Yahoo! to get a new logo with the same old flavour next month

        There are plenty of changes afoot in the Yahoo! office at Sunnyvale. Under iron-fisted CEO Marissa Mayer, Yahoo! is not only seeing a small but noticeable change in fortunes with the service refreshes and acquisitions, the Internet giant is also set to get a brand new look with a logo redesign in the works.


             In a blog post early this morning, Kathy Savitt, Chief Marketing Officer at Yahoo! announced that the company is going to introduce a brand new logo next month. “Over the past year, there’s been a renewed sense of purpose and progress at Yahoo!, and we want everything we do to reflect this spirit of innovation. While the company is rapidly evolving, our logo — the essence of our brand — should too.”

           To kick off the countdown to the new logo, Savitt announced that Yahoo! will be putting up a new design each day and on day number 30, will unveil the new Yahoo! logo. For those of you who think Yahoo! will completely change its identity, think again, Yahoo! will still be retaining its exclamation mark – the service’s calling card. It will also be retaining the colour purple and the famous yodel, the double “O”s that increase in size. Essentially, we could be looking at just a change in the font for the logo.

             The new-logo-a-day exercise will be limited to Yahoo’s network throughout the US only, but you will be able to check out the daily new logo on Yahoo’s Tumblr blog, Twitter and Facebook page. The logo redesign was done in partnership with artists like Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, John Legend and Imagine Dragons. The “30 days of change” campaign will come to an end on September 4 with the unveiling of Yahoo’s new logo.

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Facebook changes News Feed again

                 
               Facebook's quest to be a personalized newspaper for the internet age continued on Tuesday with tweaks aimed at making sure members spy hot stories from their friends.

Changes to the leading social network's formula for figuring out which posts will be of interest included "bumping" up potentially intriguing stories that went unnoticed during prior visits to Facebook.

"It is hard for users to get back to old things; you have to scroll through things you have already seen," Facebook News Feed team engineering Lars Backstrom said while discussing the latest changes.

"We wanted to make it so people weren't missing important stories that didn't make top slots but were just below the fold."

Signals weighed in the machine learning algorithm were modified to bump-up a story considered more interesting than fresher material that formerly got priority simply for being newer.

"We tweaked the model," Backstrom said, noting that about 30,000 signals are balanced in the algorithm.

"Instead of just taking the new stories, we would take all stories that were new to you, that you haven't seen, even if it isn't the freshest."

A test of the change showed that the number of stories people read in News Feeds rose to 70% from 57% with "bumping," according to Facebook.

"Story Bumping is going to be a really nice tool for people if they... are sitting with a Facebook account and have run out of things to look at," said Facebook vice president of product Chris Cox. "It will bump up new stuff."

News Feeds were also modified to take into account the "last actor" a member interacted with and then give that friend's posts temporary priority since they seem to be up to something interesting.

"We wanted to capture your current state of mind as you were using Facebook," Backstrom said.

"A lot of signals are long term, such as the relationship with each friend; we wanted a real time factor."

Facebook's ranking software assigns numerical scores to the roughly 1,500 stories typically eligible for delivery to a member's News Feed and displays the top 300.

Powerful factors for ranking are relationships, along with how often a member comments, shares, "likes," or otherwise acts on posts of friends. Hiding posts sinks content from that person in News Feed rankings.

"Our goal is to create the best personalized newspaper for each of our readers," Backstrom said.

Facebook engineers are experimenting with ways for News Feeds to better handle chronological posts, such as a friend firing off play-by-play updates from a sporting event.

Backstrom's team meets each Tuesday to brainstorm ways to improve the Facebook News Feed, with worthwhile ideas tested internally among workers or with a tiny fraction of the social network's more than one billion members.

"It starts with intuition and then that gets written into code as a feature," said Cox. "Then we look at interactions."

Ads displayed as promoted posts in News Feeds are handled separately from content generated by people's friends or family members at Facebook, according to the ranking team.

"We figure out the most relevant News Feed with the organic content, and then, as a newspaper or television programme might do, we create advertising slots," said Facebook product manager Will Cathcart.

Backstrom compared the job of ranking News Feed posts to the challenge faced by internet search engines Google or Bing when it comes to quickly determining optimal results for queries.

"Facebook is one of the only places where you have a problem on the same scale as what Google or Bing is doing but you have to use different techniques because of the personal aspects of it," Backstrom said.

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Usian Bolt Now Playable in Temple Run 2

 

The six-time Olympic gold medalist and so-called "fastest man on Earth", Jamaican runner Usian Bolt, is now a playable character in the mobile game Temple Run 2.

This is the first instance in which Imangi Studios, the game’s creator, has added a character based on someone in real life. Imangi Studios, called Bolt's addition to the game an "obvious and fitting partnership."

Bolt joins the game's cast of fictional characters as a 99-cent in-app purchase available from the game's "Upgrades" menu, wearing his signature yellow-and-green Olympic uniform. He also brings the unique power-up, "Bolt", when activated, the character auto-dashes at breakneck speed, immune from the game's traps, with the coin magnet.

"I am a big fan of Temple Run. I travel all over the world, and travel time gives me lots of opportunity to play Temple Run at airports or on car journeys," Bolt said. "It's exciting to see myself represented within a game I already play."

Temple Run 2 is free for iOS and Android

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Types Of Hackers

This is How Google Defines Hacker

Q. Ever Wondered If there are type of Mobiles,PC's,Animals,People Then Are There Type of Hackers

Ans. Yes ,3 Major Types Lets Me Give A Brief Intro About Them.

