Generation Next Gadgets

The Eee PC 1008P is the latest generation premium netbook from Asus. The company took help from famous designer Karim Rashid to add some of sort of uniqueness to its design. Along with the updated laundry list of internal components, the Eee PC 1008P is Year 2010-ready. It is got almost everything right for a netbook; it’s thin, lightweight, has a comfortable keyboard/touch-pad and decent battery life - thanks to the extra battery pack. The main gripe we had with the 1008P is the low screen brightness. Also, just two USB ports could be too less for some people.
The 1008P Karim Rashid Edition takes it a bit further by swapping the glossy black exterior, which was known for its notorious fingerprint affinity, with a unique design. The entire exterior of the Eee PC 1008P is covered by a slightly protruding textured pattern, which can be related to the scaly body of a reptilian. It comes in two shades; pink and brown. The brown one we received looked quite elegant.
The Asus Eee PC 1008P comes with a 10.1-inch glossy LED-backlit display. It is based on Intel Pinetrail Atom chip the Atom N450 1.66-GHz. There is 1GB of RAM, 250GB, and Windows 7 Starter edition operating system, but only two USB ports a minor disappointment. The Eee PC 1008P doesn’t come with Gigabit Ethernet (only 10/100 Mbit LAN), but includes 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity. There is a 1.3MP webcam recessed on its top screen bezel which is good enough for video chats.
With the Asus 1008P model, the battery is now removable,and not only that, it is very slim, and is removed in a slide out way from a slot in the side. It also features an updated chiclet style keyboard.Along with the Intel Atom N450 CPU, it will feature 2GB of RAM, a 320GB hard drive, 802.11b/g/n WiFi, 1.3MP webcam, Bluetooth, 10.1-inch 1024×600 pixel LCD and Windows 7 Starter Edition OS.

Good
Very reasonable price
Though a 3 cell, battery life is healthy

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Good
Well designed
Touchscreen UI is fluid
Bluetooth remote control is handy
Camera is quite decent

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Good
Smooth, stutter free playback
Well depicted colors

Bad
No MKV, no point of HD support without it

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Good
Good touch interface
Wall-mountable
HD Capability

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Just Cause was a pretty crappy game so I must say I was pretty surprised when Eidos announced a sequel. Thankfully the game looked a lot better not just visually, but from a gameplay standpoint as well featuring some pretty over the top stuff.
But you can never judge a book by its cover so I could never really gauge the game’s fun quotient unless I actually got some hands on time with it. Luckily Eidos dropped a rather large demo on Steam, XBL and PSN to sample a taste of the action before the game’s release later this month.
The Just Cause 2 demo is a timed one which means you’ll have around thirty minutes to cause some serious chaos in the picturesque island of Panau. While I can see the full game looking pretty, the demo was a bit too brown for my tastes as it took part in a rather sandy area of the island.
So anyway all you need to know in the demo is that you’re there to help freedom fighters of sorts and the more chaos you cause the more missions open up for you. To aid you in your noble cause is a grappling hook of sorts a la Bionic Commando that’ll allow you to zip line from one place to another and even tether objects together, enemies and vehicles included.
It works like this. You target an object or your person by pressing down on the F key (default layout for the PC version) and without taking your finger off F you target another object and only then release the key. Doing so will tie those two objects together leading to some rather humorous situations. For example you can tether an enemy to a vehicle and drag him along an entire road or even better tie him to a gas canister and shoot off the lid gleefully watching his painful yet entertaining demise.
This mechanic is also pretty useful in scaling buildings vertically or the environment horizontally. If you’re bored of driving simply latch onto a car and car-skate on the roof for as long as you want. I can see people having a ball with this mechanic initially but at the same time I also see the novelty wearing off pretty fast. And once that happens you’ll begin to notice all the not so pleasant aspects of the game like extremely brain dead enemy AI, weak combat mechanics and the fact that you’ve come across better voice acting in porn. Yes, it’s that bad. Making it worse is the fact that you can’t skip cut-scenes so enjoy shoving that pencil down your ear lobe every time someone opens their mouth in the game.
Sure the game has a lot of side quests and there’s way more variety than there was in the first game but based on what I saw I really can’t recommend this to you since there’s tons of cooler stuff on the horizon. Either way expect our full review once the game hits stores by the end of this month for the PC, PS3 and Xbox360.

