Firefox phone to launch this year

Mozilla, the company behind the popular Firefox browser, has announced the availability of two developer preview phones for its upcoming Firefox OS platform. The devices are designed to get developers better acquainted with the OS, which faces an uphill battle against the dominant iOS and Android platforms.

Firefox OS is based on Boot to Gecko technology, is an open source platform, and will run HTML5 apps. Mozilla announced last summer that it intended to introduce budget Firefox OS smartphones in Brazil in early 2013, though these new devices are the first hardware we've seen for the platform.

The handsets have been developed by Geeksphone in partnership with Telefonica, and offer two distinct flavors. The low-end Keon model (orange) features a Qualcomm Snapdragon 1GHz S1 CPU, 512 MB RAM, 4 GB of storage, a 3-megapixel camera, 1580 mAh battery and a 3.5-inch HVGA multitouch display.

The Peak model (white) boasts a more powerful Snapdragon S4 1.2 GHz dual-core CPU, a larger 4.3-inch IPS display, and a 1800 mAh battery. The Peak also offers better optics in the form of front-facing 2-megapixel and rear-facing 8-megapixel cameras. Both devices feature microSD card slots for expandable memory.

In terms of specs, both models fall short of flagship devices such as theiPhone 5 or Galaxy S3, lacking high-end features such as LTE and NFC. However, these handsets are solely for developer use and won't see commercial release, meaning that they're unlikely to represent the finished product.

Apple's iOS and Google's Android platforms currently dominate the mobile space and rely heavily on developers to produce high-quality apps that increase and augment the functionality of their platforms. It seems that Mozilla understands that the quality (and to some extent, quantity) of a platform's application offering can be the defining factor in its success, and is hosting a series of App Days to aid developers in their efforts to build apps for the open source OS.

There is no concrete release date for the Keon and Peak handsets, but the first units are expected to head out to developers next month.

source: Mozilla

Easiest way to install Windows from a USB stick.

When you need to install (or reinstall) Windows then normally you’ll reach for the regular CD/ DVD. But this is slow, easily scratched if you leave it lying around, and of, course, won’t be any use at all if your target system doesn’t have a working optical drive.

And that’s where WinToFlash comes in. This straightforward tool will take your installation disc (Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8 and Server 2003/ 2008 are supported), copy the files to a USB flash drive, and make it bootable, leaving you with a faster, more durable and convenient installer.

If you want to get involved in the complexities of this, then an Advanced Mode makes them all available. You can, for instance, choose the file system you’d like on the USB drive, its MBR configuration, FAT 16/32 configuration and more. So if you’re a Windows expert then there should be enough here to overcome any boot issues you might have with particular hardware.

The WinToFlash default settings are well chosen, though, so if you prefer the easy life then you can just run a simple wizard, point the program at your Windows disc and flash drive, and it’ll take care of everything else.

You still have to pay close attention to what you’re doing, of course. By default WinToFlash will format the target drive to make it bootable, for instance, destroying any data it contains -- so be very sure you point WinToFlash at the right location.

And booting from USB may not always be so easy, particularly with older PCs. If your system stubbornly starts from the hard drive as usual then check your BIOS setup program for its boot settings; you may need to give USB or removable devices a higher priority on the boot list.

For the most part, though, WinToFlash works just fine, and in around 10 minutes the program produced a bootable USB flash drive which launched without problems on our test Dell Inspiron notebook.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics can be a valuable tool for monitoring and tracking the efficiency of your online campaigns and get the best results in your marketing efforts. Whether you are a small or big enterprise, Google Analytics can be handy in providing statistics on the number of visitors to your site including information related to page views. Additionally, it can also give you an overview of the total number of new visitors who may have viewed your website. In short, it allows you to measure the online traffic to your website and helps in making further improvements in your advertising campaign. Google Analytics can be the best choice for marketers, as it is completely free and works well for small companies with small advertising budgets. 

One of the major benefits of using Google Analytics is to gain complete freedom in managing your website content. If you are not satisfied with the performance of your website, then you can make changes to your content as and when required. Additionally, this tracking tool can be used to drive targeted traffic to your website and improve conversion rates for your website for greater revenue. There are plenty of advantages of using Google Analytics as it helps your website to get a high ranking on the search engines and also boosts the productivity of your online business. 

