Pepsi Phone P1s With 5.5-Inch Display, Android 5.1 Lollipop Launched

Pepsi-branded smartphones and accessories were announced to be in the works last month. The popular Pepsi brand on Thursday took the wraps off the Phone P1 and Phone P1s in China. The food and beverage company is however running a crowdfunding campaign to produce the smartphone.

It's worth noting that Pepsi is only licensing its brand for use on smartphones and accessories, while Shenzhen-based Scooby Communication Equipment company will be manufacturing the first smartphones. The company has revealed two versions of its first smartphone: Phone P1 is the regular version while the Phone P1s is compatible specifically with China Unicom's FDD-LTE support. There are no other differences in specifications between the two variants.

The Pepsi Phone P1s (and P1) is now available via crowdfunding campaign from jd.com in China. The early bidders (now sold out) were offered a price of CNY 499 (approximately Rs. 5,000). The phone was then available at CNY 699 (approximately Rs. 7,250) for next 1,000 bidders, after which it will be available for CNY 999 (approximately Rs. 10,500) and followed by CNY 1,299 (approximately Rs. 13,470) until the target has been achieved. The company has set a target of CNY 3 million (approximately Rs. 3,10,69,901) by December 3 and at the time of writing had raised CNY 637,614 (approximately Rs. 66,03,534).

For specifications, the Pepsi Phone P1s (and P1) features a 5.5-inch 2.5D curved display with a resolution of 1080x1920 pixels. It runs dido OS 6.1 version based on Android 5.1 Lollipop. The smartphones feature hybrid dual-SIM card slots, with the second slot usable for either a microSD card or a SIM card.

The Phone P1s (and P1) is powered by a 1.7GHz octa-core MediaTek (MT6592) processor with 2GB of LPDDR3 RAM. It comes with 16GB inbuilt storage and supports expandable storage via microSD card (up to 64GB). The phones sports 13-megapixel rear camera while there is a 5-megapixel front camera also on board. It is backed by a 3000mAh battery.

The 4G LTE-enabled Pepsi Phone P1s supports Bluetooth, 3G, GPRS/ EDGE, Micro-USB, and GPS. The smartphone also features a fingerprint scanner at the back panel just below the primary camera.

The handset comes with accelerometer, ambient light, and proximity sensors. It measures 152.2x76.2x7.7mm and weighs 158 grams. The Pepsi Phone P1s will be available in Blue, Gold, and Silver colours.

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Hackers-for-hire played key role in JPMorgan, Fidelity breaches

NEW YORK/SAN FRANCISCO: 

When US prosecutors this week charged two Israelis and an American fugitive with raking in hundreds of millions of dollars in one of the largest and most complex cases of cyberfraud ever exposed, they also provided an unusual look into the burgeoning industry of criminal hackers for hire.

The trio, who are accused of orchestrating massive computer breaches at JPMorgan Chase & Co and other financial firms, as well as a series of other major offences, did little if any hacking themselves, the federal indictments and a previous civil case brought by the US Securities and Exchange Commission indicate.

Rather, they constructed a criminal conglomerate with activities ranging from pump-and-dump stock fraud to internet casino break-ins and unlicensed bitcoin trading. And just like many legitimate corporations, they outsourced much of their technology needs.

"They clearly had to recruit co-conspirators and have that type of hacker-for-hire," said Austin Berglas, former assistant special agent in charge of the FBI's New York cyber division, who worked the JPMorgan case before he left the agency in May. "This is the first case where it's that clear of a connection."

Berglas, who now heads cyber-investigations for private firm K2 Intelligence, said additional major cases of freelance hacking will come to light, especially as more people become familiar with online tools such as Tor that seek to conceal a user's identity and location.

Rented time

This week's indictments accused a hacker referred to as "co-conspirator 1" of installing malicious software on the servers of multiple victims at the direction of Gery Shalon, the alleged mastermind of the scheme now under arrest in Israel. A second indictment charges a man referred to as John Doe, believed to be in Russia, for an attack on online trading firm E*Trade.

Officials have not said if the co-conspirator and John Doe were the same person, or even if the FBI knows their true identities.

