How to stay private now that anyone can find you on Facebook

Facebook is tweaking your privacy settings again, but it’s not quite as serious as it sounds—the change, which removes an option to hide your name in search results, was announced last december and has already been in effect for 90 percent of users. On Thursday, Facebook removed the option for the last users still hanging on.

This change only affects the less than 10 percent of you still using “Who can look up my timeline by name?” In December, Facebook said it would be retiring the setting “in coming weeks,” but that really meant more than 10 months, apparently. If this change is a shock to your system, listen up: There are other privacy settings you can use to control who has access to your profile.

If you're still using the search option, you'll see this notice in the coming weeks.

Check those privacy settings

Now that Facebook's Graph Search tool is available to most American users, the way people find you has changed. Instead of looking for you by name, people can find you by searching for “friends of my friends who live in New York” or navigate to your profile from another friend’s page. You can control the audience of your updates, photos, or bio information if you don’t want strangers seeing your information.

How? Click on Privacy Settings. The first thing you’ll see is a question: “Who can see my stuff?” You have the option to limit the visibility of all your past pasts to just friends, friends of friends, or public—that means everyone. After changing the setting on your past posts, you can change the setting on your future posts: If you decide only friends should be able to see your updates, photos, and check-ins, then everything you post will default to friends-only. You can change the privacy setting on individual posts, if you decide that a specific photo should be visible to the world.

These are your privacy settings. Learn how to use them.

The only thing you can’t make friends-only is your cover photo—that banner at the top of your timeline—so make sure it’s an appropriate one.

See? Not so scary. It’s annoying when Facebook suddenly changes privacy settings with no warning, but that’s not what happened here. As always, monitor your settings carefully.

Ten essential tips for searching the Web

Finding just the right page among the billions on the Web requires not only a search engine but also a bit of know-how. Here is a selection of my favorite tips for searching the Web.

1. Search for a phrase

To search for an exact, complete phrase and not just its constituent words, put it in quotation marks. For example, instead of typing at sunrise on my birthdaytype ”at sunrise on my birthday”. The number of hits will shrink dramatically, as you’ll see only pages that include that exact phrase.

2. Be more specific

If you want to find articles about managing bookmarks in Safari on an iPhone running iOS 7, don’t search for just manage bookmarks. Throw all those terms in: manage bookmarks safari iphone ios 7. The more information you provide, the more useful your results are likely to be.

3. Exclude a word

To make sure your search for information on the connector your iPhone uses doesn’t return matches about an atmospheric phenomenon or a fictional race car, put a hyphen (-) in front of terms that should disqualify a page from appearing in Google’s results—for example, lightning -thunder -storm -McQueen.

Get more specific by excluding certain words from your search.

4. Use your own words

If you visit Google.com in Google Chrome, you can click the microphone icon on the right side of the search field and speak your search terms out loud. As soon as you finish talking, Google displays matching results and sometimes offers a summary aloud.

In Google Chrome, go to the Google homepage, click the microphone icon (top), and start talking. Whatever you say appears on screen (bottom), followed shortly thereafter by matching search results.

5. Try an advanced search

If you want much more control over your searches, such as specifying which geographic regions to search in, how recently created a page should be, or the page’s reading level, go to Google’s Advanced Search page or, after performing a basic search, click the gear icon in the upper-right corner of the results page and choose Advanced Search from the pop-up menu.

Google’s Advanced Search page lets you fill out a form with options for a detailed, specific search.

6. Convert, calculate, and more

You can also use Google to find all sorts of information besides lists of webpages. Google can handle calculations (try 104 * 36.8), currency conversions (185 dollars in euros), time-zone conversions (time in Paris), weather forecasts (weather San Diego), word definitions (define: pedantic), and a great many other things.

You don’t need a calculator (or a calculator app) if you have a browser open.

7. Learn from the source

A great place to learn dozens of additional tips for using Google is Google itself. For example, Google’s “Basic Search Help” and “Tips & Tricks” pages have loads of tricks and shortcuts you can use.

