MediaFire for Android: Store 50GB of Your Stuff For Free

Download this app from Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mediafire.android

Storage space is precious, and most major services—Google Drive and iCloud, for example—only give you a measly 5GB for free. MediaFire, is pretty magnanimous, doling out 50GB on the house. And it just launched on Android.

What does it do?

Lets you stash your files and photos in the cloud for free.

Why do we like it?

You never know when you’re going to need to pull up a picture or a document. Maybe you need to file expenses at work, or maybe you just want to show a friend some pictures of the house you grew up in. Sometimes those files are quite large. No problem—MediaFire has a 200MB file size limit. And since you have 50GB of free space, you don’t have to make hard decisions of which files you’re uploading to the app for easy access.
VIA | gizmodo.com

www.electroshopworld.co.za

Three Useful Tricks for Organizing Your Messy Windows Taskbar

The Start menu may be gone in Windows 8, but you don’t care—you’ve got a taskbar full of your most commonly used apps. Here are three tips to keeping your taskbar as organized and powerful as possible.
You probably already know most of the Taskbar’s best integrated features, as detailed in our power user’s guide to the Windows taskbar: keyboard shortcuts, jump lists, and maybe even a few registry tweaks that make it better. Here, we’ll run down three more advanced tricks and downloads that help you organize it for optimal usage.

Add Separators to the Taskbar for Easier Scanning

If you’ve ever wanted to group your apps into separate spaces on your taskbar, you actually can—with a little help from this workaround we’ve talked about before. All you need to do is create a shortcut to a fake EXE file, give it a transparent icon, and add it to your taskbar. You can separate your office apps from your games, or even your slow-loading apps from your fast-loading apps—that way, if you accidentally click on the wrong button, you don’t have to wait 60 seconds for the wrong app to load before you close it. Check out our original post for the full rundown on how this works.
One reader, however, made this tip even better. If you put that transparent icon into an image editor—like the GIMP—you can add text to each separator to give them different categories. See the image below for an example.

Use Bins to Create Stacks of Applications

If you find you have too many apps and need to save some space, the $5 Bins is the perfect tool to make that happen. With it, you can create a group of shortcuts that all reside on the same taskbar square and “expand” when you hover over it.
Clicking on that square without hovering will open the first app in the bin. While the aforementioned separators are good for separating categories of apps, this feature makes Bins perfect for collecting the programs you only use occasionally, but want quick access to. For example, my “music” bin has MusicBee—my primary player—as the first item in the bin, so I can launch it just by clicking on the bin as a whole. But if I want to launch Spotify, Pianobar, or iTunes, I can open up the bin and click them from there, without having to dig through the Start menu or screen.

Add Folders and Documents to the Taskbar

So you’ve got all your favorite apps beautifully organized in your taskbar, but what about the other stuff you need quick access to? You can add them to your taskbar through jump lists, but that isn’t ideal for everyone—they can easily feel buried under those menus. This trick will bring them out of those menus and into your main taskbar so they’re easier to access.
This is extremely easy to pull off: Just create a dummy file (like a text file) and rename it to something with a .EXE extension. Drag it to the taskbar to create a taskbar entry for it then hover over it, right-click on its name in the jump list to go to its Properties and change its path to whatever file or folder you want (and change its icon if you want). Now, when you click on that icon in the taskbar, it’ll bring up the file or folder you specified in its properties. Be sure to use this sparingly, or you’ll run out of space on your taskbar quickly!

Android Malware: How do I protect my phone or tablet against malware and viruses?

Why does Android have malware?

The biggest reason that Android has more malware than competing mobile platforms such as iOS, Windows Phone and Blackberry is that Android is the biggest platform, thus making them the biggest target. Just like in the computer world where Windows is mostly targeted by malware because, historically, Windows has the largest marketshare. However, there are also aspects of the Android ecosystem that make Android and its users more vulnerable.

One of the most heard critics is that Android is built on open-source technologies like Linux and WebKit and some critics would argue that by making the source-code public, the platform is inherently less secure than other platform on the market that keep their source-code safely guarded. But it is often forgotten that iOS is also based on BSD Unix which is open source and one the same WebKit browsing technology Android is using. No software is perfect, but open-source efforts with sufficient developer interest have consistently proven they can sustain high quality levels over the long term.

