Police – or anyone with a piece of spying software – can track everything you do on your iPhone without needing physical access to your phone.

As iPhones sync nearly instantaneously with iCloud, anyone who is listening will have near-instantaneous access to your phone - without the owner noticing a thing.

The software, called Phone Password Breaker, can download all of the data from Apple’s iCloud service – which backs up all of your pictures, text messages, emails, calendar appointments, call logs, website you have visited, and contacts.

As iPhones sync nearly instantaneously with iCloud, anyone who is listening will have near-instantaneous access to your phone – without the owner noticing a thing.

ElcomSoft chief executive Vladimir Katalov said: ‘While other methods require the presence of the actual iPhone device being analysed or at least an access to device backups, this is not the case with iCloud.

‘In a sense, Phone Password Breaker becomes an alternative way to get access to iOS devices’ content.

‘With a valid Apple ID and a password, investigators can not only retrieve backups to seized devices, but access that information in real-time while the phone is still in the hands of a suspect’.

The majority of iPhone and iPad users use iCloud to back up all of their data, apps and media – with an estimated 125 million people using the software as of April.

As long as investigators or anyone with the software has the correct email address and password for the machine they want to crack, they can download all the information from iCloud with the user knowing.

And as iPhones sync with iCloud in near-real-time, they can keep up with you where-ever you are.

The researchers at ElcomSoft studied the communication protocol connecting iPhone users with the iCloud, and were able to figure out the right commands to retrieve data stored on the servers.

Their job was made even easier as the data is received in an unencrypted format. The only way to protect yourself is to either not back up your phone, or do local ‘offline’ backups on your home computer via iTunes. source – Daily Mail UK

Have you ever been sent a text message with a link? Be careful! Identity Theft Expert and Consultant Robert Siciliano says it could be an ID theft scam known as “smishing.”

The term “smishing” refers to winning a fake prize. A link often appears in the body of an email or phone text telling you to “click here” for your prize. If you click on the infected link, it downloads malware, which compromises your device.

If you click on the infected link, the downloaded software allows a “bad guy” to remotely control your phone — from anywhere in the world. That scammer can even use your phone to access your banking information and even monitor ambient sounds around you.

How do you avoid “smishing”? Robert says:

1) Protect your cell phone and computer with anti-malware products, such as McAfee

2) Avoid clicking on links you are not familiar with.

On “Anderson,” Robert shares the top 10 identity theft scams to watch out for. Along with “smishing” another top scam is disguised phone calls. A “bad guy” will use your social networking page, such as Facebook, to retrieve personal information from you before placing a call to a victim’s family member or friend, asking for money.

Robert also reveals that a thief can easily change a caller ID. Just because the caller ID says it’s your friend, it doesn’t mean it is. How do you avoid the disguised phone call scam? Robert recommends turning on privacy settings on your Facebook account.

“Skimming” is a credit and debit card scam in which crooks tamper with debit-card processing equipment at the point of sale — inserting a tiny device into the store equipment that enables them to read the magnetic strip as it is swiped.

Tami Nealy, Senior Director of Corporate Communications at LifeLock, says the best way to avoid skimming is to be vigilant at the gas station pump, or wherever you use your debit card. Look for anything out of place. Any wires exposed? Tape evident? Hardware loose?

Also, when you insert your card, wiggle it while it’s in the slot. If something seems loose, there might be theft device attached to the swipe hardware. Wiggling the card might jar the theft device from its hiding place. Last, Tami recommends using your hand to cover your PIN number as you punch it in at the ATM, just in case there’s a pinhole camera, which can record customers as they enter their PIN. source – Anderson Cooper

1. Amazing Touch Functionality
Windows 8 allows you to use Touch to perform all the tasks that you normally perform using the mouse and keyboard. You can swipe apps off the screen, access invisible thumbnail apps at the top or bottom right corner and do much, much more using Touch.

Borrowing heavily from their Mobile OS, Windows brings full touch screen technology to home desktop computing

2. Notifications Are More User Friendly
The new Metro notification system is non-intrusive. You’ll see the notification pop up in the top right corner of the screen, not right in the middle. If you don’t open the notification, it stays there without intruding on your work.

3. Your Preferences Are Remembered
For example, when you plug in your USB, you can choose whether you want to open Explorer, copy and move files or do something else. Windows will automatically execute your choice the next time you stick your USB in.

4. Smoother App Switching
Leave your mouse pointer in the top or bottom left corner of the screen, and you’ll see a thumbnail showing the next app. Drag your mouse down to view the thumbnails and choose the next app. To see all recent desktop and Metro apps, click Alt+Tab, and to view the switching pane, use Win+Tab.

