Disable Whats App Blue Ticks For Read Messages.Here's How To.

Disabling Whats App Blue Ticks.

Recently, WhatsApp quietly introduced a new feature that lets users know that their messages have been read, with the double grey ticks appearing in front of the messages turning blue. 

And now, just as quietly, the mobile messaging service is letting users of its Android app disable the feature with the rollout of WhatsApp version 2.11.444. This version is available for users on WhatsApp's website for now, and will eventually be rolled out to all users. 

Here's how you can disable the blue coloured read receipts' with the message timestamp on WhatsApp's Android app: 

1. Make sure that your smartphone is running on Android 2.1 or a newer version. 

2. Go to settings menu and enable 'Download from Unknown Sources' in the Security tab 

3. Go to the WhatsApp website and download the APK (application) file available under www.whatsapp.com/Android/ 

4. Once the APK file is downloaded to your device, tap the 'Install' option. 

6. Now that WhatsApp has been updated, select Settings > Account > Privacy. Under the Privacy tab, uncheck the Read Receipts option. 

This feature however doesn't apply to group messages and will let other participants know when you've read a message. Also, once you disable this feature, you won't be able to view blue double-check marks when you send a message as well. 


The feature that enabled the users to see when their messages were read didn't go down too well with the users and with this update, WhatsApp seems to be taking steps to please users who were not happy with the new feature.

#TOI

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How To Exit An Email Thread.

If you're a Gmail user and find yourself in the middle of an email thread that you'd rather not be a part of, you can excuse yourself from the thread, without causing a commotion.
This is certainly helpful when it's not appropriate to reply all and say "Please stop replying all."

Here's how to do it: Open the email thread you'd like to drop out of and click on "More" in the upper-right and then in the drop-down, select "Mute."

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3 Facts To Protect Your Data Online.

The circulation of nude photographs stolen from celebrities' online accounts has raised questions about the security of storing information over the internet, a growing practice known as the Cloud.

Apple confirmed that some celebrity accounts were compromised by a targeted attack on usernames, passwords and security questions.

Although Apple said there was no general breach in any of its systems, such as the iCloud storage service, it appears hackers were able to gain access to individual accounts simply by figuring out passwords and answers to security questions.

So if celebrities' information isn't safe, then whose is? Here is a closer look at how safe data is when stored remotely on these services.



Q. What is the cloud?

A. The cloud is a way of storing photos, documents, email and other data on computers located elsewhere, so you're not using space on your computer, phone or other device. Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft all offer cloud-based storage. Smaller companies like Dropbox and Evernote do, too.

The advantage is that you can access the same information from any device. And if you lose your phone, for example, you don't lose your vacation pictures.

The drawback is that you are putting your information somewhere else, so you run the risk of a hacking attack on those systems and accounts.

Q. Is it secure?

For the most part, yes. Companies invest a lot on trying to ensure that people's private information stays private. "The short answer is that the cloud is often more secure than other storage".

But that doesn't mean it is completely immune. "Like a lot of internet services, there are a lot of attackers who have a lot of time,".

Q. How can individuals make their data more secure?
A. You need passwords to access your accounts, so choosing a strong one is important.

Tim Bajarin, an analyst at technology research firm Creative Strategies, recommends having different passwords for each account you hold online, so a breach in one system won't compromise another.

It is also important to have a number and punctuation mark in each password, or a creative spelling of a word to make it harder to guess. Also, avoid using common words or notable birthdays as passwords. A strong password is particularly important if you store sensitive information online.

Another way to make your information harder to hack is called multi-factor, or two-step, identification. That means the first time you log onto an account from a new device, you are asked for a second form of identification. Usually, that involves getting sent a code as a text on your phone or an email.

"If you have physical possession one of your other devices, the identification is really hard to break,".
Most major cloud services, including Apple's iCloud, Google's Google Drive and Dropbox, offer this kind of protection. Amazon's Cloud Drive is the notable exception. But you usually have to turn this on.

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How To Remote Log Out From Gmail And Facebook.

If you headed home from office, without logging out of Facebook or Gmail, you can do so from anywhere using the 'remote log out' feature. 

