Vodafone Essar, India’s third-largest mobile operator controlled by Vodafone, said on Friday it will launch Apple iPhone 3GS in the country beginning today, priced at Rs. 29,500 onwards.

iPhone 3GS is the fastest iPhone yet and is equipped with a three megapixel autofocus camera, video recording and hands free voice control features.

The handset also provides access to Apple’s App Store, which has more than 1.5 lakh applications ranging from games to social networking.

In this concept Vodafone Essar Chief Marketing Officer Kumar Ramanathan said: “We are delighted to offer iPhone 3GS in India. We are confident our customers will enjoy the revolutionary iPhone and the flexibility of our tailored tariff plans,”.

Vodafone Essar will offer three plans – a prepaid plan of Rs. 100 and two post paid plans with Rs. 799 and Rs. 999 as rental respectively.

Under the Rs. 799 plan, the customer would get 249 minutes talk time and 250 MB data usage free, while the 999 plan would offer free talk time of Rs. 299 and data usage of 600 MB without charge.

iPhone 3G is available at Rs. 33,500 (for 8GB version), Rs. 40,500 (for 16GB) and Rs. 47,500 (for 32GB) in Mumbai, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, respectively.

For other regions, the handset would be available for Rs. 29,500 (for 8GB version), Rs. 35,500 (for 16GB) and Rs. 41,500 (for 32GB).

India’s top mobile firm Bharti Airtel also said earlier this week it would start selling iPhone 3GS from Friday.

Open your browser of choice and type: http://google.com into the address bar and hit enter. Watch closely, http://google.com redirects to http://www.google.com. This is because Google has a “301 redirect” setup. A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect of one webpage to another. There are many different ways to utilize a 301 redirect. For the purpose of this article, we will only discuss the redirect of http://domain.com to http://www.domain.com (or vice versa) via .htaccess. What is the point of this 301 redirect and how do you properly implement one?

What is the point of 301 redirects?

Believe it or not, in the eyes of search engines, http://domain.com and http://www.domain.com are different pages on your website. The proof is in the PR (Page Rank). Let’s take a look at a screenshot of http://wikipedia.org. As you can see below, it shows a Google Page Rank of 7.

Now let’s look at http://www.wikipedia.org. As you can see in the screenshot, it shows a different Page Rank; a Page Rank of 8. It is viewed as a different page.

Why should you care? A variety of reasons:

1. When people link to your site, some will link to http://domain.com and others to http://www.domain.com. This causes your PR to be spread out over different pages instead of just one. The prevailing wisdom (I don’t believe it, but that’s an article for another time) is that a proper 301 redirect will cause the links that are pointed to http://domain.com to be counted as pointing to http://www.domain.com.

2. Potential duplicate content penalties. Anytime you have the same content on two different pages, you risk incurring a “duplicate content” penalty. As Google says in their webmaster guideline, “Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.” Now, Google is usually pretty good at canonicalization (the process of picking the best url when there are various choices) but a proper 301 redirect removes the guesswork and ensures the url you prefer to to be displayed is in fact displayed.

3. Cookie issues. Depending on how the cookie domain is set, the two urls may have different cookies sent to them, which may produce inconsistent page content.

4. Nice, clean navigation. One of the most important aspects of SEO is creating nice, clean navigation for the bots to follow. You might as well start at the index with a proper 301 redirect.

5. Because everyone is doing it, including Google. If Google jumps off a bridge, so should you.

How to setup a proper 301 redirect

The process of setting up a 301 redirect on an Apache server is quite simple. How to implement one on a non Apache server is an article in itself. Please note that you must have mod_rewrite installed on your server for this to work.

Step 1. Create a normal .txt. file and name it htaccess.txt

Step 2. Cut and paste the following code (replacing “yourwebsitename” with your website’s name:

Code:

Options +FollowSymLinks

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourwebsitename\.com

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourwebsitename.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

Step 3. Save the file and upload it via FTP to the root folder of your website.

Step 4. Rename the file to .htaccess

Upon submitting the name change, the .htaccess file will disappear in many FTP programs. That’s normal. You can test to see if it is working correctly by typing in http://yourdomain.com and checking if it automatically changes to http://www.yourdomain.com

Some people prefer to redirect http://www.domain.com to http://domain.com because they hold the opinion that www is deprecated. You fine folks can use this code instead:

Code:

Options +FollowSymLinks

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.yourwebsitename\.com

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://yourwebsitename.com/$1 [R=permanent,

WIRELESS SECURITY- It is surprising easy to design a system that is logically completely secure by using VPNs and firewalls, but that, in practice, leaks like a sieve. This situation can occur if some of the machines are wireless and use radio-communication, which passes right over the firewall in both directions. The range of 802.11 network is often a few hundred meters , so any one who wants to spy on a company can simply drive into the employee parking lot in the morning , leave an 802.11-enabled notebook computer in the car to record every thing it hears, and takeoff for the day. By late afternoon, the hard disk will be full of valuable goodies. Theoretically this leakage is not supposed to happen and people are not supposed to rob banks, either.