Law enforcement and computer security officials say that outsourced cybercrime services -- including rented time on networks of previously compromised personal computers and custom break-ins - are most readily found on underground Russian-language computer forums, where skilled attackers advertise their services.

The forums are tight-knit communities where newbies must be vouched for by multiple known members and pay membership fees that cost thousands of dollars, said Daniel Cohen, who oversees an undercover team at EMC Corp's RSA Security that monitors the forums.

"You can find anything you want for an operation. Hackers, servers, software, code writing. They are all available," said Cohen. Individuals hide their identities even from each other, making infiltration and arrests rare.

In this case, the ringleaders are accused of hiring hackers to steal contact information and other data that they then used to help convince ordinary investors to buy little-regulated stocks. Prosecutors have not disclosed how the hackers were compensated.

Fees vary greatly in the cyber-underground, depending on the complexity of the assignment and supply of talent available to do a particular job. Elite hackers who pull off the most technically challenging attacks might get a percentage of profits, while others might earn an hourly rate or get paid a few thousand dollars for winning access to a target's network, researchers said.

Pump-and-dump

All three of those accused this week -- Shalon, Joshua Samuel Aaron, who is at large, and Ziv Orenstein, who is also in jail in Israel -- began promoting penny stocks before the hacks took place, according to US government claims.

They used websites including Pennystockdiscoveries.com and Stockcastle.com to send emails as part of a scheme in which they invested in penny stocks, spread false information to boost their prices, and then sold them to make windfall profits, according to an SEC suit filed in July.

Orenstein's lawyer declined to comment, and Shalon's lawyer did not return messages seeking comment.

In one case in early 2012, the SEC claims that they used the website Stockcastle.com to promote shares in Mustang Alliances Inc, reaping $2.2 million, the largest pump-and-dump cited in the regulator's lawsuit. In March of that year, the British Virgin Islands Financial Services Commission issued an alert warning that two entities tied to Stockcastle were falsely claiming to be registered in the territory.

That same year, the enterprise began a massive hacking spree to get contact information for investors who might be good targets, according to prosecutors. By the end of 2013 they had ordered up six hacks that provided data on tens of millions of customers, prosecutors said.

They hit the mother lode in 2014 when they attacked three other firms, and stole data on 83 million customers from JP Morgan alone, prosecutors said.

In addition to JP Morgan and E*Trade, the firms attacked included the mutual fund giant Fidelity Investments, Scottrade, TD Ameritrade Holding Corp and News Corp's Dow Jones unit, the publisher of the Wall Street Journal, according to court documents and people familiar with the cases.

"To do a 'pump-and-dump' operation, you no longer need 30 people behind phones in a strip mall," said Shane Shook, a security consultant specializing in investigating financial breaches. All you need is to find a hacker on a Dark Web forum to provide addresses from customers of financial services firms like Fidelity or JPMorgan, then hire a spam service to push out promotional emails, he said.

Shalon bragged about the stock manipulation scheme, telling the hacker known as co-conspirator 1 in a web chat message that it was "a small step towards a large empire," according to the indictment.

His plan, Shalon told the hacker, was to distribute "mailers" on stocks to those customers. The hacker asked if buying stocks was popular in America, the indictment said, prompting Shalon to reply: "It's like drinking freaking vodka in Russia."

Shalon ultimately made good on his promise to build an empire, according to the indictments. Profits from the pump-and-dump fed into a sprawling conglomerate including offshore Internet casinos and payment-processing services for other criminal operators, such as counterfeit pharmaceutical makers. Shalon also allegedly directed hackers to attack rival casinos, stealing customer data and temporarily bringing down their websites with denial-of-service attacks, which are easily commissioned online.

Butterfly and Hidden Lynx 

While this week's indictments opened the first major criminal case involving outsourced hacking, there have been other substantial break-ins that researchers believe were contract jobs.

Researchers at Symantec in July attributed a series of precision breaches at Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter in 2012 and 2013 to a sophisticated gang called Butterfly, which also attacked law firms and pharmaceutical companies.

Computer security firm Symantec concluded that the group likely works for hire, either for a client looking for financial gain in the stock market or for competitors. How Butterfly gets hired remains unclear.