8. Simplify Google URLs

One thing I’ve come to dislike about Google, however, is that the links on its results page are all Google URLs that redirect you to the original page. For example, if you search for macworld, the first hit is for www.macworld.com. However, if you try to copy the URL, it’ll look something like this:

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CCwQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macworld.com%2F&ei=YL48UrOEPYbyQGA3ICIBg&usg=AFQjCNF8KJ4binisdLIm41H5qMrvHdQgw

And, depending on your browser, this sort of URL may also throw off your browsing history, making it difficult to see which sites you’ve been to.

Luckily, you can solve this problem with a browser extension. My pick for Apple’s Safari is Shaun Inman’s free Detox. (It was originally designed for Twitter, but it works great for Google, too.) For Google Chrome, first install the free Tampermonkey, and then add the script Scrub Google Redirect Links. For Mozilla Firefox, try Wladimir Palant’s free Google/Yandex Search link fix.

9. Use another search engine

Even the best Google search won’t help you find pages that Google hasn’t indexed, or items that are on page 5987 out of 28,001. If Google isn’t cutting it, you have alternatives. Competitors, including Bing, Yahoo, Ask.com, and DuckDuckGo, may point you to sites that don’t show up in Google. And because each search engine prioritizes search results differently, the page you’re looking for may be more prominent in one than in another. If you get stuck, trying the same search in another engine may do the trick.

10. Try a metasearch

If you frequently need to search across multiple engines (and, perhaps, on highly specific databases that store information not indexed in general-purpose public search engines), you might be a good candidate for DevonAgent Pro (4 out of 5 rating), which can query many sites and services at once and summarize search results in a way that exposes connections between related concepts.

Apple to unveil iPhone 6 in 2014 summer: Report

 Apple could launch iPhone 6next year in summers. 

In a research note, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster said he expects Apple's sixth-generationiPhone to come with 'a larger screen option', adding that it could be a 'blockbuster'. 

According to the New York Post, the news of early release of iPhone 6 is good news for the phone lovers and potentially for Apple shareholders. 

The stock has been sagging over the last 12 months amid slumping sales growth and could use a boosta 'blockbuster' product. 

Last quarter, Apple eked out revenues of 35 billion dollars, which were flata year earlier. 

In addition to the 'blockbuster' iPhone 6, Apple could also release brand new productsa watch and television, the report added.

Now, software that can crack CAPTCHAs

A technology startup said that it had come up with software that worksa human brain in one key way: it can crack CAPTCHAs, the strings of tilted, squiggly letters that websites employ to make users "prove you are human," as Yahoo! and others put it. 

San Francisco-based Vicarious developed the algorithm not for any nefarious purpose and not even to sell, said co-founder D Scott Phoenix. 

Instead, he said in a phone interview, "We wanted to show we could take the first step toward a machine that worksa human brain, and that we are the best place in the world to do artificial intelligence research." 

The company has not submitted a paper describing its methodology to an academic journal, which makes it difficult for outside experts to evaluate the claim. Vicarious offers a demonstration of its technology at vicarious.com, showing its algorithm breaking CAPTCHAs fromGoogle and eBay's PayPal, among others, but at least one expert was not impressed. 

"CAPTCHAs have been around since 2000, and since 2003 there have been stories every six months claiming that computers can break them," said computer scientist Luis von Ahn of Carnegie Mellon University, a co-developer of CAPTCHAs and founder of tech startup reCAPTCHA, which he sold to Google in 2009. "Even if it happens with letters, CAPTCHAs will use something else,pictures" that only humans can identify against a distorting background. 

CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. They are based on the standard set in 1950 by British mathematician Alan Turing in 1950: a machine can be deemed intelligent only if its performance is indistinguishablea person's. 

CAPTCHAs serve that function: in order to sign up for free email, post comments, buy tickets or other online activities, more than 100,000 websites require users to prove they are human by deciphering the squiggly letters, which are often blurred, smeared and cluttered with dots and lines. 

