The News on QR Codes

The majority of people have actually seen Quick Response Codes, although they have actually been common in North America since 2006. They were invented in Japan in 1998 in order to make the inventory of cars less complicated during manufacture. They quickly ended up being preferred in various other industries due to the ease of readability and the capacity for keeping big amounts of information. It's intriguing to keep in mind that Denso Wave, a subsidiary of Toyota, holds the patent rights to the QR code but has selected not to exercise them. There are various other patent rights on both the code and the name, QR code, so it is necessary for all companies utilizing them to ensure that they are making use of both a standard type and one that is licensed.

Ways to read and use the codes is extremely simple. Download an application for QR codes to your mobile phone furnished with a video camera. There are many them, but RedLaser is a great one for both Apple or Android types. Blackberry users can choose QR Scanner Pro. After you follow the directions, you simply take a photo of the code you want to browse, ensuring you are as close as feasible and without glare. Once the application has recognized the code, it will certainly take you to the designated site on your mobile tool.

When it comes to the information that QR codes feature, there are also various versions of QR codes. Variation 4, the most common today holds up to 55 characters, but soon there will certainly be much greater versions. Already there is a Version 10 having 174 characters and additional tracking boxes (not merely the 3 that show up on the model above). There is a brand-new Variation 40 that can feature 142 characters.

Here are some warnings. I'm going to quote directly from the Wikipedia article. There are now safeguards being produced to shield against these atagging (attack tagging) problems, but it's a great idea to examine before you download an application. The sources for this details has all be thoroughly checked by Wikipedia contributors. Kindly refer to the original article.

Malicious QR Codes combined with a permissive reader can put a computer's contents and user's privacy at risk. This practice is known as "atagging", a portmanteau of "attack tagging." They are easily created and may be affixed over legitimate QR Codes. On a smartphone, the reader's many permissions may allow use of the camera, full internet access, read/write contact data, GPS, read browser history, read/write local storage, and global system changes. Risks include linking to dangerous websites with browser exploits, enabling the microphone/camera/GPS and then streaming those feeds to a remote server, analysis of sensitive data (passwords, files, contacts, transactions), and sending email/SMS/IM messages or DDOS packets as part of aBotnet, corrupting privacy settings, stealing identity, and even containing malicious logic themselves such as JavaScript or a virus. These actions may occur in the background while the user only sees the reader opening a seemingly harmless webpage. In Russia, a malicious QR Code caused phones that scanned it to send premium texts at a fee of USD$6 each.

Regrettably the usage of QR codes has ended up being a massive protection risk for mobile phones, based on e-Cycle.

Mobile phones and tablets contain an overwhelming amount of confidential data. Sensitive emails, business contacts and passwords are all available on cell phones and pads. Making this information susceptible to hackers can be disastrous and while most people have learned to think twice before clicking on a suspicious link that was emailed to them, they do not exercise the same level of caution when it comes to QR codes. This lack of protection makes QR codes a growing risk in mobile security. Users should be aware of the mobile security risk that QR codes pose and view the website they are directed to before scanning. Various QR code applications allow the option to preview the link prior to scanning the barcode. This precaution prevents the user from scanning a code when the URL appears suspicious. Often times when a QR code is fraudulent, it will lead the user directly to a login screen. Cybercriminals use this form as a trap to retrieve personal information. In most instances, personal information should not be required when scanning a QR code. Legitimate codes will automatically complete a request or will only require contact information for subscriptions. To view the rest of this article, click here.

An additional means is to use a quick response code app that inspects the codes before they are opened up such as Norton Snap. If there is a "bad" code the reader program or app will certainly notify you and encourage not to open it. Companies need to also plainly state just what you will certainly view after opening up a QR code. Just as with email and phone calls no one should hand out personal details after opening a code. Now there are programs that can alter just what you view when you open up a code. It is not always just the web page of an internet site. It can be a video, a sales web page - any type of number of things, and the website can be changed as frequently as every minute by the program or plugin. Google Chrome has a setup that allows you to develop a QR code merely by right clicking on an internet site.

It appears that QR Codes as well as Bar Codes are here to stay and both are extremely beneficial. Restaurants and realty offices specifically have actually adopted them completely. They are easy to make and effortlessly transformed to information or directed to sites. After having lived in Japan for 15 years myself I congratulate the Japanese to have actually invented something small and so beneficial, like one of their small computer systems or semiconductors. Incidentally, QR Codes can also be used with Kanji, the text used by the Chinese and Japanese, so they have actually been totally taken on in China, even being used on train passes and soon on passports.

