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Don't have Facebook account but want to use its Messenger service? Then go for it because Mark Zuckerberg wants even the people who hate Facebook to use the social network's separate Messenger service . So, you no longer need an active Facebook account to make use of the Messenger service, all you need is just your name and phone number, the company announced today. Facebook is giving a new " Not On Facebook? " option on the sign-up screen for its messaging app, which allows anyone to create an account for the Messenger app using his or her first name and phone number. Facebook to offer Messenger to people without Facebook account Facebook currently started offering this option for people in the United States, Canada, Peru, and Venezuela; the rest have to wait for the feature. Users with non-Facebook accounts will enjoy the same Messenger features, including voice and video calls, payments, stickers and GIFs. The only and major differenc...

In wake of the latest revelations about the National Security Agency (NSA) global spying on country's leaders, France may decide to offer political asylum to whistleblowers Edward Snowden and Julian Assange , as a " symbolic gesture ." Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden , who is facing criminal espionage charges in the U.S., has remained in Russia for almost two years after exposing the United States government's worldwide surveillance programs and he awaits responses from two dozen countries where he'd like to live. WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange has remained in the Ecuadorian embassy for three years in London to avoid extradition to Sweden, where Assange is facing sex crime allegations. French Justice Minister Christiane Taubira told French news channel BFMTV on Thursday that if France decides to offer both of them asylum, she would "absolutely not be surprised." Recent WikiLeaks report claimed that the United States had been spying on...

Adobe has rolled out an emergency software patch for its Flash Player to patch a critical zero-day vulnerability that is already exploited by the hackers in the wild. The company said the flaw could potentially allow hackers to take control of the affected system and that it had evidence of " limited, targeted attacks " exploiting the flaw. Therefore, Adobe is urging users and administrators to update their software immediately. About the Zero-day Flaw: The vulnerability, assigned CVE-2015-3113 , is a remote code execution bug that enables hackers to take control of an affected computer system. Cyber crooks are already exploiting this zero-day vulnerability in the wild in an effort to hijack computers, targeting systems running Internet Explorer on Windows 7 and Firefox on Windows XP . The vulnerability was discovered and reported by FireEye researchers, who first noticed the flaw actively exploiting in a phishing campaign to target companies...

Google was under fire of downloading and installing a Chrome extension surreptitiously and subsequently listened to the conversations of Chromium users without consent. After these accusations, a wave of criticism by privacy campaigners and open source developers has led Google to remove the extension from Chromium , the open-source version of the Chrome browser. The extension in question is " Chrome Hotword ," which was found to be responsible for offering the browser's famous " OK, Google " functionality. ' Ok, Google ' is certainly a useful feature that allows users to search for things via their voice when they use Google as their default search engine, but its something that also enables eavesdropping of every single conversation made by a user. Google Silently Listens to your Conversation This issue came to light by Pirate Party founder Rick Falkvinge , who says Google has silently installed black box code into the open-so...

Since it introduced at the annual Google I/O conference, Project Soli has been trending on the Internet. Project Soli is one of Google's latest cutting-edge experiments that could actually transform the way humans interact with technology. Project Soli is not a wearable watch you might think it is. So what is Project Soli? It's you. Yes, you heard it right. Google's secretive Advanced Technology and Projects group (ATAP) who is working on Project Soli, knows that our hands and fingers are the best way we have to interact with smart devices, but the fact here is — everything is not a device. So Project Soli wants to make your hands and fingers the only user interface you will ever need to interact with technology, even without the need to touch anything to control it. Before knowing how Project Soli exactly makes this happen, let's have a look at this GIF, which was pulled from Google's Project Soli demo video by Airows: And Her...

Sending an important and confidential email to one of my friends and mistakenly clicked send to someone else. Holy crap! This is something experienced by everyone of us at some point. When we accidentally hit the reply-all button, send an email to the wrong person, or sometimes forget to attach a file, and then left only with an instant pain of regret. It feels like there is no going back. Isn't it? But to make you go back and rectify your mistakes, Google has rolled out a new feature that delays sending your email for 30 seconds after you hit Send, so that you can recall it if you want to make some changes. You Have 30 Seconds to Unsend an Email After the feature remained in public beta for six years, Google has finally brought this life-saving " Undo Send " feature to the main settings on the Web version of Google's Gmail service. Once enabled, the Undo Send feature offers you up to 30-second window to "undo" sending an outgoing ema...