In Facebook, click on the tiny gear sign on the top right of the page, go to 'account settings' and then to 'security' on the left pane. Under 'security settings', click on 'active sessions'. 

No one else might be using your account, but you would not have logged out of Facebook, leaving the session active. Anyone can gain access to your account in such circumstances. To remote log out, click on 'end activity'. 

In Gmail, at the bottom right side of the page, you will see details of your latest email access. If someone else is simultaneously using your account, you will see a notification there. 

Click on the 'Details' link below it. A new window opens, with a notification on whether the account is simultaneously open elsewhere. Like in the case of FB, you might not have logged out of the account, leaving it active. If so, you will see an option to 'log out of all sessions'. It also shows you the details of your previous 10 accesses to the account.

Thank You.

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How To Find A Lost Device That Is In Silent Mode.

I lost my tablet somewhere in my house and have been searching for hours. It's an Android device, which seems to have Wi-Fi-enabled (responds to pings), but doesn't seem to react to cloud-based messages. Furthermore, I have Cerberus installed on it, but cannot connect to it. Is there a way of physically finding the device by measuring the signal strength from different locations in my flat? I know it's theoretically also possible to triangulate a Wi-Fi signal, and even though I have four Linux based Wi-Fi receivers, I don't know any non-commercial software that is capable of doing so.

Plan B
Not a direct answer to your question, but Plan B app is specifically for situations where you've lost track of your Android device and didn't have any sort of "finder" app on it. Note: Plan B only works with Android 2.0-2.3.

airodump-ng
I know you can get the signal reception using airodump-ng (part of the aircrack-ng tool suite) if you have a compatible Wi-Fi card and a Linux distro up and running. You'll see something like this with the signal reception listed as PWR (in decibels). If you keep pinging the device throughout this, you should see the airodump-ng screen update much quicker with the MAC address of the device. You should then be able to move around with your laptop, trying to increase the PWR until you find the device.

Homing Cone
Something that may work: Go to the hardware store and buy some brass mesh and build a cone. You'll probably need to layer the mesh, then hold your phone in the middle of the cone. The brass mesh should block all radio signals, so if you get a signal, it's coming from the direction of the open area of the cone. In theory, you can use this to home in on the device. FYI, the brass mesh is one component in building a SCIF.

Ethernet & More
Some Wi-Fi routers have a signal strength measurement on them. I know DD-WRT has this. If yours does, then you can do something like this:

*Get a long Ethernet cord.
*Plug one end into the router and one into your cable modem, internet connection, etc.
*Move the router around your apartment and see where you get the strongest signal. (Keep in mind, water pipes, metal studs etc can all distort Wi-Fi signals.)
*Another option would be to make your own directional antenna, kind of like this. You could also check out this page for some useful command line Linux Wi-Fi commands.

Triangulate
One-storied home? You can sort-of triangulate using signal strength alone. You have to assume that signal strength is proportional to distance from the transmitter, which isn't very accurate, but it could be accurate enough to help narrow down the search space. How to measure signal strength from 3 points in your house:

On a floor plan of the home, mark your three points, and with a drawing compass, swing an arc across the flat with a radius proportional to the signal strength so that the arcs enclose a fairly small space within the home.

If the assumption we made were true (and your measurements and drawing were accurate), your tablet should be within the space between the arcs. It's not quite true but hopefully not too far off either.

Start your search near that space. Hopefully its location will remind you of where you actually left the tablet. If not, search out from there, possibly repeating the above steps at a shorter distance from this location.

Multi-storied house? Same idea, only now plotting is more complicated by the third dimension. Easier would be to repeat the above for each floor. Now you have two or three more spaces to search but that'll be more information than you had before.

Source: Lifehacker India

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Save Your Data From Being Corrupted.

Data loss - whether from hardware failure, digital corruption, or even accidental deletion - is a hard, yet inevitable truth in this age of computers. But you can take simple precautions to protect important documents and e-mails, photographs, music files and videos. Your Windows OS comes with tools that will help you take a backup; your external hard drive comes with backup software. Yet, despite best intentions we fail to create copies of our files. It's probably because the process might seem daunting. Well, its not...

