Live Stream Of Royal Wedding Breaks Internet Records

The marriage of Prince William to Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge, was streamed live on the British royal family's YouTube channel, the first royal wedding to be covered in such a way.

Livestream, said the event broke its own records, with more than 330,000 viewers at one point.

On Twitter, nine of the top 10 trending topics were related to the royal wedding.

The BBC website, was struggling under the strain Friday morning, intermittently flashing an error message during the ceremony saying the site was experiencing "abnormal traffic".

The two hottest searches on Google were "Royal wedding coverage" and "Kate Middleton wedding dress", (where's pippa ? :) )which devoted the celebrated logo on its home page to the royal wedding and they mapped the royal procession route in 3D.

Palace officials hosted a live multimedia blog on the royal site, where visitors could congratulate the couple in an online wedding book and make donations to the Royal Wedding Charity Fund.

Fears that the global media event, expected to draw two billion viewers worldwide and many of them online could "break" the Internet proved unfounded.



 

How to Dismantle and Destroy a Hard Drive

There are a ton of reasons why you might want to physically destroy a hard drive rather than use disk wiping software:

higher confidence that the data is destroyed, a recourse if your drive has failed and no longer accessible, and sheer fun.

If the thermite method and other extreme physical disposal methods aren't for you, dismantling the drive to get to the platters is an alternative method.

The main process involves removing the screws around the outside of the drive, pulling out the screws holding the electronics, and then popping the cover off.

After removing the magnets, you can get to the platters, the heart of your hard drive.

First run the magnets over the platters to degauss them. Because that's not a guarantee that the data is unrecoverable, you should then physically destroy the platters, bend them or break them with a hammer or saw them into pieces.

And that will be the end of those discs and the data on them.

The video below shows how Google use a disk crushers and the destruction of old hard drives to prevent leakage of customer data.

PSN: Credit Card Details For Sale

This just keeps getting worse by the day, hackers responsible for the PSN breach last week are attempting to sell users' credit card details online.

They claim to have the details of 2.2m Sony PlayStation Network users, including Credit card security numbers.

They are hoping to sell the credit card list for upwards of $100,000.

Read more here

Mortgage, Loan Calculator 1.1 For iPhone

Mortgage/Loan Calculator 1.1 the latest update for iPhone, iPod touch and iPads is out

Mortgage/Loan Calculator is a new application on the market that offers more flexibility than the other similar apps being offered. This one boasts incredible ease of use coupled with powerful tools for homeowners.

 This new application offers incredibly easy to use features that include auto calculating of figures to determine savings of different loan, duration and payment scenarios, factoring in property tax and homeowner's insurance for a complete, comprehensive picture. 

Users are also able to email and save results, as well as compare a number of different loan options, side by side.

The app is intuitive and automatically does the work when numbers are entered in the input fields, users don't even have to press a "calculate" button for any of the figuring.

Users are able to very quickly and easily try a number of different scenarios with this application, to determine the impact on their mortgage of making pre-payments or extra ad-hoc payments. 
Also they can adjust loan duration periods and monthly payments to see what the financial outcome would be. Homeowners can then plan their loan strategies better by knowing how many extra payments would pay off their mortgage within a desired amount of time.
Or at least they know how much total interest they are paying over the life of the loan, or how much they could save by paying it off early.

To ensure that the figures are accurately comprehensive, the app allows users to factor in their property taxes and insurance to get a truly complete picture of their mortgage costs.

Mortgage/Loan Calculator 1.1 is available worldwide exclusively through the App Store in the Finance category. 

Speech to Text Recognition For Google Chrome

Chrome browser version 11 has a cool new feature:
speech input through HTML.

This means that you can now talk into your microphone and order commands on websites that support the new speech API.

Only limited to Google Translate at the moment and in the English language.

The use the speech feature first make sure that you have a microphone hooked to your computer and using Chrome 1
Next, go to Google Translate and change the “From” language from “Detect language” to “English”.

You should now see a microphone icon appearing at the lower-right corner of the input box.

Click the microphone icon and speak what you want translated. When you're done talking, Google will automatically translate the spoken words. You can even click on the “Listen” button to hear the translated words spoken back to you.

