Buzz Launcher Review: This App Is About To Make Your Android Phone A Lot Better

Buzz Launcher is possibly the most revolutionary Android launcher we’ve seen yet. Where others like Nova, Apex & ADW seek to re-create the aesthetic of Jelly Bean with a few twists, Buzz Launcher sets out in an entirely different direction – with astonishing results. Android users looking for a spectacular alter to the look of their device will find a lot to love with Buzz Launcher – yet don’t expect to load it onto your tablet.

Description from Google Play:

Buzz Launcher is a highly customizable launcher that enables you to apply shared Homescreens to your own smartphone. Buzz Launcher is an ad-free custom launcher that has more than 400,000+ free themes (the largest number of free themes among launchers)! Freely download, apply, customize, share, & even create Homescreens! (Available from Android 4.0.3+)

With Buzz Launcher, you can:
• Customize so much more than just your wallpaper or theme.
• Change between multiple smooth, fast, & easy Transition effects.
• View all Homepacks in a glance NOW: http://www.homepackbuzz.com
• Apply new home screens at a touch of a button, instantly!
• Personalize your homescreen with robust icon, wallpaper editing features
• Download & implement completely free homescreens within 5 seconds!
• Share home screens with a single touch via Facebook, Twitter, & Google+!
• Explore unique widget features such as clock, date, & battery
• Create your own customized widget using Buzz Custom Widget (Free)!
• Show your Homepacks to your friends

“Prepare to have your mind blown. Buzz Launcher is perhaps the most revolutionary Android launcher we’ve seen yet…….Words seem inadequate to properly describe the beauty of Buzz Launcher, which is undoubtedly the most highly customizable & visually stunning Android launcher we’ve tested” – Laptopmag

” You don’t need to know the best place to obtain wallpapers, or even the best widgets, because other people have shared their masterpieces with you.”- Android Headlines
“Buzz Launcher is one of several impressive launcher apps out there, yet it’s distinguished by its versatile functionality & rich community of themers” – Phonearena

Themes & Appearance

We have no sufficient words to properly explain the beauty of Buzz Launcher, which is certainly the most highly customizable & visually stunning Android launcher we’ve tested. The sheer variety of dazzling user-made themes nearly boggles the mind. Perhaps the most astonishing feature of Buzz Launcher is that when you’re using many of these themes, it feels as if you’ve installed a unique operating system.

The inventive “homepack” concept lies at the heart of Buzz Launcher’s flexible UI. The launcher allows you to download user-made homepacks that contain custom widgets, themes & configurations in a single package. After downloading, simply tap “apply to my home” and, voila! your desktop has been completely transformed, with unique icons, widgets, wallpapers, transition effects & more. Moreover, the desktop configuration sets up automatically, saving you the effort of hunting for the themes & widgets on Google Play.

Buzz Launcher boasts a huge array of custom homepacks, most of which differ dramatically from stock Jelly Bean & each other. Most Android launchers share certain design features, such as an app dock at the bottom of the screen & a notifications bar at the top. Among Buzz’s homepacks, however, there are no such sacred cows. You’re just as likely to find a pack that uses a custom dock & icons as one that dispenses with those concepts entirely, like the beautifully minimalist “Calvin & Hobbes” homepack. Only Jelly Bean’s three virtual buttons remain unchanged among all homepacks.

Check out the below screenshots of buzz launcher homepack screens which have been taken by a new launched android Moto E device:-












Full Article       _@_Techfat
Buzz Launcher _@_Google Play Store

Feds release former LulzSec hacker ‘Sabu’

LulzSec hacker Sabu is free.

After years of cooperating with federal authorities, former member of hacker group LulzSec Hector “Sabu” Monsegur received a sentence of time served plus one year of supervised release, a New York Federal court decided today. As a result, the former hacker avoided jail time.

LulzSec was a splinter group of hackers originally associated with activist group Anonymous. Monsegur has been working with the government since 2011, after being arrested in his home in New York City.