Tech criminologist Marc Goodman, author of the book 'Future Crimes', says another group, dubbed Hidden Lynx by Symantec, may consist of contractors moonlighting from jobs with the Chinese military.
"It's crime as a service," "Goodman said. "They take all the pain out of it."

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'Startup founders, not cricketers, are the new Indian idols'

"Whom do you idolize?"

At school or college, in competitions of every nature, from friends and family members, the question of who one wants to be like in a few years seems to crop up invariably. Over a decade ago, when I was growing up, the answer would largely cover a few regular names. A celebrated cricketer, an astronaut, maybe an actor, a social worker, a historical figure or perhaps a businessman or two. Circa 2015, however, things are decidedly different.
The same question quickly gets answers like Jack Ma, Steve Jobs, Lei Jun, Mark Zuckerberg ... the list goes on. There is an equally large number of Indian entrepreneurs and startup CEOs that a college-goer or a fresh professional hero-worships ardently. The youngsters are closely following their international idols' every step, every tweet, every interview as they have become almost synonymous with that romantic notion of 'following your passion'.

Many of the top entrepreneurs in the country today are engineering graduates from regular middle-class families. Most of them have no political connections, great family wealth or business inheritance backing them. They are, therefore, symbolic of completely self-made success.
Unlike the earlier generations that often viewed business as the preserve of those who have the clout and the luck to navigate through the country's red-tapism, startup pundits make it clear that no obstacle is too large. In addition, many entrepreneurs are viewed as mavericks. They have made a success of their companies entirely on their own terms, doing things differently and always taking the uncharted path. These elements make for a highly palatable recipe as far as the youth goes.

Young adults today don't want to be told what the set path is. They don't want to believe that if they do things differently, success will elude them. This is exactly what their startup idols personify. The new-age entrepreneur's zany policies, belief in ideas against all odds, innovative strategies, courage, confidence and complete disregard for traditional parameters of judgment validate the youth's own desire for freedom, flexibility and love for the unconventional.

What also makes the new-age entrepreneurs connect with the youth is how they leverage technology. Many of these founders and CEOs have either found a solution to a real-life problem through technology or have just managed to make life simpler and smoother using tech.

Tech, as we all know, is something that the youth is most passionate about and feels strongly about. A man who makes booking a cab a matter of seconds is bound to be liked and admired by the youth. He who makes a phone recharge possible in the middle of the night also automatically becomes someone the young citizen views with affinity.

The fact is new-age entrepreneurs have their finger on the pulse of the youth and offer solutions and technologies that wow them.

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MTNL to soon launch free roaming service

MTNL chairman and managing director NK Yadav said the scheme will be announced soon and they are finalizing th... Read More

NEW DELHI: State-run telecom operator MTNL, which offers services in Delhi and Mumbai, will soon launch free roaming scheme, allowing customers to receive calls at no extra cost while travelling across the country.

BSNL already has such a scheme in place.
At present, MTNL customers have to pay roaming charges for incoming calls when they go outside of Delhi and Mumbai.

MTNL chairman and managing director NK Yadav told PTI the scheme will be announced soon and they are finalizing the dates.

The government under National Telecom Policy 2012 has set a goal to achieve free roaming gradually.

Telecom minister Ravi Shankar Prasad during a meeting of consultative committee attached to the ministry of communication and IT informed Members of Parliament (MPs) that MTNL is planning to launch free roaming soon.

Moreover, MTNL has also increased minimum broadband speed to 2Mbps and is offering free broadband for one month to its landline customers.

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Google Maps for Android Gets Offline Navigation and Search Features

Next time you need directions to a place but don't have a good connectivity on your phone, Google Maps will still be able to offer help. The Mountain View-based company announced on Tuesday that it is introducing offline navigation and search features to its mapping service on Android. The company says that iOS client of Maps will get these features "soon".

Google says that it has redesigned the service to accommodate the new features. Users will now be able to download maps of specific areas of the cities or states and save them on their phone. When your phone is connected back to a good network, the app will automatically go online and offer other Maps features such as live traffic updates. The offline navigation feature is similar to what's offered byHere, formerly Nokia-owned mapping service.