Much of the security problem can be traced to the manufactures of wireless base stations (access point) trying to make their products user friendly. Usually, if the user takes the device out of the box and plugs it into the electrical power socket, it begins operating immediately-nearly always with no security at all, blurting secrets to everyone within radio range. If it is then plugged into an Ethernet, all the Ethernet traffic suddenly appears in the parking lot as well wireless is a snooper’s dream come true: free data without having to do any work. It there fore goes without saying that security is even more important for wireless systems than wired ones.

Add or change album art in Windows Media Player

Windows Media Player can display the album cover artwork associated with the songs in your library.

Where does album art come from?

The Player downloads album art from an online database where the information is supplied  by a variety of non-Microsoft data providers, such as AMG.

The Player downloads album art when you rip a CD. To do so, the Player attempts to match the CD to an entry in the online database. If it finds a match, the Player automatically downloads the media information that is available for the CD, including album art. In addition, the Player periodically scans your library for songs that are missing album art. If it can match a song that is missing album art to an entry in the online database, the Player will download the missing album art.

Why album is art missing sometimes?

The Player might not be able to download album art from the database in the following situations:

• You aren’t connected to the Internet when ripping a CD.
• You are connected to the Internet, but the online database is missing album art (or there is no media information at all) for the CD you are ripping.
• Your system administrator has prevented your computer from downloading items such as album art from the Internet.
• You ripped the CD using a program other than Windows Media Player; doing so might prevent the Player from finding a match in the online database.

Finally, if the online database contains incorrect album art for a CD, the Player will download that album art.

The following procedures describe methods you can use to fix missing or incorrect album art.

You can try to match an album in your library with an entry in the online database. If you find a match, the Player will download whatever album art is in the database to your computer.

Note that when the Player downloads album art, it also downloads all other media information associated with that album (such as the album name, song titles, and so on). If you have manually edited the media information for that album in your library, the following procedure will overwrite your changes.

1.Connect to the Internet.

2.Click the Library tab, and then browse to the album that you want to fix.

3.Right-click the album, and then click Find Album Info.

4.If you get an error message that says that you must change your privacy settings before you can update media information, do the following: Click the Tools menu, click Options, click the Privacy tab, and then select the Update music files by retrieving media info from the Internet check box. Then, in the library, repeat the previous step.

If the Tools menu is not visible, show the Classic Menus.

5.Do one of the following:

• oIf the correct album or artist information appears in the search results, select the correct entry, and then follow the instructions on the page to update the album art and media information automatically. If the correct album information does not appear in the search results, follow the instructions on the page to search again using different search criteria.
• oIf the correct album information appears with a generic music icon displayed as the album art, then album art is not available for download. See the procedure about how to add album art manually in this topic.

If some of your albums are missing album art, you can manually add a picture of your choice. When you do so, the picture is embedded into the file, and the Player will always show the embedded file as the album art (as opposed to any album art that the Player may have downloaded from the online database).

1.Click the Library tab, and then browse to the album that is missing art.

2.Find a picture that you want to use for album art (the picture can be on your computer or on a webpage), right-click the picture, and then click Copy.

The original picture can be in any of the following formats: BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, or TIFF.

3.In your library, right-click the album art box, and then click Paste Album Art.

A copy of the picture is embedded into each of the songs from that album. The copy of the picture is automatically scaled to the appropriate size and converted to the JPEG format before it is embedded in the file. The original picture file is not modified.

Note

• oIf you cannot add album art manually, verify that you have permission to modify the file. For example, right-click the file, and then click Open File Location. In the folder, right-click the file, click Properties, and then clear the Read-only check box if it is selected.

Where can you view album art?

Album art can appear in a variety of places inside and outside the Player, including:

• In the library
• In the List pane on the right side of the Player
• In the status area at the bottom of the Player (near the playback controls)
• In certain visualizations
• In the Windows folder where you store your music files (for example, the Music folder)
• In the Info Center View (to see this view, click the Now Playing tab, right-click the area where videos and visualizations appear, and then click Info Center View)
• In the Find Album Information dialog box (the dialog box that appears when you click the Find Album Info command)

Note that the album art that appears in the Find Album Information dialog box is provided by data providers, such as AMG. The album art that appears in the Info Center View is provided by the online store that you currently have selected.

WEB SECURITY-Web security can be divided into three parts. First how are objects and resources named securely? Second, how can secure, authenticated connections be established? Third, what happens when a web site sends a piece of equitable code? For this we discuss some threats-

THREATS-First, the home page of numerous organizations has been attacked and replace by a new home page of crackers choosing. We prefer to call these people Crackers’. In most cases, the crackers just put up some funny text and the sites were repaired with in a few hours.

