Google now allows you to 'search' without internet

Google on Wednesday said that it will allow smartphone users to "search" for something even when there is no internet connection in the phone. Now of course, there is a catch here. Google, irrespective of its brilliant engineers, cannot defeat the laws of physics and return the search results from the web when there is no data connection in a smartphone. Just that now the Google app will now won't tell offline users that it can't complete the search. Instead, it will queue up the search query and complete the search when the phone connects to internet.

"Mobile networks can sometimes be inconsistent or spotty, which means that even if you have a connection when you start your search, it might fail before you get your results back," Google's Shekhar Sharad wrote on the company blog.

"With this change, search results are saved as soon as they are retrieved, even if you lose connection afterwards or go into airplane mode. So the next time you lose service, feel free to queue up your searches, put your phone away and carry on with your day. The Google app will work behind-the-scenes to detect when a connection is available again and deliver your search results once completed," he said.

Although this is not any solution to the internet connectivity issues that people face, particularly in countries in India, it just makes it slightly more convenient to use the Google Search on smartphones.

For now the feature is available only on Google Search app for Android. To get this feature, all that users have to do is update the app on their phone by going into the Play Store.

Of late, Google that is among the world's biggest web companies, is focusing a lot on improving the offline features in its app. Earlier, the company hoped to improve the offline capabilities of YouTube by allowing consumers to download the videos temporarily. The company's CEO Sundar Pichai had said this offline YouTube feature was specifically created keeping Indian users in mind. But then proved so useful and popular that the company also rolled it out in other regions.

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Rs 1299 Jio 4G phone leaked in image, looks like old feature phones

For several days now we are hearing about a cheap Rs 1000 Jio phone that is supposed to hit the market soon. It is said that this phone is not a smartphone but a feature phone. Now, there seems to be an image of such a phone floating on the web. Technology blog Fonearena says that this is Jio's upcoming cheap phone and that it will cost Rs 1,299.

The phone doesn't seem to have touch screen. It looks similar to a regular Nokia's feature phone. There is a D-Pad in middle similar to most of the feature phones in India. The keypad starts with shortcuts keys for MyJio, Jio Live TV, Jio video and Jio Music placed just below the display. The phone comes with T9 keypad and also has a dedicated button for torchlight.

According to the previous reports, Jio is working on a new category of phones which could help it tap the rural and tier-III markets for its mobile business and network. These phones will be feature phones but will support 4G connectivity, complete with the VoLTE feature that will help users make calls using the cellular network.

Reportedly, Jio could launch these VoLTE enabled phones with a price starting as low as Rs 999. According to an ET report, Reliance is working on two feature phones priced at about Rs 1,000 and Rs 1,500 which are likely to hit the market by March this year.

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Keeper Security reveals the most common passwords of 2016 and they're embarrassingly terrible

Password manager and digital vault firm Keeper Security has revealed the most common passwords of 2016, and they're embarrassingly lazy and awful. After scouring 10 million passwords that became public through the numerous massive data breaches that occurred in the past year, the Keeper team found that people are still relying on simple, easy-to-remember strings of characters to secure their online accounts and digital identity.

"We couldn't stop shaking our heads," Keeper wrote in a blog post on Friday. "What really perplexed us is that so many website operators are not enforcing security best practices."

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The firm noted that the list of most commonly used passwords have not changed much over the past few years indicating that "user education has limits".

"While it's important for users to be aware of risks, a sizable minority are never going to take the time or effort to protect themselves," they wrote. "IT administrators and website operators must do the job for them."

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Like in 2015, the most commonly used password of 2016 was "123456", which was used by nearly one in five users. Other popular passwords included easy-to-crack, overused strings such as "123456789," "qwerty," "11111" and, of course, "password."

Keeper also notes that four of the top 10 passwords of 2016 and seven of the top 15 were all six characters or shorter.

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"This is stunning in light of the fact that... today's brute-force cracking software and hardware can unscramble those passwords in seconds," the firm said. "Website operators that permit such flimsy protection are either reckless or lazy."

While some popular passwords such as "1q2w3e4r" and "123qwe" suggests that some users do attempt to use unpredictable patterns and character strings to secure their online accounts, Keeper dubs these efforts "weak at best".

"Dictionary-based password crackers know to look for sequential key variations. At best, it sets them back only a few seconds," Keeper said.

Also present on the list was the "seemingly random" password choices "18atcskd2w" and "3rjs1la7qe," which security expert Graham Cluley believes were created by bots created to post and spread spam on online forums.

"If a user forum does not have strong measures in place to verify that an account is being registered by a living, breathing human being, it's relatively trivial for someone with mischievous intent to write a program that creates multiple accounts for the purposes of spreading spammy messages or malicious links," he wrote last year.

"We can criticize all we want about the chronic failure of users to employ strong passwords. After all, it's in the user's best interests to do so," Darren Guccione, CEO and co-founder of Keeper Security, said. "But the bigger responsibility lies with website owners who fail to enforce the most basic password complexity policies. It isn't hard to do, but the list makes it clear that many still don't bother.

"While it's important for users to be aware of risks, a sizable minority are never going to take the time or effort to protect themselves. IT administrators and website operators must do the job for them".

Here are the 25 most common passwords of 2016, according to Keeper Security:

1. 123456

2. 123456789

3. qwerty

4. 12345678

5. 111111

6. 1234567890

7. 1234567

8. password

9. 123123

10. 987654321

11. qwertyuiop

12. mynoob

13. 123321

14. 666666

15. 18atcskd2w

16. 7777777

17. 1q2w3e4r

18. 654321

19. 555555

20. 3rjs1la7qe

21. google

22. 1q2w3e4r5t

23. 123qwe

24. zxcvbnm

25. 1q2w3e

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Ontario man photographs bizarre 'light pillars' in night sky

A rare weather phenomenon recently lit up the northern Ontario sky like a science fiction movie, and one local man managed to catch it on camera.

It happened when North Bay resident Timothy Joseph Elzinga was checking in on his two-year-old at around 1:30 a.m., reports the CBC. He happened to look out the window and was surprised to see rays of bright coloured lights shooting up into the sky.

Elzinga was intrigued and headed outside to snap some shots of the bizarre sight — a phenomenon known as light pillars.

According to the New York Times, the light pillars occur when hexagonal-shaped ice crystals form close to the ground. These crystals reflect nearby light sources like street lights or car headlights back up into the sky.

Last January a photographer in Kauttua, Finland managed to snap a shot of light pillars from directly below. From where she was standing, it appeared as if a street map of her town was being projected into the sky in light.

Light pillars happens with some frequency during the winter months in colder regions, so northern Canadians have the best chance of spotting the otherworldly display.

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