Cyber crime is the latest threat to India’s security with those inimical to its interests hiring experts to spy on companies and vital networks, says famous ethical hacker Sunny Vaghela.
“There has been an increase of 200 percent in cyber crime cases in India in the last three years and that is an alarming trend,” said Ahmedabad-based Vaghela, director of TechDefence Pvt. Ltd, a reputed cyber crime security consultant.
“The new tactics are more towards data theft like espionage on some other companies, working for some foreign intelligence agencies sitting in India, SMS and mobile call forging,” Vaghela told IANS.
Vaghela was in Guwahati for a demonstration on cyber crime security measures at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) here.
At the age of 18, Vaghela found loopholes like “Session Hijacking” & “Cross Site Scripting” in popular social networking website orkut.com.
Today, at 23, he has solved more than 16 cases in association with the Ahmedabad police’s crime branch, tracing out the origin of a terror e-mail relating to the Ahmedabad serial explosions, and helped Mumbai Police get information on Jamat-ud-Dawah post-26/11.
“Take the Ahmedabad serial explosions and the threat mail where a Yahoo engineer was involved. Big names and people are today indulging in cyber crimes with people from abroad outsourcing Indians spying on Indian networks,” Vaghela said.
“Cyber crime today is not restricted to just hacking and goes much beyond to data theft, to social network and credit card fraud, SMS and mobile hacking as well.”
Vaghela said the biggest worry is that officials of Indian investigating agencies are not competent enough to deal with techno crimes.
“Investigating agencies are still lagging behind in terms of technologies or techniques to actually tackle cyber crimes. Not even two percent of the officials know what is Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), its use or how to take precautions,” Vaghela said.
He said the hacking of mobile numbers and for making calls and sending SMS is another area of concern.
“Anyone can use or misuse a mobile number to send SMS or make a call. This technology was misused in the 26/11 bombings. But all the servers and the infrastructure required to commit this cyber crime is not available in India,” he said.
“The Indian IT law is not defined to tackle such crimes using mobile phones and that is dangerous.”
Vaghela said social networking sites are not at all safe and hackers exploit and misuse vital information from such sites for indulging in crime.
“Social networking sites are not at all safe. People are revealing lots and hackers use and misuse such information from such sites,” he said.

US law-enforcement agents are being trained to use social-networking sites like Facebook to befriend suspects and collect evidence, according to documents released by advocacy group The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).
The Justice Department internal training document, called Obtaining and Using Evidence from Social Networking Sites, revealed that undercover agents for the FBI and other agencies set up false profiles on sites like My Space and Facebook to try to nab suspects by getting access to their social networks.
The training manual said that such operations can be useful to communicate with suspects or targets, reveal their personal communications, gain access to non-public information and map social relationships and networks. Information gleaned can also be used to verify alibis and establish locations, the 33-page document revealed.
Social networks are also a good source of information on defence witnesses, the Justice Department’s slide presentation said.
“Knowledge is power,” the document said. “Research all witnesses on social-networking sites.”
The document notes the potential problems with such covert operations with the words: “If agents violate terms of service, is that ‘otherwise illegal activity?’” referring to site policies against establishing accounts with a false identity.
While the Justice Department document left the question open, a document released to EFF by the tax-collecting Internal Revenue Service noted that that IRS employees are prohibited from using deception or fake online accounts to obtain information about taxpayers.
“In civil matters, employees cannot misrepresent their identities, even on the Internet,” the document states. “You cannot obtain information from websites by registering using fictitious identities.”
The EFF, which advocates for online privacy rights, withheld comment on the Justice Department documents but did praise the IRS policy.
“The IRS should be commended for its detailed training that clearly prohibits employees from using deception or fake social networking accounts to obtain information,” the group said Tuesday.

