How to Hide Your Cellphone Number

Now, I just stumbled on this info today.

How do you hide your cellphone number when you are calling somebody?

Want to call somebody without letting them know what phone number you are calling from?

Here is how to do it.

When you dial a number that you wanna call, you have to dial *67 first followed by the area code and your number. After that is done your number will not be shown from the receiver's caller ID. That's it.

Try it.

Tips to Choose your Next Electronic Gadget

There are many cool electronic gadgets on the market, not all of those are ideal for daily uses, I will give you some information on how to select a good electronic gadget that perfect for your daily uses.





Something like mp3 player will be a very good gadget for your daily uses. By that player you can enjoy your music anywhere and anytime, let your digital mp3 player do everything for your enjoyment. The mp3 player should be small and with a light weight. It is always a great idea for th next gadget.





You next mp3 player can be combined with sunglasses to add a very cool function for your sunglasses, by this great gadget you can protect your eyes while enjoying your favorite music and songs, it is really a cool gadget for your enjoyment, I recommend you to try one of those.





Another gadget that will make you feel good is the mp4 player watch, which can easily play a complete film, only by your mp4 watch you can watch a complete film anywhere, it is very exciting gadget, You can also use it to play your personal clips, songs etc..





The last one I will mention here is the photo frame, it works like magic to display your photo with high resolution, it can compatible with TVs, DVDs, PCs, Laptops and other electronic equipments, take your time to find another cool gadget for the the next buy.





I suggest you to search for these cool gadgets online. Nowadays, it is very simple to do shopping online.

By Elhusseiny Shahin

Comets probably won't cause the end of life as we know it: study

Crashing comets probably won't cause the end of life as we know it, a study said Thursday.

Astronomers at the University of Washington used computer simulation to model the evolution of comet clouds in the solar system over the past 1.2 billion years.

The simulation allowed them to peer into the Oort Cloud, a remnant of the nebula from which our solar system was formed.

"For the past 25 years, the inner Oort Cloud has been considered a mysterious, unobserved region of the solar system capable of providing bursts of bodies that occasionally wipe out life on Earth," said study author Nathan Kaib.

But the simulation found the Earth has likely only sustained two or three significant hits from comets in the past 500 million years.

Those comets may have spurred the late Eocene extinction -- a "minor event" by evolutionary standards -- which occurred about 40 million years ago.

But if that's the case, Kaib said that was probably the most intense comet shower since the fossil record began.

And the infrequency of the strikes "makes these phenomenon an improbable cause of additional extinction events," concluded the study published in the journal Science.

Comet strikes are very rare in party because the gravitational fields of Saturn and Jupiter can eject them into interstellar space or drag them crashing into the giant plants.

Disaster movie writers can take heart, however. The study doesn't preclude the threat of a massive asteroid strike, which is believed to have ended the dinosaur era.

Agence France-Presse - 7/30/2009

Fast new Internet link slow in reaching African users

Ken Sas wages a weekly battle at a Mozambican Internet cafe to get online, despite cripplingly slow connections that leave him dozing as pages load.

"You can see, I try to click on the link but it's not coming fast. It's quite slow," the Zambian national complains. "Then I have to purchase more time and it costs me another 25 meticals (about one dollar)."

That should change soon, after the first broadband Internet link on Africa's east coast went live one week ago, linking a dozen countries to Europe and India with a fibre-optic cable that promises to lower costs and dramatically boost speeds.

Mauritius-based company SEACOM promises to revolutionise communications in Africa and lower bandwidth costs by up to 90 percent, after switching on the cable that resulted from a two-year, 600-million-dollar (427-million-euro) effort.

Countries like Kenya and Uganda can now experience broadband connections for the first time, while others like South Africa -- which already has high-speed Internet -- expect the new cable to lower costs by boosting competition.

But many end users will have to wait to see the benefits.

In fact, many don't know SEACOM exists.

At the Teledata Internet cafe, employee Zacarias Tovela said SEACOM hadn't changed web surfing there yet.

"I know there's a new service called SEACOM, but I don't know if we're connected to it or not," he said.

SEACOM spokesman Frederic Cornet said the company sells bandwidth wholesale to local service providers, who until now have relied on slower, costlier satellite connections.

"We truly hope that it's only a matter of time before they start sharing the cost savings with the end users," Cornet said.

The new cable will also boost telephone service in countries where international calls can be a shout in the dark.

"Voice delays in phone conversations and spending a long time to download data is an order of the day in many African countries," said Lindsay McDonald, telecoms analyst at Frost & Sullivan business consultancy in South Africa.

