South African Rolene Strauss crowned Miss World 2014

Miss South Africa, 22-year-old Rolene Strauss, was crowned Miss World 2014 at the pageant's final in London on Sunday, with an estimated billion viewers watching on television around the globe.

Miss Hungary, Edina Kulcsar, was the runner-up and Miss United States, Elizabeth Safrit, came third in the 64th annual competition, contested by women from 121 countries.

Strauss clasped her hands together in surprise and was presented with the sash by the outgoing Miss World, Megan Young of the Philippines.

The medical student sat in the winner's throne as the 2013 champion put the glittering crown on her head before a fireworks finale at the ExCeL exhibition centre in east London.

"South Africa this is for you," Strauss said afterwards. "I think I will brace myself for what's about to happen. It's a huge responsibility."

Mumbai on Farting

How to get a job at Google

Last June, in an interview with Adam Bryant of The New York Times, Laszlo Bock, the senior vice president of people operations for Google - i.e., the guy in charge of hiring for one of the world's most successful companies - noted that Google had determined that "GPAs are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless. ... We found that they don't predict anything." He also noted that the "proportion of people without any college education at Google has increased over time" - now as high as 14 percent on some teams. At a time when many people are asking, "How's my kid gonna get a job?" I thought it would be useful to visit Google and hear how Bock would answer. 

Don't get him wrong, Bock begins, "Good grades certainly don't hurt." Many jobs at Google require math, computing and coding skills, so if your good grades truly reflect skills in those areas that you can apply, it would be an advantage. But Google has its eyes on much more. 

"There are five hiring attributes we have across the company," explained Bock. "If it's a technical role, we assess your coding ability, and half the roles in the company are technical roles. For every job, though, the No. 1 thing we look for is general cognitive ability, and it's not IQ. It's learning ability. It's the ability to process on the fly. It's the ability to pull together disparate bits of information. We assess that using structured behavioral interviews that we validate to make sure they're predictive." 

The second, he added, "is leadership - in particular emergent leadership as opposed to traditional leadership. Traditional leadership is, were you president of the chess club? Were you vice president of sales? How quickly did you get there? We don't care. What we care about is, when faced with a problem and you're a member of a team, do you, at the appropriate time, step in and lead. And just as critically, do you step back and stop leading, do you let someone else? Because what's critical to be an effective leader in this environment is you have to be willing to relinquish power." 

What else? Humility and ownership. 

"It's feeling the sense of responsibility, the sense of ownership, to step in," he said, to try to solve any problem - and the humility to step back and embrace the better ideas of others. "Your end goal," explained Bock, "is what can we do together to problem-solve. I've contributed my piece, and then I step back." 

And it is not just humility in creating space for others to contribute, says Bock, it's "intellectual humility. Without humility, you are unable to learn." It is why research shows that many graduates from hotshot business schools plateau. "Successful bright people rarely experience failure, and so they don't learn how to learn from that failure," Bock said. 

"They, instead, commit the fundamental attribution error, which is if something good happens, it's because I'm a genius. If something bad happens, it's because someone's an idiot or I didn't get the resources or the market moved. ... What we've seen is that the people who are the most successful here, who we want to hire, will have a fierce position. They'll argue like hell. They'll be zealots about their point of view. But then you say, 'here's a new fact,' and they'll go, 'Oh, well, that changes things; you're right.'" You need a big ego and small ego in the same person at the same time. 

The least important attribute they look for is "expertise." Said Bock: "If you take somebody who has high cognitive ability, is innately curious, willing to learn and has emergent leadership skills, and you hire them as an HR person or finance person, and they have no content knowledge, and you compare them with someone who's been doing just one thing and is a world expert, the expert will go: 'I've seen this 100 times before; here's what you do.'" Most of the time the nonexpert will come up with the same answer, added Bock, "because most of the time it's not that hard." Sure, once in a while they will mess it up, he said, but once in a while they'll also come up with an answer that is totally new. And there is huge value in that. 

To sum up Bock's approach to hiring: Talent can come in so many different forms and be built in so many nontraditional ways today, hiring officers have to be alive to every one - besides brand-name colleges. Because "when you look at people who don't go to school and make their way in the world, those are exceptional human beings. And we should do everything we can to find those people." Too many colleges, he added, "don't deliver on what they promise. You generate a ton of debt, you don't learn the most useful things for your life. It's [just] an extended adolescence." 

Google attracts so much talent it can afford to look beyond traditional metrics, like GPA. For most young people, though, going to college and doing well is still the best way to master the tools needed for many careers. But Bock is saying something important to them, too: Beware. Your degree is not a proxy for your ability to do any job. The world only cares about - and pays off on - what you can do with what you know (and it doesn't care how you learned it). And in an age when innovation is increasingly a group endeavor, it also cares about a lot of soft skills - leadership, humility, collaboration, adaptability and loving to learn and re-learn. This will be true no matter where you go to work.