In practice, someone trying to break CAPTCHAs in order to do what a site is trying to deter - sign up for umpteen email accounts, for instance - can easily hire someone to accomplish that. "Most CAPTCHAs now are broken by paying people in Bangladesh to do it manually," said computer scientist Greg Mori of Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, an expert on machine learning and computer vision. "For 50 cents an hour, you can get someone to break seven per minute." 

Digitizing books?
Developing software to break CAPTCHAs would in theory speed that up exponentially. Vicarious said its algorithm achieves success rates of 90 to 97 percent, depending on the difficulty of the CAPTCHA; a CAPTCHA scheme is considered broken if a machine can break just 1 percent of the ones it generates. 

That makes "text-based CAPTCHAs no longer effective as a Turing test," the company said in a statement, meaning that CAPTCHAs can no longer be used to tell humanmachine. 

That might be beneficial, experts said. Google's reCAPTCHA uses wordsold books and other publications that have been optically scanned but are difficult to digitize because they are so degraded. "If you can actually solve reCAPTCHAs, you can digitize old books more easily," said Mori. 

In addition, the algorithm Vicarious uses to break CAPTCHAs might be deployed more widely. 

"If they've done it, it could improve the reliability of opticalacter recognitionthat used in banks to scan checks and by the IRS (Internal Revenue Agency) to read scanned documents," said Karl Groves, an independent website developer who for years has tracked claims about breaking CAPTCHAs. 

The feat required relatively tiny amounts of data and computing power, Vicarious said, instead using algorithms that mimic the perceptual and cognitive abilities of the human brain. 

The company has described only in general terms what it hopes to use artificial intelligence for, describing its goals as building a vision system modeled on the human brain and developing human-level artificial intelligence based on what it calls a "recursive cortical network," for applications in robotics, medical image analysis, image and video search, and other fields. 

That has been sufficient to attract more than $15 million in fundinginvestors including Facebook co-founder and Vicarious board member Dustin Moskovitz. In a statement, he said, "We should be careful not to underestimate the significance of Vicarious crossing this milestone," adding that the company is "at the forefront of building the first truly intelligent machines."

Tutorial: Edit videos online: how to embrace YouTube‘s cloud

Video editing isn't the quickest of tasks to do on your computer, and sometimes you just can't wait to get a video online for your friends and family to see. That's why YouTube has launched a video editing tool that lets you tweak your movies online and then upload them straight to the video-sharing site.

Now you don't have to wait until you get home to polish and publish your footage; you can use any machine with internet access to get your movie looking and sounding as good as possible.

The new YouTube Video Editor enables users to combine multiple existing pieces of footage to create a new, longer video. You can also trim the beginning or end of a clip to make it shorter and cut out unwanted material. You can even use the editor to add soundtracks, and there's one-click publishing to YouTube so you don't need to spend time re-uploading the newly edited clip. Let's get started!

Step-by-step: Edit a home movie on the fly

Get your videos looking and sounding great with YouTube's editing tools

1. Open the editor window

You need a YouTube account before you can edit your videos on the site. If you've already registered, just head over to www.youtube.com/editor and sign in with your username and password. If you don't have an account yet, go back to www.youtube.com and sign up first. Once you've logged in you'll notice that,the rest of YouTube, the editor has a very clean look and is easy to navigate.

2. Name your video

Enter a title for the edited version of your video. Don't worry, this will not replace the original clips - the editor will create and publish a brand new video ready for uploading at the end. Once you're satisfied with the way your movie looks and don't want to change it any more, simply click on 'Publish' to complete the process. First, though, we need to upload our clips.

3. Upload clips

To get your videos onto YouTube so you can edit them, open up a new tab in your web browser and go to the Upload page. Hit the 'Upload' button and navigate to the video files on your computer, or drag and drop them onto the pageyour desktop. The upload begins and you can view its progress at the top of the Upload window.

4. Make clips private

You're going to be uploading a few clips and combining them into a single video, so it's best to choose the 'Private' optionthe privacy settings so people don't accidentally stumble across your work in progress. The default setting is 'Public'. You can also tag the clips while uploading them to make sure that you group them together in an easily identifiable way.