You've had the ability to download and use Google Maps offline for a while now, but this is the first time Google will be offering other features like turn-by-turn navigation and providing information about places, like hours of operation, contact information, as well as ratings.

The company had first announced its plans to deliver these features at the I/O developer conference earlier this year. The offline navigation support may not sound as useful to people in developed nations as they have nearly-ubiquitous connectivity, but the vast majority of users in other parts of the world don't have such luxury.

Google says roughly 60 percent of the world doesn't have access to reliable and fast Internet connection -- or at times, any connection. "This is a huge problem, especially as people attempt to navigate and explore the world around them, so Google Maps is taking steps to help people across the globe find directions and get where they're going, even when they don't have an Internet connection," Amanda Bishop, Product Manager at Google while announcing the new feature.

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IRCTC Now Lets Users Book Train Tickets 30 Minutes Before Departure 

Come November 12, you can book a railway ticket online via IRCTC 30 minutes prior to the departure of a train.

In a passenger-friendly move, the Indian Railways has also made changes in its system of chart preparation, which would now be prepared twice.

First reservation chart would be prepared four hours prior to departure of a train while second and final one, 30 minutes before the train departs, a senior Railway official said.

According to the revised rules, booking will be allowed on Internet as well as at reservation counters for a particular train, subject to availability of berths, even after the preparation of first reservation chart.

Railways has also made it mandatory for the concerned department to finalise the reservation chart four hours before the departure of train from November 12 in order to facilitate passengers to know the status of their ticket and plan their journey well in time.

This is a significant move to provide additional booking facilities enabling passengers to buy tickets even after the preparation of reservation charts, the official said.

A second and final chart of reservations will be made available before departure of train and handed over to onboard ticket checking staff.

This exercise will ensure optimum utilisation of train accommodation as well as enhanced earnings, the official said.

Also, there were complaints of delay in finalisation of reservation chart giving scope to touts for indulging in illegal ticketing activities.

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Chrome Exploit Allegedly Gives Root Access to Virtually Any Android Device

A critical vulnerability in Chrome for Android has been reported that makes it possible for attackers to take over a device. The vulnerability was demonstrated at the MobilePwn2Own, PacSec conference in Tokyo. The researcher believes that the vulnerability affects all versions of Android capable of running the latest version of Chrome.

Qihoo 360 researcher Guang Gong showcased the exploit. The vulnerability resides in JavaScript v8, Google's open source JavaScript engine. For the vulnerability to be exploited, users needs to be tricked to visit a malicious website using Chrome Web browser.

An attacker is then able to install an arbitrary application and gain the full privileges of the device. He noted that the attack was "one shot exploit," essentially meaning that just one vulnerability was enough to perform the attack. The exploit worked on many other devices as well, said Dragos Ruiu, the organiser of PacSec.

"The impressive thing about Guang's exploit is that it was one shot; most people these days have to exploit several vulnerabilities to get privileged access and load software without interaction," Ruiu toldVulture South.

"As soon as the phone accessed the website the JavaScript v8 vulnerability in Chrome was used to install an arbitrary application (in this case a BMX Bike game) without any user interaction to demonstrate complete control of the phone."

Working details of the vulnerability haven't been disclosed, and Ruiu said that Google had been made aware of the vulnerability.

At the same event, two security researchers managed to trick the Samsung Galaxy S6, Galaxy S6 Edge, and the Galaxy Note 4 to connect to a compromised base station and had the calls and messages go through it. As a result of which, a victim's calls and messages could be intercepted.

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Amazon May Export Delivery Lessons From India to Cut Costs Abroad

E-commerce giant Amazon.com is taking lessons learnt from its daily battles with India's choked roads and cramped cities to some of its largest developed markets, exporting a model of cheaper deliveries and reduced warehousing costs.

Online shopping is booming in India, where millions of consumers are newly able to access the Internet thanks to cheap smartphones. For Amazon, it is already the largest contributor of new customers outside the United States.

But, like local rivals Flipkart and Snapdeal, Amazon has struggled with deliveries in cities where snarl-ups are frequent and road signs unreliable. In response, firms have set up logistics networks and use motorbikes instead of trucks.

Flipkart, for one, has tapped Mumbai's dabbawalas, a more than a century-old lunch box distribution service.