WhatsApp? Service down, three days after Facebook deal

WhatsApp's 450 million worldwide users were unable to access the smartphone free-messaging service for several hours on Saturday, three days after Facebook declared it was lavishing up to $19 billion on it.

"Sorry we currently experiencing server issues. We hope to be back up and recovered shortly," WhatsApp said in a message on Twitter that was retweeted more than 25,000 times in just a few hours and provoked ridicule because it comes so soon after Facebook's hefty acquisition.

Some WhatsApp users found they were unable to connect to the app, while others complained their messages were not going through.

WhatsApp did not say how long the outage lasted, but about 2.5 hours later it tweeted again to say: "WhatsApp service has been restored. We are sorry for the downtime..."

The specialist website techcrunch.com suggested the problem might be down to "a surge of signups and usage that has overloaded its servers" after the publicity the app garnered following Facebook's announcement on Wednesday.

Facebook is betting huge on mobile with the eye-popping cash-and-stock deal for WhatsApp, which was only started five years ago but has quickly grown as a free alternative to text messages.

It is Facebook's biggest acquisition and comes less than two years after the California-based Internet star raised $16 billion in the richest tech sector public stock offering.

Neither WhatsApp nor Facebook were immediately available for comment. 

However, the outage was the source of much amusement -- as well as anger -- on Twitter. 

"I expect you are all away from your desks on the ales drinking some of that Facebook cash!" one user, "leonclarance," replied to WhatsApp's tweet about the blackout.

Another simply tweeted: "Turn down Facebook's offer guys!" 

BEWARE...Stores can track where you go, using your smartphone

Should shoppers turn off their smartphones when they hit the mall? Or does having them on lead to better sales or shorter lines at the cash register?

Retailers are using mobile-based technology to track shoppers' movements at some malls and stores. The companies collecting the information say it's anonymous, can't be traced to a specific person and no one should worry about invasion of privacy. But consumer advocates aren't convinced. It's spying, they say, and shoppers should be informed their phones are being observed and then be able to choose whether to allow it.

The Federal Trade Commission held a workshop Wednesday on the issue, part of a series of privacy seminars looking at emerging technologies and the impact on consumers. FTC attorney Amanda Koulousias says the commission wants to better understand how companies are using phone-location technology, how robust privacy controls are and whether shoppers are notified in advance.

Here's how the technology works:

Your smartphone has a unique identifier code - a MAC address - for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. It's a 12-character string of letters and numbers. Think of it like a Social Security or vehicle identification number, but this address is not linked to personal information, like your name, email address or phone number. The numbers and letters link only to a specific phone.

When your smartphone is turned on, it sends out signals with that MAC address (for media access control) as it searches for Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. Those signals can also be captured by sensors in stores that could tell a department store how often shoppers visit, how long they stay, whether they spend more time in the shoe department, children's clothing section or sporting goods, or whether they stop for the window display, take a pass and decide to move on.

Companies that provide "mobile location analytics" to retailers, grocery stores, airports, and others say they capture the MAC addresses of shoppers' phones but then scramble them into different sets of numbers and letters to conceal the original addresses - a process called hashing. This is how they make the data they collect anonymous, they say.

The companies then analyze all the information those hashed numbers provide as shoppers move from store to store in a mall, or department to department in a store. Mall managers could learn which stores are popular and which ones aren't. A retailer could learn how long the lines are at a certain cash register, how long people have to wait - or whether more people visit on "sale" days at a store.

"We're in the business of helping brick and mortar retailers compete" with online retailers, said Jim Riesenbach, CEO of California-based iInside, a mobile location analytics company. "The retailers want to do the right thing because they know that if they violate the trust of consumers, there will be a backlash."

West Virginia pizza worker caught urinating in sink fired

 A West Virginia pizza restaurant has been shut down after a district manager was caught on surveillance video urinating into a sink.

Pizza Hut Corp. spokesman Doug Terfehr says the company was made aware of the video on Tuesday, fired the employee shortly thereafter and the restaurant in Kermit, about 85 miles southwest of Charleston, was then closed indefinitely.

The video dated January 29 shows the manager urinating in a sink in the kitchen.

In a statement, the company says it was "embarrassed" by the actions and has "zero tolerance" for violations of its operating standards. The incident occurred after business hours.

Mingo County health official Brett Vance says the company is overseeing the restaurant's cleaning.

The video and firing were first reported by WOWK-TV.

Fine-tuning has limits; it's time to create

When Microsoft tapped Satya Nadella as its third chief executive, the technology giant turned to a longtime engineering executive and company insider. He takes over at a critical time, as Microsoft grapples with both strategic and cultural challenges. In his first interview as CEO, Nadella, just weeks into his job, talks about leadership lessons from his predecessors, his management style and fostering innovation. This interview has been edited and condensed. 

Q: What leadership lessons have you learned from your predecessor, Steve Ballmer? 