5. Browse clips

Once your clips have been uploaded successfully, go back to the Video Editor tab, refresh the page and you'll see your newly added videosready and waiting. Each clip is represented by a tiny thumbnail, and if you need to remind yourself of what each one contains, you can preview each one easily by clicking the 'Play' icon that appears when you hover over it.

6. Choose clips to edit

To begin editing and combining your uploaded video clips to create a new movie, you need to drag and drop them to the storyboard at the bottom of the page. You can also click on the '+' icon in the corner of each clip to add it to the storyboard. If you want to arrange your clips in a different order, simply drag and drop them around in the storyboard area.

7. Edit clips

Many of your clips probably contain portions of footage at the beginning and end that you can discard immediately. Move your mouse pointer over any of your clips on the storyboard and click the 'Cut' icon that appears (it looksa pair of scissors). This opens the edit window. To cut a clip down, simply drag the trimmer bar at either end and move it to the appropriate place.

8. Frame by frame

When you're cutting your clips, you'll notice that there are arrows above and below the line of the trimmer tool. You can use these to nudge your video along frame by frame, and fine-tune your cuts so they're just right. Click the arrows to nudge a frame either forward or back. You can do this on the trimmer line at either the start or end of the timeline.

9. Add back to project

While you're editing one of your clips with the trimmer, you'll see a real-time preview of it above. To play your newly edited clip in full, click on the 'Play' button. When you've finished editing bits out and you're satisfied that you've got it just right, choose 'Save' on the bottom left of the panel and your clip will be returned to the storyboard in its freshly edited form.

10. Preview combined clips

If you click the 'Play' button on the main window on the right-hand side of the editor, the clips in the storyboard will be played seamlessly one after the other to show you what your complete movie will look like. You can use this to preview the video at any stage, but it's likely you'll have to do a little more editing on each clip first to get the results you want.

11. Search for audio

When you've cut down video segments and pieced them together to make a longer movie, the results might look great, but you'll probably end up with discordant sections of audio. With the YouTube Video Uploader, you can add a new soundtrack in a flash. the Audio tab and you're shown over 500 audio snippets to choose from. Use the search bar above to find music you want.

12. Add audio

If you want to hear a preview of any of the audio tracks before you add it to your movie, simply hit the 'Play' icon that appears to the right of the track when you hover your mouse over it. If you find a piece of audio you like, click and drag it to the audio area of the storyboard (just below your collection of video clips) or press the '+' icon to add the track to your movie.

13. Final edits

To finish off your YouTube video, you need to arrange your clips into the right sequence. You can re-order the clips at any time in the storyboard just by dragging and moving them into a different order. Bear in mind that the finished movie needs to be under 10 minutes in length before you can save it and upload it to YouTube, so it pays to be quite selective with your editing.

14. Publish your movie

When you're satisfied that your movie looks and sounds as good as it can, click the 'Publish' button to begin the upload. You'll see a new screenyou can edit some details, including the title and any tags you want to add. You can also geotag the video using the map on the right-hand side of the page. Simply choose a date, time and location, then click 'Save'.

15. Let your friends know

The Publish screen also has a field labelled 'Broadcasting and Sharing Options'. This isyou can change your video's privacy settings (either Public or Private) and invite contacts to watch it directly by sending them a message. When you do this, you'll be presented with a windowyou can write a short message explaining your video invitation.

16. It's showtime!

Congratulations! You've just made your first YouTube-edited video and uploaded it for the world (or just your friends) to watch and admire. Your YouTube contacts should be able to view it, and they can also press the 'Like' button to give their seal of approval. If you make a video public, you can also use the 'Like' button to gauge how well your video has been received.

New Sony Xperia phones, including 8-core monster, could debut November 12

Word came yesterday that Sony is planning a November 12 event in Shanghaiit will debut not one, but two new Xperia phones.

First there's something called the Xperia Z1S, according to Chinese site Digi-Wo.

As the name suggests, the Z1S will likely be a spin-off of the Xperia Z1, similar to the Xperia Z1 Mini, as Sony apparently continues to take cuesSamsung.