More than two years on from its arrival in India, Amazon says it is now ready to apply some of the innovations applied here to markets including the United States, Mexico and Brazil.

Britain, for example, could get a delivery service called Easy Ship, where orders are picked up by Amazon's crew directly from sellers, cutting out the time and cost of sending goods to a warehouse and the need for more space.

"It's not just that we learn from the big brothers like North America," Akhil Saxena, director of operations at Amazon India said in a recent interview at the company's local headquarters in the southtern city of Bengaluru.

"There is so much focus on India and the kind of growth that is happening here... People say, if it works for them, let's see what we can pick and learn," said Saxena.

E-commerce in India could grow to $137 billion by 2020 from $11 billion in 2013, says Morgan Stanley, and firms like Amazon, local market leader Flipkart and rival Snapdeal, backed by Japan's SoftBank, are fighting for a bigger share.

Speedy and cheap delivery is critical to winning over customers in a cut-throat industry, where heavy discounts mean firms are already burning through substantial cash to grow.

Harish Bijoor, an independent brand expert and business analyst, said the innovative delivery services were helping Amazon extend its reach in India, even at the cost of giving up some control over logistics - a lesson it could export.

"E-commerce is a trust business today and without that you cannot achieve scale," Bijoor said.

Made in India
Unlike in its other markets, government restrictions on foreign investment mean Amazon operates in India purely as a marketplace, rather than hawking its own goods. That tightens its relations with a multitude of sellers, and underlines the need to keep those connections simple.

Launched in India in 2014, Easy Ship, for example, cuts out costs of storing, packing and separately shipping goods.

"This probably cuts your overall transportation cost at least by half," said Samuel Thomas, Amazon India's director of transportation, adding that it trains sellers to provide the service, now used by 30,000, or more than 75 percent of them.

Another service introduced in India in May and considered for export to other markets, Seller Flex, allows sellers to have the flexibility to store goods and ship them to customers on their own, instead of routing them through Amazon.

Amazon provides technology and training to ensure goods are packed, labelled and delivered as the company would.

While Amazon in developed markets may not want to tweak its model for best selling goods, analysts said, it could consider the made-in-India seller solution to cut down on warehousing and delivery costs for thousands of "non core" products which are offered, but infrequently bought.

"Amazon is becoming a lot more flexible about how it services its customers," said Neil Saunders, at UK-based retail research firm Conlumino.

"If you go back about five years ... it was fairly one-dimensional. Now you have Amazon Prime, in some cities you have same day deliveries, a couple of hour deliveries ... And this is part of that."

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No, This Startup That Raised Rs. 12 Crore Isn't '12-Days-Old'

Coverage of startups seems to be see-sawing between breathless adoration, and cynical condemnation. We're in the latter phase again unfortunately, and that's why you might have seen headlines claiming that a 12-day-old startup just raised Rs. 12 crore in funds. Making the news even more salacious, the founder of the startup actually worked for one of the companies that is providing the funds. Clear signs of cronyism and all that's wrong in the world of funding, or is there actually more to the story?

Zilingo (the company in question) co-founder Ankiti Bose was upfront about her connection with funder Sequoia Capital in our meeting in October. "I was a consultant at McKinsey, and after that, I was a VC myself," says Bose, who met us in a co-working space the company is using for its office. "I used to work at Sequoia Capital. I left seven to eight months back, to start Zilingo, with the idea of doing long tail aggregation."

Co-founder Dhruv Kapoor, an IIT Guwahati alumnus, has worked in Sequoia-backed mobile gaming studio Kiwi, and also with Yahoo on a localisation automation tool. "That's something we've used extensively - because in South-East Asia, you need a localised product," Bose says. The two launched Ziligo as a Thailand-based e-commerce startup - the idea is to tap the long tail seller ecosystem in South-East Asia, with native language user experience.

Although the company has just launched officially, work on Zilingo has been going on for seven months now, Bose says. She tells us that the co-founders and a designer stayed in Thailand for a majority of that period, to figure out the market.