A: The most important one I learned from Steve happened two or three annual reviews ago. I sat down with him, and I remember asking him: "What do you think? How am I doing?" Then he said: "Look, you will know it, I will know it, and it will be in the air. So you don't have to ask me, 'How am I doing?' At your level, it's going to be fairly implicit." 

I went on to ask him, "How do I compare to the people who had my role before me?" And Steve said: "Who cares? The context is so different. The only thing that matters to me is what you do with the cards you've been dealt now. I want you to stay focused on that, versus trying to do this comparative benchmark." The lesson was that you have to stay grounded, and to be brutally honest with yourself on where you stand. 

Q: And what about Bill Gates? 

A: Bill is the most analytically rigorous person. He's always very well prepared, and in the first five seconds of a meeting he'll find some logical flaw in something I've shown him. I'll wonder, how can it be that I pour in all this energy and still I didn't see something? In the beginning, I used to say, "I'm really intimidated by him." But he's actually quite grounded. You can push back on him. He'll argue with you vigorously for a couple of minutes, and then he'll be the first person to say, "Oh, you're right." Both Bill and Steve share this. They pressure-test you. They test your conviction. 

Q: There's a lot of curiosity around what kind of role Bill is going to play with you. 

A: The outside world looks at it and says, "Whoa, this is some new thing." But we've worked closely for about nine years now. So I'm very comfortable with this, and I asked for a real allocation of his time. He is in fact making some pretty hard trade-offs to say, "OK, I'll put more energy into this." And one of the fantastic things that only Bill can do inside this campus is to get everybody energized to bring their A-game. It's just a gift. 

Q: What were some early leadership lessons for you? 

A: I played on my school's cricket team, and there was one incident that just was very stunning to me. I was a bowler - like a pitcher in baseball - and I was throwing very ordinary stuff one day. So the captain took over from me and got the team a breakthrough, and then he let me take over again. 

I never asked him why he did that, but my impression is that he knew he would destroy my confidence if he didn't put me back in. And I went on to take a lot more wickets after that. It was a subtle, important leadership lesson about when to intervene and when to build the confidence of the team. I think that is perhaps the No. 1 thing that leaders have to do: to bolster the confidence of the people you're leading. 

Q: Tell me about your management approach in your new role. 

A: The thing I'm most focused on today is, how am I maximizing the effectiveness of the leadership team, and what am I doing to nurture it? A lot of people on the team were my peers, and I worked for some of them in the past. The framing for me is all about getting people to commit and engage in an authentic way, and for us to feel that energy as a team. 

I'm not evaluating them on what they say individually. None of them would be on this team if they didn't have some fantastic attributes. I'm only evaluating us collectively as a team. Are we able to authentically communicate, and are we able to build on each person's capabilities to the benefit of our organization? 

Q: Your company has acknowledged that it needs to create much more of a unified "one Microsoft" culture. How are you going to do that? 

A: One thing we've talked a lot about, even in the first leadership meeting, was, what's the purpose of our leadership team? The framework we came up with is the notion that our purpose is to bring clarity, alignment and intensity. What is it that we want to get done? Are we aligned in order to be able to get it done? And are we pursuing that with intensity? That's really the job. 

Culturally, I think we have operated as if we had the formula figured out, and it was all about optimizing, in its various constituent parts, the formula. Now it is about discovering the new formula. So the question is: How do we take the intellectual capital of 130,000 people and innovate where none of the category definitions of the past will matter? Any organizational structure you have today is irrelevant because no competition or innovation is going to respect those boundaries. Everything now is going to have to be much more compressed in terms of both cycle times and response times. 

So how do you create that self-organizing capability to drive innovation and be focused? And the high-tech business is perhaps one of the toughest ones, because something can be a real failure until it's not. It's just an absolute dud until it's a hit. So you have to be able to sense those early indicators of success, and the leadership has to really lean in and not let things die on the vine. When you have a $70 billion business, something that's $1 million can feel irrelevant. But that $1 million business might be the most relevant thing we are doing. 

To me, that is perhaps the big culture change - recognizing innovation and fostering its growth. It's not going to come because of an org chart or the organizational boundaries. Most people have a very strong sense of organizational ownership, but I think what people have to own is an innovation agenda, and everything is shared in terms of the implementation. 

Q: How do you hire? 

A: I do a kind of 360 review. I will ask the individual to tell me what their manager would say about them, what their peers would say about them, what their direct reports would say about them, and in some cases what their customers or partners may say about them. That particular line of questioning leads into fantastic threads, and I've found that to be a great one for understanding their self-awareness. 

I also ask: What are you most proud of? Tell me where you feel you've set some standard, and you look back on it and say, "Wow, I really did that." And then, what's the thing that you regret the most, where you felt like you didn't do your best work? How do you reflect on it? 

