Author: Swadesh Parasher

BOX, The Bitdefender BOX! : A Security solution service for Home network!

Gone are the times when every newly developed technology is based on old devices that are already out on the market. It’s time for something new. Bitdefender came up with a smart security solution in the form of Bitdefender BOX, the one unified and independent solution for your home network security. The dependency of users upon antiviruses only is now obsolete since the BOX can handle it all.

What is Bitdefender BOX?

Imagine an antivirus software in physical form, where all your data is flowing in and out of the network is under constant supervision from the filters installed due to the hardware.

Adding a bit of intelligence to a small piece of networking hardware, Bitdefender Antivirus has now created a device for the security of all the devices under the Internet of Things, as a part of your home network. What’s more is that the BOX provides you, irrespective of your geolocation, BOX administration control and intrusion notifications on your Android and IOS devices through VPN.

The device must be connected to the internet in order to provide uninterrupted protection. Every packet flowing in through the net ports is scanned and verified for signs of any malicious or fake phishing packets. One can either use the BOX itself as the router or simply connect it to the router. The service is provided only to those who are registered with Bitdefender, or will be after purchasing the device.

Specifications

It is a small, sleek, shiny and lightweight box with measurements 1.1″ x 3.5″ x 3.5″. Small enough to fit in a corner of the table, and adding to the scene too with its LEDs. Feel proud if you already own it, because every multinational company building has large security boxes with a quite similar purpose but with great maintenance cost.

Packed with 64 MB DDR2 RAM, 16 MB flash memory and a single core 0.4GHz MIPS processor, it is surprising how this small device can handle all these tasks with such efficiency. Technology has really gone to the limits, and if you think you are in enough awe, wait till you hear about its VPN service out of your home network. Hardware wise, the device has a reset button (backside), two 10/100 Ethernet ports, and a very shiny cover, plus the Alien-eye LED. Under the hood, the chipset holds all the configurations and management interfaces, plus the connection modules to the cloud, handling all traffic monitoring.

Cost

Bitdefender is going to provide a free one-year subscription included in the $199 purchase for the device. After another $99 per year for the subscription update, once again you are free to live under its protection for one more year. Along with the BOX, if you really are a security guy, then there goes another $69.95 well spent.

Setup

The device seems simple enough, but as we know, some simple devices tend to confuse people more than complicated ones. How are you going to connect the device to your home network connection without disrupting your network service? Bitdefender thought of that too. Detailed Quick setup and User-brief instructions are provided with the device and are also present online to make installation easier.

You might think that this makes it more complex, but you are wrong. Decide whether you want to use the BOX as the default router or add it as an overhead protection to the router. After that make the connections, and setup a few usernames and password, an optional change in DHCP settings of the router, and if you are special, then maybe a bridge mode conversion of your default router, to connect to the box , and that’s it!

But remember, In order to complete the setup, you will require an interface. How were you thinking of configuring it? The download of the Bitdefender iOS or Android app is required to complete the setup. After this setup only, you can monitor the security of your home network, even when you are out of your home network range.

Bitdefender Box is also special because it provides the feature of VPN connectivity service to its users. All data streaming out of your mobile phone will be tunneled to the BOX at your home, which will forward it to cloud and thus providing your device with a constant link to the Home network security issue and configurations. Finally, Network Security solutions right in your hand, isn’t that cool?

Look out for this device wherever you can get your hands on it. Seriously

Source: Bitdefender

July 22, 2015
LightWeight Social Share buttons for blogger to speed up your blog

It feels really great when someone shares your blog post on the social media websites, which immediately indicates that your content was worth that extra step that your readers took to share it with their friends/family. Driving traffic to your new blog is little tricky at the beginning and often frustrating. If you’re not following some of the common practices that have been proved to work for many popular websites/blogs, then you’re simply going to choke it to death.

As I mentioned in my previous post, we have registered a new account on blogger service by Google – which is dedicated to providing the mentorship and guidance that we never received during our startup. I am sharing these tips and tricks to help you avoid making the mistakes that we did at the beginning and wished someone could point us in the right direction. We got lucky and got exposed to the inspirational work of Yeah! Local, which gave us our direction and in turn, momentum. Fortunately, if you’re reading this post – then you’re on the right track.

See Also: Here’s why you should choose blogger as your first blogging platform

Social sharing buttons are a crucial part of any website/blog. You’ll find it everywhere in one form or another. Even Websites likes Facebook, Twitter, Google+ has their own internal sharing tools which help their users share stories or snippets with their friends/families.

Speed Matters

It is a fairly simple job if you go ahead and add the codes directly, or use third-party services such as AddThis, Shareaholic, SimpleShareButtons, ShareThis etc. One thing which is common with these services is they all use a set of their own javascript and CSS files, which drastically slows down your blog. Google itself admitted in the official blog that they prefer faster website over the slow one, which is something you shouldn’t take lightly.

