Google Launches Project Shield To Freely Protect Sites From DDoS Attacks

In a move to protect freedom of expression on the internet, Google is launching a new tool to help websites protect themselves from attacks by hacker groups and other elements. Project Shield leverages Google’s infrastructure to ward off DDoS attacks.
A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is one of the favoured tools of hacker and activist groups. What’s a DDoS attack? Basically, several computers across the world start pinging one website incessantly, until its servers can no longer handle the load and the site crashes or is unavailable for viewing.
It’s a crude attack, but effective and used often because it is cheap to execute. In fact, if done right, it can even make huge websites like Twitter go offline.
“For small, independent media or human rights organizations, a website might be the only voice they have. These types of websites have increasingly become the target for DDoS attacks, preventing access to important information,” Google says.

Project Shield combines Google’s DDoS mitigation technologies and Page Speed Service (PSS), which allow websites to serve their content through Google to be better protected from DDoS attacks.
“Over the last year, Project Shield has been successfully used by a number of trusted testers, including Balatarin (www.balatarin.com), a Persian-language social and political blog, and Aymta (www.aymta.com), a website providing early-warning of scud missiles to people in Syria. Project Shield was also used to protect the election monitoring service in Kenya (www.iebc.or.ke), which was the first time their site stayed up throughout an election cycle,” Google says.

Boom, the startup that wants to build supersonic planes, just signed a massive deal with Virgin

Have you heard about Boom? Boom is a relatively new startup that’s aiming to build something pretty crazy. They’re not building an app… or a social network… or even some new gadget for the Kickstarter crowd. Boom wants to build planes. Really, really, really fast planes. Specifically, they’re trying to design and build a supersonic passenger plane that goes 2.2x the speed of sound. If all goes to plan, they’ll be able to shuttle people from New York to London in 3.5 hours, and SF to Tokyo in 4.5. Sound crazy? I wouldn’t disagree. It’s worth noting that the company is in the very early days for something as intensive, massive, and hugely expensive as designing and producing a passenger aircraft. They’re still working on their first prototype, and hope to fly it by late next year. But it’s also worth noting that the team behind the plane has some serious talent in its blood: the company’s 11 employees have collectively contributed to over 30 aircrafts — having worked on thin...

How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It

Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document? That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the docum...

Fun Tools to Translate Your Name into Japanese Calligraphy

Japanese calligraphy is an artistic writing style of the Japanese language. Its Chinese origins can be traced back to the twenty-eighth century BCE. Calligraphy found its way into Japanese culture in 600 CE and is known as the karayo tradition. For Westerners, calligraphy is forever fascinating. However, it takes years to learn how to properly draw the signs. Two basic principles must be known to understand Japanese writing: there are different writing styles and different alphabets. Kaisho for example, is a writing style most commonly used in print media. Tensho on the other hand is used in signatures. Other writing styles are Reisho, Gyosho and Sousho. The alphabets include Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana. Katakana is used for writing foreign words. It can also serve to highlight words, in analogy to capital letters as we know them from the Roman / Latin alphabet (Romaji in Japanese). Each Kanji character has a meaning of its own, while Hiragana or Katakana characters merely repres...

Kiran Upadhyay

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