Those two lines of questioning help me a lot in terms of being able to figure people out. I fundamentally believe that if you are not self-aware, you're not learning. And if you're not learning, you're not going to do useful things in the future. 

Q: What might somebody say in a meeting that, to you, sounds like nails on a chalkboard? 

A: One of the things that drives me crazy is anyone who comes in from the outside and says, "This is how we used to do it." Or if somebody who's been here for a while says, "This is how we do it." Both of them are such dangerous traps. The question is: How do you take all of that valuable experience and apply it to the current context and raise standards? 

Q: Any final big-picture thoughts on how you're going to approach your new role? 

A: Longevity in this business is about being able to reinvent yourself or invent the future. In our case, given 39 years of success, it's more about reinvention. We've had great successes, but our future is not about our past success. It's going to be about whether we will invent things that are really going to drive our future. 

One of the things that I'm fascinated about generally is the rise and fall of everything, from civilizations to families to companies. We all know the mortality of companies is less than human beings. There are very few examples of even 100-year-old companies. For us to be a 100-year-old company where people find deep meaning at work, that's the quest.

WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum's rags to riches story

Jan Koum, an immigrant from Ukraine, was so poor as a teenager that he used to save his old Soviet notebooks for school and queued with his mom for food stamps.

Brian Acton lost a small fortune in the dot-com bust and was rejected for jobs at Twitter and Facebook.

Now, the friends behind the hot mobile messaging startup WhatsApp are the newest tech industry billionaires.

Facebook this week bought WhatsApp in a stock-and-cash deal worth up to $19 billion and gave Koum a seat on the social network's board of directors.

Koum signed the Facebook takeover contract at the unused building where he and his mother once queued for food stamps in the Silicon Valley city of Mountain View, where WhatsApp is located, according to Forbes Magazine.

Koum, who turns 38 on Sunday, has described growing up as a rebellious Jewish child near Kiev and having little when he immigrated to California with his mother at the age of 16 just after the Soviet Union's breakup.

His father did not make it to the United States, where the family sought to escape anti-Semitism and oppressive tactics of secret police.

"Jan's childhood made him appreciate communication that was not bugged or taped," Sequoia Capital partner Jim Goetz said in an online post.

"When he arrived in the US as a 16-year-old immigrant living on food stamps, he had the extra incentive of wanting to stay in touch with his family in Russia and the Ukraine." 

Koum's mother brought with her a cache of pens and Soviet-issued notebooks to save money on school supplies, according to Forbes magazine.

A self-described trouble-maker at school, Koum had a job sweeping the floors in a grocery store. After his mother was diagnosed with cancer, they got by on disability payments, Forbes reported.

Koum learned computer networking from manuals bought from, and eventually returned to, a used book store, according to the account.

He enrolled in a state university in Silicon Valley and was working on the side with a computer security firm when he met Acton while on assignment at Yahoo in 1997.

Acton was employee number 44 at the Sunnyvale, California-based Internet firm and shared a "no-nonsense" attitude with Koum. Within a year, Koum was working as an engineer at Yahoo and the pair was on their way to being close friends.

Koum eventually chose Yahoo over college. When Koum's mother died of cancer in 2000, his mentor Acton stepped in with support.

Acton, meanwhile, reportedly lost millions investing during the famous dot-com boom that ended with an infamous dot-com bust.

Acton and Koum left Yahoo in 2007 and took a year off, exploring South America and playing the sport of Ultimate Frisbee, according to Forbes.

Kiran Kumar Reddy resigns as Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister, quits Congress

Kiran Kumar Reddy resigned from the Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister's post, the membership of the state assembly and the Congress party, a day after the Lok Sabha passed the bill creating Telangana as the 29th state of India.

Mr Reddy played the Telugu 'bidda' (son of the soil) card to the hilt before walking over to the Raj Bhawan from his residence, covering a distance of two kms,  to hand over his resignation. Addressing his last press conference before announcing his resignation, he lashed out at both the Congress and the BJP for allowing the bill to be passed in the Lok Sabha, making it clear that he was planning to plough a lonely furrow in the coming days.

"It is shameful that this bill was presented like robbers, hiding from people, putting off TV, throwing out those who were objecting. The BJP also conspired to harm Telugu people, striking a secret deal with the Congress," he said. 

Mr Reddy also pointed out that "nowhere has a bill rejected by state assembly been passed by Parliament. For seats and votes, all political parties have done lot of harm to Telugu people. I condemn this. Telugu people will all be harmed by this.'' 

On Tuesday, the Lok Sabha passed the controversial bill that creates a new Telangana state by bifurcating Andhra Pradesh. The Rajya Sabha will take up the bill today. 

For months, Mr Reddy has battled for a united Andhra Pradesh, rebelling against his party which decided to hurry through its Telangana plan with an eye on the national elections due by May. The Congress hopes the split will bring it rich electoral dividends from the 10 districts of the Telangana region. 