In South Africa, the presence of high capacity bandwidth is expected to increase the business like intercontinental call centers and other business process outsourcing.

"Companies doing business in some African countries are mostly making the use of VSat for communication, which is very costly and unreliable," said McDonald.

SEACOM says land-based infrastructure is being rolled out in most countries along the coast to distribute the new network to users along the length of the continent.

"African countries have for a long time been paying high fees for poor Internet bandwidth and mobile connectivity," said Dobek Pater, an analyst at Africa Analysis, an information technology consultancy.

"We are not going to witness a sudden drop in prices, adjustments are likely to unfold in a year's time, depending on the reaction of service providers in different countries," he said.

Rajay Ambeker, telecoms analyst at Prudentia expects broadband prices in South Africa to drop by at least 90 percent from the current prices.

"The new technology is going to increase competition and lower prices among the few service providers we have here," said Ambeker. "This is a dynamic change for the continent."

Meanwhile, ordinary users hope the benefits will start arriving soon.

Orray Carlos, owner of Internet Express cafe in Maputo, laughed as he watched his connection speed bounce anaemically around one megabyte per second. SEACOM promises speeds of 1.2 terabytes per second -- one million times faster.

"The person would just click," he said, "and there it would be."

Agence France-Presse - 7/30/2009 4:20 PM GM

China Source of Spam

China is responsible for for most of the world's email spam, according to new unpublished research. Nearly three-quarters of the Web sites advertised in computer spam studied by the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Spam Data Mine so far in 2009 are tied to China, said Gary Warner, UAB's director of research in computer forensics.
Warner has dubbed the trend the "Spam crisis in China."
"China has become a safe heaven for Web site operators that use spam to promote their products because of the willingness of some Chinese Web-Hosting companies to ignore spam complaints about those sites, which are hosted on their servers for a fee," Warner said. "The hosting companies don't create the spam, but rather declare themselves bullet-proof hosting sites - meaning that regardless of the illegal activities being reported, they will not terminate their customer's spam-related Web sites or domains."
Computer spam refers to unsolicited commercial advertisements distributed online via e-mail, which can sometimes carry viruses and other programs that harm computers.
For the year to date, the UAB Spam Data Mine has reviewed millions of spam e-mails and successfully connected to the hundreds of thousands of advertised Web sites in the spam to 69,117 unique hosting domains, Warner said.
Of the total reviewed domains, 48,552(70 percent) had Internet domains, or addresses, that ended in "cn" - the Chinese country code. Also, 48,331 (70 percent) of the sites were hosted on Chinese computers.
Further encouraging the Chinese spam epidemic is the widespread availability of cheap domain names.
Domain names based in China can cost as little as one yuan, or 15 cents in US currency.
In contrast, US domain names can costs as much as $35 a year, with a portion of the fees goes to efforts to detect fraud and abuse like spam. The low domain rates in China encourage Web page operators to buy numerous domains, leading to a continuous stream of spam promoting those various sites.
"Not only is it cheap to operate spam promoted Web sites through the Chinese technology infrastructure, there is not enough revenue being generated to pay for the creation of programs or entities that could prevent such abuses from taking place," Warner said.
Warner said that while China are responsible for perpetuating the illegal spam activity, they risk the reputation of their entire nation's Internet presence.

New System makes online data expire

Privacy is dead, most of us figure. We post enough personal data online weekly that evil-doer could take over finances or identity without too much trouble.
And there may be a few cautious e-mailers left, but many of us would Blanche if the contents of our non-work electronic missives were printed for all to see.

Unlike paper, online data is seemingly forever, but new system, called Vanish, has come to the rescue, computer scientists at the University of Washington say. Vanish puts an expiration date on our online personal data (pictures, e-mails, Facebook posts, caht messages) such that it automatically self-destructs and becomes irretrievable from all Websites, inboxes, back up sites and home computers, says researcher Tadayoshi Kohno.

"If people understood the implications of where and how their emails is stored, they might be more careful or not use it as often," he said.
A paper on the Vanish project went public this week and will be presented at the Usenix Security Symposium Aug. 10-14 in Montreal. Vanish is somewhat different from encryption, the keys for which can be sub opened anyhow.

It relies instead on the creation of a secret key for each message that is never revealed to the user, Kohno said, and then chopped into dozens of pieces that are scattered on worldwide file-sharing networks. Over time, the parts of the key become permanently inaccessible.