What if advertisers found a stealthy new way to get their pitch across — a form of messaging perceived more as a friendly recommendation than hard sell? In an over-crowded media environment, marketers would surely flick to such an innovation.
Children are indeed great story tellers. Just spend an hour with them and you will learn so many things about it. Children have a very wide and innocent imagination. Their mind can explore through so many different adventures which are magical and mystic.
As a teacher I get to spend so much time among these magical explorers. While teaching subjects like History, Literature or Science, the children are so very engrossed in what is being taught. When I check their notebooks, the last few pages are always filled with artwork and imaginary pictures that tell a story.
With the improvement in technology, I feel our children are losing their creativity. I mean just look at it, if our child is given homework like writing an essay or preparing a craft or drawing something, what do we do? We immediately Google it. Whatsapp has even made sharing homework easier. Even schools now days have e-boards and projectors that show documentaries and videos to the kids to explain them their textbook stuff.
It’s time to unlock the imagination of our kids.
Colgate is here to help your child reconnect with his or her dream world. With the collection of mystical characters in the Colgate collectible packets, help your child explore his/her creative side and tell you a story. The new 4 different collectible packs of Colgate Strong Teeth packs come with interesting space adventures & some trivia inside them. Along with creativity, your child can also learn some interesting facts.
I handed over the packet to my daughter. Her eyes sparkled with joy and she immediately got working on preparing her magical story.
After almost three days, her story was ready and here it is. I’m sharing this with you’ll.
“The tution teacher was absent so the children started jumping with joy thinking that it would be a free period. But to their shock, the teacher decided to take the period to complete her portion.
She started teaching the students about the solar system and the space. She was telling the stories about astronauts.
As I looked into the textbook I saw beautiful pictures of the planets and solar bodies. I saw a picture of a rocket. I began to think how it would be like to travel in space.
My parents and I got into a car and travelled to NASA. There we found out that there was an asteroid making is way towards earth.
The NASA team was sending a group of astronauts into space to destroy the planet and save earth.
I joined the group of astronauts. We received training and were prepared to go to and trained us to work without gravity. I wore my space suit which was made of 13 layers of material.
Our rocket took off and while doing so it emitted a lot of power which is almost more than 13000 train engines.
We entered into space. We landed on a space station that allowed us to live and work in earth’s orbit.
From our space station we could see many planets at a far distance. The sun shone very brightly like a ball of fire.
From the computers in our source station we saw the comet and how far it was.
We had machines ready to destroy the comet. But when we tried to destroy it we failed.
As I was heading back to my space station in my space ship from a failed mission, in a far distance I noticed an UFO. I got very scared.
The UFO came close to my spaceship and opened its doors. An alien got out of it.
I was very scared. But the alien was friendly. He told us that he and his team will help us destroy the comet if we help him to return to his home planet Mars as his UFO was out of fuel.
We promised him. We helped him reach Mars with the help of our rocket. His family was very happy to see him. They gave us a special lazer missile as a gift.
We used that lazer missile to destroy the comet. We saved earth. I and my team returned back to earth after our very successful mission.That’s when the school bell rang. I saw the blackboard and noticed that the teacher had explained to us about the different planets and their features.
But, I think, I learned a lot more on my magical space journey.”
“I’m blogging my #ColgateMagicalstories at BlogAdda in association with Colgate.”
By LIKHAVEER
73 people have been arrested in the racket where US citizens were cheated out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
It took just two days for J Roy (name changed) to figure out that all was not quite above board at the call centre he had just joined, having had several years' experience in business process outsourcing units or BPOs.
"It just didn't seem right," he told when he was brought to court on Monday.
Roy is among 73 men and women who have been arrested in a widespread call-centre racket busted in Thane district near Mumbai in which callers, posing as American tax agents, coerced victims in the US into paying up online after telling them that they had defaulted on their taxes. The police suspect that the roots of the racket go back to Ahmedabad and have said it could be much wider than what they have uncovered so far.
On Monday, all the arrested accused were produced before a Thane magistrate. Thirteen have been remanded to further police custody and the rest have been sent to judicial custody.
Murky business
The call centre that Roy worked at was one among more than 10 that have been raided in Thane district over the last week, starting from October 4. He had spent a month there and was due to get his salary this week, but the police swooped in on his centre.
Looking back, Roy said with a smile, he knew that “the American Internal Revenue Service doesn’t call anyone”.
With a script ready for employees that ranged from mildly threatening to downright aggressive, the goings on at these purported call centres were far from right.
The call-centre employees, posing as US Internal Revenue Service agents, would use Voice over Internet Protocol or VoIP – voice calls made using a web connection – and would tell their prospective victims that they had failed to pay their full taxes and would have to pay up or face further action. The convinced callers would make an online payment using a credit card.
Several thousand Americans – police are yet to estimate the number of victims – were conned into parting with small and large sums of money. The masterminds of the racket are still at large. The police said that about seven people had put their money into setting up these call centres and operating the racket. However, 73 mostly junior employees have been arrested so far. More than 630 are also under investigation.