The Z1S will reportedly be the new flagship, with a 4.3-inch 720p display and the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 chip.

More importantly

The other new device rumored for the event is something being called the Sony Xperia "Tianchi," and it's a whole lot more interesting.

The Tianchi will reportedly be aimed at budget-minded consumers, but will nevertheless sport an 8-core processor.

That's because that 8-core chip will be MediaTek's more affordable 2GHz MT6592 or MTK6592, its first "True Octa Core" processor.

Like a spider's legs

MediaTek considers its processor the first "true" 8-core chips becauseeight of its A7 cores can operate simultaneously.

Speculation over the summer held that this powerful MediaTek chip might hit phones as early as 2014, but apparently it might arrive even sooner than that in Sony's Xperia Tianchi.

In addition to the new chip, the Tianchi is said to pack a 6-inch 1280 x 720 display.

With November 12 just a few weeks away we might catch a glimpse at these new Sony devices soon.

• Sony's latest flagship is impressive, but not without its faults. Read TechRadar's full Xperia Z1 review here!

Market for expensive smartphones shrinking: Report

Even as the mobile phone market is expected to expand by over 5% to about 1.91 billion units by 2014, the opportunity for smartphones in the premium category is now fading, global research firm Gartner has said. 

The firm expects mobile phone shipments to touch 1.81 billion units this year against to 1.74 billion units in 2012. 

"The mobile phone market will continue to experience steady growth, but the opportunity for high average selling price (ASP) smartphones is now ending," Gartner said, while giving its global outlook for the PC, tablet and mobile phone shipments. 

The firm added that growth is expected to comemid- tier smartphones in mature markets and low-end Android smartphones in emerging markets,India. 

Worldwide combined shipments of devices (PCs, tablets and mobile phones) are projected to reach 2.32 billion units in 2013, a 4.5% increase2012, it said. 

"The market is being driven by a shift to lower-priced devices in nearlydevice categories," Gartner said. 

Android will remain the leading device operating system (OS), as it is on pace to account for 38% of shipments in 2013, it said. 

Windows OS is projected to decline 4.3% in 2013 as a result of the decline in traditional PC sales, but will return to growth in 2014 with device OS shipments increasing 9.7%, it added. 

Similarly, another global research firm IDC also said that mobile phone shipments will increase aided by sub-$200 smartphones. 

Worldwide smartphone shipments are forecast to grow 40% year-over-year to more than 1 billion units in 2013. 

"High smartphone growth is the result of a variety of factors, including steep device subsidiescarriers, especially in mature economic markets, as well as a growing array of sub-$200 smartphones," it added. 

Total smartphone shipments are forecast to reach 1.7 billion units in 2017, IDC said. 

Overall mobile phone market is growing faster than previously forecast thanks to a stronger-than-expected first half of the year driven by strong gains in emerging marketsIndia and the sub-$200 smartphone segment. 

"IDC previously projected 5.8% growth for the year. Vendors are now forecast to ship more than 1.8 billion mobile phones this year, growing to over 2.3 billion mobile phones in 2017," the research firm said.

YouTube music subscription service may arrive

Google is reportedly speculated to launch a music subscription service for YouTube before the year's end. 

The service is rumoured to be a lotSpotify, but will be inclusive of videos, andPandora, will have both a free version and a paid premium version, allowing users unlimited access to albums and artists. 

According to Cnet, it is speculated that the users opting for unlimited access will also get ad-free music along with offline storage. 

Earlier, it was rumoured that the search giant was planning to launch the same service this past summer. 

The service is expected to cost users about 10 dollars per month and will be compatible with many of Google's other products and services, such as Google Glass. 

The report said that in March, Google was said to have made a deal with Warner Music Group that gives Google rights for two services it's said to be working on, one that's part of Google's Android music platform, Google Play, and the other for YouTube. 

YouTube boasts of 1 billion unique monthly users and is considered the largest music service in existence that makes money via ads. 

Google spokesperson did not comment about the latest speculation but revealed that the company is working on new and better ways for people to enjoy YouTube content acrossscreens, and on giving partners more opportunities to reach their fans.