1. White hat hacker                                 2. Gray hat hacker                         3. Black hat hacker

White Hat and Grey Hat Hacker & What is the Real Difference?

What is worse, the public is not able to understand terms like grey hat, white hat, Linux OS, or cracker.
However, the truth is that the subculture of the hacker world is more complex than we think. Especially if we consider that, these are very intelligent people.

So, what is ethical hacking white hat and how does it differentiate from grey hackers? The only way to find out is to submerge ourselves in the world of hackers and understand, at least, the most basic concepts.

1. What Is A White Hat Hacker?

A hacker can be a wiz kid who spends too much time with computers and suddenly finds himself submerged in the world of cyber-security or criminal conspirators. On the other hand, he can be a master criminal who wants to obtain huge amounts of money for him, or even worse, dominate the world.

In the movie Matrix, the concept of hackers changed a bit. Although the agents of the Matrix considered them terrorists, the truth is that they were rebels fighting for the liberty of humanity. Things do not need to reach that extreme, though. We are not at war with intelligent ma chines so that kind of scenario is a bit dramatic.

Therefore, a hacker is an individual who is capable of modifying computer hardware, or software. They made their appearance before the advent of computers, when determined individuals were fascinated with the possibility of modifying machines. For example, entering a determine code in a telephone in order to make free international calls.


When computers appeared, this people found a new realm where they could exploit their skills. Now they were not limited to the constraints of the physical world, instead, they could travel through the virtual world of computers. Before the internet, they used Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) to communicate and exchange information. However, the real explosion occurred when the Internet appeared.

Today, anyone can become a hacker. Within that denomination, there are three types of hackers. The first one is the black hacker, also known as a cracker, someone who uses his computer knowledge in criminal activities in order to obtain personal benefits. A typical example is a person who exploits the weaknesses of the systems of a financial institution for making some money.

On the other side is the white hat hacker. Although white hat hacking can be considered similar to a black hacker, there is an important difference. A white hacker does it with no criminal intention in mind. Companies around the world, who want to test their systems, contract white hackers. They will test how secure are their systems, and point any faults that they may found. If you want to become a hacker with a white hat, Linux, a PC and an internet connection is all you need.

2. Grey Hat Hackers

A grey hat hacker is someone who is in between these two concepts. He may use his skills for legal or illegal acts, but not for personal gains. Grey hackers use their skills in
order to prove themselves that they can accomplish a determined feat, but never do it in order to make money out of it. The moment they cross that boundary, they become black hackers.

For example, they may hack the computer network of a public agency, let us say, NOAA. That is a federal crime.

If the authorities capture them, they will feel the long arm of justice. However, if they only get inside, and post, let us say, their handle, and get out without causing any kind of damage, then they can be considered grey hackers.

If you want to know more about hackers, then you can attend one of their annual conventions. Every year, hackers from all over the US, and from different parts of the world, reunite and meet at DEF CON. These conventions are much concurred. In the last one, 6,600 people attended it.

Every year, DEF CON is celebrated at Las Vegas, Nevada. However, hackers are not the only ones who go to this event. There are also computer journalists, computer security professionals, lawyers, and employees of the federal government. The event is composed by tracks of different kind, all of them related, in some way, to the world of hackers (computer security, worms, viruses, new technologies, coding, etc). Besides the tracks, there are contests that involve hacking computers, l ock picking and even robot related events. Ethical hacking, white hat hacking or whatever names you wish to use, at the end, it has a purpose: to protect the systems of organizations, public or private, around the world. After all, hackers can now be located anywhere, and they can be counted by the millions. Soon, concepts like white hat, linux operating system or grey hat will become common knowledge. A real proof of how much has our society been influenced by technology.

3. Black Hat Hackers

Black hat hackers have become the iconic image of all hackers around the world. For the majority of computer users, the word hacker has become a synonym for social misfits and criminals.
Of course, that is an injustice created by our own interpretation of the mass media, so it is important for us to learn what a hacker is and what a black hacker (or cracker) does. So, let's learn about black hat techniques and how they make our lives a little more difficult.
Black hat is used to describe a hacker (or, if you prefer, cracker) who breaks into a computer system or network with malicious intent. Unlike a white hat hacker, the black hat hacker takes advantage of the break-in, perhaps destroying files or stealing data for some future purpose. The black hat hacker may also make the exploit known to other hackers and/or the public without notifying the victim. This gives others the opportunity to exploit the vulnerability before the organization is able to secure it.

What Is Black Hat Hacking?

A black hat hacker, also known as a cracker or a dark side hacker (this last definition is a direct reference to the Star Wars movies and the dark side of the force), is someone who uses his skills with a criminal intent. Some examples are: cracking bank accounts in order to make transfernces to their own accounts, stealing information to be sold in the black market, or attacking the computer network of an organization for money.

Some famous cases of black hat hacking include Kevin Mitnick, who used his black hat hackers skills to enter the computers of organizations such as Nokia, Fujitsu, Motorola and Sun Microsystems (it must be mentioned that he is now a white hat hacker); Kevin Poulsen, who took control of all the phone lines in Los Angeles in order to win a radio contest (the prize was a Porsche 944 S2); and Vladimir Levin, which is the handle of the mastermind behind the stealing of $10'000,000 to Citigrou.

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