3 Things You Can Do With Cortana In Windows 10

Personal assistance apps coming to the desktop was only a matter of time and the Windows 10 preview build released a few days ago gives us a look at how Cortana will work on your desktop. Integrated with the search feature that debuted with Window 10, it’s more than just a way to push people to use Bing. We took it for a spin and here are three things you do with Cortana, and a guess at what else you will be able to do with it once the feature rolls out in the final version.

1. Look Up Weather

This is a seriously old trick for personal assistant apps/features. Siri can do it, Cortana can do it on the Windows Phone, Google Now does it, you can ask Chrome to look up the weather for you and with Windows 10, all you have to do is say ‘Hey Cortana’ and ask it what the weather is.

 

2. Add A Reminder

Cortana comes with a neat Reminder feature and you can use simple voice commands like, ‘Add a reminder’ to add one. The reminder can be set for a place or for a particular time. Not only can you dictate what the reminder is for but also speak where or what time you want to be reminded. Reminders can be set to repeat. For places to work as a trigger for the reminders, you will first need to add them

 

3. Search The Web With Bing

This feature is pretty standard with most personal assistance apps and the execution is really what makes any difference. With Cortana, anything you say that it doesn’t comprehend as a command will be sent to an online search with Bing. It will use your default browser and not force you to use Internet Explorer.

These three features are currently up and running on the Windows 10 build released a few days back but there are a few commands that give us the message in the screenshot below, one of which was asking Cortana to find a place to eat. Cortana does come with a Places feature so perhaps in future updates, or as we continue to populate our favorite places, the feature might work.

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Set iPhone Screen Brightness Far Lower Than What Apple Allows [No Jailbreak]

Have you ever picked up your phone in the middle of the night to check the time or  if see you have a new message/email, only to be blinded by the screen’s brightness? It happens to the best of us. The pain aside, the light from your display might even wake someone you’re sharing a bed with while you’re busy bringing up the control center to reduce the brightness. There’s a simple little way to reduce the screen’s brightness to one far lower than what you can set from the brightness slider in Control Center and Settings. It’s actually built right into iOS and takes a little setting. Here’s how you can enable it and activate it with a little shortcut.

Go to Settings>General>Accessibility and tap the Zoom option.

Turn this feature on from the switch at the top and then tap the Zoom region option. Set it to ‘Full Screen Zoom’. Return to the previous screen and set the Maximum Zoom Level to its lowest.

 

Next, use three fingers to tap on the screen three times. You will see the following menu appear. Select the ‘Choose filter’ option and from the list of options you get, select ‘Low Light’. That’s about it. Now turn Zoom off since you won’t want to use this super low brightness option all the time. It’s time to set up a shortcut to activate it quickly.

Go to Settings>General>Accessibility and scroll down all the way to bottom where you will see the Accessibility Shortcut. Tap it and set it to enable the Zoom option or if you have it configured for something else, add Zoom to it as well.

 

You can now reduce your screen’s brightness from the Control Center to the lowest level it will allow. Then triple tap the home screen button to view the even darker display. It can go so dark that it’s barely visible. If you set the brightness to a normal level, simply enabling the Zoom option will give you a screen that’s easier on the eyes (pun intended).

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Spam Uses Default Passwords to Hack Routers

In case you needed yet another reason to change the default username and password on your wired or wireless Internet router: Phishers are sending out links that, when clicked, quietly alter the settings on vulnerable routers to harvest online banking credentials and other sensitive data from victims.

Sunnyvale, Calif. based security firm Proofpointsaid it recently detected a four-week spam campaign sent to a small number of organizations and targeting primarily Brazilian Internet users. The emails were made to look like they were sent by Brazil’s largest Internet service provider, alerting recipients about an unpaid bill. In reality, the missives contained a link designed to hack that same ISP’s router equipment.

According to Proofpoint, the link in the spam campaign led to a page that mimicked the telecom provider. The landing page included code that silently attempted to execute what’s known as a cross-site request forgery attack onknown vulnerabilities in two types of routers, UT Starcom and TP-Link. The malicious page would then invoke hidden inline frames (also known as “iframes”) that try to log in to the administration page of the victim’s router using a list of known default credentials built into these devices.