11 tips to fix dead USB port

Did you plug a USB drive into your computer yesterday, but today it doesn't show up? Yet that drive works in the other USB ports on your computer. The problem may be the port! This is one of those computer issues that happens so rarely, we tend to blame the USB drive itself; just plug it in somewhere else and carry on. 

However, USB devices are still on the rise in popularity and show no signs of slowing down. USB flash drives, USBgers for your phone, USB to connect your iPod, USB coffee warmers, USB is everywhere! So you NEEDyour ports working. Here's what you can do to check out your USB port and some tips on fixing it. 

Physical examination

The first thing that you want to do is to see if the USB port is physically damaged. A simple test is to put your USB Flash Drive into the port and see if it wiggles up and down really easily. Be gentle doing this! You don't want to create a hardware problem if you don't already have one. If you're not sure how sturdy the USB port should be, do the same thing in a port that you know works and compare the two. If it is definitely loose, you'll probably want to move right to the end of this articlewe talk about dealing with USB port hardware issues. If not, follow the steps we have here. 

Restart computer

Before you get carried away with Device Manager, try the old tech support standby - turn it off and turn it on again. Sometimes that works by forcing the operating system to scan for hardware,the USB port, and makes it work again. If that doesn't work, then it's time to get into Device Manager. 

Check Device Manager

You can launch the Device Manager in a few different ways, but here's the quickest one: Click on the Start menu and type devmgmt.msc then hit Enter. Device Manager should start up right away. You'll see the following window: 

Device Manager: Device Manager showsthe categories of devices that can be installed in your computer. At this point in time, you want to look at the Universal Serial Bus controllers entries. Click on the arrow head to expand the selection. You will see somethingthe window below: 

USB controllers: This might not make much sense to you, but there is some useful information here. Seeit says Intel(R) 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller? That is the specific type of USB Host Controller for my computer. The key words are USB Host Controller. Find those in your Device Manager. If you cannot find any, this may be our problem. 

Click on the Scan for hardware changes button in the toolbar. You can see it highlighted in the image below. This will force your computer to checkof your hardware again. If you're lucky, this will pick up the USB port, and you'll see a USB Host Controller in the list. If not, then the problem isn't fixed yet. 

Scan for hardware changes:here, things get a little tougher. You'll still be working in Device Manager for now. If you are working with a desktop computer, with your mouse and keyboard plugged into USB ports, you may need to manually force a restart with the following steps. Uninstalling the USB Host Controllers will disable your USB devices. 

Under the Universal Serial Bus controllers heading, you will right-click on the first USB Host Controller. That will bring up a small menuthis one: 

Uninstall USB host controllers: Click on Uninstall. Repeat that process for any remaining USB Host Controller. Now restart the computer. This will force the computer to poll for these controllers and, hopefully, pick up the one that isn't responding. 

While you're in the Device Manager, did it seemthere were an awful lot of devices installed that might no longer be in your computer? Sometimes the drivers stay lingering on your computer, long after the device is gone. This is a good time to clean those out, and we have just the article on easily removing old driversWindows. 

Did that work for you? No? Let's go deeper then. 

Disable Selective Suspend feature: The USB Selective Suspend Feature is a power saving setting in Windows. What it does is suspend power being sent to a USB device, in order to save battery life of the computer. This is a good feature in theory, but on rare occasions the feature does not wake up the USB Device. If that's the case, then it would appear that your port is dead. You can disable the USB Selective Suspend Feature through a registry key. It's a good idea to do this on any computer that always has power to it, such as a server or desktop computer. You might not want to do this with your laptop, but if you do, you'll be able to turn it on again easily. 

To get to the Registry Editor, click on Start and then enter regedit in the Search box and hit your Enter key. The Registry Editor window will open. It looksthis, if you haven't seen it before: 

Registry Editor: Navigate to the Disable Selective Suspend key by clicking on HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, then SYSTEM, then Current Control Set, then services, then USB.it says Disable Selective Suspend in the right-hand window, right-click and click Modify. In the Value Data field enter the number 1. This will disable the selective suspend feature and power will go to your USB ports constantly. 