Monsegur assisted authorities in over 300 hacking cases, including some major attacks on federal groups like NASA, Congress, and the armed forces, according to recently released documents. Because of his help, prosecutors were able to get a reduced sentence for Monseur.

Monseur’s sentence is far less severe than sentences served to other recently apprehended hackers. For example, Anonymous hacker Jeremy Hammond was hit with 10 years in jail plus three years of supervised release for his role in releasing emails from security firm Stratfor regarding government spying activities.

Full article_@_VB

3D printer can print 'fruit'

(A 3D-printed strawberry created using the 3D Fruit Printer)

A 3D printer uses 3D printing combined with molecular gastronomy to create 3D "fruits" in a matter of minutes.

We've seen 3D-printed chocolate, 3D-printed sugar sculptures, even 3D-printed pizza -- but one thing we never thought to see on that list is fruit. That is, however, exactly what one company claims to have done.

The Cambridge, UK-based company Dovetailed has invented and unveiled what it is calling the 3D Fruit Printer, a machine that "prints" three-dimensional "fruit". It is not, however, actual fruit: instead, it's a sort of reconstituted version that can be any flavour.
The printer uses a molecular gastronomy technique called spherification for converting liquid to a series of gelatinous globules resembling caviar or tapioca pearls. For fruit juice, this means mixing the juice with alginic acid. This mixture is then dripped into a cold bath of calcium chloride; the resultant reaction produces a skin around the ball of liquid, which pops when you bite into it (although you should really rinse it off first).

The "printer", then, is probably closer to a mixing machine, allowing you to make "pearls" of any low-calcium liquid, which can then be eaten; it cannot, for example, print an apple in the shape of an apple, but instead produces pearls of apple juice. By mixing juices, you can create new flavours; apple and raspberry, for example.

What it can do is combine the globules into a combined mass that resembles a raspberry -- and by tweaking this technique, the Dovetailed team may be able to create objects that do look more like an apple or other type of fruit.

"Our 3D fruit printer will open up new possibilities not only to professional chefs but also to our home kitchens -- allowing us to enhance and expand our dining experiences," said Dovetailed founder Vaiva Kalnikaitė. "We have re-invented the concept of fresh fruit on demand."

The 3D Fruit Printer was unveiled on 24 May at TechFoodHack, an "experimental food hackathon" held in Cambridge and co-organised by Dovetailed and Microsoft Research.

Full Article_@_C|Net

Google engineers open gates to Quantum Computing Playground

Does the idea of playing about with a quantum computer please you? If so, you can check out one fresh alternative route, thanks to a group of Google engineers. How about a GPU-accelerated quantum computer? You can take advantage of something called the Quantum Computing Playground which has launched as a browser-based WebGL Chrome Experiment. It features a GPU-accelerated quantum computer with a simple IDE interface. It has its own scripting language, with debugging and 3D quantum state visualization features.

Quantum Computing Playground can simulate quantum registers up to 22 qubits, run Grover's and Shor's algorithms, and has quantum gates built into the scripting language itself. Commenting, ExtremeTech said the programs are written in a language called QScript,-which "looks a lot like any other simple Bash-like scripting language."

The 'Playground' web page provides some background to quantum computers and how they are unique. "A classic computer processes bits, which at any given time can be in one of two states: 0 or 1. Quantum computers use qubits, which can exist in any superposition of states 0 and 1, and are represented by a complex number. When N qubits are in superposition, a combination of 2^N states is created. A classic computer can only hold one of these states at a time, while quantum computers can perform meaningful operations on superpositions of states. This basic property of quantum computers opens a way to multiple interesting algorithms."

The comments expressed by technology sites describing the new Quantum Computing Playground mentioned the lack of any detailed tutorial. They note that one needs some sort of programming experience to dig in and enjoy. Said I Programmer, for example: "One of the problems with using it is that it doesn't provide a course in quantum computing or quantum principles and to make much sense of it you need to know something about quantum mechanics and have a rough idea if what quantum gates are all about."