If successful, the attacker’s script would modify the domain name system (DNS) settings on the victim’s router, adding the attacker’s own DNS server as the primary server while assigning the secondary DNS server to Google’s public DNS (8.8.8.8). Such a change would allow the attackers to hijack the victim’s traffic to any Web site, redirecting it away from the legitimate site to a look-alike page designed to siphon the victim’s credentials. In the event that the attacker’s DNS server was unresponsive for any reason, the victim’s router would still function normally.

The malicious script used by the spammers in this campaign tries multiple default credentials in a bid to hijack routers with factory-default settings. Image: Proofpoint.

The real danger of attacks like these is that they bypass antivirus and other security tools, and they are likely to go undetected by the victim for long periods of time.

“There is virtually no trace of this thing except for an email,” said Kevin Epstein, vice president of advanced security and governance at Proofpoint. “And even if your average user knows to look at his router’s DNS settings, he’s unlikely to notice anything wrong or even know what his normal DNS settings should be.”

Many modern routers have built-in defenses against such attacks (including countermeasures known as CSRF tokens), but new vulnerabilities in existing routers — even recent model routers — are constantly being uncovered. I asked Proofpoint whether such protections — or security improvements built into most modern browsers — would have stopped this attack. Their experts seemed to think not.

“The routers being attacked in our example were not so diligent and so were vulnerable to this attack,” Proofpoint’s lead analyst wrote in an email response to my question. “What you’re likely thinking of is the cross-origin policy, which is designed to prevent attacks similar (but not identical) to this one (it mostly focuses on javascript). In this case, iframes are permitted by default, so modern browsers (by design) will happily participate in the attack we documented.”

In any case, I hope it’s clear by now that leaving the default credentials in place on your router is merely inviting trouble. Last month, I wrote about how the botnet used to take down Sonyand Microsoft‘s online gaming networks was built on the backs of hacked home routers that were all running factory-default administrative credentials.

If you haven’t changed the default credentials on your router, it’s time to do that. If you don’t know whether you’ve changed the default administrative credentials for your wired or wireless router, you probably haven’t. Pop on over to routerpasswords.com and look up the make and model of your router.

To see whether your credentials are the default, you’ll need to open up a browser and enter the numeric address of your router’s administration page. For most routers, this will be 192.168.1.1 or 192.168.0.1. This page lists the default internal address for most routers. 

Read more about this attack at Proofpoint’s blog post.

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New Features In Firefox 36 For Desktop And Android

Firefox 36 is out and this version is easily one of the least exciting versions ever released if you’re an end user. It’s got bug fixes and the usual security improvements but little else. The one major security improvement is that the HTTP/2 protocol is now fully supported. It has been implemented for both the desktop and Android versions of Firefox. The mobile version has also gotten a new tablet interface. The desktop version will now sync tiles for frequently visited web sites that appear on the new tab page across devices. For mobile users running Android Lollipop, Maithili language is now supported, and for desktop users support for the Uzbek language has been added.

Firefox 36 Desktop

For end users the tiles for top sites syncing across devices  is the only noteworthy change here. Before, even with Firefox sync set up, the new tab would populate with over time with the frequently visited sites instead of just using your browsing history or data from Firefox running on a different machine. Those days are now gone and when you sync Firefox, they’ll sync on their own.

Firefox Android

The only major feature here is for tablet users and that’s the new interface. It’s easier to navigate for the screen sizes that you commonly see in tablets. You’ll be able to get a better overview of open tabs and this interface lays the groundwork for more features to come (image courtesy Mozilla).

For a detailed look at the changes in Firefox for Desktop and Firefox for Android, read the release notes.

