IAS Exam 2015

The Civil Services preliminary exam (IAS Exam)  is scheduled in August 2015. For catching up with latest developments and details about preparing for IAS Exam 2015, visit

IAS Exam 2015

Cuil is not cool

A new search engine has been set up. It's called 'Cuil' (pronounced 'cool'), has $33m in backing and it doesn't collect information about the surfing tendencies of users. Stories about it point out pluses like the size of its massive index (120 billion Web pages) and minuses like fewer total hits than what Google turns up when searching the same thing.

Formed by ex-Googlers, Cuil has been in development for the last three years and has attracted a huge amount of interest, coverage and upon launch - searches.

"Anybody who thought Cuil was this Google killer can really see now that no, that's not going to happen today — and the likelihood is that's not going to happen a year from now," says Danny Sullivan, internet search guru and editor-in-chief of SearchEngineLand.

Cuil's distinctive design, in which results appear in three columns across the page, also allows for longer previews of each site's content. But the acid test of any search site is the results it generates, and for now, anyway, Cuil falls way short of the industry's leaders, and even for that matter, of many startups.

Cuil has a distinctive, if old-fashioned, approach to indexing websites. Instead of ranking them based on popularity, as Google does, it focuses on the content of each page. That may make sense in theory — after all, the most popular restaurants, for example, rarely serve the best food — but it is precisely the model that Google broke away from in order to give users more relevant results.

"Obviously, there's a lot of interest in any stealth startup that's going to be a search engine. ... Everyone wants to know, 'Who's the next Google?'" said Erick Schonfeld, co-editor of Silicon Valley tech blog TechCrunch. "There's no way any startup in the world can outperform Google. The question really is whether or not Cuil can produce better results than Google can."

Google SMS (The Vacationeers)

Another eerie Google tale from The Vacationeers. A young man uses Google SMS and gets more than just movie times.

Yahoo! rejects Microsoft's latest offer

Yahoo!’s board met over the weekend and rejected a new proposal from Microsoft that would have seen the Internet company broken up.

The proposal, which the board of Yahoo rejected at a meeting Saturday, would have given Microsoft Yahoo's search business, with the rest of the company going to investor Carl Icahn.

The search giant said it had received the joint proposal from Microsoft and Mr Icahn late on Friday and was given less than 24 hours to accept. It said Microsoft and Mr Icahn made clear they were unwilling to negotiate the fundamental terms, which included the immediate replacement of Yahoo!'s board and removal of top management.

"This odd and opportunistic alliance of Microsoft and Carl Icahn has anything but the interests of Yahoo!'s stockholders in mind," Yahoo! chairman Roy Bostock said.

"Clearly Microsoft, having failed to advance in search, is aligning with the short-term objectives of Mr Icahn to coerce Yahoo! into selling its core strategic search assets, on terms that are highly advantageous to Microsoft but disadvantageous to Yahoo! stockholders," Mr Bostock said.

The move comes a few weeks before Yahoo!'s annual meeting on August 1, when Mr Icahn, who owns nearly 5 percent of Yahoo!, is seeking to oust chief executive Jerry Yang and replace the nine-member board with his own slate of directors.

Major internet security flaw disclosed

A security researcher Tuesday revealed a flaw that makes it possible for hackers to take control of the Internet.

The flaw is in the design of the Internet's Domain Name System(DNS), a fundamental feature of the Internet that makes it possible for computers to find Web sites.

Details of how the flaw works were not revealed, but it allows Internet users to be redirected anywhere an attacker chooses, said Dan Kaminsky, the director of penetration testing for IOActive, who discovered the flaw by accident six months ago.

According to a bulletin from the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), the vulnerability (VU#800113) could allow cache poisoning and misdirection of Web requests, sending users to unknown Web sites.

Web poisoning exploits are well-known, but because the new vulnerability lies in the basic design of the protocol, it is potentially more dangerous than previous problems. If the vulnerability is exploited, “you would have the Internet, but it wouldn’t be the Internet you expect,” Kaminsky said.

A group of 16 security researchers met on Microsoft’s campus in March to coordinate a response.

Major vendors of Domain Name System (DNS) servers are making an unprecedented coordinated release of patches.

By withholding details and using a patch that does not directly fix the vulnerability, the researchers hope to make it as difficult as possible for hackers to find the vulnerability.

ICANN and IANA sites hacked by Turkish group

"You think that you control the domains but you don't! Everybody knows wrong. We control the domains including ICANN! Don't you believe us?"

Two of the world's most important internet regulatory web sites – ICANN and IANA - were hijacked by a Turkish group called "Netdevilz" and briefly redirected to another site which screamed the above message, according to researchers at Zone-h.

IANA is the organization responsible for managing the DNS (domain name system) root zone and assigning the DNS operators for the Internet's top-level domains. DNS, which translates the domains and URLs into IP addresses, is a critical component of the Web's traffic-guiding infrastructure.

ICANN, which oversees IANA, also allocates IP address space and manages the Web's top-level domain naming system.

The zone-h researchers said the redirected domains included icann.com, icann.net, iana.com and iana-servers.com. They were hijacked to atspace.com, according to zone-h.

"We reached the defacers by e-mail but they refused to tell us how they changed the DNS records, however a cross-site scripting or cross-site request forgery vulnerability might have been exploited," zone-h said.

Firefox 3 released

Mozilla Firefox 3 has been released. Available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux in approximately 50 languages , the new version has over 15,000 improvements.

What’s New in Firefox 3:

The Web is all about innovation, and Firefox 3 sets the pace with dozens of new features to deliver a faster, more secure and customizable Web browsing experience for all.

User Experience. The enhancements to Firefox 3 provide the best possible browsing experience on the Web. The new Firefox 3 smart location bar, affectionately known as the “Awesome Bar,” learns as people use it, adapting to user preferences and offering better fitting matches over time. The Firefox 3 Library archives browsing history, bookmarks, and tags, where they can be easily searched and organized. One-click bookmarking and tagging make it easy to remember, search and organize Web sites. The new full-page zoom displays any part of a Web page, up close and readable, in seconds.

Performance. Firefox 3 is built on top of the powerful new Gecko 1.9 platform, resulting in a safer, easier to use and more personal product. Firefox 3 now uses less memory while it’s running, and its redesigned page rendering and layout engine means users see Web pages two to three times faster than Firefox 2.

Security. Firefox 3 raises the bar for security. The new malware and phishing protection helps protect from viruses, worms, trojans and spyware to keep people safe on the Web. Firefox 3’s one-click site ID information allows users to verify that a site is what it claims to be. Mozilla’s open source process leverages the experience of thousands of security experts around the globe.

Customization. Everyone uses the Web differently, and Firefox 3 lets users customize their browser with more than 5,000 add-ons. Firefox Add-ons allow users to manage tasks like participating in online auctions, uploading digital photos, seeing the weather forecasts, and listening to music, all from the convenience of the browser. The new Add-ons Manager helps users to find and install add-ons directly from the browser.

Download Firefox 3