A step by step demo is provided along with some very useful information on the Help page but the need for previous exposure to the principles of quantum computing would be helpful. ExtremeTech said, "The Help/About page has a few details about the inner workings of the simulator and QScript, but you'll still need a pretty solid grounding in computer science or quantum computer theory."

All the same, the Quantum Computing Playground needs little coaxing to draw the interest of those who are genuinely curious about working with quantum algorithms. "If you have ever wanted to try your hand at quantum algorithms, there is no longer an excuse," I Programmer said Thursday.

After all, according to the Playground site, quantum computers that perform operations on sequences of qubits are not available commercially. "The proof-of-concepts for capabilities of quantum computing have been demonstrated in multiple laboratories around the world, so there is a chance that quantum computers will become one day everyday's reality. For now, you can experience the technology of tomorrow today, inside our Playground."

Full Article_@_Phys.org

Visit QCP  _@_Quantum Computing Playground

Start for Android is a versatile lock screen replacement with more than just looks

Keeping your Android device feeling fresh and new is half the battle to staving off the continual impulse to upgrade, and an easy way to do this is by installing a new launcher or lock screen replacement that gives your phone a new look and feel.

There are certainly no shortage of options to choose from, but Start for Android by Celltick is a relatively new entrant to the market which just been overhauled to provide more options, UI tweaks and a more refined performance.

Celltick’s changes haven’t been made just for the sake of it; the company said many of them are the result of suggestions from its users. We thought it well worth spending a few minutes with the app to get acquainted.

Let’s Start!

Once installed, you’re met with a new lock screen any time you lock your phone. Unlike some other Android launchers which take over the whole look of your device, Start just changes how your lock screen looks and behaves.

The large circle at the bottom-center of the display shows how many notifications you have, and dragging it over one of the icons brings up a hovering subset of options.

So, for example, dragging it over the message icon (shown below) brings up a sub-menu of messaging apps like WhatsApp, Gmail, Hangouts, SMS etc. Releasing your finger over your selection will launch straight into that app.



Similarly, selecting the phone icon takes you to your call list, and selecting the clock icon will pop up a list of your recently used apps.



Naturally, no self-respecting Android lock screen app would leave out customization options – and Start is no exception.

By either searching Google Play or using the in-app settings (an easier method), you can find more themes to customize the look of your lock screen.  There are a fair few to choose between (so there’s no obligation to look at a girl flying a kite in a meadow full of flowers) and some popular favorites like a Tron theme, which should please some.



As well as changing the overall theme, you can choose to set a different background picture, or tweak a few of the settings, like the clock and date display size, or choose whether to show them at all. More on that below.

One thing a lot of lock screen apps struggle with is dealing with the security settings. In Start, your settings are preserved as if it wasn’t running, meaning that you essentially have to get through two lock screens. It’s not ideal, but it’s not a total deal breaker and is better than requiring that picture passwords or PINs are disabled.

Getting around

If you did want to change your background or theme, swiping right from the lock screen will take you to the options menu (below right). Tapping the More Themes option will bounce you through to the Google Play store and a list of available themes to download.

As well as making your notifications look a bit slicker, Start goes a bit further than the average lock screen tweak by allowing you to connect a bunch of apps, which are displayed on the left-hand side of the screen.

Tapping the Settings button in the options menu will give you more detailed options for the plugins you want to show in the sidebar, and for things like controlling whether the search bar, clock or the date is shown on the lock screen.



Options for plugins include Twitter, Facebook, RSS, a media controller, a photo gallery, news updates and more.

If you choose to switch these plugins on, a vertical list of icons denotes each on the left-hand side of the screen. Tapping the icon for that service will launch it directly on the lock screen, shown below.