Download Firefox 36 For Desktop

Download Firefox From The Google Play Store

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Brute Force Attacks – Definition and Prevention

There are many methods hackers use to get into a computer, computer network, a website or an online service. Carrying out a Brute Force Attack is one of them. It is one of the simplest, yet time consuming method to hack a server or a normal computer. The Brute force attack mechanism has its advantages – it can also used to check network security and to recover forgotten passwords. In this post we will try and understand Brute Force Attack definition and see the basic prevention method.

Brute Force Attacks

A Brute Force Attack is a type of Cyber Attack, where you have a software spinning up different characters to create a possible password combination. The Brute Force Attack password cracker software simply uses all possible combinations to figure out passwords for a computer or a network server. It is simple and does not employ any intelligent techniques. Since it is math based, it takes less time to crack a password using brute force applications rather than figuring them out manually. I said math based because computers are good at math and perform such calculations in split seconds compared to human brains, that take it longer to create combinations.

Brute Force Attack is good or bad depending upon the person using it. It could be a cyber criminal trying to hack into a network server or it could be a network admin trying to see how secure his or her network is. Some computer users also use brute force apps to recover forgotten passwords.

Speed of computing & passwords matter during Brute Force Attacks

If you are using all lower letters and no special characters or digits, it might be a work of just 2-10 minutes before a brute force attack can crack the password. However, a combination of upper case and lower case letters along with a digit (supposing there are eight digits), will take more than 14-15 years to crack the password.

It also depends upon the speed of computer processor, as to how long it takes to crack the password of network or normal login to a Windows standalone computer.

Thus it makes a lot of sense to have a strong passwords. To create really strong passwords, you can make use of ASCII characters to create stronger passwords. ASCII characters refer to all the characters available on the keyboard and more (you can see them by pressing ALT+numbers (0-255) on Numpad). There are some 255 ASCII characters and each one has a code that is read by machine and converted to binary (0 or 1) so that it can be used with computers. For example, the ASCII code for “space” is 32. When you enter a space, the computer reads it as 32 and converts it into binary – which would be 10000. These 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 are stored as ON, OFF, OFF, OFF, OFF, OFF in the computer’s memory (that is made of electronic switches). This has nothing to do with brute force except that in case of use of all ASCII characters, if you use special characters in the password, the total time taken to crack the password could run above 100 years or so. I spoke about ASCII for people who do not know how characters are stored in computer’s memory.

Here is a link to a Brute Force Password Calculator, where you can check out how long it will take to crack a password. There are different options given that include lower case letters, upper case letters, digits, and all ASCII characters. Based on what you used in your password, select the options and click on calculate to see how difficult it would be for a Brute force attack to compromise your computer or server.

Brute Force Attack Prevention & Protection

Since no special logic is applied in brute force attacks except for trying out different combinations of characters used for creation of a password, prevention on a very basic level, is relatively easy.

Apart from using a fully updated Windows operating system and security software, you should use a strong password that has some of the following characteristics:

1. At least one upper case letter
2. At least one digit
3. At least one special character
4. The password should be minimum of 8-10 characters
5. ASCII characters, if you wish.

The lengthier a password is, the more time it will take to crack the password. If your password is something like ‘PA$$w0rd”, it will take more than a 100 years to crack it with currently available brute force attack apps. Please do not use the suggested password in example, as it is very easy to break it using some intelligent software that falls out of the realm of brute force attacks.

Our freeware PassBox is a handy little tool that will remember all your passwords and even generate strong passwords for your account – or you could use some free  online password generator to create strong passwords anonymously. Having done that, test your new password with Microsoft’s Password Checker. The Password Checker evaluates your password’s strength as you type.

If you are using WordPress website software, then there are also many WordPress security plugins that automatically block brute force attacks. Using a web firewall like Sucuri or Cloudflare is another option you can consider.  One way to block brute-force attacks is to lock out accounts after a defined number of failed password attempts. The Limit Logins WordPress plugin is good for stopping brute force attacks on your blog. Other measures include allowing logins from only select IP addresses, changing default login URLs to something else and using Captcha’s to harden your WordPress blog security.

source :thewindowsclub

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How to use Your Pen drive as a Password in Windows 7

Computers are the most important storage area to store valuable files, documents and data, etc., for any individual person or an organization. Security is also necessary for these computers. So Security is most crucial for the computing world. Admin Password is not enough to protect your PC because hackers have various ways to hack your PC or they can easily steal your valuable data.