Mr Reddy's efforts have included leading the state Assembly in rejecting the Telangana plan and a protest sit-in at Jantar Mantar in Delhi.

The non-Telangana Seemandhra region is observing a daylong bandh today to protest the bill's passage in the Lok Sabha.  

JK Rowling pens second crime novel under pseudonym

JK Rowling, celebrated British author of the popular Harry Potter series, has penned her second crime novel under a pseudonym to be published in June.

The Silkworm, to be published on June 19, will again feature Cormoran Strike, the private detective Rowling introduced in 2013's 'The Cuckoo's Calling'.

The author's pseudonym Robert Galbraith was unmasked last year after the information was leaked by a member of her legal team.

Rowling, 48, has penned a new story about her private detective Strike and his assistant Robin Ellacott.

This time, the crime-solving duo will be on the trail of a killer who murders a writer called Owen Quine, The Independent reported.

"At first, Mrs Quine just thinks her husband has gone off by himself for a few days (as he has done before) and she wants Strike to find him and bring him home," a synopsis from publishers Little, Brown Book Group reads.

"But as Strike investigates, it becomes clear that there is more to Quine's disappearance than his wife realises," it says.

Quine has just finished work on a manuscript that sees him draw on "almost everyone" for poisonous character assassinations that could ruin lives.

"When Quine is found brutally murdered under bizarre circumstances, it becomes a race against time to understand the motivation of a ruthless killer, a killer unlike any Strike has encountered before," the teaser states.

Rowling was unmasked on Twitter as the author of thriller The Cuckoo's Calling. She had hidden behind a fake name to avoid readers forming preconceptions based on her Harry Potter success.

"I was yearning to go back to the beginning of a writing career in this new genre to work without hype or expectation to receive totally unvarnished feedback," Rowling wrote on her Robert Galbraith website.

"It was a fantastic experience and I only wish it could have gone on a little longer."

Rowling successfully took legal action against the solicitors who had leaked the information and donated both the damages and the novel's royalties to the Soldier's Charity.

A partner at the solicitors told his wife's best friend about Robert Galbraith's real identity, who in turn disclosed it to The Sunday Times.

Four Rajiv Gandhi killers to be released, decides Tamil Nadu government

The Tamil Nadu government has decided to release three men and one woman convicted of killing former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. The death sentence of the men was commuted to life in prison by the Supreme Court yesterday.

Chief Minister Jayalalithaa's cabinet met this morning and decided to free the four convicts a day after the court had left it to the state government to grant them remission. Murugan's wife Nalini Sriharan's death sentence had been commuted earlier on the intervention of Rajiv Gandhi's widow, Congress president Sonia Gandhi.
 
While sparing the three men from the gallows, a bench headed by the Chief Justice of India, P Sathasivam, said, "It is definitely not a pleasure for this court to interfere with the powers of the President. We implore upon the government to advise the President so that mercy petitions can be disposed of at the earliest."

The court did not accept the government's view that the convicts did not deserve mercy. The Centre's lawyer, Attorney General Goolam Vahanvati, had said there was "not a word of remorse" in their mercy plea and there was "no agony, torture or dehumanizing effect due to delay."

The Supreme Court had on January 21 commuted the death sentences of 15 convicts, announcing that "inordinate and inexplicable" delays in carrying out executions were grounds for reducing their original punishment.

Santhan, Murugan and Perarivalan were convicted in 1998 for Mr Gandhi's assassination by a woman who greeted him with a garland and a bomb strapped to her chest during a rally in 1991. Their mercy petition was sent to the President, the last stage in the process of appeals, in 2000 and was rejected 11 years later. Their hanging was stayed in 2011 on the orders of the Madras High Court.

That year, the Tamil Nadu assembly had passed a resolution urging the President to grant mercy to the convicts and consider "Tamil sentiment."

India among five most dangerous countries for journalists in 2013

One hundred and thirty-four journalists and media support staff were killed while on reporting assignments last year, most of them targeted deliberately, the London-based International News Safety Institute (INSI) said on Tuesday.

Of these, 65 died covering armed conflicts - primarily in Syria, where 20 were killed, and Iraq, where the death total was 16 - while 51 were killed in peacetime covering issues like crime and corruption, and 18 died in accidents.

After Syria and Iraq, cited by the Institute as the most dangerous countries for journalists last year, came Philippines with 14 deaths, India with 13 and Pakistan with 9.

The total was down from 152 deaths recorded in 2012, but there was an accompanying rise in assaults, threats and kidnappings directed at journalists which largely go unreported, said the INSI study, "Killing the Messenger."

The institute, funded by major world news organisations including Reuters, has been issuing the report since 1996. Its main work is providing security training for journalists reporting in dangerous situations.

INSI said local journalists were the main victims, with 123 of the dead killed while covering their own country. Of the 20 who died in Syria, 16 were Syrian nationals.