Beyond Notifications

While I like the idea of the convenience of these plugins provide, the version I tested didn’t provide the ideal experience. For example, I couldn’t link my Facebook account (Twitter worked fine) as the log-in page wouldn’t show the keyboard on my phone so I could enter my details.

Similarly, I like the photo gallery option – you get to select which images you want to include from across your various albums – but transitioning between each image takes a second or two for each, making it a slower process than you’d really want. The media controller seemed a bit hit-and-miss too – it let me restart/replay a track, but not pause, play or skip forwards.

These minor gripes, however, are just that – growing pains of an app which only launched in October 2013 and that’s still figuring out exactly which features are most useful to its users and how best to implement them.

It’s worth bearing in mind that we tested a pre-release version of the new build ahead of its public launch, which means the version on the Google Play store today could have addressed some of these issues already.

Growing pains aside, Start provides Android users with a slick lock screen option that has the potential to grow into something genuinely useful in the future. The new version is live on Google Play now and free to download.

Full article _@_TNW
Install App _@_Google Play App
More Info  _@_Celltick

Whistle Camera for Android lets you take photos and selfies with your mouth

The term “hands-free” will never be the same. Imagine that you don’t have to fiddle with the touchscreen to take a picture on your Android device. Imagine that you don’t even have to hit a physical button to take a selfie. Imagine just whistling. Okay, now stop imagining and check out Whistle Camera for Android. The app lets you whistle to take a picture. We tested it ourselves and we can say with confidence that it works exactly as promised.

Here’s the official feature list:

#Whistle detecting camera.
#High quality pictures.
#Auto focus.
#Easy holding and taking pictures just with one hand.
#Using the volume up button for more easy way to take a picture.
#Picture sites hands free while driving using the whistle.
#Selfie pictures using cam countdown.
#Both landscape and portrait orientation supported.
#A very useful and fast picture gallery.
#Share your photos.
#Easily edit your photos.

In the app’s settings, you can change where the images are stored as well as tweak the sensitivity for the whistle detector (on a scale of one to eight, the default is three). In our tests, the default setting worked just fine, but if you take pictures in noisy areas, you may want to adjust it accordingly. The app also has ads and regularly prompts you to upgrade to the Pro version. That’s not the main drawback though.

While Whistle Camera can control both your front and back cameras, it can only handle photos. As a result, it’s difficult for us to recommend this as a complete replacement for Google Camera. Whistle Camera was created by XDA member itayg, but it’s not the first of its kind. Before it came Auto Answer, which lets you answer your incoming calls with a whistle and was also created by itayg.

Full article _@_ TNW

Install App _@_ Google Play App

This Is How to Build an Interface for the Ultimate Smartwatch

(A concept smartwatch designed by Branch Creative for WIRED’s January 2014 cover.Photo: Todd Tankersley)

The inauspicious beginnings of the smartwatch era have prompted intense debate about the role design could or should play in the success of the emerging product category. The prevailing theory is that what will make people want to wear computers on their wrists will be imported from runways in New York, London, Paris, and Milan: fashion and style.

At CES, Intel brought the COO of Barneys New York onto the stage to promote its nascent wearables platforms. Design-driven Apple, months before the expected launch of its anticipated iWatch, has hired the CEOs of both Yves Saint Laurent and Burberry. And fashion concerns aren’t just about wrist wear: on Friday, Google promoted a fashion executive to head the Google Glass team.

The fashion-will-fix-smartwatches narrative is a really compelling story. It’s also completely wrong — or, at minimum, flies in the face of decades of study about how new technologies get adopted. As documented by Everett Rodgers in The Diffusion of Innovations, no fundamentally new product type succeeds solely based on the fact that it’s attractive; it succeeds because it does something genuinely useful at a price point low enough that people don’t consider it a luxury. And then it becomes normal and even attractive because it was first useful.

Ask a Better Question

So if it’s not fashion, what is standing between today and the smartwatches-everywhere future? One thing: a great, unique interface that showcases how much better this new product type can perform both new and existing functions.