Besides, companies who aspire to create a unique brand value for their products in the market can use this tool in real time tracking of the visitors coming to their website. Google Analytics can provide accurate statistics on the number of visitors who come to your website and the time spent by each one in viewing your website. In short, this tool can be valuable in measuring the bounce rate of your website that may be able to indicate the effectiveness of your landing pages in attracting the visitors. Generally, a low bounce rate is associated with more percentage of satisfied visitors, who are able to get more relevant and useful information from your website. 

 

Some advantages of using Google Analytics to succeed in your business:

Target your online visitors
By using Google Analytics as a monitoring tool, you can target a niche audience who may be keen on purchasing your products. You can provide greater online visibility to your business with more exposure to your company’s brand using this marketing approach. It helps you to keep track of the kind of visitors coming to your website and use popular keywords that may be used in the process of searching for specific products. Hence, you can cater better to the demands of the potential customers and stay ahead of the competition. 

Measure the results of your marketing campaign
Google Analytics can be used to optimize your website performance and attract more number of customers for boosting your sales prospects. You can also use targeted keywords as part of your SEO marketing strategy with the help of the statistics derived using Google Analytics tool. There are different functionalities using which you can determine whether your marketing campaign will be successful or not. As a result, you can get lots of opportunities for growing and diversifying your online business with the help of this amazing tool.

Customize your website for greater exposure
With the help of this tracking tool, you can make ongoing changes to your website by changing the content and improving the landing pages to draw greater number of visitors. Additionally, you can also find out deficiencies in your website and use attractive and interesting content that can attract your readers. Besides, you can also identify niche areas and add interesting images or graphics to make your website more visually appealing for the target audience. 

Evaluate traffic flow to your website
Google Analytics can be useful in finding out information about various source of incoming traffic flow to your website to help determine your marketing strategy. You can find popular links and keywords that are used by the visitors while searching for specific products on the search engine as well. This can be useful for maximizing the results of your e-mail marketing campaign for the success of your promotional efforts. Besides, this method of tracking user activities on the website can be immensely useful in catering to the specific needs and requirements of the customers.

Improve your web page quality
You can determine if the quality of your web page content is of a high standard with the help of the Google Analytics tool. Based on the results of this tool, you can optimize your website by repackaging it and providing it a new look to increase the frequency of online visitors. At the same time, you can get an opportunity to understand the needs of your niche target audience and provide them with excellent information using a well designed website. 
 

Google Analytics provides some excellent features for the customers with efficient reporting tools and helps in providing customized data that may be useful in formulating marketing strategies. Additionally, it also comprises of the content analytics report that can help in finding out your website conversion rates and the number of visitors who frequent your website. Moreover, you can also use the mobile analytics feature to find out the effectiveness of mobile ads and campaigns to find out its reach among the online visitors. 

Social reporting tools enable you to find the effectiveness of social media strategies on your online business and the impact on your website conversion rates. Besides, advertising analytics tool can help you to figure out whether your advertising campaigns are able to bring the best results and create a positive impact on your sales revenue. Thus, this integrated approach of Google analytics works in favor of online enterprises and helps in creating a harmonious environment for survival and growth of business. 

Hence, Google Analytics can be the best investment for both small and large enterprises as it can help in providing a solid marketing edge to boost their promotional efforts. Marketers can find the most popular keywords that can help improve their SEO campaign strategy and provide higher sales leads for their business. It also provides an insight into critical areas in your website that may require improvement and accordingly create opportunities for attracting greater online traffic. In short, this tool provides tremendous opportunities for all kinds of business owners in managing their resources in an economical manner.

Now, you can use Google Analytics to measure the outcome of all kinds of campaigns and use the statistics to create a unique brand for your products in the market. Evaluate, monitor and innovate your online strategies to get the best results for your business.

Top 15 Free Hacking Tools!!!