If the USB key doesn't exist in your registry, it's easy to create it. Just navigate to the services key, and in the toolbar click on Edit > New > Key. Call it USB. 

Edit New Key: In the USB key, right-click in the right-hand window. You'll only have the New option. Click on that and DWORD (32-bit) Value. It may just be called DWORD Value on your system. Name the new value Disable Selective Suspend. Justabove, right-click and click Modify. In the Value Data field enter the number 

1. There! You have disabled the selective suspend feature. You may need to restart your computer for the setting to be applied. 

This is a good time to mention that if you ever feel the need to block your USB portsworking, there is a tool to help with that. It's called USB Manager and we have a short article on how it works. 

Is your dead USB port working now? No? Then you might well consider that the USB port is physically damaged. 

Fix damaged hardware: If it's still not working, it may very well be a hardware issue. USB ports are pretty fragile and USB Flash Drives can act as levers on them, wreaking havoc on the electrical connectors inside. This is seen very often in laptops,the user will pack up the laptop and not disconnect the USB Flash Drive. It can usually be fixed. 

The takeaway

There are several ways to try to repair your USB port. Hopefully, it's just operating system or driver related as that's the easiest and cheapest fix. Don't dismay if it is a hardware problem - those can be fixed fairly simply and inexpensively too. The point is, it can be fixed.

Source: Guy McDowell, Makeuseof.com

LG curved smartphone G Flex spotted

LG’s much talked about smartphone the G Flex has made its first appearance in a hands-on video on an Argentine TV channel. 

Although not much is known about the specs of G Flex, the video has revealed the device sports a 6-inch curved OLED screen which bendstop to bottom. The video - of broadcaster Telefe whose journalist reportedly obtained a prototype of the phone and talked about it on his show - shows that the device carries the same back-sided button pattern as the LG G2. 

The G2 has the power/lock button in the middle of the volume rocker and above that is the 13MP rear camera. 

Details of G Flex’s processor are also not out yet, but it is expected to be similar to that in G2. The recently-launched G2 has a 2.3GHz Quad-core processor, an Adreno 320 GPU with 2GB RAM. 

Apartthe video, a couple of photos of the G Flex have also been leaked showing off the device in various angles. 

Recently, alleged press renders had leaked in the media showing off the design and built of the curved smartphone. 

Samsung had also recently announced it curved smartphone, the Galaxy Round, which has a 5.7-inch display, curvedthe right to left angle. It would also be having a Super Flexible AMOLED HD touchscreen with 3GB RAM, a 13MP camera, a 2.3 GHz quad-core processor and a 2,800 mAh battery among other things. 

Its key features include a tilt function which allows users to check information such as missed calls and battery life, even when the home screen is off. Users can also scroll through media files by pressing the screen's right or left hand sides. 

The battle to make curved display devices has been hotting up and South Korean giants Samsung and LG are leading. Apple also reportedly plans to bring out a smartwatch with a curved display soon. 

As per reports, LG would be officially unveiling the G Flex sometime in November. However, LG is likely to launch it in South Korea before taking it to other markets.

App store reaches 1M apps milestone

Apple's App Store has reportedly reached its 1 million apps mark, more than five years after launching. 

Apple's CEO Tim Cook revealed the milestone at the company's latest products launch on Tuesday. 

According to Mashable, there have been more than 60 billion app downloads to date and 13 billion dollars paid out to developers and at the same time last year, by comparison, Apple had only 7,00,000 apps and 30 billion downloads. 

However, Apple's App Store is still behind Google's Play Store which passed the one million mark in July this year, the report added.

HP beats TCS, Cognizant to retain Pepsi contract

BANGALORE: Food maker PepsiCo is close to renewing its data centre management contract with Hewlett-Packard, dealing a blow to Indian rivals that were hoping to wrest the multimillion dollar contract.