"Once we validated the idea after meeting a lot of sellers, using the existing products, figuring out where the whitespace was," says Bose. "What we figured out was that in all of South East Asia - there was a gap in demand. People have C2C type of apps, like Carousell and Tokopedia, or they have the Flipkart-Amazon type apps like Lazada, which are not built keeping in mind these kind of folks who are very mobile-centric. We thought of building a product for those people," she adds.

"Our backend couldn't use something like Shopify or Magento - we had to create our own platform - [because] there were multiple currencies, multiple languages, and localisation happening," she adds, comparing the app to Alibaba + TMall, built from scratch, and customised for the South-East Asian market. Another big part of the plan has been to build for cross-border commerce. "We didn't want to build something that was Thai to Thai - we always knew that this is an Asia play," Bose says.

Zilingo plans to start shipping from the Thai sellers to Singapore, Indonesia, Hong Kong in November and to other Southeast Asian countries right after, according to an emailed statement accompanying its recent round of funding.

The company makes its money through commissions on sales; the packaging, door-to-door pickup and delivery, insurance, and everything else is handled by the startup. Sellers are given a mobile app that simplifies their storefront management. That's an important tweak for the region, Bose says, because most sellers in Asia don't use laptops, but all of them have smartphones.

"Everybody has 4G, but their aversion to using Excel, etc for doing business is much higher than you would find in India," she says. "They are the Facebook-using Instagram generation." Bose adds that 70 percent of Zilingo's seller base have physical stores as well. "The seller is somebody who ships 50-60 products a day, they are savvy, smartphone using, they have access to a good network," she adds.

The app officially went live on the 31st of October, fully localised in Thai, with more than 300 sellers on board. At the time of writing, Zilingo has over 10,400 Facebook fans, and between 1,000-5,000 downloads on Google Play. But unless the company could make an app on the day it started, it's clear that Zilingo has actually been working for a while now, making the 12-day-old startup headlines look particularly strange.

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It's Time to Go Green: Save the Planet and Money Too

Bengaluru's world famous eyesore, Bellandur Lake became a headlining act on national and international media, as news reports highlighted how it had caught fire, with foam coming right into pedestrians faces. A change.org campaign demanding an immediate cleanup of the lake has collected over 31,000 signatures so far, while the local authorities have installed water sprinklers around areas where it tends to froth. Yet, the problem doesn't seem to be solvable until the city's citizens take accountability to treat their sewage. Actually improving the cities we live in would be a lot easier if we, as individuals, take some steps that don't just help the environment, but also actually save us a fair bit of money.

Nearly 650 million litres of untreated sewage is discharged into Bengaluru's vicinity every day, says S Vishwanath of the Bengaluru-based company Biome Environmental Solutions. The firm works on water sustainability solutions in government schools and drought affected areas. He points out that this problem has existed for fifteen years, and it's only after the foam started hitting the cars and two-wheelers in the city that people took notice. "It was frothing in Vishwavati Valley, where farmers had to deal with this froth since 2000. This is clearly a question of industrial consumption levels of detergents and fatty acids and other stuff which is going into the lakes," Vishwanath says.

Vishwanath's himself harvests water from the roof at the highest level of his home for cooking and drinking, while the water from lower roofs is used for landscaping and gardening. All the grey water (washing machine water and bath water) is funnelled through a series of filtration tanks, where grey water is stored, and plants, algae and bacteria break it down, removing phosphates and nitrates from the water. Guppies are put in so that mosquito larvae don't breed.

"The fish eat the larvae, and they are also functional indicators. If they start to die, then the water is not getting treated enough," Vishwanath explains. Eventually, the filtered water is used for in the garden and for flushing the loo below. In theory, this water can also recharge the groundwater. An eco-san toilet installed on the roof recycles urine as fertiliser for plants, while solids are composted in blue drums, so that no human waste goes out of the house.

It's possible to build an eco-friendly house, with features for rainwater harvesting, solar heating, and using environmentally friendly materials for construction, at around the same per-square foot cost as traditional building methods, experts say. Retrofitting can be a little more expensive, but over time, the saving from consuming less water and electricity won't just mean a cleaner environment, but also smaller monthly bills.

According to a report, 'green' construction can lower energy consumption by 30-50 percent, and lower water consumption by 30-70 percent. Short term planning is a particularly big culprit; a one-star rated gadget like an A/C or geyser might be significantly cheaper than a similar product with a higher energy efficiency rating, but the added electricity it consumes has a real cost, in terms of pollution and your finances over time.