Today we learn a cool trick that is to carry your PC password with yourself. It means using Pendrive as PC password. Yes, it is possible to carry your PC password in pendrive. You can log into your PC by using pendrive as a password. There is no need to remember your password. Simply insert your pendrive and log into your PC without any password.

The Beauty of this trick is it doesn’t need any software to install and nobody can log into your PC without inserting that pendrive. So that your data is safe and nobody can access it or harm it.

So you need a pendrive to make as a password. Now follow these steps to make pendrive as PC password:-

Pendrive as PC Password – Procedure

• First insert a USB/pendrive into a PC and start it.
• Right click on My Computer and select on Manage.
• Computer Management window is opened and select Disk Management on left-hand side of this window.

• Select your pendrive and click on Change Drive letters and paths.

• Now click on Change and Select the drive letter as A from the drop down box of change drive letter and paths window, click on OK.

• Now open Run and type syskey. Press enter

• Startup Key The startup Key window is open and select on option StoreStartup Key on Floppy Disk then press Ok.

Now your startup key is stored in pendrive and letter A is chosen forpendrive because the startup key is stored on a floppy which always represented as the letter A and B. And finally, when you start your PC you need to insert pendrive. Without Pendrive you will not able to access your computer. So keep this Pendrive as PC password Protected safe.

If you want your default setting back, then follow the same steps and just chose option Store Startup Key Locally and press OK so that you will log into your computer without pendrive.

Thank you for reading this post and you are free to ask your doubt in the comment section so that I solve your problem as soon as possible.

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How to Download from Torrents when Torrent is Block in Your Network

From Wikipedia

Tribler is an open source anonymous peer-to-peer decentralized Bit Torrent client. Tribler is based on the Bit Torrent protocol and uses an overlay network for content searching, which makes the program operate independent of external websites and renders it immune to limiting external action, for example, government restraint. Due to this overlay network Tribler does not require an external website or indexing service to discover content. The user interface of Tribler is very basic and focused on ease of use, instead of diversity of features. Tribler is available for Linux, Windows, and OS X.

First Download Tribler from here and install in your pc

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Record-breaking 1Tbps Speed achieved Over 5G Mobile Connection

New Generations usually bring new base technologies, more network capacity for more data per user, and high speed Internet service, for which Internet service providers usually advertise. However, it is believed that the fifth generation (5G Technology) of mobile network will be beyond our thoughts.

1TBPS OVER 5G

Security researchers from the University of Surrey have just achieved Record-Breaking data speeds during a recent test of 5G wireless data connections, achieving an incredible One Terabit per second (1Tbps) speed – many thousands of times faster than the existing 4G connections.

After 4G, 5G is the next generation of mobile communication technology that aims at offering far greater capacity and be faster, more energy-efficient and more cost-effective than anything that has seen before. The boffins say 5G will be different – very different.

The 5G test was conducted at the university's 5G Innovation Centre (5GIC), which was founded by a host of telecoms industry partners including Huawei, Fujitsu, Samsung, Vodafone, EE, Aircom, BT, Telefonica, Aeroflex, BBC and Rohde & Schwarz.

DOWNLOAD 100 MOVIES IN JUST 3 SECONDS

1Tbps of speeds are far faster than previously announced 5G tests – Samsung’s 7.5 gigabits per second (Gbps) record, which was 30 times faster than 4G LTE (Long-Term Evolution) speed and just less than 1% of the Surrey team's speed.

"We have developed 10 more breakthrough technologies and one of them means we can exceed 1Tbps wirelessly. This is the same capacity as fiber optics but we are doing it wirelessly," 5GIC director Prof Rahim Tafazolli told the news website V3.

With 1Tbps, it is possible to download a file 100 times the size of a feature film in just three seconds. This incredible speed is over 65,000 times faster than the current 4G download speeds.