Popular legal thriller author John Grisham has broken his holdout against selling his books in an electronic format and will sell all of his 23 titles as e-books, his publisher said on Tuesday.
The former lawyer, whose best sellers include “The Firm” and “A Time To Kill”, had previously held off selling his books electronically, expressing concern that e-books would wipe out traditional book stores and make it harder for new writers to succeed. But beginning Tuesday, all Grisham’s fiction and non-fiction books will be available through e-book retailers, publisher Random House said. As e-books have grown in popularity, some authors have been embroiled in royalty negotiations with publishers. Publishers in turn have had disagreements with e-book retailers such as Amazon.com about how to split e-book sales. Stuart Applebaum, a Random House spokesman, would not disclose the terms of the deal, but said “today was a watershed deal.” The deal “is certain to usher in a new generation of Grisham readers and e-book adopters,” Sonny Mehta, chairman of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, which is owned by Random House and publishes Grisham’s hardback titles, said in a statement.
Since his first novel “A Time To Kill” was released in 1989, Grisham has sold more than 250 million books worldwide, according to Random House. Several of his novels have been turned into films. Grisham’s literary agent said the author had no comment on Tuesday’s announcement. Grisham said in a TV interview last November that discounting of printed books by major retailers and the advent of e-books was “a disaster in the long term” for publishers, bookstores and authors. “If a new book is now worth about $9 then we have seriously devalued that book,” Grisham said on the “Today” show. “Suddenly the whole industry is going to change, you are going to lose publishers, you are going to lose bookstores. I am probably going to be alright, but the aspiring writers are going to have a hard time getting published,” he added. Grisham’s e-books were available on Tuesday through e-book retailers such as the Sony Reader Store, Barnes & Noble.com and Amazon.com, who all had Grisham’s newer print editions like “The Associate” listed at $9.99 and his older books at $7.99.

Google Inc’s initial sales of its Nexus One smartphone have significantly lagged the pace of Apple Inc’s iPhone and Motorola Inc’s Droid sales coming out of the starting gate, an analytics firm said on Tuesday.
According to a report by Flurry, Google sold roughly 135,000 of its new Nexus One phones in its first 74 days on the market. By contrast, Apple sold 1 million of the original iPhones in the first 74 days, while Motorola sold 1.05 million Droid phones — which are based on Google’s Android software — during the same timeframe. The sales estimates, which Flurry said it based on software applications featuring its analytics technology that have been downloaded to most of the phones, suggests a less than stellar start to Google’s plan to play a larger role in the mobile phone business.
Google launched the Nexus One phone, which it developed with handset manufacturer HTC Corp of Taiwan, in January, marking the first time the giant Internet search company had sold a hardware device directly to consumers. But the Nexus One, unlike the iPhone or the Droid, can only be purchased on the Web and is not available at retail stores. Google has also advertised the phone exclusively online, foregoing the high-profile television ad campaigns of the iPhone and the Droid. Kaufman Brothers analyst Aaron Kessler said he would have assumed that Google would sell more than 135,000 units. “Clearly Google is not spending a lot of money marketing it. It doesn’t seem like Google has huge expectations on this one,” said Kessler. But he noted that Google’s broader mobile strategy is to grow the overall base of devices from various manufacturers that use Google’s Android smartphone software. According to a recent report by comScore, the market share of Android-based smartphones in the U.S. grew to 7.1 percent in January from 2.8 percent in October 2009.
By contrast, Apple’s share grew at a much slower pace, reaching 25.1 percent in January compared with 24.8 percent in October. Google was not immediately available for a comment. The Nexus One is currently available for $179 with a two-year contract from Deutsche Telekom AG’s T-Mobile USA, or $529 without a service plan. Google has said that the phone will be available with Verizon Wireless, the largest wireless carrier in the U.S., sometime in the spring. Verizon Wireless is a joint venture of Verizon Communications Inc and Vodafone Group Plc. Flurry said it used the first 74 days of sales as a benchmark, since that was the timeframe that Apple initially announced it took to sell the first million iPhones in 2007. Since March 19 will mark the first 74 days of Nexus One sales, Flurry said it forecasted results for the last few days of the period.