There could be many factors that might be affecting your web page load time, but if you’re using social like buttons on your blog than replacing it with our social sharing tool will make a noticeable difference to overall load time. We are using it on our own website and compared the performance with the regular social tools available out there.

What makes it so special?

First of all, there isn’t a single line of Javascript code used to render this social sharing toolbar on the blog, which reduces the number of requests to be made by clients to the web page. On traditional social buttons, it loads JS/CSS files for every social button included. For example – If you use Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons on your blog, it would load 3 different JS files along with 3 CSS rules to render these buttons. That’s totals 6 requests, not to mention that it increases the bandwidth and total page size of your blog, as each file adds up to the total size of the page.

Using our tool, you reduce these request to 1 (One), as it only requires single CSS file (of size 9KB) to render all the buttons. It is SEO friendly, fast, super slim, light weight and beautiful.

Where can I get it?

To add it to your blogger website, simply head over to our Blogger Lab, where we shared the Live demo and simple instructions to implement it on your blog.

Live Demo

July 19, 2015
This super thin solar panel mobile charger is trending on kickstarter

Keeping your smartphone alive can be a little tricky when you are away from home. It gets worse when charging sockets are unavailable and even worse when you don’t possess a charger itself. Thanks to this new solar panel chargers, you can charge your smartphones and other gadgets without relying on the power outlets.

A new Solar charger by Yolk — called Solar Paper is exactly what the name suggests. It is thin as paper, and can charge any device which requires power up to 10 watts.

The 7.5-inches long, 3.5 wide and 1.5 thin – Solar Paper is real easy to carry around and can prove to be a lifesaver (for your smartphone obviously) when you need it the most. The one-the-go companion has 0.45-inch thick USB charging port at the top, which is connected to the solar panel, and acts as a gateway for power juice for your gadgets.

A nifty feature is Solar Panel’s auto restart. With similar gadgets, a passing cloud or sudden shadow shuts the charger down, forcing the manual reboot. But Solar Panel resets that automatically. You can use it to charge anything that connects with USB: GoPro, external batteries, Bluetooth speakers, digital cameras, and so on.

Each solar paper is capable of producing 2.5W, which is sufficient for charging an external battery or low energy devices like GoPro. To charge an iPhone you should have at least 2 solar paper connected to each other (using the magnetic connector on the paper which offers easy attachment/detachment), which is combined to produce 5W. You can connect up to 4 solar papers together to produce total of 10W of power.

There are a couple of other advantages of using magnets in Solar Paper, too. First, there’s no wear and tear when you fold or unfold the panels, greatly extending Solar Paper’s life. The magnets are also quite strong, so you can use them to mount Solar Paper to metal objects, as shown in the picture.

At the time of writing this article, this project has already raised more than $400,000 from 2,749 backers on Kickstarter. It still has 33 days to go before this campaign ends, by which this number is expected to be multiplied by 10.

Have a look at the official video, and a message from Sen Change, CEO, Yolk:

July 18, 2015
Remove uTorrent Sponsored ads with single click

We posted a tutorial that would guide you to manually disable the Sponsored ads in uTorrent. While it does the work and helps you disable ads on uTorrent on Windows, it is fairly complex for some less tech-friendly readers. I wanted to write an article on this wonderful online tool I found few months ago, but somehow I forgot to do so. Today, I was forced to filter out this tool again from my never-ending bookmarks on Google Chrome after formatting my computer. I was testing an AntiVirus software, and I messed it up.

Anyways, I felt like I should share this tool with my readers.

See Also: [How To] disable sponsored ads on uTorrent

The free tool called “Pimp my uTorrent,” is a one click ad removal for uTorrent. You just need to go to their web page (which is hosted on Github) and click on a button to remove ads from uTorrent. It is the same person who developed “Duckie TV,” a tool to track down your Favorite TV shows.

Once you click the button, it will remove all the sponsored ads from uTorrent and give your UI a new visual effect which resembles that of uTorrent Plus (a premium version of uTorrent).

While this seems so interesting, it is little creepy that a single button can inject some codes or change the settings on a software. It may seem little suspicious but there is nothing to be worried about as the developer of the website revealed their secrets and posted a note on the website explaining how they are able to get into the application to change hidden settings.

Apparently it is just a javascript magic, which exploits a piece of code which is still present in uTorrent from one of their abandoned project – Torque. The project was supposed to implement torrent support to the browser using a version of uTorrent that runs without a user interface. This allowed the developer to reverse engineer it for this script to work.

So, go ahead and pimp your uTorrent!

July 16, 2015
Commodore launches a new smartphone; who are they actually?

A new smartphone is launched in the market with pretty mediocre specs, which is Meh! for most of us. The company that launched this new device — Commodore is unknown to me, as well as most of the people who wasn’t born in the 80s.

