Yahoo Hacked

Yahoo Hacked

Usernames and passwords of some of Yahoo’s email customers have been stolen and used to gather personal information about people those Yahoo mail users have recently corresponded with, the company said Thursday.

Yahoo didn’t say how many accounts have been affected. Yahoo is the second-largest email service worldwide, after Google’s Gmail, according to the research firm comScore. There are 273 million Yahoo mail accounts worldwide, including 81 million in the United States.

Yahoo said the usernames and passwords weren’t collected from its own systems, but from a third-party database.

Yahoo said it is resetting passwords on affected accounts and has “implemented additional measures” to block further attacks. The company would not comment beyond the information in its blog post. It said it is working with federal law enforcement.

Angry birds website hacked

Angry Birds website hacked

Angry Birds creator Rovio Entertainment Ltd says the popular game's website was defaced by hackers, two days after reports that the personal data of its customers might have been accessed by US and British spy agencies.

Reports earlier this week said that documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden suggested the NSA and Britain's GCHQ had been able to extract information through numerous smartphone apps, including Google Maps and the Angry Birds game franchise.
Rovio CEO Mikael Hed said the personal details of customers could have been accessed from information gathered by third-party advertising agencies.

Angry Birds, an addictive birds-versus-pigs game that has been downloaded more than 1.7 billion times worldwide, is one of the latest examples of how everyday pieces of software can be turned into instruments of spying.

How to get know that your Gmail is safe from hackers or not

Gmail Security

If you have a Gmail account, you can easily check whether or not you have been hacked.
Google has provided users with tools right within the Gmail inbox that can help keep your account secured. Here’s how it works:

To check if your account has been targeted and hacked into without your knowledge, you need to log into your Gmail account using a desktop browser.

Now scroll down to the bottom of your inbox and locate a link called “Details”. When you click on it, a pop-up window will appear, and it will show you a detailed list of the last ten times you – or anyone else –has accessed your account. It will also show you not just when your account was accessed but also how it was viewed. You’ll know if the inbox was opened using an email app, browser, smartphone app and the IP address through which it was accessed.

If you see a suspicious device or IP address, you may want to change your password as soon as possible.
To strengthen the security on your Gmail account, you can even turn the two-factor authentication system on. You can store your IP addresses of the various computers and devices you use to access Gmail, in order to ensure nothing fishy is going on around your account.

How to bypass cache when loading sites

How to bypass cache when loading sites

The browser cache is a useful feature of every web browser.Contents of the website, such as the site's logo, other images or contents, are saved to disk so that they are loaded from there the next time they are requested.
This is useful as it not only reduces the bandwidth needed to display a page on the domain, but may also speed things up as no connection is necessary to download those elements to the system you are using.

While the cache is useful most of the time, it can get in your way at times as well. Say, you get a white page on Facebook whenever you load the site, or do not see changes that you have made to your website.

One common cause for these kind of issues is that contents are loaded from cache and not from the site directly.

While you can hit Ctrl-F5 to force the browser to load all contents from network or Internet servers again, it may not be practicable if you have to use that feature often.

That's where the Chrome extension Cache Killer comes into play. You can toggle Cache Killer, and when it is enabled, it will automatically clear the cache before new page loads so that contents are loaded from the server the site is hosted on, and not from the local hard drive or memory.

The extension is mostly useful for web developers who want to make sure that changes have propagated correctly on a live or test server, but it can have its uses for other users as well.
Cache Killer comes with a single option that you can turn on. If you do, it is automatically enabled on start of the browser so that you do not have to do so manually first.

Microsoft SkyDrive now becomes OneDrive

Microsoft OneDrive

Microsoft is renaming SkyDrive as OneDrive. The company's cloud file-storage service, which launched in 2007, will soon be come with the new name, and all SkyDrive products will eventually migrate to OneDrive.com.

" Microsoft has been increasingly steering its customers toward using SkyDrive, giving away 200GB of free storage for two years to anyone who buys a Surface tablet as well as making SkyDrive the default place to store documents in apps like Word and Excel in Windows 8.1.

Functionally, OneDrive will work the same as SkyDrive and users of SkyDrive and SkyDrive Pro shouldn't notice any changes apart from the name. SkyDrive Pro, a the business-focused arm of the service, also gets a new name: OneDrive for Business, mirroring the naming convention established by other cloud services, such as Dropbox.

A small video presentation on OneDrive:

Google to offer $2.7 million prize at hacking contest

Google Hacking contest

 Search engine giant Google will offer $2.7 million to researchers who can hack its browser-based operating system Chrome OS as part of its Pwnium hacking contest to be held in March this year.

This year, Pwnium 4, will be hosted in March at the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver, Canada.

Google will also pay $150,000 for providing an exploit to be able to persistently compromise an HP or Acer Chromebook, ie hacking the device to retain control even after a reboot.

The earlier editions of Pwnium competitions focussed on Intel-based Chrome OS devices, but this year Google will allow researchers to also choose from ARM-based Chromebook, the HP Chromebook 11 (Wi-Fi) and the Acer C720 Chromebook (2GB Wi-Fi) based on Intel's Haswell microarchitecture.

How to backup and restore Windows 8 start screen layout

Windows 8 Start Screen

Whether you use the Start screen not so much , you've probably spent some time setting it up just the way you like it. To save you from having to go through it again when you reinstall Windows or if your Start screen gets rearranged accidentally, you can back up your layout and restore it later. Here's how:

Step 1: Open the Run dialog box by hitting Windows key + R.

Step 2: Type, "%LocalAppData%\Microsoft\Windows" and hit Enter to open Windows Explorer to the location of the Start screen layout files.

Step 3: Copy the files, "appsFolder.itemdata-ms" and "appsfolder.itemdata-ms.bak" to your backup folder.

 If something happens to your Start screen layout and you want to restore it, just copy the backup files back to the original location and overwrite the files already in the folder.