A Swedish man who was the mastermind behind the $40 BlackShades Remote Access Tool (RAT) that infected over half a million systems around the world was sentenced to almost five years in a U.S. prison on Tuesday. Alex Yücel , 25, owned and operated an organization called "BlackShades" that sold a sophisticated and notorious form of software, called RAT, to several thousands of hackers and other people in more than 100 countries for prices ranging from $40 to $50. BlackShades malware was designed to capture keystrokes, steal usernames and passwords for victims' email and Web services, FTP clients, instant messaging applications, and lots more. In the worst case, the malicious software even allowed hackers to take remote control of victim's computer and webcam to pilfer photos or videos without the knowledge of the computer owner. Yucel (a.k.a. " marjinz ") was sentenced to four and three-quarter years in prison by U.S. District Judge Kev...

There's a new and clever way of hacking into computers, and it can be done cheaply – Using just a radio receiver and a piece of pita bread . Yeah, you heard it right. Security researchers at Tel Aviv University have demonstrated how to extract secret decryption keys from computers by capturing radio emissions of laptop computers . Capturing the radio signals to steal data from a computer system is nothing new. But the process required expensive, bulky lab equipment to accomplish. However, the Israeli-based researchers team managed to do it with cheap consumer-grade components as well as small enough to hide inside a piece of pita bread. Using cheap equipment, the team of researchers, including Daniel Genkin, Lev Pachmanov, Itamar Pipman and Eran Tromer , was able to capture keystrokes, applications running on a computer system, and encryption keys. How the method works? The idea is simple, as different computer operations, such as playing some game o...

No doubt, You must be aware that Google tracks you, but what you probably did not realize is how precisely and till what extent it tracks you. Well, Google knows which movies I watched where, when, at what time and with how many of my friends , and knows it so well — even my eyebrows raised slightly in surprise! Yes, you heard right. If you are using your Gmail account like I do, receiving all movie booking and tickets, Google can easily track your movie flavors and frequent hangout places without access to GPS. GOOGLE READ MY EMAILS FOR EVENT INFORMATION I was feeling bored last night, so I decided to watch a movie and moved towards Google to search newly released films. As I googled " Movies 2015 "... Holy Crap! What I saw on the monitor was unbelievable. In Google search results, I was able to see the list of all my past movie booking event activities and even my future bookings ( shown below ), and it was so, so accurate. If you have Google acc...

Google, Apple, Microsoft , and Mozilla have joined hands to create code for use in the future web browsers that promises up to 20 times faster performance. Dubbed WebAssembly (or wasm for short), a project to create a new portable bytecode for the Web that will be more efficient for both desktop as well as mobile web browsers to parse than the complete source code of a Web page or an application. Bytecode is actually a machine-readable instruction set that is faster for web browsers to load than high-level languages. WebAssembly — A New File Format to Compile Code At the moment, browsers use JavaScript to interpret the code and allow functionality on websites such as dynamic content and forms. By default, JavaScript files are downloaded from the server and then compiled by the JavaScript engine in the web browser. However, improvements have been made to load times via Asm.js — the stripped-down JavaScript dialect described as an "assembly language for ...

Do you actually read the list of permissions that Android apps are asking for before you install them? I know most of us treat those permissions like terms and conditions, blindly tapping our way through. But if you actually do, you would be aware of their reach. Some of your apps can make phone calls Some can track your location Some can read your browsing history, contacts, SMS, photos, calendar And… Even share this personal information with third parties without your knowledge. But, do they need all those permissions? No doubt, Google's Android mobile operating system has a powerful app permission system that forces app developers to mention the exact permissions they require. But, there is one major issue for Android users: By default, it is a Take-it-or-Leave-it situation, which means you can choose to install the app, granting all those permissions or simply, not install it. It appears like every app developer wants access to much of my phon...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has released its annual report card of tech companies for 2015 based upon how much they keep your personal data secure from government snoops. And the Worst Companies Award goes to… At&T WhatsApp Verizon Yes, you heard right! WhatsApp is one of the three worst companies at protecting its users' data so if you are concerned about your data privacy, you should think twice before using WhatsApp. The EFF released its latest Who Has Your Back report based on 5 basic criteria that included: Follows Industry Accepted Best Practices Tells Users About Government Data Demands Discloses Policies on Data Retention Discloses Government Content Removal Requests Pro-user Public Policy: opposes backdoors The prominent privacy advocacy group analysed 24 companies in total, and among them AT&T, Verizon and WhatsApp came out to be the worst companies at protecting its users' data. Where Verizon met two criteria of the EFF...