Unfortunately, neither the watch-emulating button interface of the Pebble nor the touchscreen-on-a-strap concepts from Google and Samsung hit the mark. They simply feel like a previous generation of interface slapped onto an emerging form — which is exactly what they are.

After careful consideration of existing solutions, emerging and available technology, and the form factor’s constraints, I have identified four principles for designing good smartwatch interfaces. Using these principles, I’ll evaluate the viability of three feature candidates to make smartwatches intuitive: voice, gesture, and contextual response.

First, the 4 Principles of Good Wearable Design

1. Glances, not stares: No smartwatch should ever command the attention, especially the eyesight, of a user for more than a few seconds at a time. Spending longer erodes any advantage over a smartphone.

2. Interact once, display many times: Smartwatches should primarily provide displays of information and prompts for action rather than providing rich interactive elements, meaning they will show lots of information that is passively consumed.

3. Speed over accuracy: Consumer smartwatches should be flexible, fun, in-the-moment companions, which means they should make lots of ignorable suggestions rather than waiting to make a few suggestions that it deems perfectly right, as current predictive services do.

4. Pass the hallucination test: Smartwatch use can be perceived as novel behavior, but it can’t present like Bluetooth headsets, which make it impossible to know who is on the phone and who is screaming at an imaginary friend on the street.

Now, the interfaces: voice, gesture, and contextual response. As you might notice, none of these three ideas is new; ironically, the best interfaces for new devices tend to come from failures in the previous generation (touchscreens were going nowhere fast when Steve Jobs first held up the iPhone, after all).

Voice: The Future We Think We Want

Ever since Apple launched Siri, it’s been expected that voice control would become the next big thing. Since smartwatches don’t have room for even virtual keyboards, many have suggested that voice could make for an ideal mode of interaction.

In practice, it’s a dead-end. Voice is highly imprecise, as its reliability depends on being in a quiet place (which rules out virtually any public use case, defeating the point of a wearable). This means users need to carefully monitor and repeat commands to get what they want, which fails my first three principles of good design. Moreover, it fails the hallucination test horribly, as anyone who has ever witnessed a lost Siri user seeking directions can attest (“HOW DO I GET HOME? HOW. DO. I. GET. HOME?”). I’ll happily go on record as saying we’ll have more reliable mind-reading interfaces before we have a primary voice interface suitable for smartwatch use.

Gesture: Using Your Body to Control a Body-Worn Device

Bringing up gestural controls often conjures images from Minority Report: Tom Cruise wearing three-fingered gloves and performing Power Ranger moves to navigate his computers. In spite of this wondrous vision, the technology has languished on existing devices. Microsoft recently announced it was no longer mandating the inclusion of its Kinect interface on new Xbox One. In spite of these failures, gesture might be ideal for a smartwatch strapped to a wrist.

Here’s why: One irony of today’s touchscreen- or button-based smartwatches is that they can’t be operated by the hand closest to them. Shakes, slaps, twists, arm flips, brushes, and other gestures could all make great methods for dismissing notifications, skipping messages or music tracks, and communicating with a simple yes/no–and either arm could get involved. It could be argued that fitness bands–to date the most successful category of wearables–are controlled by gesture, as they use motion sensors to detect activity. Gesture control speaks to the first three principles: It’s a glance-and-interact model focused around the speedy display of information that may be useful. And provided these gestures skew subtle, they would have no issue passing the hallucination test.

Contextual Response: Data-Backed Mind Reading

A significant reason big data has become such a big deal over the past several years is its potential to personalize information and activity based on user context—a good example of this is how on iOS you can set a reminder to prompt you to “Check the Mail” when you arrive back home. Contextual response is user-facing, reordering information and triggering events based on current location, mood, activities, preference, and body analytics. Contextual information can be designed to meet my first three principles. And as it’s merely generating a set of choices visible to the user, it doesn’t trend toward hallucination issues.