Open Market - Although it is true that Android has seen more malware issues than its competitors, the presence of malware on Android seems to have a lot more to do with the ecosystem android is using than the technology itself. Where Apple, Microsoft and RIM offer a curated app market, the Google Play is almost free-for-all; anyone can offer their app through the Google Play market and Google allows anyone to set up their own Android market (Amazon’s App Store is probably the best known).

Types of threats

Unlike computers, Android doesn’t have traditional viruses which spread between devices. Instead, malware creators have focused on other types of exploits such as tricking the user into doing something they shouldn’t.

Malware Apps: The most common malware app is an app that claims to be a popular game or based of a popular trend and lures the user into installing it. Once the user installs this malicious app, it installs clandestine software behind the users back that might try to grab passwords and keystrokes, forward emails and address books or even credit card information to cybercriminals.

Drive-by exploits: These exploits are a bit nastier. The basic idea is to lure Android users to a specific website containing a code which exploits a vulnerability in the web browser. Once the site is visited, malicious software can be installed without the user’s permission. But these exploits are not exclusive to Android; other operating systems such as iOS and Blackberry have the same issues.

Often, social engineering or phishing techniques are used to usher users to the infected site. For instance, you might get an SMS message that looks like it’s from a carrier or service provider, urging you to download an important update.

How to protect your Android device

There are some simple things you can do to protect your Android phone from being infected and reduce the chance greatly of having problems.

Only download from trusted app stores – First of all, don’t just download any content you run in to on the web. Always make sure to download your apps from either the Google Play store or another trusted app store such as the Amazon app store or you’re mobile provider’s app store. Go to your Android device’s Applications Settings menu and disable the “unknown sources” option for installing apps. This will prevent your device from installing apps via email, the Web, or any source besides Google Play.

Research the app and the publisher – Before downloading an app, spend some time researching the publisher. Look for reviews of the app or publisher on reputable websites, see if the publisher has any other released apps and don’t always trust the reviews in the Google Play store itself since some publishers are notorious for writing their own five star reviews.

Stay away from APKs – Do not install APKs (Android application package files) directly on your phone from an SD card or USB drive unless you are sure about its content and provenance.

Always check the permissions the app is asking for – Android will always present you a list of permissions the app is asking for before installing. Make sure to read carefully through this list and some common sense will usually help you a lot here. If you are installing a clock app and the app asks you for access to your address book or location, a bell should ring. The general rule here is that if an app asks for more permissions then it needs to have to run properly, there probably is some foul play in the game.

But above all, don’t panic! Android is still a very safe operating system and with some easy precautions you’ll stay trouble free.

 

www.electroshopworld.co.za

Silent Skype calls contain secret messages

A new technique can track and embed the secret data during a phone call on Skype, it has been revealed. Wojciech Mazurczyk at the Institute of Telecommunications in Warsaw, Poland said that there are concerns that Skype calls can be intercepted and analysed, New Scientist reported.
Users can hide extra, non-chat messages during a call through his team’s SkypeHide system. Mazurczyk and his colleagues Maciej Karas and Krysztof Szczypiorski analysed Skype data traffic during calls and discovered an opportunity in the way Skype “transmits” silence. Rather than send no data between spoken words, Skype sends 70-bit-long data packets instead of the 130-bit ones that carry speech. The team hijacks these silence packets, injecting encrypted message data into some of them.
The team found that the receiver simply ignores the secret-message data, but it can nevertheless be decoded at the other end. Mazurczyk said that the secret data is indistinguishable from silence-period traffic, so detection of SkypeHide is very difficult. They found they could transmit secret text , audio or video during Skype calls at a rate of almost 1 kilobit per second alongside phone calls.

ShareKey: An App That Can Turn Your Smartphone Into a Door Card!

This App is called ShareKey. It is made by Prof. Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi, a German professor at the Center for Advance Security Research.

ShareKey is an NFC(Near Field Communication)-enabled app which can turn your smartphone into a door key. With ShareKey installed, all you need to do is swipe your Smartphone over the NFC lock on the door, and then ShareKey would send the command to open the door via Bluetooth or wifi.
Since it is based on NFC technology for the security concern, no device is able to intercept the signal at this close distance.
In addition, ShareKey sets access to the permission of visit, frequency, and duration. Users can freely do the setup by their own as this app can be well compatible with iPhone, iPad, iPod series, and iOS system devices. However, the bad news is that iOS system products still do not have this NFC function, then that’s why the app is not widely used nowadays.
But, what if you accidentally lose your Smartphone or what if your phone gets stolen? Does this mean that the thief can walk into my house without problems? ShareKey definitely has potential but some security measurements will have to be taken.