5. Close Metro Apps Without Using Task Manager
Use touch and drag your app from the top of the screen till it shrinks to a thumbnail size. Then drag it off the screen to close it. You can do this with your mouse as well, or use Alt+F4, as you would with a desktop app.

6. Uses Lesser Memory
During tests, Windows 7 and Windows 8 machines were rebooted several times to test system memory usage. The Windows 8 machine showed 3 less system processes (9+% less). Windows 8 uses 124 MB less available desktop memory (20% less than 7).

7. Control Panel Easier To Navigate
The control panel is cleaner and easier to navigate, better than the Windows 7 Category View. You can manage all your system functionality customization on one screen instead of moving through multiple screens.

8. Pinnable Metro Interface
You can now pin your email, appointments, contacts and photos pinned to it. This makes the Metro more user-friendly and more fun. There’s also the Metro tile for the desktop, where you can pin Explorer and libraries.

9. Redesigned Charm Bar
When you swipe from the edge of your screen, you can see the redesigned charm bar containing your Share, Search, Devices, Settings and Start options. You can access the charm bar through your mouse as well.

10. Swap Between Start And Previous Task
A group of your previous tasks are lined up under Start, which makes it very easy to navigate around. You can scroll your mouse and swap between Start and apps– the tiles move just as smoothly as though you were using Touch.

11. Quick Link To Apps View
If you want a quick look at all your apps, just swipe up from the bottom on the Start screen. All your apps are neatly organized into program groups and even arranged alphabetically for maximum user-friendliness.

12. Improved Switching Pane
Drag your mouse down to see the thumbnails in the switching pane, or just use touch pad or swipe sideways with Microsoft Touch Mouse to switch between apps and pics.

13. Great Metro-Style Apps
There are Xbox apps that allow you to control your Xbox console from your Windows PC or phone and Xbox LIVE Games and Xbox Companion. These apps allow you to seamless connect to your HDTV through Xbox and browse music and video marketplaces.

14. Great Looking, Better Performing Apps
There’s Bing Finance, Bing Weather and Bing Maps, along with Pinball FX2 and Solitaire that are not just great looking but perform excellently, among others.

15. Great Updates To Windows Desktop 
There’s the ribbon-based Explorer, improved file copy and the new Task Manager. The new Start tip replaces the Start button of 7 and comes with a menu of useful options, which were hard to find in 7.

16. Cloud Integration
You can save apps within the local file system and also into the cloud with SkyDrive. This and several other cloud integration aspects make Windows 8 seamless.

17. Advanced Methods For Installation, Upgrades And Repairs
The Push Button Reset allows you to reset your PC, removing personal data, settings and apps in about six minutes. There’s the PC Refresh that takes about 8 mins to refresh your PC. No more waiting an entire day to clean up.

18. Context-Sensitive, Advanced Search Options
Windows 8 brings you advanced, multi-faceted context-sensitive search both on Windows Explorer and on Internet Explorer. When you switch to context-sensitive search, IE brings you results from Bing. source – Tech XT

When you get a new fan, you have the opportunity to keep them engaged. If you don’t, they’ll simply stop reading your posts. Here are some of the things you should keep in mind as you determine how best to engage your Facebook customers.

Which Days are Your Fans Most Responsive?

You need to maximize likes and comments to be visible to fans. Part of getting better engagement results is knowing which days of the week your fans are most and least responsive. This is different for every company and industry. Knowing the best day of the week for all Facebook pages won’t help you with your brand. So even if the best overall day is Tuesday, your company’s best day might be Sunday.

For example, recent research indicated that the most responsive day for high-fashion brand pages is Wednesday, while the most responsive day for outdoor clothing brand pages is Thursday. Why should brands care? Well, even if you post every day, your greatest focus should go to those days when followers are most responsive. So, if your best day is on the weekend, make sure you have that covered.

It also turns out that the best days of the week to post on Facebook are not always the same days brands create the most posts. Sometimes it’s a Sunday, and maybe no one is working. It appears that the amount a brand posts is not based on their most responsive days, but perhaps just on convenience or coincidence.

How to Maximize the Most Engaging Days

If you want to figure out this data for your page, here are the steps:

• 1. Go to your Facebook page insights and click on likes.
• 2. Click on export data. Choose post level data, then select at least a two-month range so you have a good sample.
• 3. Save it and open it in Excel.
• 4. There’s not a quick way in Excel to group dates by day of week, but with a bit of manual work, you can find the average lifetime of engaged users per post, per day of the week.