Numerous sites have been brought down by denial of service attacks in which the cracker floods the site with traffic, rendering it unable to respond to legitimate queries. Often the attack is mounted from a large number of machines that the cracker has already broken into (DDoS attacks).

SECURE NAMING- Let us start with basic- (take a example).

Alice wants to visit Bob’s web site. You type bob’s URL into your browser after few seconds, a web page appears. But is it Bob’s? May be yes or may be no. Trudy might be up to her old tricks again. For example, she might be intercepting all of Alice’s outgoing packets and examining them. when she captures on HTTP get request headed to Bob’s web site, she could go to Bob’s web site herself to get the page, modify it as wishes, and return the fake page to Alice. Alice would none the wisher. worse yet, Trudy could slash the price at Bob’s e-store to make his good look very attractive, there by tricking Alice into sending her credit card number to Bob to buy some merchandise.

One disadvantage to this classic man-in-middle attack is that Trudy has to be in a position to intercept Alice’s outgoing traffic and forge her incoming traffic. In practice, she has to tap either Alice’s phone line or Bob’s, since tapping the fiber backbone is fairly difficult. While active wire-tapping is certainly possible, it is a certain amount of work, and while Trudy is clever, she is also lazy. Besides, there are easier ways to trick Alice.

DNS SPOOFING- Tricking a DNS server into installing a false IP address is called DNS spoofing. For example, suppose Trudy is able to crack the DNS system, may be just the DNS cache at Alice’s ISP, and replace Bob’s IP address with her (Trudy’s) IP address. When Alice looks up Bob’s IP address, she gets Trudy’s, so all her traffic intended for Bob goes to Trudy. Trudy can now mount a man-in-the-middle attack without having to go to the trouble of tapping any phone lines. Instead she has to break into a DNS server and change one record, a much easier proposition.

How might Trudy fool DNS? It turns out to be relatively easy. Trudy can trick the DNS server at Alice’s ISP into sending out a query to look up Bob’s address .Unfortunately since DNS uses UDP; the DNS server has no real way of checking who supplied the answer. Trudy can exploit this property by forging the expected reply and thus injecting a false IP address into the DNS server’s cache.

Trudy starts the attack by sending a lookup request to Alice’s ISP asking for the IP address of Bob’s. Since there is one entry for this DNS name, the cache server queries the top level server for the com domain to get one. However Trudy beats the com server to the punch and sends back a false reply. If her false reply gets back to Alice’s ISP first, that one will be cached and the real reply will be rejected as an unsolicited reply to a query no longer outstanding. A cache that holds an intentionally false IP address like this is called a poisoned cache.

Techhail is conducting a contest in which the lucky winner will be given Nokia 5230 XpressMusic is a touch screen mobile similar to Nokia 5800.

To participate in this contest you need to do the following:

You can win 5230 by tweeting, commenting and writing about this contest in your blog. If you tweet the message you get one entry ticket for the lucky draw. Commenting on the blog entitles you for one ticket and a review on your website/blog gives you 10 tickets.

This contest will run until Jan 31st 2010 11:59pm IST and winners will be announced on Feb 1st 2010. One Winner will be selected randomly and will be sent the box packed Nokia 5230. This contest is open for all my blog readers across the world. So try to gather maximum tickets and win the Nokia 5230 from TechHail.

link- http://www.techhail.com/blogging/win-nokia-5230-by-tweeting-commenting-in-techhail-giveaway/2847

Special thanks to samrat p for this giveaway

HTML -The Hyper text markup language; Web pages are currently written in a language called HTML.HTML allow users to produce web pages that includes text, graphics, and pointers to other web pages. HTML is a markup language a language for describing how document are to be formatted. The advantage of a markup language over one with no explicit markup is that writing a browser for it is straight forward .Tex and troff are other well known example of markup languages.

By embedding all the markup commands with in each HTML file and stand zing them, it become possible for any browser to read or reformat any web pages. Being able to reformat web pages after receiving them in crucial because a page may have been produced in a 1600*1200 window with 24 bit color but may have to be displayed in a 640*320 window configured for 8 bit color.

While it is certainly possible to write HTML document with any standard editor, it is also to use special HTML editors or word processors that do most of the work (but correspondingly give the user less control over all the details of the final result).

FORMS OF HTML- HTML 1.0 was basically one way .users could call up pages from information’s providers, but it was difficult to send information back the other way. As more and more commercial organization began using the web, there was a large demand of two-way traffic.

The demand led to the inclusion of forms starting in HTML 2.0. forms contains boxes and buttons that allow users to fill in information or make choices and then send the information back to the pages owner. It has a variety of parameters for determining the size, nature and uses of the box displayed. The most common forms are blank field for accepting user text, boxes that can be checked, active maps and submit buttons.