By Victoria T Graper

Stop Leechers From Compromising Your Website And Your Computing Resources

 Leeches are worms that predominantly suck blood and feed on blood from vertebrate and invertebrate animals. Historically, leeches were widely used for medical purposes in Greece and India to remove blood from patients. Modernly, in the internet world however, web administrators and website owners associate leeches with more subtle ends, rather than the sucking of blood, merely the sucking of computing resources. This historical association is modernly used to associate users across the internet who use resources on a network without paying for them or giving anything back to the network.

On a torrent network a leecher is someone who downloads files without adequately contributing to the network, in a meaningful way - typically by disconnecting from the network as soon as he/she has completely downloaded the file. On other networks, a leecher is someone who benefits from the network or gathers information from the network and offers nothing in return. In economic terms, such users are called free riders. For example, a member of a labor union who does not pay any dues but benefits from the efforts of the union.

As a website owner, you should be concerned about leechers using your resources such as disk space, bandwidth and other computing resources such as processing power or memory. This may occur when users that are authorized by you to use the website use it in a manner that is not authorized or intended by you. For example, a university may offer its students a cloud storage space for educational purposes, and some students may maliciously use such storage space to store movies or mp3 files, which is not necessarily illegal or wrong - but is not the intended use of the resource offered to the students.

This may also occur in a small or medium business, where employees are offered storage space on the network to store the data they need, so that they can access it from multiple locations through the internet - but the employees may end up using the storage space for completely unrelated purposes, such as to store personal information and files. Users may also end up sharing the login information with other people and allow them to use those resources for unintended uses.

As a website owner, depending on whether your resources are scarce and based on the cost benefit of having such leechers, you may want to terminate such leechers. The next obvious question that arises is, how you would identify such leechers, and how you would terminate them. Obviously it is not feasible to individually eliminate each user and verify each user, but there ought to be a system to identify usage patterns and alert you when there is a risk of leechers being on your network.

Many popular web hosting interface providers offer leech protection, and it is widely used in the industry to prevent leeching activity. Mr. Ruzbeh Raja a web administrator at a popular web hosting company said that "Preventing leechers is a priority for many website owners and, indeed widely used by our clients to prevent waste of resources". Mr. Raja further said that users being offered an unlimited web hosting plan in particular should be concerned about leechers given that they do not have a particular set limit of the resources they can use, he said that this would cause them to run the risk of being caught as abusing their account as a whole.

By Shaunak Sayta

Application Performance Monitoring And Management Solutions To Improve User Satisfaction

The organization today looks for a solution that helps to monitor and quantify the speed and efficiency of the business critical applications to run smoothly and ensure best end users experience. To save on the valuable productivity time and revenue, organizations are investing in application management software by getting services both on-premises and as-a-service delivery options. The solution provides you with 360 degree view of business applications to help resolve performance problem and find root causes before they disrupt critical services.

The vital offerings in Application performance management (APM) are:

User Experience Management: Identify and resolve response time by managing performance SLA and measuring data on user interactions.

• Synthetic User Record and Playback
• Real User Performance Monitoring
• Real User Session Capture and Replay
• Business Analysis Data Mart

Application Server Monitoring and Diagnostics: Prevent problems before it disrupts critical services and violate service level agreement (SLA).

• Application Server Monitoring
• Component-Level Monitoring
• Transaction Tracing
• Web Server Monitoring
• Message Queue Monitoring

Database Monitoring and Management: Provide consistent performance monitoring and management across varied database platforms, helping you reduce administrative costs and improve service levels.

• Database Monitoring
• Real-time Database Diagnostics
• Database Workload Analysis
• Database Tuning

SLA Monitoring and Dashboards: SLA monitoring solution feeds crucial application and service management information into the existing framework. SLA policies & reports are developed to improve service quality and minimize any disruption. These policies are created by using data from performance, availability and change across from the IT environment.

• Role-based Dashboards
• Dependency Mapping
• Service Definitions
• Component Discovery
• SLA / OLA Policies
• 3rd Party Integration

Virtual Server Management

Minimize hardware costs and identify/fix problems faster with deep visibility into VMware ESXi and Hyper-V performance management issues. The solution for virtual server monitoring and capacity management provides powerful virtual infrastructure monitoring, capacity planning, service management and charge back.

Infrastructure Monitoring

The infrastructure monitoring solution helps to link all the disparate parts of your IT environment as one centralized platform by providing constant management & monitoring for all diverse operating systems that supports critical applications from every perspective.

• Operating System Monitoring
• Network Device Monitoring

Virtual Desktop Diagnostics and Monitoring

AVAP for Virtual Desktops brings powerful diagnostics and rich monitoring and diagnostics solutions for virtual desktop environments.