Local storage

The quickest place to save a backup of your data is on the hard disk in your PC. Here, however, you will first need to ensure that your copies are stored on a separate physical drive in your machine. A note of caution: different partitions do not mean different drives. In the event of a hard drive failure, you will lose all your data if your files were stored on the same disk, even though it might show as a different drive letter on your system.

Now, given current drive capacities, most PCs come with just a single hard drive. In this case, it would be best to invest in an external hard disk. As mentioned earlier, each brand comes with its own backup utility. Follow the simple steps to back up your files at regular intervals. Tip: Till you get into an 'automatic' habit, create a reminder on your phone that will prompt you to backup every weekend.

Personal cloud storage
While a local backup is a good idea, an online repository for your documents, music and pictures will give you the freedom to access them from any web-enabled device. Besides, many cloud services come with mobile apps, allowing you to access, synchronize and share files on the go.

Dropbox (www.dropbox.com)
This service gives you 2GB of free storage. If you suggest it to friends, you can earn up to 18GB of space. Dropbox also has software for Windows, Mac and Linux PCs, and apps for Android, BlackBerry, and iOS devices. To back up a file, place it in the local Dropbox folder on your PC and it will be pushed online, showing up on your smartphone as well.

Google Drive (drive.google.com)
Google Drive offers up to 15GB of free space which is shared across Gmail and Google+ services. While Drive is not ideal for multimedia file storage, it is perfect for documents, with support for over thirty formats that can be opened within the mobile app - available for Android and iOS - or the web browser.

Box (www.box.com)
With 10GB of storage space, you will have more than enough room for backing up personal and work-related documents. If you are not into taking your photographs public on Flickr and Picasa, you can store them on Box. Entire folders can be shared with friends and family, turning the backup process into an advantage. Just make sure you don't give write access to those with whom you share the folder. Besides mobile apps for Android and iOS devices, Box also works on Windows Phone.

SkyDrive (skydrive.live.com)
With SkyDrive, you get 7GB of free space and the ability to work on documents within a web browser or its app that's available for Android, iOS and Windows Phone. This service works well with photos too: it comes with a slideshow function and supports sharing on social networks.

Mega (mega.co.nz)
Mega tops ours charts with a whopping 50GB of free storage space. It is a pure-bred digital locker with AES-128 encryption for all your data. As of now, the service can be accessed via your PC and through an app for Android. iOS and Windows Phone offerings are in the works.

Backing up with Windows
You can also use the built-in backup and restore utility in Windows. The best part is that you can schedule and automate the entire process with the help of a simple wizard.

In Windows 7
Click Start > Control Panel > System and Maintenance > Backup and Restore. Here, you are presented with two options 1 Make a full backup of the system: In the left pane, click Create new, full backup. 2 Customize the archival: Click Set up backup and then follow the wizard to configure what you want to make a copy of. After that first time, whenever you bring up Back and Restore, just click Back up now. To restore your data, double-click the backup file to start the process. Alternatively, open Backup and Restore > Restore my files. Browse through the backup and choose the files and folders you want to restore; select the destination and click Restore.

In Windows 8.1
Connect an external hard drive to your PC. Then, using your cursor, point to the upper right corner of the screen. In the 'charms' bar that appears, click on the Search option and type File History to access it. Enable the File History option and follow the instructions to select the folders you want to backup. You can restore files from earlier copies with the same utility.

Thank You.

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Your Computer Not Recognizing Your USB Drive? Here's What To Do.

External drives — either USB flash drives or external hard drives — should be easy to use. In some cases, you may connect your drive to a Windows PC or another device with a USB port and find that it's not recognized. This problem can be caused by partition issues on your external drive, using the wrong file system, dead USB ports, driver issues in Windows, or other problems. In a worst case scenario, the drive itself may simply be dead. 

The steps below will be the same for both USB flash drives and larger external hard drives, which work similarly. 

Does the drive show up in disk management?

First, let's check whether Windows detects the drive when you plug it in. Plug your removable drive into your computer. If it's an external hard drive, you may have to flip a power switch on the hard drive to activate it. Some heavy-duty removable hard drives may even have to be plugged in with a separate power cable before they'll work. 