If contextual response is to be more than a roulette wheel of data analytics, however, it will require far more–and more accurate–data than we currently have, not to mention consumer control of it. As a result, contextual response UIs will likely be secondary to gesture at first, though they would improve and become more prominent over time.

A Race With No Front Runner

It does appear that 2014 could be the year smartwatches finally break. Google has demoed Android Wear, a variant on Google Now for the wrist (clever contextual response actions, clunky touchscreen and voice interface), and Apple could call a press conference to introduce the iWatch seemingly any day. It’s one of those moments in tech when the opportunity is clear, but the successful approach is not. Much as I feel that gesture-plus-contextual response will win in this market, the real opportunity will come when that interface is attached to use cases that have remained elusive over the years — health, ubiquitous mobile payments, post-PC personal productivity. I can’t wait to see which UI designers will seize the moment.

Full article _@_ Wired Magazine
More Info _@_ How WIRED Designed the Ultimate Smartwatch

TIME 100: The Most Influential People in the World in 2014

Time Magazine has released its "The Most Influential People in the World in 2014" list  Superstar Beyonce Knowles-Carter is on the cover of the popular issue, and subsequent inside covers feature actor Robert Redford, General Motors CEO Mary Barra.

Some industry, media and government heavyweights pack this years list. Some expected others maybe not, either way the list sheds light on the movers and shakers of 2014. A great portion of the list came from music, movies and the political world. The honores aside, this year's list sets a new record for the number of women included, 41 in all, according to Time. 

Other honorees include actress Amy Adams, Amazon founder and The Washington Post’s newest owner Jeff Bezos, Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Pope Francis, actress Christy Turlington Burns, potential presidential candidate and grandmother-to-be Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State John Kerry, Late Night host Seth Meyers, country singer Carrie Underwood, “Happy” singer Pharrell Williams, Russian President Vladimir Putin and singer Miley Cyrus.

Full List: Time 100 List

OpenSSL code beyond repair, claims creator of “LibreSSL” fork

OpenBSD developers "removed half of the OpenSSL source tree in a week."

OpenBSD founder Theo de Raadt has created a fork of OpenSSL, the widely used open source cryptographic software library that contained the notorious Heartbleed security vulnerability.

OpenSSL has suffered from a lack of funding and code contributions despite being used in websites and products by many of the world's biggest and richest corporations.

HEARTBLEED DEVELOPER EXPLAINS OPENSSL MISTAKE THAT PUT WEB AT RISK
"Trivial" coding error in open source project wasn't intentional, report says.
The decision to fork OpenSSL is bound to be controversial given that OpenSSL powers hundreds of thousands of Web servers. When asked why he wanted to start over instead of helping to make OpenSSL better, de Raadt said the existing code is too much of a mess.
"Our group removed half of the OpenSSL source tree in a week. It was discarded leftovers," de Raadt told Ars in an e-mail. "The Open Source model depends [on] people being able to read the code. It depends on clarity. That is not a clear code base, because their community does not appear to care about clarity. Obviously, when such cruft builds up, there is a cultural gap. I did not make this decision... in our larger development group, it made itself."

The LibreSSL code base is on OpenBSD.org, and the project is supported financially by the OpenBSD Foundation and OpenBSD Project. LibreSSL has a bare bones website that is intentionally unappealing.

"This page scientifically designed to annoy web hipsters," the site says. "Donate now to stop the Comic Sans and Blink Tags." In explaining the decision to fork, the site links to a YouTube video of a cover of the Twisted Sister song "We're not gonna take it."

 LibreSSL is initially built for OpenBSD and will support multiple operating systems after the code and funding are shored up. The OpenBSD operating system itself was created as a fork of NetBSD in 1995.

When asked what he meant by OpenSSL containing "discarded leftovers," de Raadt said there were "Thousands of lines of VMS support. Thousands of lines of ancient WIN32 support. Nowadays, Windows has POSIX-like APIs and does not need something special for sockets. Thousands of lines of FIPS support, which downgrade ciphers almost automatically."