Other sites where you can test the new speech feature is Web2Voice and HTML5 demos.

TomTom Sold User Data To Police for Speed Traps

 Basically, if you own a TomTom GPS and you got a ticket in a speed trap...it was your own data that busted you!

Here is a statement from TomTom's CEO claiming the company didn't know about this and that it won't happen again:

 

Locate Your Camera’s Photos On The Web

Digital cameras store the camera’s serial number in the photo’s EXIF information, which can then be used to identify photos taken with that specific camera.

A new web service called "Stolen Camera Finder" uses this concept to locate photos on the Internet.

The main idea behind the search is that the thief may have uploaded photos taken with the camera to the Internet, which would then open up possibilities to identify the person responsible for stealing the digital camera.

You can upload a photo taken with a particular camera to the service’s website, or enter the camera’s serial number directly to start a search for photos on the web.

The drag and drop upload is currently only working under Firefox and Google Chrome, if you use another browser you need to enter the camera’s serial number into the form.

The service crawls the web for photos with serial numbers and adds all that are found to its database, which currently contains a list of well over one million serial numbers.

The positive thing about this service is that you can identify the person responsible for stealing your stuff, see where your photo's are posted on the web and the negative side is that you can stalk a person with this service...
Check out the website here

What You Need To Know Right Now About The Sony PSN Hack

Sony revealed  additional information, about the hack

name, address (city, state/province, zip or postal code), country, email address, birthdate, PlayStation Network/Qriocity passwords and login, handle/PSN online ID.

Note that the email addresses, logins and passwords also have been stolen from Sony

This is going to turn ugly considering that many users on the web use the same email and password combination on a lot of sites.

If you are a customer you need to immediately change your passwords on site where you may have used the same password, and your email account.

Furthermore Sony says that it is possible that profile data may have also been obtained, which would include purchase history and billing address. Worse, they cannot eliminate the possibility that created card data was taken as well.

That’s the worst case scenario, and there is not lot that users of the network can do at this time, but to actively monitor their credit card bills to check for unauthorized payments.

To protect against possible identity theft or other financial loss, remain vigilant to review your account statements and to monitor your credit or similar types of reports.

The data stolen could also be used in custom attacks as the attackers could use the user’s name and other information to make requests look legit.

Sony asks all users to change their PSN passwords as soon as the service goes online again.

A frequently asked questions section has been uploaded to the Playstation website which contains further information and support phone numbers.

With 70 million users, the data alone could be worth a fortune on the black market.



Final note:
1 - PSN users need to change their web account passwords immediately.
2 - You need to change the password of your email accounts if identical
3 - Monitor your credit card statements and account statements to make sure that no unauthorized payments are made from the accounts.

Windows Phone 7 Also Collects Location Data

Image by clintonjeff via FlickrAfter Google and Apple now Microsoft has admitted that Windows Phone 7 tracks users locations.

Microsoft revealed that it collects data such as the signal strength, the radio type, and if GPS is available also logs latitude, longitude, direction and speed and also the BSSID, which is the MAC address of the device.

Microsoft said it does not collect information sent over private, non-protected wireless networks. It said that its software specifically only picks up publicly broadcast data from WiFi access points and that packets sent over encrypted or unencrypted networks remain safe from its location tracking.

They reassured customers that it does not collect emails, passwords or similar information from open networks. It also does not monitor devices connected to access points, nor the SSID name of an access point, which could reveal the identiy of the user since many people name their networks with personal information.

Microsoft said that it does not share the data with mobile operators.

Microsoft also stressed that users can turn off this location tracking feature

Many of these questions are likely to be similar to those asked by US lawmakers recently as they probe Microsoft and a number of other companies about their location tracking policies. The fact that Microsoft is publishing the information for all to see might go down well with investigators, as the company apparently is tackling the problem head on.

Calculate And Track Your Gas Mileage

Image by chiaraogan via FlickrFuelly is a handy little web application that's easy to use from your smartphone, or your computer.

It tracks your gas purchases and mileage over time and calculates miles per gallon overall and per tank.

The best part about Fuelly is comparing your car to others of the same make and model.


Check out the website