Waste management and chemical pollution are as big an issue as excess consumption. One of the main reasons for Bengaluru's frothing lakes seems to be our everyday detergent - which has foaming agents, surface active agents, and phosphate. Delara Damania, founder of Bengaluru-based Common Oxen which makes natural cleaning agents for the home, points out that even wastewater sludge goes into farms, and comes back into our food. "The fact that nobody is regulating this is just mind-boggling," she says. 

Her startup is built around the problem of eliminating phosphates from household cleaning. "Phosphates on their own are not a bad thing, but they encourage the proliferation of water hyacinths, and other fast-growing weeds, that sort of suck out the oxygen and kill the other aquatic animals, and that's what spoils the water bodies," she says.

Vani Murthy, one of Bengaluru's most active waste management campaigners, is launching a mission to get one million people to compost their green waste at home. "It's a one week challenge, and is building up to a launch," she says. "If you could, on your part, take care of that half a kg of waste that you generate, than asking the municipality. That's one action that can have a direct impact on the future of the planet itself."

Composting is one action you can do for a better world, she says. "You are dealing with 60 percent of the waste right where it is being generated, converting it into something that is so important for the soil to grow your own food," Murthy adds. "The safest food is what you grow, because you know what you are putting in there."

Once you understand the process of aeration, the breakdown of food into micro-organisms, Composting can be a lifetime practice, a gateway to rooftop gardening. Murthy bartered her compost for seeds in her early days, and now she has three terrace gardens growing her own food. The organic terrace gardening group on Facebook has 27,000 members, and out of that, 6,000 to 7,000 are from Bengaluru, she says. They have quarterly events where people bring their produce called Oota from Your Thota.

For the first-time composter, she recommends doing it at zero expense, using an old bucket with some holes in it. "Start off with peels, egg shells, fruit peels. Dry leaves can be added to the compost mix, as it absorbs moisture from the peels and keeps the pile balanced. It does not let the wet waste get compacted," she says. A composting kit needs a bit of shade, and has to be protected from rain. Cow dung or sour butter milk can be used as a source of microorganisms.

"The basic rule is that it should be well aerated. If it doesn't breathe, it becomes anaerobic, and that's when it starts to stink. For aeration, it should not be packed in too compact - it takes a few tries to get the right balance," she says.

Reducing your energy footprint
If you're planning to build a green home or live in one, Teri's Griha Rating Booklet has a bunch of useful parameters to evaluate and rank housing projects by, with a points based rating system based on various criterion. These include factors such as materials used, environmental impact, energy use, water harvesting, low-power devices, 5-star rated electronics, amount of daylight used, surface reflectivity, and cooling.

Teri's rating system stresses on local sourcing of components - there are somethings that you lose points for - for example you can't use Italian marble, because it has a higher carbon footprint because of the transportation cost.

Some of the things to look into include insulated walls and roof construction, which can reduce you air conditioning bill in the summer and your heating costs in the winter. Smaller windows will also help - large windows look nice, but turn your home into a greenhouse, which isn't very suitable in India. You can also look into alternative energy, such as solar panels, and solar heating for water; rainwater harvesting can also make a big impact.

Materials like teak wood, and quarried stone that has to be transported from afar are a bad idea when you're building a new house. Fly ash bricks and locally sourced materials, design that promotes ventilation instead of air-conditioning, and planning for things like low-flow water and low-energy lighting all add up and make a big impact over time.

Prasanto Roy, who lives in India's first Teri Griha home, which scored 96 percent overall on their Teri's ratings, said that building a green home doesn't come with a significant cost overhead.

"Other houses that have been built in this area cost more than this one, and they don't even use green features. That is because they have used more expensive finishes, fittings, Italian marble," he says. "For us, it cost ten percent more per square foot to build this house. There are some savings you get directly in the capex itself, as you need less equipment, and so on."

Roy's house is made of two types of fly-ash bricks, which are easily available. Around 70-80 percent of the material was locally sourced. The supply chain for green materials has improved since he built his home, with Teri's website cataloging the suppliers. "Today, almost everything can be sourced locally, but electronics like controller systems, were imports," he adds.