"Most journalists were targeted, and shooting was the most common cause of death," INSI said. The report, compiled for INSI by the Cardiff School of Journalism in Wales, showed 85 of the victims were shot.

Others died in explosions, stabbings and beatings, under torture or by strangulation, or in accidents, according to INSI.

In 2012, 28 reporters died in Syria, 18 in Somalia, 12 in Nigeria, 11 in Mexico and 11 in Pakistan. 

The 2013 total for the Philippines, which in past years has seen a mass shooting of reporters as well as individual assassinations, included five who lost their lives in natural disasters.

Now, passwords that can never be hacked!

With an ever-increasing cases of online account hacking being reported, it's getting difficult to protect passwords and keep the accounts safe. But worry no more.

A computer scientist has devised what he calls 'geographical passwords' to protect online accounts and keep the hackers at bay.

Computer scientist Ziyad Al-Salloum of ZSS-Research in Ras Al Khaimah, UAE, has devised 'geographical passwords' as a simple yet practical approach to access credentials that could provide secure access to different entities.

At the same time, it would mitigate many of the vulnerabilities associated with current password-based schemes. 

The new 'geo' approach exploits our remarkable ability to recall with relative ease a favourite or visited place and to use that place's specific location as the access credentials.

The prototype system developed at ZSS-Research is capable of protecting a system against known password threats. 

"It's much easier to remember a place you have visited than a long, complicated password," argued Al-Salloum. 

Even strong, but conventional passwords are a security risk in the face of increasingly sophisticated "hacker" tools that can break into servers and apply brute force to reveal passwords.

Indeed, over the last few years numerous major corporations and organisations - LinkedIn, Sony, the US government, Evernote, Twitter, Yahoo and many others - have had their systems compromised to different degrees.

"Proposing an effective replacement of conventional passwords could reduce 76 percent of data breaches, based on an analysis of more than 47,000 reported security incidents," stressed Al-Salloum.

The geographical password system utilises the geographical information derived from a specific memorable location around which the user has logged a drawn boundary - longitude, latitude, altitude, area of the boundary, its perimeter, sides, angles, radius and other features form the geographical password.

Once created, the password is then "salted" by adding a string of hidden random characters that are user-specific and the geographical password and the salt "hashed" together.

Thus, even if two users pick the same place as their geographical password the behind-the-scenes password settings is unique to them.

If the system disallowed two users from picking the same location, this would make it much easier for adversaries to guess passwords.

The research was published in the International Journal of Security and Networks.

Kapil Sharma will make big screen debut with Yash Raj Films' Bank-Chor

After inviting actors like SRK and Salman Khan to his TV show, stand-up comedian Kapil Sharma is all set to make his own debut as an actor with thriller-comedy Bank-Chor.

Kapil has signed a three-film contract and talent management deal with Yash Raj Films. 

Y-Films, the youth branch of the studio previously made the sleeper hit of last year Mere Dad Ki Maruti.

"It's a privilege and a dream to be part of the YRF family and have my launch with their Youth Films Studio, Y-Films. The script is the most exciting part since it's the kind of role that's very unlike the stereotype of a comedian or what people could typecast me as," Kapil said in a statement. 

The comedian said he has already started working on the nuances of his character which would see him in a different avatar. 

"I've always loved and watched thrillers and this is a thriller comedy so even better. I've done serious theatre for years before comedy. Finally with YRF's vision, I'll get to do this again after a 12-year break and this script has equal scope of comedy," he added. Bank-Chor is a comic-caper that tells the story of three morons trying to rob a bank who pick the worst day possible when everything that can go wrong, goes wrong and how they're inadvertently caught in the crossfire of cops, industrialists and corrupt netas. 

Bank-Chor is directed by Bumpy and produced by Ashish Patil and goes on the floors in April this year. "Kapil is one of the most exciting names in entertainment right now. He opens up a whole new space of films, brands and more for us. And audiences are going to get to see a whole new side of him in Bank-Chor. We're thrilled to welcome him into the YRF jungle!," said Patil, who is Business and Creative Head, Youth Films at Yash Raj Films.

Heavy rain claims several lives in Britain, severe flood warnings announced

Sodden communities along the River Thames braced for more floods on Sunday, as Britain counted the cost of a storm that claimed several lives and left tens of thousands of homes without power.

At least three people were killed in separate incidents in Ireland, Britain and the English Channel after violent winds and heavy rain swept in from the Atlantic on Friday.

Pulling down power lines and disrupting transport networks across the region, the storm brought fresh misery to flood-hit communities in Britain, parts of which are suffering their wettest start to the year for 250 years.

Prime Minister David Cameron warned on Saturday that the worst was not yet over as he visited the Thames-side village of Chertsey, west of London, to see how the military were helping bolster flood defences.

"What we do in the next 24 hours is vital because tragically the river levels will rise again. So every sand bag delivered, every house helped, every flood barrier put in place can make a big difference," Cameron said.