Next, open the Disk Management tool. To do so, press Windows Key + R, type diskmgmt.msc into the Run dialog, and press Enter. 

You should see your external drive listed in the Disk Management window. Even if it doesn't appear in your Computer window because it doesn't contain any partitions, it should show up here. 

If you do see the drive here, you can continue to the last section where we'll format it properly so Windows or your other devices can access and recognize it.If you don't see the drive here, continue to the next section where we'll try to determine why your drive isn't recognized. 

Making Windows recognize the drive 

If Windows doesn't see your drive at all, it's possible there's a hardware issue with your computer's USB port, a driver problem with your Windows computer, or you may just have a dead drive. 

First, unplug the drive from your USB port and try plugging it into another USB port on your computer. If it works in one USB port but not another, you may have a dead USB port. If you've plugged the drive into a USB hub, try connecting it to the computer instead. Some USB hubs won't provide enough power for your external drive to function. 

If the drive doesn't show up in Disk Management even after you skip the USB hub and connect it to another USB port on your computer, it's tough to know for certain whether the drive itself is bad or the computer is having a problem. If you have another computer nearby, try plugging the drive in there to check whether it's detected. If the drive doesn't work on any computer you plug it into — be sure to check whether it appears in the computer's Disk Management window — the drive itself is likely dead and will need to be replaced. 

If the drive does work on other computers — or you don't have another computer around to test this with — Windows may be having a driver problem with the drive. You can check for this using the Device Manager. 

To open it, press Windows Key + R, type "devmgmt.msc" into the Run dialog, and press Enter. 

Look under Disk drives and check for any devices with a yellow exclamation mark next to them. If you see a yellow exclamation mark, you have a driver problem. Right-click the device with a yellow exclamation mark, select Properties, and look at the error message. This error message can help you fix the problem — you may want to perform a Google search for the error message you find. 

Such problems can be tricky to fix. If the problem started recently, you may want to run System Restore. You may want to use the Update Driver button to install an updated driver, use the Roll Back Driver button to revert any changes, or use the Uninstall button to uninstall the device from your system and hope that Windows will reinstall the driver and configure it correctly when you reconnect the drive. 

Partitioning and formatting the drive 

We can use the Windows Disk Management tool to fix partition and file system issues with the drive. If you see that the drive is unpartitioned and is full of "unallocated space," you'll want to create a new partition on it. This will allow Windows and other operating systems to use it. 

To do so, right-click inside the unallocated space, select New Simple Volume, and go through the wizard to create a new partition. 

If your drive is partitioned and you still can't see it, ensure you've set a drive letter so you can access it in Windows. This should happen automatically, but if you've manually unset the drive letter, the drive may not show up and be accessible in Windows. 

To do this, right-click the removable drive's partition, select Change Drive Letter and Paths, and add a drive letter. For example, add the letter G: and the removable drive will be accessible at drive G. 

If the drive does appear to be partitioned, it may be partitioned with the wrong file system. For example, you may have formatted the drive with the ext4 file system from Linux or the HFS Plus file system from a Mac. Windows can't read these file systems. Reformat the drive with the newer NTFS file system or older FAT32 file system so Windows will be able to recognize it. 

To reformat a partition, right-click it, select Format, and select your desired file system. 

Note that this will erase all the files on your drive, so you'll want to copy any important files off of it first — for example, if you formatted the drive on a Linux or Mac computer, take it back to a computer running Linux or Mac and copy your important files off of it before continuing. 

If you can't access the drive from another device, such as a DVD player, smart TV, game console, or media center device, it may be formatted as NTFS. Many devices, even Microsoft's own Xbox 360, can't read the Windows NTFS file system. They can only access drives formatted with the older FAT32 file system. To fix this problem, simply reformat the NTFS partition as FAT32. The drive should then be recognized by other devices when you connect it to them. 

Note that this process will erase the files on your external drive. Copy the files off the drive to back them up first, if necessary.format-removable-drive-as-fat32Following this process should solve most of the disk recognition issues you'll encounter. If a drive isn't recognized by any computer you connect it to and never shows up in the Disk Management window, it's probably dead.