MagicScroll for Chrome lets you read every Web page like a book

MagicScroll for Chrome wants to transform the way you read online.
Typically, you’ll navigate a Web page by using the vertical scroll bar, the scroll wheel on your mouse or perhaps the arrow buttons on your keyboard. But the MagicScroll Web reader transforms each page into a book-like interface, making it easier to read long articles without distraction.

After you install the extension, you’ll see a small book icon in the toolbar at the top. You click this on any Web page, and it magically transform the page into a MagicScroll book.
“It’s hard to read on the Web,” says MagicScroll developer Richard Wallis. “Your favorite newspaper or magazine probably lets you read articles on its website. It’s convenient but there are a couple of drawbacks. Compared with print, you’re less likely to finish the article, you’ll read it slower, you’ll skip over sentences and your comprehension will go down.”
Wallis says there are a couple of common sense explanations for this, such as Facebook or email distractions, or even the backlight. But Wallis reckons these explanations are wrong. “Distractions and backlighting don’t help, but they’re insignificant compared with the real problem which you haven’t noticed. You haven’t noticed it for the same reason you wouldn’t notice that a particular swan is white if you’d never seen a black one.”
Wallis adds that scrolling, as you know it, is a great way to experience online maps, or even an Excel spreadsheet, but not so much for text. “That’s because scrolling moves the text on a page,” says Wallis. “And moving text, even if it’s under your control, will break your reading rhythm.”

How it works

Click the book icon, and you’ll see something like this. Clicking the little arrows on either side of the main text effectively turns the page.

Alternatively, you can hit the ‘play’ scrolling button at the bottom right, and a line traverses down the page, revealing the next line of text as your eyes move with it. You can increase/decrease the speed accordingly, depending on how fast a reader you are.

“The way it scrolls will probably be new to you,” adds Wallis. “It might take you a second or two to get used to it, but it is better. I’d like the Web to scroll like this but that’s probably a lot to ask. So I’ve built a browser extension and a bookmarklet that’ll let you scroll existing websites without moving the text.”
MagicScroll is like a stripped-down version of Readability, a service which also includes features such as save-for-later, as well as mobile apps and aChrome extension. But MagicScroll is less about presentation and aesthetics than it is about eliminating scrolling from your Web reading experience.
MagicScroll is free to use and, if you’re looking for a new way to read content online, it’s certainly worth checking out.
? MagicScroll | Chrome

www.electroshopworld.co.za

What is a Quad Band Phone?

A quad band phone is a cell phone that can operate on the four major GSM frequencies used by service providers around the world. Beneficial for travellers, a quad band phone can be used even when the user is outside of his service provider’s area.

Types

There are many types of quad band phones, ranging from basic phones to high-end Android Phones. But all of them have one thing in common; they can all access the four major GSM frequencies used worldwide, 850, 900, 1800 and 1900MHz. In North and South America, 850MHz and 1900MHz are most commonly used and in other parts of the world such as Europe and Asia, 900MHz and 1800MHz are used. A quad band phone can potentially function on all of these bands.

                       Android 4.0 Phone "Stratos" - 5.3 Inch, 1GHz Dual Core, Dual SIM

A quad band phone has the advantage over dual band and tri band phones since it can operate on all four bands and not just on two or three bands, this as long as the cell phone service provider has an agreement with the network owner of the other networks.

Considerations

Most quad band phones will automatically switch frequency bands and connect to the closest GSM network but quad band phone users should consult their cell phone provider before traveling abroad to ensure that their phone will function on the network of the country of destination.

Some features such as 3G and 4G internet might not work on a different network when abroad and additional fees and cost might be charged by your provider for roaming. Check with your provider if there are any discounted travel packages available or turn of roaming in Android to make sure no additional costs are charged.

Rugged Design Mobile Phone “Fortis” – Dustproof, Shockproof, Waterproof, Quad Band GSM, Dual SIM

Specifications

In order to being able to receive all four bands, a quad band phone has more powerful internal hardware and a better antenna than most other phones on the market. Many quad band phones offer internet options, fast downloading abilities, large address book storage options and Bluetooth capabilities. Add this to the reliable calling network available worldwide and quad band phones stand out as one of the best options for mobile phone users who frequently travel.