More than 3,000 members of the military are involved in the flood relief effort, according to the defence ministry, as the government seeks to counter criticism that it was too slow to respond to the crisis.

Fourteen severe flood alerts warning of a risk to life were in place along the River Thames on Saturday night, with another two issued for the southwest of England, which has borne the brunt of two months of heavy rain.

In a newspaper interview published on Sunday, opposition Labour leader Ed Miliband blamed climate change for the run of bad weather and urged government ministers to treat global warming as a "national security issue".

Cameron said last month that "I very much suspect" there is a link but said that either way, there should be more investment in flood defences.

Violent storm claims lives

Friday's violent storm pulled up trees, sent roofs flying off buildings, slammed waves into the coast and opened up a 20-foot (six-metre) sink hole in a quiet street in Hemel Hempstead, north of London.

A 49-year-old taxi driver with three children was killed when a building collapsed onto her parked car in the centre of London, and her two passengers were injured, police said.

Out on the English Channel, an 85-year-old man died after high winds sent a "freak wave" smashing through a window of a cruise ship off the coast of north-west France, the ship's operator said.

Some 70,000 French homes were left without power as meteorologists registered winds of up to 150 kilometres per hour (90 miles per hour), though most of these had been reconnected by Saturday night.

Meanwhile in Ireland, a 65-year-old man working for telecoms firm Eircom was killed in Cork on Saturday when he was trying to erect a fallen telephone pole which fell on his head, the RTE state broadcaster said.

"Tragically these weather events have been hitting community and after community and doing that week after week," a wind-swept Cameron said in Chertsey.

"It has been very, very tough for people and my heart goes out to anyone whose been flooded and we'll do everything we can to help people get back on their feet."

The prime minister has promised that money is "no object" in helping flood-hit communities, although Bank of England governor Mark Carney has warned the bad weather is likely to affect Britain's fragile recovery from recession.

India-born millionaire's arrest shakes up UK politics

The arrest of an India-born businessman and his son as part of a probe by the UK's Serious Fraud Office (SFO) into allegations of bribery at aerospace and defence major Rolls-Royce has shaken the corridors of power in Britain.

Multi-millionaire Sudhir Choudhrie and his son Bhanu, well-known as major political donors to Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg's Liberal Democrat party, were arrested and questioned for several hours on Wednesday before being bailed without conditions.

A spokesperson for the duo said they "deny all wrongdoing and are cooperating fully with the investigation". Britain's coalition partners Liberal Democrats are now under the spotlight over their close links with Mr Choudhrie, known to friends as Bunny. He has given the party over 500,000 pounds since 2010 and over one million pounds since 2004.

The entrepreneur, who moved to the UK in 2002 and is now based at a 5-million pound apartment in London's posh Chelsea neighbourhood, had been on a list of nominations from Mr Clegg's office to be a Liberal Democrat peer in the House of Lords, but his name mysteriously did not go forward in 2013.

His son Bhanu manages the family business, C&C Alpha Group, as its chief executive. The group runs hospitals and care homes across the UK among a string of other ventures, including real estate.

Personal links with the Choudhrie family are set to further embarrass the Liberal Democrats as it emerged that Mr Clegg and his wife Miriam, hosted their family charity Path to Success at Lancaster House, a UK government building, in 2011.

The Choudhries have regularly attended other events alongside Mr Clegg and other senior Liberal Democrats, including Simon Hughes, the Liberal Democrat Justice Minister, who received a 60,000-pound donation from Mr Choudhrie last year.

A Liberal Democrat spokesperson said the party was aware of the allegations but could not comment while the investigation is ongoing. The SFO is probing whether Mr Sudhir Choudhrie was an intermediary used by Rolls-Royce, two people familiar with the situation told the Financial Times newspaper.

According to some media reports, Indian authorities are believed to have recently dropped a separate investigation into Mr Choudhrie as part of a probe into deals done by Italian consortium Finmeccanica. No charges were brought against him and he strongly denied all wrongdoing.

How to clear GRE? What is GRE? Entrance test for foreign universities,scholarship

What is GRE?

Students planning to pursue Masters of Science, commonly known as MS, take the GRE -Graduate Record Examination to get admission in one of the foreign universities. Do not let your struggle go wasted by not being able to deliver your best on the exam day. The GRE is one such exam which is important to take admission in Post Graduate programmes.

Who all are eligible for GRE?

This information is primarily meant for engineering graduates. If you have decided to do an M.S. after your B.E., and for all those who want to pursue Masters programme according to their respective courses. This exam is gateway to many foreign universities. This exam is to check your verbal and quantitative skills.

How to clear GRE?

Graduate record examination (GRE is an exam) is an exam conducted globally by the Educational testing service (ETS), the world’s largest private non-profitable organization which conducts assessment test worldwide for admission in various institutes across the USA and some other English speaking countries like the UK, Canada, Australia and others. GRE is a standard test score accepted by many universities for graduate level course since 1949.