5G EXPECTED TO ROLL OUT BY 2020

The test was carried out over a distance of 100 meters using equipment built at the university. The head of the 5GIC said he planned to demonstrate the technology to the public in 2018. It’s believed that 5G could possibly be available in the UK by 2020.

UK communications regulator Ofcom has been supportive of efforts to get 5G to the public. Ofcom previously said it expected 5G mobile should be able to deliver speeds between 10 and 50Gbps, compared with the 4G average download speed of 15 Megabits per second (Mbps).

According to Prof Tafazolli, there were hurdles to overcome before 5G would be ready, he said, "An important aspect of 5G is how it will support applications in the future. We don't know what applications will be in use by 2020, or 2030 or 2040 for that matter, but we know they will be highly sensitive to latency."

There is a need to bring "end-to-end latency down to below one millisecond" in order to enable latest technologies and applications which would just not be possible with 4G. Tafazolli mentioned 3D holographic chess games on smartphones, controlling connected cars over 5G and other possible future applications requiring such low latency.

5G – NEW FRONTIER FOR CYBER ATTACKS

5G will, no doubt, provide a high speed Internet connectivity that would be really a great news for all, but that would be a distinction for cyber criminals as well. In Future, by leveraging 5G technology, it would be very easy for hackers and cybercriminals to take down almost any website on the Internet using Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.

In Era of expected 50Gbps Internet speed at home or business, there would be no need for cyber criminals to make a critical infrastructure of botnets by compromising hundreds of thousands of devices, rather they only need few devices with 5G Internet connection to launch the ever largest DDoS attack of around 1 Tbps.

To resolve such issues in future, High speed Internet service providers and online communications service providers need to setup real time monitoring, reporting, limiting, and mitigation and protection mechanism against DDoS attacks in an attempt to protect online users.

SOURCE :thehackernews

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Tor Browser 4.0.4 Released

Tor — a privacy oriented encrypted anonymizing service, has announced the launch of its next version of Tor Browser Bundle, i.e. Tor version 4.0.4, mostly supposed to improve the built-in utilities, privacy and security of online users on the Internet.

Tor Browser helps users to browse the Internet in a complete anonymous way. The powerful Tor Browser Bundle, an anonymous web browser developed by the Tor Project, received some updates in its software.

Tor Browser Bundle is basically an Internet browser based on Mozilla Firefox configured to protect the users’ anonymity via Tor and Vidalia. The anonymity suite also includes 3 Firefox extensions: Torbutton, NoScript and HTTPS-Everywhere.

NEW FEATURES

The latest version, Tor Browser Bundle 4.0.4, has been recently released, with a few number of new features:

• Updated to Firefox to 31.5.0esr with important security updates.
• Update OpenSSL to 1.0.1l
• Update NoScript to 2.6.9.15
• Update HTTPS-Everywhere to 4.0.3

BUG FIXES

• Meanwhile, the new Tor version 4.0.4 also include some bugfixes:
• Bug 14203: Prevent meek from displaying an extra update notification
• Bug 14849: Remove new NoScript menu option to make permissions permanent
• Bug 14851: Set NoScript pref to disable permanent permissions

"A new release for the stable Tor Browser is available from the Tor Browser Project page and also from ourdistribution directory," states the Tor project team.

Tor is generally thought to be a place where users come online to hide their activities and remain anonymous. Tor is an encrypted anonymizing network considered to be one of the most privacy oriented service and is mostly used by activists, journalists to circumvent online censorship and surveillance efforts by various countries.

However, late last year we have seen large scale cyber attack on Tor network that quietly seized some of its network specialized servers called Directory Authorities (DA), the servers that help Tor clients to find Tor relays in the anonymous network service.

On the other end of the side, last month 12 high-capacity Tor Middle relays was launched by the Polaris — a new initiative by Mozilla, the Tor Project and the Center of Democracy and Technology — in order to help build more privacy controls into technology. The addition of high-capacity Tor middle relays to the Tor network helps reduce finite number of Tor connections occurring at the same time.

