it received 2475 points in two days.

By October 24th, the news had reached the Wall Street Journal, Information Week, and the BBC. Techie Buzz also published an interview with a user named “arson” in the #OpDarknet IRC channel. Arson stated that their mission was only to take down illegal materials and the operation was not triggered by any particular event:

We vowed to fight for the defenseless, there is none more defenseless than innocent children being exploited.

November 2nd: Final Release

The last official PasteBin communique from #OpDarknet was uploaded on November 2nd, 2011. They stated that the whole plan behind the operation was not to take down Tor or the darknet in general, but specifically to attack the CP sharing occurring on these sites. It revealed “The Honey Pawt,” a modified TorButton for Firefox, which, when used, would log users information if they tried to access the Hard Candy wiki or Lolita City.

On October 27th, Operation Paw Printing went into effect for 24 hours, marking the end of the DDoS attacks on The Hidden Wiki and implementation of the modified TorButton, which was only available on the Hard Candy page. When a user of HC updated the button, their IP information was logged. Over the course of the day, 190 unique users and IP addresses were logged, mapped out below.

The PasteBin document noted that November 5th, 2011, Guy Fawkes Day, would mark the end of the Operation and Anonymous would be “sailing away for another Lulz.”

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Manually Remove Virus From PC,USB or Memory Card using a simple command;Say bye bye to antivirus

Manually Remove Virus From PC,USB or Memory Card using a simple command;Say bye bye to antivirus

virus Unknown   06:11:00

Computer Virus infection is only removed through antivirus programs as you know, but this time we are talking about Shortcut Virus which is a new modern virus that automatically sneeks into your computer/USB/SD card and convert your content into a shortcut. 

• Sometimes this virus will hide all your contents. 
• Another irritating thing is that the short cut virus cannot be removed by most of the anti-virus programs available in market.
• The only way to remove the virus was to format the entire partition or memory device.

BUT NOW THERE IS A WAY !!! 

Follow these steps to get rid of shortcut virus forever:

Step 1: Connect the affected device(Pen drive,memory card etc) to your PC/laptop.

Step 2: Open run (press windows button + R ). Then type in " cmd " in Run and press enter or OK to open command prompt.

Step 3: Go to My computer and check out the drive letter of your infected device or drive. 

As you can see mine is 'F'

Step 4:Now to remove shortcut virus from pendrive type "attrib -h -r -s /s /d f:\*.*" in the Command prompt.

Important

Replace " f " in the above cmd entry with the drive letter of your affected device.

Step 5: Press Enter button.

Step 6: Open your device(Pendrive,memory card etc). You would see both your original files and shortcut files.

Delete all the shortcut and unknown files.

Copy your original files and folders to another drive.

Step 7: Finally format the Pen drive or Memory card. 

You have successfully removed shortcut virus from pendrive and recovered the infected files in the device.

Tips to protect your pen drive from Virus

• Keep your system up to date with the latest antivirus.
• Update your antivirus program at regularly.
• Do not ever open the shortcut or virus file with the extension filename.lnk. It could badly harm your computer and could infect your other removable devices too.
• Before opening any removable drive ( pen drive or SD card ) perform a deep scan of the removable device.

Leave your valuable comments and if you find any difficulty in removing shortcut virus tell us, we will help you.