Source: Chris Hoffman, makeuseof.com 

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How To Keep Your 'Search' History Private.

Your search history contains some of the most personal information you will ever reveal online: your health, mental state, interests, travel locations, fears and shopping habits. 

And that is information most people would want to keep private. Unfortunately, your web searches are carefully tracked and saved in databases, where the information can be used for almost anything, including highly targeted advertising and price discrimination based on your data profile. 

Fortunately, Google, Microsoft's Bing and smaller companies provide ways to delete a search history or avoid leaving one, even if hiding from those ads can be more difficult. 

Google makes it easy to find your personal web history, manage it and even delete it. Just go to google. com/history and log in to your Google account. There, you will see your entire history and can browse it by category. 

If you would like this history to go away, click the gear icon in the upper right of the page and choose Settings. Here, you can turn off search history, so Google won't save future searches. You can delete your history from Google's database or just remove specific items from your recent history. 

You can turn off and erase your search history on Microsoft Bing at bing.com/profile/history. Yahoo lets you turn off future search histories but doesn't have a way to delete the old one. Visit search. yahoo.com/preferences/ to turn off your history.

Thank You.

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How To Stop Video Ads On Facebook From Auto-Playing.

Facebook recently introduced the worst kind of ads to its users. If you sign in to the desktop or mobile version, a video trying to sell some kind of a service will immediately begin to play. The only way to stop it is to tap on it once.

You can completely disable the auto playing feature, but this hack only works on the desktop, not on your iPhone or Android device. iPhone and Androids can be set to play videos automatically only when connected to a Wi-Fi network.

Here's how it works for desktop:

1.For Desktop:

* Sign in to your Facebook account. Scroll over to the right and click Settings at the top.

* Scroll over to the left and click "Videos" at the bottom.

* Move your cursor over to the right and click "Off." The videos won't automatically play on desktop anymore. This process was done on Google Chrome, and it works the same in Firefox. For some reason, however, the "Videos" option doesn't appear in Safari, so Safari users might be out of luck for now.

2.For Mobile:

Unfortunately, there is no way to completely disable Facebook's video ads on mobile. However, you can disable them when you're not on Wi-Fi:

1. Open Facebook, open the left sidebar, and tap "App Settings."
2. Check the "Auto-Play Videos on Wi-FI Only" box.

    On Android:

1. Open Facebook, open the left sidebar, and tap "App Settings."
2. Check the "Auto-Play Videos on Wi-FI Only" box.

   On iOS:

Similar to Android, there is no way to disable the ads completely, but you can disable them when you're not on Wi-Fi.

1. Go to the iOS Settings app from the home screen, and open up Facebook's settings.
2. Tap the Settings option and under "Video," switch the "Auto-Play on Wi-Fi Only" option on.

Thank You.

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Creating Captions For YouTube Videos.

YouTube has offered automatic captions for years on many of the videos it hosts, with text generated by the same speech recognition algorithms used by other services like Google Voice and Google Now. These "auto-caps" are often a help to educators or those with hearing impairments, but YouTube admits that the quality of the captions created by the speech recognition software can vary from video to video -and may not even work on some clips.

If you are creating videos and uploading them to the site, you can personally edit the text on any automatically generated captions on your clips. Just log into your YouTube account, go to the Video Manager area and next to the clip you want to fix, click the drop-down menu next to the Edit button. Select Captions and edit the text in the caption fields as you see fit. The Captions page in the YouTube Help online guide has links to several articles about adding your own captions, subtitles and transcripts for videos, as well as a full tutorial in the Creator Academy area of the site. As a video-sharing business, YouTube has a how-to video on adding closed captions and subtitles too. 

The Caption It Yourself site offers tips and basic guidelines for creating video captions, as well as links to tools for creating captions. If you do not like the automatically generated captions, third-party programs like SynchriMedia's Movie Captioner for Windows and Mac OS X give you full control over the text displayed on your videos. Voxcribe is another service for captioning videos and uses speech recognition to transcribe the text. If you use additional software, YouTube has more information about uploading subtitles or closed captions created in other programmes with your clips.

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