The only shortcoming here is that the data is limited by how good and engaging your posts have been. It’s better to look at 10 to 20 brand pages per industry. You will have to manually look at hundreds of posts, or find a way to scrape that data. Then you can find the average likes and comments per post, per day of the week across an entire industry.

If one of your competitors is doing a much better job at getting likes and comments, you might want to follow their lead. It could be, in part, the days of the week they post, and also the type and quality of content. source – Mashable

The photo-sharing app is on fire. It now has more than 50 million users — and is adding new ones at the rate of roughly 5 million per week, according to its API.

Instagram hit 40 million users around April 13, and 30 million at the start of the month (no April Fooling). This is astonishing growth for an app that started 2012 with just 15 million users.

Of course, the fact that the app was recently released for Android — after being iPhone-only for its first two years — is likely driving a lot of those sign-ups. But Instagram also hit number one in the iOS App store for the first time in the wake of the Facebook acquisition.

Google doesn’t break out exactly how many Android downloads an app gets on its Google Play page. But Instagram did cross the 10 million download threshold two days ago, so it’s a safe bet that roughly 40 million of those users are on the iPhone.

In other words, iPhone and Android have divided Instagram sign-ups fairly equally since it became available for both platforms. (So much for Apple executive Phil Schiller’s claim that the app had “jumped the shark.”)

And who is Instagram user number 50 million? According to Gramfeed, it’s a user named fox289. All we know about the user is drawn from his or her profile picture: an FC Barcelona soccer shirt. Just how many accounts are like fox289 — with no photos posted, no users followed — is something Facebook will be very interested in. source – Mashable

To update your billing Paypal records please proceed to our secure webform by update your billing Here.

Thank you for your time,
PayPal® Billing Department.

The email look like it has has been sent by Paypal. But when I visited the site using the link in the email to update my banking information on the very first look I understood that this is just another scam.

After visiting the site I checked back the email and checked the email address of the sender and found that it has been sent from service@intl.piypal.com instead of the regularservice@intl.paypal.com which is used by Paypal to email its customers.

which is the hackers phishing site. (removed few letters from the link, you can check the actual link in the image below)”]I entered a test email and a test password to the site and it took me to a page asking me to update my banking information including my credit card details.

If you get this email then please mark this email as spam. Always remember one thing no matter what never give away your personal or your bank details and credit card details just because you received an email asking you to do so. Even if its a genuine email, please verify once as to why they need your details.

Always stay safe online and share this article to increase awareness. source – TechExtreme

How fast does your site load when visitors access it? Does it make users — and potential customers — wait or does it pop right up? If so, are simply blaming the hosting service, and/or the ISP and ignoring the problem? If so, you could be missing out on the fact that it’s your site, or at least, the widgets attached to it, causing the lag, and not the providers you’re using.

According to a report (via Technology Review) from the makers of browser plug-in, Ghostery, one of the main causes of website slowdown is, provided the hosting service is working as normal and there’s nothing interfering with Internet access, all of the widgets and embeds site owners include in their site’s backend.

In fact, if you’re going by the blog post’s text, many of the slow website loading issues can be pinned on analytics scripts and/or widgets. The post even features a graph showing the biggest offenders in relation to site slowdowns:

As you can see, one of the biggest offenders in relation to site lag is a service called Avalanchers, which appears to be blog network suggestion site, but, as Technology Review says, it also comes across as a spam-filled link-sharing network, which is just the kind of thing you want to avoid if you don’t want to get bit by Google’s Panda movement. Not only is associating your site with such networks haphazard, at least in relation to Google rankings, slow website load times are a great way to ensure visitors don’t return to your site.

Based on the GhostRank panel findings, here are some additional points of interest, based on their findings:

 

• Avalanchers’ load time exceeded its next closest competitor, AdFunky, by a whopping 1,300 milliseconds.
• If you were to load all of these elements on one page, in succession, they would add about 22 more seconds to the page’s load time. Think about that.
• From a transparency standpoint, most of these companies don’t disclose how long they retain the data they collect or who they share it with.

 

Simply put, if you are trying to produce a quality site that appeals to your visitors — remember, we are now firmly in the grip of the holiday shopping season — avoiding these products, especially if used in conjunction with others on the list, is something to avoid. If search engine rankings, especially Google, is something you cherish, you’ll avoid these services as well. Not only does Google frown upon link-sharing networks like Avalanchers, slow-loading sites are not embraced by Google, either.

Simply put, avoid services like these, especially if you are using a combination of them, if strong Google rankings are something you enjoy. source – Web Pro News

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