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What Does the “+” in Supported DDR4 RAM Memory Types Mean?

If you are preparing to replace hardware in your computer or build one of your own, then some of the supported memory types shown for motherboards may be a bit confusing. What does the “+” that is sometimes shown for DDR4 RAM really mean? Today’s SuperUser Q&A post has the answer to a confused reader’s question.

Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites.

Photo courtesy of Tecnomovida Caracas (Flickr).

The Question

SuperUser reader Karl Richter wants to know what the “+” in supported DDR4 RAM memory types means:

Some motherboard producers add a “+” to the specification of supported memory types (i.e. ASRock X99 Extreme 3 supports DDR4-3000+). Does DDR4-3000+ somehow differ from DDR4-3000? The Wikipedia article on DDR-SDRAM does not contain the “+” or mention anything related. I do not see the difference reflected in selection filters when browsing online stores either.

What does the “+” in supported DDR4 RAM memory types mean?

The Answer

SuperUser contributor Yass has the answer for us:

The “+” usually indicates that the motherboard supports RAM with a frequency of over 3000 MHz. The OC in brackets means that the motherboard allows the RAM to be over-clocked. The caveats being that you may need to increase the voltage and/or the timings in order to accommodate the higher frequency.

This article provides a good explanation of memory timings (i.e. 9-9-9-24):

Memory Timings/Latency Explained

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What is the Difference Between BIOS and Firmware?

When a person is just getting into computers, there is a lot of new vocabulary to learn and sometimes it can all get a bit confusing. Take the terms BIOS and Firmware, for instance, do they mean the same thing or are they different? Today’s SuperUser Q&A post comes to the rescue to help a confused reader with terminology.

Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites.

Photo courtesy of John C Bullas (Flickr).

The Question

SuperUser reader Koray Tugay wants to know what the difference between BIOS and Firmware is:

Could anyone elaborate on what the difference between BIOS and Firmware is please?

What is the difference between BIOS and Firmware?

The Answer

SuperUser contributors malakrsnaslava and Tonny have the answer for us. First up, malakrsnaslava:

BIOS is Firmware for computers. As you continue to read and learn about computers, you will gain understanding about BIOS, UEFI, EFI, and so on.

BIOS is an acronym for Basic Input/Output System and also known as System BIOS, ROM BIOS, or PC BIOS. It is a type of Firmware used during the booting process (power-on/start up) on IBM PC compatible computers. BIOS Firmware is built into PCs, and it is the first software they run when powered on. The name itself originates from the Basic Input/Output System used in the CP/M operating system in 1975.

Firmware is a combination of persistent memory, program code, and the data stored in it. Typical examples of devices containing Firmware are embedded systems such as traffic lights, consumer appliances, digital watches, computers, computer peripherals, mobile phones, and digital cameras. The Firmware contained in these devices provides the control program for the device.

Followed by the answer from Tonny:

As others have already stated, BIOS is the specific name for the motherboard Firmware in older PCs. New computers these days have a technically and somewhat different kind of Firmware called UEFI or EFI.

Please note that any computer will also contain other Firmware (besides BIOS/UEFI/EFI). Network cards, video cards, raid controllers, hard-drives, flash drives, SSDs, and sound cards (just to name a few) can all have Firmware embedded inside.

Weirdly enough, the Firmware for video cards is often called video BIOS. This is technically incorrect. BIOS is only appropriate for referring to the start up Firmware of the motherboard itself.

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What Is Spoofing Technology

The word "spoof" means to hoax, trick, or deceive. Therefore, in the IT world, spoofing refers tricking or deceiving computer systems or other computer users. This is typically done by hiding one's identity or faking the identity of another user on the Internet.

Spoofing can take place on the Internet in several different ways. One common method is through

E-mail spoofing involves sending messages from a bogus e-mail address or faking the e-mail address of another user. Fortunately, most e-mail servers have security features that prevent unauthorized users from sending messages. However, spammers often send spammessages from their own SMTP,which allows them to use fake e-mail addresses. Therefore, it is possible to receive e-mail from an address that is not the actual address of the person sending the message.