The IRS regularly puts out advisories about fake calls such as the ones these centres were making. Despite this, in rented premises, the purported call centres managed to run a lucrative racket, that has fetched around Rs 500 crores in a year, according to reports.
From the script
Most of the callers were young men and women – in their 20s and 30s – who had responded to advertisements and flyers announcing openings at call centres or had heard of them through word-of-mouth. Knowledge of English was generally enough to get the job.
They were then primed with a script based on anticipated responses. Some of the conversations went like this:
Statement: Where are you calling me from?
Answer: I am calling you from the INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE HEADQUARTERS which is located in Washington DC.
Statement: Where was the miscalculation (error) found?
Answer: Well, Mr customer let me make you aware that we are calling you from the investigation departments and not from the audit department and hence we cannot help you to where did you do the mistakes (sic).
Employees were trained in how to sound menacing, and taught to ask questions like, "What is your intention now, would you like to resolve this case or are you looking for a dispute?”
Callers who asked why they had not been sent the paperwork by mail or heard about the problem earlier would be told that attempts had been made to reach them, but to no avail. They would also be told no further paperwork could be sent across as it was lying in the court house.
Those who sought to speak to their accountants would be told this meant the IRS could charge them up to $50,000 as a fine and inform their employers and the media.
An accent trainer, among those arrested last week, helped the callers work on their diction and delivery and develop what the trainer described as a “neutral sounding" accent – something that would presumably not peg them to a specific country.
The scripts also took into possible scenarios where people would not agree to pay up easily and gave instructions on how to tackle those. For instance:
Scenario 1
Answer: I have already paid the IRSCaller: What we are investigating about is the miscalculation seen in your tax filed which makes us assume your intention was to defraud to IRS and the income tax law (sic).
Scenario 2
Statement: I am not going to make any payment over the phone.Answer: …I am here to guide you so that you can go ahead and make the payment and resolve the matter outside the court house so we can go ahead and cancel the arrest warrant.”
Scenario 3
Statement: My accountant files my taxes.Answer: Well Mr Customer, let me make aware that federal government has not allow to hire any third party for your taxes (sic)… the law suit is filed against you. So you are the responsible person for it.”
Tell-tale signs
A relative said his nephew had worked in call centres before this and was trained to simply repeat what they had been taught without thinking too much. “That is how these things usually work,” he said.
For employees, however, there were several tell-tale signs. There were no formal identity badges, no work contract at the time of joining and most significantly, no salary slips. Employees were paid in cash, with salaries starting from Rs 10,000 monthly for about eight hours of work. This was alluring for school dropouts or young people from lower-middle-class families.
"We started to realise something was wrong, but everyone is tempted by money," said the relative of one of the accused. “When a young man has a steady income it is good for him and for the family.”
An employee who worked at one of the raided call centres on a night shift had not met his wife in a month before he was arrested last week. “He said to me, ‘I have to show them I am working hard,” his wife told Scroll.in. “His job was simply to supervise, he did not make calls.”
One of the accused claimed they realised something was wrong only about four or five days before the police raided the centres. Many had been working at the establishments for just a couple of months or a few weeks and were waiting for their salaries.
“Our children are also victims,” said a relative of one of the arrested accused. “They were only employees, doing as they were told.”
Big fish at large
The relative of another employee said: “The police needs to go after the masterminds, not the employees, who were the small fry.”
The police, however, believe that it is unlikely that the employees had no clue what was going on.
The police said that a team has just returned from Ahmedabad, the possible starting point of the operation.
“There are likely to be more [such fraudulent centres],” said Param Bir Singh, Thane commissioner of police.
The raids were conducted over the past week in Thane. Many of the centres were renting out premises in a single building. “It is an industry,” said a senior police official. “We have learnt so much in investigating this case.”
The three First Information Reports registered in the case so far include charges of cheating and cheating by impersonation under the Indian Penal Code and sections of the Information Technology Act, including those related to sending menacing messages.
Police conducted the raids based on tip-offs they received and also found that the call centres had been operating without the requisite permissions.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation in the US is expected to formally contact the Thane police in connection with the scam.
Police estimate that the racket was running for a year, but say that further details will only be gleaned once they nab the main accused in this case. The purported mastermind, believed to have fled the country, is a 23-year-old identified as Sagar Thakkar alias Shaggy, who has no previous criminal record, police said.
Some reports said that some “gang members” were operating from the US, but the police did not comment on this.
By SARAH WILLIAMS ! INNLIVE
PRACTICALLY EVERY WORD we use to describe a computer is a metaphor. “File,” “window,” even “memory” all stand in for collections of ones and zeros that are themselves representations of an impossibly complex maze of wires, transistors and the electrons moving through them. But when hackers go beyond those abstractions of computer systems and attack their actual underlying physics, the metaphors break.
Over the last year and a half, security researchers have been doing exactly that: honing hacking techniques that break through the metaphor to the actual machine, exploiting the unexpected behavior not of operating systems or applications, but of computing hardware itself—in some cases targeting the actual electricity that comprises bits of data in computer memory. And at the Usenix security conference earlier this month, two teams of researchers presented attacks they developed that bring that new kind of hack closer to becoming a practical threat.