Indian information technology companies such as Tata Consultancy Services and HCL Technologies have been aggressively pursuing contracts that are coming up for renewal. HP, with its constant senior leadership changes over the past few years, was seen as being the most vulnerable incumbent. About $100 billion (Rs 6.2 lakh crore) worth of IT outsourcing deals are set to expire in 2013, according to Everest Group, a USbased outsourcing advisory and market research firm.

TCS, HCL Technologies and Cognizant were reportedly among the bidders for more than $500-million (about Rs 3,100 crore) deal that PepsiCo is renewing. “I believe all the big guys, including TCS, HCL Technologies and Cognizant were in there (bidding for the deal),” said Peter Bendor-Samuel , founder and CEO of Everest Group. He said the total contract value could be as high as a billion dollar. HP has declined to comment, while emails sent to PepsiCo did not elicit any response.

PepsiCo, whose brands include Lays and Mountain Dew, had in 2006 signed a $100-million (about Rs 620 crore) deal with HP for managing its data centres in the UK, Mexico and Hong Kong. The contract was up for renewal this year. The new deal includes the three data centres as well as others in Europe. “HP (enterprise services) is increasingly facing direct competition from Indian-centric vendors,” said Sarah Burnett, vicepresident of research at IT advisory firm NelsonHall.

Burnett said HP “recently lost a major IT infrastructure outsourcing contract at Anglo American (miner) to HCL.” Last week, the Palo Alto-based HP hosted a team from PepsiCo at its Bangalore centre. Sources said the five-member team held discussions with the offshore delivery team at HP to evaluate the infrastructure and capabilities before signing off on the renewal. “Switching an incumbent is very costly and, therefore, companies try to negotiate their terms with existing vendors,” said Biswajit Banerjee, senior analyst at Pierre Audoin Consultants (PAC).

While data centre management has been a lucrative business for global players, it is only in the past few years that Indian companies have entered the space in a big way. Banerjee said many of the deals coming up for renewal were signed five-10 years ago, when the likes of TCS and HCL — which have emerged the dominant players in the space — were too small to bid.

According to a recent ISG report, the annual contract value of deals from the renewal market for Indian providers grew at a compounded annual rate of 16% between 2009 and 2012, compared with a meager 0.4% for their US counterparts. Sales at TCS’ infrastructure business, under which data centre management falls, grew 39% in the latest quarter. Similarly at HCL Technologies, revenues from the segment rose 42.2% over the year.

Why your resume on LinkedIn should be up to date

SAN FRANCISCO: LinkedIn just gave its users another reason to ensure their resumes are up to date. The online professional network has introduced a mobile feature that shows information about people's careers in emails being read on iPhones. 

The tool, called Intro, pulls details from the profiles of LinkedIn's more than 238 million users so the recipient of an email can learn more about the sender. 

The information will be limited to what the email senders already allow anyone to be seen on their LinkedIn accounts, unless they already have granted the recipient broader access through a connection on the service. 

The feature works with Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL Mail and Apple'siCloud when any of them are plugged into the iPhone's built-in email app. LinkedIn plans to update the feature so it also works with Microsoft's Outlook.com and Exchange email. Intro also works on Apple's iPad, although the feature isn't tailored for that device. LinkedIn eventually will release a version of Intro designed especially for the tablet format. 

LinkedIn imported the technology powering the Intro feature from its acquisition last year of Rapportive, a startup that had already been mining online social networks to include personal information in correspondence sent to Gmail accounts. 

Intro is part of LinkedIn's push to make its network indispensable on mobile devices as more people manage their personal and professional lives on smartphones and tablets. 

LinkedIn says about 38 percent of the traffic to it networking services now comes through mobile devices, up from just 8 percent in early 2011. LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner predicted that mobile devices would be reeling in more than half the service's traffic at some point next year. 

As part of its effort to make its network more alluring on mobile, LinkedIn also released a new version of its service's app for the iPad. 

LinkedIn's strategy has been paying off since the company went public nearly two-and-half years ago. The Mountain View, California company has consistently been delivering earnings that exceed analyst projections, helping to lift its stock by more than five-fold from its initial public offering price of $45. 

The shares shed $3.60 to $241.35 in Wednesday afternoon trading, as the broader markets ticked down..