There were also "thousands of lines of APIs that the OpenSSL group intended to deprecate 12 years or so ago and [are] still left alone."

De Raadt told ZDNet that his team has removed 90,000 lines of C code. "Even after all those changes, the codebase is still API compatible," he said. "Our entire ports tree (8,700 applications) continue to compile and work after all these changes."

The OpenBSD team started working on LibreSSL about a week ago, he told Ars.

OpenSSL Software Foundation President Steve Marquess declined comment on LibreSSL, saying, "I haven't had the chance to look at what they're doing so I don't want to comment at this time."

In a blog post last week, Marquess described OpenSSL's struggle to obtain funding and code contributions.

"I’m looking at you, Fortune 1000 companies," Marquess wrote. "The ones who include OpenSSL in your firewall/appliance/cloud/financial/security products that you sell for profit, and/or who use it to secure your internal infrastructure and communications. The ones who don’t have to fund an in-house team of programmers to wrangle crypto code, and who then nag us for free consulting services when you can’t figure out how to use it. The ones who have never lifted a finger to contribute to the open source community that gave you this gift. You know who you are."

As for Heartbleed, "the mystery is not that a few overworked volunteers missed this bug," Marquess wrote. "The mystery is why it hasn’t happened more often."

The Heartbleed flaw, which can expose user passwords and the private encryption keys used to protect websites, was accidentally added to the code by a volunteer contributor and went undetected for two years.

Read more: Arstechnica

Article re/print: Ramz Isis 

Trojan Banker Disguised As The WhatsApp For PC

With the New Year barely settled in, we are already experiencing a host of IT security threats which if left unchecked, could lead to a range of ramifications previously unheard of. The most recent and grave of these threats was discovered by Kaspersky Lab (a Russian multi-national computer security company which provides Antivirus and Internet Security software)

The Trojan banker dubbed the "WhatsApp For Pc Trojan" poses as a message to the unsuspecting victim "this message says that WhatsApp for PC is finally available and that the recipient already has 11 pending invitations from friends in his account." The email which was originally discovered by the  Kaspersky Team as a spam, looks like;

When the victim makes the unfortunate mistake of clicking he is immediately sent "to a hacked server in Turkey and will then be redirected to a Hightail (Yousendit) account to download the initial Trojan, which in the system looks like a 64 bits installation file" according to Dmitry Bestuzhev, a Kaspersky Lab Expert, who broke the news of the discovery.

But that is not all, the finding went to discover that the 64 bits installation file was actually a " standard 32 bits app with a moderate VT detection"

It gets worse, because apparently the creators of this Trojan, went to great lengths to ensure that it goes below the radar of most anti-virus software, it comes equipped with " some anti-debugging features like: UnhandledExceptionFilter() and RaiseException()". The discovery went on to find "it downloads a new Trojan that is banker itself." which is even harder to trace because  "the malware comes from a server in Brazil and has a low VT detection 3 of 49" It also cleverly camouflages itself, by using the icon of an mp3 file with a small size of 2.5MB. Using the mp3 icon is a clever trick to fool most of us into thinking its a harmful media file, and consequently click ourselves into trouble.

The creators of this Trojan apparently dotted all their 'I's & crossed all their 'T's, because they hard coded it in Delphi XE5-Embarcadero (a rapid app development solution for software developers building true native apps for Windows, Mac, iOS and Android), which makes analysis twice as difficult because of its anti-debugging feature.

As soon as the malware is installed and functioning it begins its malicious duties loyally, by reporting "itself to the cybercriminals’ infections statistics console" using a local port 1157 to send compromised information "in the Oracle DB format." But it doesn't stop there, the discovery further revealed that even after sending compromised data from the infected computer, the malware goes a step forward to download a "new malware into the system" with an average size of 10Mb.