Breaking Assumptions
Both of those new attacks use a technique Google researchers first demonstrated last March called “Rowhammer.” The trick works by running a program on the target computer, which repeatedly overwrites a certain row of transistors in its DRAM flash memory, “hammering” it until a rare glitch occurs: Electric charge leaks from the hammered row of transistors into an adjacent row. The leaked charge then causes a certain bit in that adjacent row of the computer’s memory to flip from one to zero or vice versa. That bit flip gives you access to a privileged level of the computer’s operating system.
It’s messy. And mind-bending. And it works.
Rowhammer and similar attacks could require both hardware and software makers to rethink defenses based on purely digital models. “Computers, like all technologies really, are built in layers that make assumptions of one another. Think of a car, assuming its wheels roll and absorb shocks, and don’t melt into goop when they get wet,” says security researcher Dan Kaminsky, who found a fundamental flaw in the Internet’s domain name system in 2008. “What’s interesting about networked technology is the fact that those assumptions can be attacked.”
Last year, Thomas Dullien (one of the inventors of the technique, perhaps better known by his hacker handle Halvar Flake) and his fellow Google researchers showed that they could use electricity leakage to flip crucial bits in the DRAM memory of a set of laptops, the first proof that charge leakage could be predictable and exploitable. Researchers in Austria and France followed up a few months later to show the attack could be enabled by javascript code running in a browser.
Those variations on Rowhammer, along with the newest ones presented at Usenix, show that the hacker world is increasingly focused on techniques that break those fundamental assumptions of computing. “Rowhammer is just scratching the surface,” says Dullien. “This has the potential to be a gigantic field of research.”
Making Rowhammer Practical and Specific
The latest attacks take Rowhammer in a new direction, applying it to cloud computing services and enterprise workstations rather than consumer PCs. One attack by a group of Ohio State researchers used the technique to hack Xen, the software used to partition computing resources on cloud servers into isolated “virtual machines” rented to customers. The hack breaks out of those virtual machines to control deeper levels of the server.
A second paper by Dutch and Belgian researchers achieves a similar effect, and also shows a new way to use Rowhammer more reliably. It exploits a feature called “memory de-duplication” that combines identical parts of virtual machines’ memory into a single place in the memory of a physical computer. On the Dell workstation the researchers tested, they could write data into the memory of a virtual machine and then use that data to locate and “hammer” the physical transistors underlying not just those bits of data, but the identical bits on someone else’s virtual machine running on the same computer.
The trick, which the researchers call “Flip Feng Shui,” allowed the group to pull off highly targeted hacks, like sabotaging an encryption key so that they could later decrypt a target’s secrets. “It’s less like a flamethrower and more like a sniper rifle,” says Ben Gras, one of the researchers at the University of Vrije who came up with it.1
A New Level of Stealth
Rowhammer is far from the only new hacking technique that exploits computers’ physical properties. Proof-of-concept malware shown off by Israeli researchers over the summer, for instance, uses the sound ofcomputers’ cooling fans orhard drive motors to transmit stolen data as audio. Another group of Israelis showed last year they could use just $300 of handheld equipment to extract encryption keys from a computer by monitoring the radio emissions leaked by its processor’s power use.
But as with Rowhammer, the most disturbing physical hacks are microscopic. University of Michigan researchers have been able to build a secret backdoor into a single cell—a collection of transistors less than a thousandth of the width of a human hair—among billions on a modern microchip. When a hacker who knows about the backdoor’s existence runs a certain program, it causes that cell to pick up charge from nearby transistors and induce a certain bit to flip, just as in the Rowhammer attacks. The result is an ultra-stealthy physical sabotage technique that’s virtually impossible to detect with digital security measures. “It’s operating outside of the Matrix,” says Matthew Hicks, one of the Michigan researchers, who described the technique to WIRED in June.
This kind of exploitation of hardware means that no software update can help. Researchers have identified one countermeasure to Rowhammer’s memory charge leakage: a feature of DRAM called “error-correcting code” constantly corrects abnormal levels of charge in any particular transistor. More widely implementing that feature in computer memory could head off current implementations of the Rowhammer attack.
But Dullien warns that DRAM is just one potential target. “Lots of things—chips, hard disks, whatever—are designed to be OK in the average case but probably not when they’re given adversarial input,” he says. “We don’t know where the next broken piece of hardware will show up. But that’s why everyone’s so excited about researching this more.” Computer scientists may soon find their machines aren’t just vulnerable in ways they haven’t considered, but in ways their digital models don’t even allow them to imagine.
1Correction 5:30 pm EST 8/31/2016: An earlier version of the story stated that the “Flip Feng Shui” technique applied to a Dell server, not a Dell workstation, and could be used to alter the generation of an encryption key, when in fact they showed it could be used to alter a pre-existing “public key” so that messages encrypted with that altered public key could be decrypted without the private key.