• Virtual Server Monitoring
• Virtual Machine Life-cycle Management

Custom Application Development, Support & Maintenance

A lot of IT service providers provide bespoke software development services based on various technologies. To suit your specific requirements, such providers adopt various development methodologies such as Scrum, Agile and Waterfall, which significantly trim down your development costs and reduce risks.

Simplify managing your IT applications across various layers of the application infrastructure, whether it is on the physical, virtual or cloud environment. Keep reading to know more about the infrastructure services.

By David Steven Clark

How Much A/V Equipment Do You Need For Your Corporate Event?

Small Event

A small event is one with 30 attendees or less, or one held at a venue such as an office space or restaurant. For an event that size, small-scale equipment is usually sufficient. The setup options are:

• For a smaller room: One speaker to play audio from the computer, plus one projector and projector screen to display visuals.


• For a larger room around 30+ attendees: Two speakers (one left, one right) in the front of the room, a projector and projector screen centered in the middle, and a wireless microphone to reinforce the speaker's voice.


• Wireless slide advancers should be offered to streamline the presenter's process to move forward and back through the slideshow.

Mid-Sized Event

If your event is expecting 50-200 attendees, you are dealing with a mid-sized event in terms of your audiovisual needs. The venues for these types of events include hotel banquet rooms, larger private dining rooms, larger office meeting rooms, and outdoor venues. The AV setup needs to ensure that each member of the audience sees and hears clearly.

Setup Options:

• The suggested setup includes one speaker on each side plus a mid-range power projector and a medium to large screen set up in the center.


• For large rooms, two screens on each side may be necessary, and the presenter should be outfitted with a wireless microphone to ensure optimal audio coverage.


• Often lighting and truss is used to set the ambience, especially if the room's built-in lighting, usually fluorescents, is not wanted.

Large Event

Larger venues are those that can hold anywhere from a few hundred to thousands of attendees, and thus call for more powerful A/V equipment. These venues include stadiums, auditoriums, tradeshows, convention centers, main banquet rooms, exhibits, outdoor arenas, and more. Even with the most sophisticated equipment, a traditional front left and right speaker setup will likely not be sufficient. In addition to the above listed setup for the small to mid-size venues, the following might be needed:

• Side fills may be used to provide sound for those in the audience farther back from the stage, in addition to more than two projectors


• In order for the speakers and presenters on stage to be seen, staging and risers are also generally necessary.


• In terms of lighting, this is where the setup becomes more complex and advanced as well. While conventional, non-moving lights are often used for presentations and seminars, moving, automated lights are popular in a live show scenario.

When planning your event and consulting with an A/V company in order to get the necessary equipment, always take the time to consider attendance and venue size. You want to make sure that you don't order more, or less, than what you really need.

By Alexander G Brink

Social Media Issues: Why You Should Secure Your Social Networking?

In recent times, it was reported by Facebook that 83 million of its accounts were spurious, which, in practical terms, could be the entire population of Germany. So, who owns these fake accounts? As of now, no one knows, though it's clear that these bogus accounts are not used for charities or for promoting a good cause - it's most likely the other way around. Therefore, it should be common sense to take precautions while socializing on social media.

Furthermore, since the invention of the internet, it has enabled us to do lots of things - including chatting on social media website with friends, family and perhaps strangers. More than often, you'll receive a friend request from a complete stranger, and it's likely that - without thinking twice - you'll accept that stranger's friend request - especially if you find that unfamiliar person interesting or attractive. Conversely - once they have earned our trust - many of us often reveal our personal information to strangers without truly knowing the consequences of this naïve, yet critical blunder. Without having any second thoughts- we have a tendency to divulge small, but important pieces of personal information - which may not seem important to you - but can reveal key details about your identity. To make matters worse, imagine if there was a hacker on the other end? It wouldn't take long for this cyber-criminal to put the pieces of your identity's puzzle together, and before you know it, all or most of your critical accounts could possibly be hacked.

Additionally, once this e-crook has access to your account, he or she would easily be able to gain trust from your friends and hack most their accounts using Phishing - fake websites developed to retrieve user account and passwords. Other than phishing, there are plenty of other methods which can be employed by hackers to gain access to victims' accounts, such as malware and brute force.

Nonetheless, you can protect yourself by utilizing the following privacy protection tips:

If you don't know them, don't add them:

The title is self-explanatory for this tip. If you get a friend request from an unknown person, simply don't accept their friend request.

Make use of the privacy restriction options and features:

Most social media websites let you customize your privacy. It's recommended that you limit your profile visibility, this way you can minimize your chances of becoming a victim of e-crime.

Prevent hackers from breaching your personal computer:

Install and update your antivirus software religiously, as this can prevent sophisticated malware from entering your personal computer. Finally, add a second layer of protection by encrypting your important and sensitive data.