Another way spoofing takes place on the Internet is via IP spoofing. This involves masking the IP address of a certain computer system. By hiding or faking a computer's IP address, it is difficult for other systems to determine where the computer is transmitting data from. Because IP spoofing makes it difficult to track the source of a transmission, it is often used in denial-of-service attacks that overload a server. This may cause the server to either crash or become unresponsive to legitimate requests. Fortunately, software security systems have been developed that can identify denial-of-service attacks and block their transmissions.

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What is HTTP/2 ? Next-Gen Protocol For Faster and Safer Internet

Good news for Internet folks! Get Ready as the entire web you know is about to change. The new and long-awaited version of HTTP took a major step toward becoming a reality on Wednesday – It is been officially finalized and approved.

Mark Nottingham, chairman of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) working group behind creating the standards, announced in a blog post that the HTTP 2.0 specifications have been formally approved. Now, the specifications will go through a last formality – Request for comment and editorial processes – before being published as a standard.

LARGEST CHANGE IN HTTP OVER LAST 16 YEARS

HTTP, or Hypertext Transfer Protocol, is one of the web standards familiar to most as the http:// at the beginning of a web address. HTTP protocol governs the connections between a user’s browser and the server hosting a website, invented by the father of the web Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

HTTP/2 is simply an update to the protocol, but is really a huge deal because the last time the HTTP specification was updated back in 1999. This means the HTTP/2 will be the first major update to the HTTP standard over the last 16 years, marking the largest change since 1999 when HTTP 1.1 was adopted that underpins the World Wide Web as we know it today.

HTTP/2 promises to deliver Web pages to browsers faster, allowing online users to read more pages, buy more things and perform more and faster Internet searches.

WHAT IS HTTP/2 ?

HTTP/2 is based on SPDY protocol, a protocol introduced by Google in 2009 and adopted by some technologies including Google's own Chrome browser, Mozilla's Firefox, Microsoft's Internet Explorer, many websites such as Facebook, and some of the software that delivers Web pages to browsers.

SPDY (fittingly pronounced "speedy") was designed to speed up the loading of web pages and the browsing experience of the online users. Both SPDY and HTTP/2 use "header field compression" and "multiplexing" to let browsers make multiple requests to web servers via a single connection.

“HTTP/2 uses multiplexing to allow many messages to be interleaved together on a connection at the same time, so that one large response (or one that takes a long time for the server to think about) doesn't block others,” Nottingham said.

BROWSE EVERYTHING FASTER

HTTP/2 won’t replace the traditional web standard what the world knows and loves, but it is expected to help websites load faster and more securely once it’s adopted a wide scale.

"Making HTTP/2 succeed means that it has to work with the existing web. So, this effort is about getting the HTTP we know on the wire in a better way, not changing what the protocol means," Nottingham wrote in a blog post last month.

PUSHES ENCRYPTION

HTTP 2.0 also brings another big change – Encryption. It was originally planned to push encryption technology called TLS (Transport Layer Security, formerly called SSL for Secure Sockets) in HTTP/2, but this was rejected because of inconvenience to certain network operators and proxy vendors by burdening them with new standards.

However, when Firefox and Chrome developers said that they won't support HTTP/2 unless it does support encryption. Therefore, Nottingham says, sites that want to get the benefit of faster browsing "will need to use TLS if they want to interoperate with the broadest selection of browsers."

WHEN WILL USERS GET HTTP/2 ?

As the specification of the HTTP/2 standard is finalized and approved, after going through some editorial processes HTTP/2 will be published and ready for adoption.

Well, to enjoy HTTP/2 on Internet depends on websites, hosting services and companies such as Google to implement the standard. For its part, Google already announced that it will adopt HTTP/2 in Chrome by early 2016. Users can also expect Firefox to follow suit, as well. More information is available in the HTTP/2 FAQ.

source :thehackernews

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