Commodore may seem like an unknown name in the industry, it is a Guinness World record holder. The company was included in Guinness Book of world Records for being a pioneer in selling single Computer model of all time, which was the only success they could achieve.

The company went bankrupt almost 20 years ago, forcing them to back away from the Industry. Nobody ever expected that the company will be able to make a comeback, that too after more than 20 years.

Fast forward to 2015, Commodore launched PET based on their 1977 PET computer in hope to get back into the game once again.

PET is powered by 1.7GHz Mediatek 64-bit Octa core processor with ARM Mali T760 GPU for graphics. It is packed with 3,000 mAh battery, 13-MP read camera with Sony sensor and 8MP front camera with an 80-degree wide angle lens.

The smartphone has dual Sim card slot and support 4G connectivity. On the software side, it runs Android Lollipop 5.0. The phone will be available in two variants – 16GB storage/2GB RAM and 32GB/3GB RAM. The former costs around $300 while the latter will cost $65 more.The phone will be available in a variety of colours, such as white, black and classic biscuit-beige.

Commodore will release PET in Italy, France, Germany, and Poland later this week. The company is planning on expanding to international markets soon.

July 15, 2015
How Does the ZTE Axon Compare to Other 2015 Flagships?

When people think of ZTE, they don’t consider them a top competitor, but surprisingly the company is the fourth highest-selling smartphone manufacturer in North America. ZTE has managed to create a large range of devices that are selling in truckloads, despite a much smaller marketing presence than a company like Samsung or Apple.

The ZTE Axon is another device by ZTE that has the potential to sell in large quantities. Whilst the device may not be getting a lot of buzzes, it definitely deserves a good, hard look. I’ll be comparing the ZTE Axon with other devices in a few different categories below.

Hardware

Besides the Galaxy S6, which uses the incredibly powerful Exynos 7420 SoC, this year’s 2015 Android flagship lineup relies heavily on the Snapdragon 810. Unfortunately for LG, the G4 has the less powerful Snapdragon 808.

All flagships this year have 3GB of RAM, however, the ZTE Axon will have 4GB – this is obviously going to allow us to see an improvement in multitasking performance, although the scale of this improvement is currently unknown. As it stands, the jump to 4GB is a decent improvement for ZTE, but it should end up being the standard for high-end devices in half 2. For example, both the Note 5 and the OnePlus Two should come with 4GB of RAM.

The ZTE Axon has no microSD card and 32GB of internal storage and a decently sized 3,000mAh battery. Finally, the Axon has a 5.5-inch LCD 2560 x 1440 display. The 13-megapixel camera on the ZTE Axon seems to be able to produce on par results for a flagship smartphone as well.

In the hardware department, the ZTE Axon easily competes with all other devices, and will even be a relevant choice when paired up against any more upcoming devices later this year.

Software

So far we haven’t really had the chance to see if ZTE have any cool software features up their sleeves for the Axon. First hands-on impressions suggest that the Axon will have a very Material Design themed interface, and, for the most part, the ZTE Axon will run and feel like stock Android 5.1.1 Lollipop, albeit with some preinstalled applications.

If you’re looking for some big software functionality, ZTE isn’t going to deliver, unfortunately. With that being said, the close-to-stock interface and high-end hardware should lead to a buttery smooth user experience.

Price

The ZTE Axon has been announced as a smartphone that will go for $450 SIM free. Contract deals will be revealed once the device has been released. The $450 price point is a bit on the fence between “a really good bargain” and “not so much of a bargain.”

On one side of the fence, you’ll find the $700 SIM free Galaxy S6, the $650 One M9, and the $650 Xperia Z3+. Even LG, who are known to offer lower prices on their flagships, offers the LG G4 for around $550 SIM free.

Without delving deeper into it, this makes the ZTE Axon look like an absolute bargain, but there is another side to the fence.

For example, the OnePlus Two has been confirmed to cost under $450, so whilst pricing is still unknown, that’s going to immediately be less than the ZTE Axon and it is expected to include a Snapdragon 810, 4GB of RAM and decent features all-around. Another interesting 2015 device is the $300 ASUS Zen one – once again, this device will have a decent set of specs, including 4GB of RAM and a 64-bit Intel ATOM processor.

What do we think?

At first look, the ZTE Axon seems like a bargain. Closer research reveals that this isn’t entirely true. For now, it’s hard to compare the ZTE Axon with other similar priced smartphones until we hear more about them.

So there we have it. The ZTE Axon will run smoothly, it will have high-end hardware, a great camera, good display, a great camera and the latest version of Android. The price tag is also a great talking point, even if it won’t be the best deal on the market.

Image credit: Androidblizzard; Ubergizmo; AndroidAuthority; Compregadget.

July 15, 2015