By Mia Burrows

My Computer Locks Up After a Few Minutes

There are many reasons why a computer may suddenly decide to freeze, most of which depend on what applications are running in the background, especially if any of these are malicious in nature, i.e. viruses and spyware.

Hardware problems can also cause this behaviour, primarily faulty RAM (memory) chips or other physical components. It may also simply be the case that there are too many applications running at the same time on your machine.

If this is the case, you will either need to close some of them down or upgrade your computer so that it can handle that level of activity.

In addition to this, it is important to make sure that your machine is not running an operating system (OS) that is over 5 years old, as this is an insecure setup in itself, due to the fact that an OS that old is unlikely to still be supported properly by the original software developers.

The best way to prevent your computer from locking up at random is to make sure that you have up-to-date antivirus and anti-spyware software installed. These two protective elements can be installed as one piece of software, depending on which antivirus software company you trust to protect your machine.

It is widely considered good practice to set such programs to update automatically so that your machine is protected should you forget to manually run this procedure.

Also, even the best protective software in the world cannot be guaranteed to be foolproof, meaning that you should backup your data on a regular basis, especially if you use your computer for any sort of business purposes.

However, should the worst happen, here is a quick guide to what you should do next, in order to prevent any further problems as well as fix the existing ones:

(Please note that this guide assumes the computer is running Windows)

• Disconnect your computer from the Internet
• Restart your computer and select the Safe Mode option
• Run your antivirus and anti-spyware program on a complete scan and follow the instructions to remove malicious software.
• Restart your computer in normal mode and update your protective software.
• Run another scan to confirm that your machine is back to normal.

Finally, as well as following the advice given above, some common sense is needed to ensure safe computer usage, a prime example of this being that you should only open email attachments that you are expecting to receive.

By John A Courtenay

The Best Bluetooth Handset for Home

The Bluetooth handset for home is gradually becoming as omnipresent as the Bluetooth mobile phone. They naturally complement each other in terms of cost efficiency and convenience, especially when using the telephone services. In the near future, as the technology continues to advance further, every cordless phone is expected to become Bluetooth cordless phone. This will allow for automatic pairing with Smartphones and cell phones the moment you enter your home.

Just as the Smartphone industry is currently experiencing a lot of competition as a result of new companies joining in, so is this industry likely to face the same in the coming years, as more companies are beginning to take an interest in the growing market. Having taken over the world of mobile and personal communication, Bluetooth technology is about to become a benchmark feature of small office and home phone system.

Currently, there are more than 3 excellent Bluetooth handsets in the market. Vtech, Panasonic, and Siemens Companies are the industry leaders. Of the three, Vtech offers the best Bluetooth handset for home with a stylish Bluetooth handset that constantly and reliably pair with a wide variety of mobile handsets. However, Panasonic has launched a vicious competitor that is receiving a lot of impressive reviews; the Panasonic KX-TG6583T.

When you arrive at home, your mobile handset automatically pairs with the cordless phone system. You may choose to leave them in the charging cradle or on a desktop provided that they do not surpass the Bluetooth range, which is about 30 ft from your base station. After they pair, it becomes possible for you to answer or make mobile phone calls via the cordless handsets.

The advantages of Bluetooth handset for home

As mentioned above, by pairing with mobile phones and other related gadgets such as earpieces and headsets, the cordless phone hinders or even eliminates the many variances between the Bluetooth phone and cell phone. For instance, upon entering your office or arriving at home, they pair automatically with your Bluetooth handset. This way they allow you to use the cordless phones to answer or make cell phone calls.

It allows you to answer mobile phone calls from any of the various cordless handsets situated in your entire apartment or house.

Generally, they are more comfortable to use compared to cell phones. Most people prefer relaxing and taking pleasure in leisurely phone conversations once at home, instead of dealing with a mobile phone.

Apart from increasing convenience and comfort, Bluetooth handsets for home and cell phones are in fact very complimentary. Together they prevail over various issues, such as dead zones or weak receptions within your home and excessive exposure to mobile phone radiation.

By allowing you to make mobile phone calls from a standard cordless phone, it becomes more opportune to use free mobile phone minutes. In fact, most users prefer to have their landline services disconnected and answer/make all calls using cellular networks. They way they are able to achieve profits within a short period.

Usually, they are either DECT Bluetooth phones or 5.8 phones. The former are immune to interruptions from WiFi, and offer extended talk-time and an excellent handset range. Depending on the model and design of your device, you can pair at least 2 mobiles and use their services to make external calls from any cordless handset closest to you. This is even more compelling for those with mobile phone plans that offer free talk time.

By Sharmistha Chanda