Malwares functioning in this order have been classically linked to Brazilian-malware creators. As Dmitry Bestuzhev went on to claim that "This is the classic style of a Brazilian-created malware". But not all is bad, accordingly Kaspersky Anti-Virus has been updated to detect & treat this form of malware. When will the other Anti-Virus companies update their virus databases? is a long shot question.

The best we can do for those of us who do not use Kaspersky Anti-Virus, is to take precautionary measures, questioning suspect mails/messages, regularly update our Virus Databases and visit the official sites for any recent releases presumed or otherwise. We could also use the power of what we call the "eRipple" which is sharing enlightening information as much as possible, with our close and extended circles to get the word out as fast as possible. This can atleast help thwart the scale of the attack and prevent otherwise innocent people from becoming the next victims.

Be careful! Stay Vigilant! Enjoy Life!

Scientists Cook Up New Electronic Material

This diagram shows a single layer of MoSe2 thin film (green and yellow balls) grown on a layer of graphene (black balls) that has formed on the surface of a silicon carbide substrate. Scientists who made the material and measured details of its electronic structure discovered it’s a natural fit for making thin, flexible light-based electronics. Credit: Yi Zhang/Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences and Advanced Light Source, Berkeley Lab

Scientists from SLAC, Stanford and Berkeley Lab grew sheets of an exotic material in a single atomic layer and measured its electronic structure for the first time. They discovered it's a natural fit for making thin, flexible light-based electronics.

In a study published Dec. 22 in Nature Nanotechnology, the researchers give a recipe for making the thinnest possible sheets of the material, called molybdenum diselenide or MoSe2, in a precisely controlled way, using a technique that's common in electronics manufacturing.

"We found the right recipe, and we provide it in the paper so people can develop it more for industrial purposes," said Sung-Kwan Mo, a beam scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Advanced Light Source (ALS), where the material was made.

"Based on tests at the ALS and at Stanford, now we can say MoSe2 has possible applications in photoelectronic devices, such as light detectors and solar cells," said Yi Zhang, a postdoctoral researcher who designed and built the equipment used to make the thin sheets, and the report's first author. The material also has potential for novel types of electronics that are still in the future, he said. Zhang is affiliated with Berkeley Lab and the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences, which is jointly run with SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

Single atomic sheets of MoSe2 have been generating a lot of scientific interest lately because they belong to a small class of materials that absorb light and glow with great efficiency.

But until now, no one had been able to make extremely thin layers of MoSe2 in significant quantities and directly observe the evolution of their electronic structure. This is important because a material's electronic behavior can change fundamentally, and in useful ways, when its electrons are confined to such thin layers.

To make the sheets, researchers heated molybdenum and selenium in a vacuum chamber at the ALS until they evaporated. The two elements combined and were deposited as a thin, high-quality film. By tweaking the process, known as molecular beam epitaxy, the scientists were able to grow films that were one to eight atomic layers thick.

The team probed the electronic structure of the film with the ALS's powerful X-ray beam, and later with equipment at Stanford. They found the first direct experimental evidence that the material abruptly changes electronic structure, becoming a much more efficient absorber and emitter of visible light, when made in sheets that are atomically thin.

The team also discovered that electrons with different spins – described as either "up" or "down" – travel along different paths and in opposite directions through the hexagonal structure of single-layer MoSe2. This could prove useful in "spintronics," a next-generation technology that would use the spins of electrons, rather than their charge, to carry and store information, said Yongtao Cui, a Stanford postdoctoral researcher who was involved in testing the film.

MoSe2's novel structure may also lend itself to an even newer concept called "valleytronics," in which both spin and charge are used to transport and store information. This idea surfaced in 2002; like spintronics, it's being eagerly explored as a potential way to continue the trend toward smaller, faster, cheaper electronic devices.

"This field is still in the initial stage of development," Cui said. "People have these applications in mind, but as research goes along they may discover new aspects of these materials, and possibly new applications."


Read more: Phys.org
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