1. Nmap

Nmap (“Network Mapper”) is a free and open source (license) utility for network discovery and security auditing. Nmap uses raw IP packets in novel ways to determine what hosts are available on the network, what services (application name and version) those hosts are offering, what operating systems (and OS versions) they are running, what type of packet filters/firewalls are in use, and dozens of other characteristics. Nmap homepage.

2. Wireshark

Wireshark is a network protocol analyzer. It lets you capture and interactively browse the traffic running on a computer network. Wireshark homepage.

3. Metasploit Community edition

Metasploit Community Edition simplifies network discovery and vulnerability verification for specific exploits, increasing the effectiveness of vulnerability scanners. This helps prioritize remediation and eliminate false positives, providing true security risk intelligence. Metasploit community edition homepage.

4. Nikto2

Nikto is an Open Source (GPL) web server scanner which performs comprehensive tests against web servers for multiple items, including over 6400 potentially dangerous files/CGIs, checks for outdated versions of over 1200 servers, and version specific problems on over 270 servers. It also checks for server configuration items such as the presence of multiple index files, HTTP server options, and will attempt to identify installed web servers and software. Nikto2 homepage.

5. John the Ripper

John the Ripper is a fast password cracker, currently available for many flavors of Unix, Windows, DOS, BeOS, and OpenVMS. Its primary purpose is to detect weak Unix passwords. Besides several crypt(3) password hash types most commonly found on various Unix systems, supported out of the box are Windows LM hashes, plus lots of other hashes and ciphers in the community-enhanced version. John the Ripper homepage.

6. ettercap

Ettercap is a comprehensive suite for man in the middle attacks. It features sniffing of live connections, content filtering on the fly and many other interesting tricks. It supports active and passive dissection of many protocols and includes many features for network and host analysis. ettercap homepage.

7. NexPose Community edition

The Nexpose Community Edition is a free, single-user vulnerability management solution. Nexpose Community Edition is powered by the same scan engine as Nexpose Enterprise and offers many of the same features. Nexpose homepage.

8. Ncat

Ncat is a feature-packed networking utility which reads and writes data across networks from the command line. Ncat was written for the Nmap Project as a much-improved reimplementation of the venerable Netcat. It uses both TCP and UDP for communication and is designed to be a reliable back-end tool to instantly provide network connectivity to other applications and users. Ncat will not only work with IPv4 and IPv6 but provides the user with a virtually limitless number of potential uses. ncat homepage.

9. Kismet

Kismet is an 802.11 layer2 wireless network detector, sniffer, and intrusion detection system. Kismet will work with any wireless card which supports raw monitoring (rfmon) mode, and (with appropriate hardware) can sniff 802.11b, 802.11a, 802.11g, and 802.11n traffic. Kismet also supports plugins which allow sniffing other media such as DECT. kismet homepage.

10. w3af

w3af is a Web Application Attack and Audit Framework. The project’s goal is to create a framework to find and exploit web application vulnerabilities that is easy to use and extend. w3af homepage.

11. hping

hping is a command-line oriented TCP/IP packet assembler/analyzer. The interface is inspired to the ping(8) unix command, but hping isn’t only able to send ICMP echo requests. It supports TCP, UDP, ICMP and RAW-IP protocols, has a traceroute mode, the ability to send files between a covered channel, and many other features. hping homepage.

12. burpsuite

Burp Suite is an integrated platform for performing security testing of web applications. Its various tools work seamlessly together to support the entire testing process, from initial mapping and analysis of an application’s attack surface, through to finding and exploiting security vulnerabilities. BurpSuite homepage.

13. THC-Hydra

A very fast network logon cracker which support many different services.  hydra homepage.

14. sqlmap

sqlmap is an open source penetration testing tool that automates the process of detecting and exploiting SQL injection flaws and taking over of database servers. It comes with a powerful detection engine, many niche features for the ultimate penetration tester and a broad range of switches lasting from database fingerprinting, over data fetching from the database, to accessing the underlying file system and executing commands on the operating system via out-of-band connections. sqlmap homepage.

15. webscarab

WebScarab has a large amount of functionality, and as such can be quite intimidating to the new user. But, for the simplest case, intercepting and modifying requests and responses between a browser and HTTP/S server, there is not a lot that needs to be learned. WebScarab homepage.

Enjoy!!!