Exam is conducted in two ways:

1. General Test: The General Test takes into account verbal reasoning, quantitative ability, and analytically writing skills. Almost all the universities accept the General test score and usually everyone opts for this test. It takes place round the year and you can choose your date according to your convenience.

2. Subject Test: The Subject Test assesses the achievement in a particular subject area or extensive background in that discipline. These tests are in the following areas: Biochemistry, Cell and Molecular Biology, Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, Literature (English), Physics and Psychology. It is conducted on a fixed date for everyone, more on the terms of an entrance exam. Mostly no engineer goes for this.

The exam is conducted in a place where there is no scope to conduct an online test. It purely depends upon the talent you exhibit that decides your success, because this test is unbiased. You may hail from any educational background but all that is put to test here is your general IQ.

REQUIREMENTS:

Some basic requirements are needed in order to take the exam.

Passport–Passport serves as a means of identification to gain admission to your test centre and your dream country. Well, if you don’t have a passport then apply for it as soon as possible, as you cannot appear for the GRE without it, but remember you can register your exam without it.

Registration–Register for the GRE in advance to be assured of obtaining your preferred testing date.

Preparation–Check out the study material and prepare well for the exam.

Some steps will help you to clear GRE

GRE has 2 sections i.e.

Each section is considered as one stage. First Section is Stage 1 (or called as Routing Stage). Depending on your performance, the test taker is routed to one of several alternative second-stage tests, each of which consists of a fixed set of questions and differs on average difficulty.

Quantitative Section:

The Quantitative section comprises of multiple choice questions covering quantitative comparison, problem solving questions with a focus on basic concepts of arithmetic, algebra, geometry and data analysis. There will be exactly 28 questions for which you will be allocated 45 minutes. The scores will be evaluated on a 200-800 scale with 10 point increments.

The approximate time you get to solve a question will be around a minute and-a-half.

The revised GRE also consists of multiple choice questions probably with both ‘select one choice’ and also ‘select one or more choices’ kind of questions. The paper is divided into two sections. There will appear a total approximate 40 questions in both the sections added together and the time allocated will be 70 minutes. So here, each section with approximately 20 questions will be allocated 35 minutes.

The approximate time you get to solve a question will be less than a minute and-a-half.

Hence, this calls for more attention, speed and accuracy. The scores here will be evaluated on a 130-170 scale with 1 point increments. The ETS has also mentioned that some changes pertaining to the test takers’ perspective have been made. The new revised test comes with a new preview and review capabilities. There will also be a new feature “Mark and Review” to tag questions so that you can skip them and return back to them. For this section especially, there will be an on-screen calculator provided to do basic calculating options which shows that there will be more stress on reasoning capability of the test taker rather than on cumbersome calculations.

Whatever may the exam pattern be, the syllabus will remain unchanged. All the basic fundamental mathematics until your high school, general reasoning ability must all be taken care of for you to confidently attempt this section with finesse.

ISRO unveils space capsule that will fly Indian astronauts

After its Mars mission, India now aims to puts humans into space. The first steps towards flying Indian astronauts into space could be taken in weeks.

The Indian astronaut capsule has been unveiled for the very first time. If all goes as per plan in the first experimental flight of India's latest monster rocket, the Geo-synchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle Mark III is likely to be tested as early as May or June from Sriharikota.

It could see this astronaut module being flown into space for the very first time, but in a sub-orbital flight. In its first test flight no crew or any animals are likely to be flown.

"Only re-entry technologies and flight dynamics will be tested and the capsule will be recovered 400-500 kilometers away from Port Blair in the Bay of Bengal," Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) chairman K Radhakrishnan told NDTV.

ISRO has been dreaming of putting an Indian into space using an Indian rocket launched from India soil. ISRO has sought funding worth Rs. 12,500 crores from the government for the program. It says once the approval comes, an Indian astronaut can be flown in a low Earth orbit in about seven years from the time the approval comes from the government.

When it happens, India's human space capsule could be sent on a seven day mission for two-three astronauts in a low Earth orbit of 300-400 kilometers above earth.

Till date only Russia, USA and China have successfully flown astronauts into space with the latest entrant being China in 2003.

The outer skeleton of Indian human space capsule has been fabricated by Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL), Bangalore and was handed over to ISRO which developed it. HAL says the first Crew Module will be further equipped with systems necessary for crew support, navigation, guidance and control systems by ISRO for experimentation in the forthcoming GSLV-MK3 launch.

"HAL takes pride in the India's space programmes and our Aerospace Division has produced this Crew Module in a record time to meet the requirements of ISRO", said Dr RK Tyagi, Chairman, HAL.

While the government has hesitated to clear a hefty bill of Rs. 12,500 crores as desired by ISRO for its human space flight program, but so that there are no delays in the development work the Indian government has already sanctioned Rs. 145 crores for the development of what it calls 'critical technologies'.