"For a typical house, depending on where you are, the one thing to focus on is cooling the home passively, so that you need less active cooling," he explains. "Go increasingly on to LED lights, and you pick the low hanging fruits - the lights which are always on, and so on. Staircase lights can have motion sensors," he says, so they will not only be on when needed. "A solar power is a simple enough system to add on, can be paired with an inverter or used directly, a 1 KVA solar panel for around Rs. 1.5 lakhs is a very worthwhile thing to do," as this can help you reduce your dependence on the grid, and save significant amounts of money over time.

At the same time, low-flow fixtures reduce water waste, and your water bill as well, and rainwater harvesting can be good for the environment and will also reduce your dependence on expensive water tankers, when the municipal supply runs short.

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Microsoft Releases First Major Update to Windows 10

Microsoft has announced it is rolling out the Windows 10 November update, the first major update to its latest operating system. Codenamed Threshold 2 and also dubbed the Fall Update, Thursday's update largely aims to smoothen the rough edges that Windows 10 originally shipped with around three-and-a-half months ago.

The update is the same build, dubbed 10586, which was rolled out to Windows Insider testers last week. As previously rumoured, computers currently running Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 can jump directly to the latest version of Windows 10, should they wish to upgrade (for free, of course). The company claims that with the new update, the same machine with Windows 10 will be 30 percent faster than Windows 7.

Besides offering fixes and improvements, the latest Windows 10 update also brings along new features to Cortana, and some graphical alterations to the user interface. The Start menu, for instance, now offers better context menu while resizing the tiles. It can now also hold more items - increasing the count from 500 to 2048.

Moving along, Cortana has gotten smarter, now allowing users to write using a stylus to create reminders. It is getting better integrations too. It can now keep a track of your upcoming meetings and events by looking at your email and offer to book an Uber cab to your destination. Cortana is now also well versed with Indian English.

The digital voice assistant always worked with the new browser, Microsoft Edge, but now users will be able to see its applications more prominently. For instance, if you visit an online retailer, Cortana will let you know if there are coupons available for that website. Speaking of Edge, it now offers tab previews, and allows you to sync favourites and reading items between different computers. Extensions support, however, is not arriving until next year.

The update is also aimed at enterprise users. The company says that it is including support for Windows Update for Business, and Windows Store for Business. Both will allow business users to utilise Group Policy to easily deploy and manage apps and updates on Windows 10 business PCs.

Users on the regular cycle (i.e. most end users) will receive the update via Windows Update. Standalone ISO images of the updated Windows 10 version are also available to download via company's MSDN channel.

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Google's Self-Driving Car Gets Pulled Over for Driving Too Slow

Everyone's equal in the eyes of the law - even self-driving cars. A testament of which was on display this week. A Google self-driving car got pulled over by a law abiding policeman in Rengstorff Ave, Mountain View, USA for driving too slowly.

This is the first time, says Google, that its self-driving car was pulled for driving too slowly, a relatively rare offence among humans. "Driving too slowly? Bet humans don't get pulled over for that too often,"said the Google car team in a Google+ post Thursday. "We've capped the speed of our prototype vehicles at 25 mph for safety reasons."

The cop pulled the car because it was driving at 24mph in a 35mph zone. In Google's defence, its car is set to drive slowly to make it safe and less scary for others, and easily approachable for people who're interested in learning more about Google Autonomous Car.

In the meanwhile, the Mountain View Police has explained the situation as well. "As the officer approached the slow moving car he realised it was a Google Autonomous Vehicle," they wrote in a blog post. "The officer stopped the car and made contact with the operators to learn more about how the car was choosing speeds along certain roadways and to educate the operators about impeding traffic per 22400(a) of the California Vehicle Code."

The cop realised the situation and graciously didn't issue a ticket. Though, at this point it is not clear who should have gotten a ticket if a self-driving car does commit a serious violation. Several concerned laws currently find the person in the driver's seat to be responsible, but the laws are still pretty grey as to what should be done when the seat is empty.

The incident, while amusing, just goes on to suggest that laws aren't moving at the same pace as technology.

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