PTCL Doubles DSL Speed for 1 Mbps Users: ProPakistani

PTCL Doubles DSL Speed for 1 Mbps Users
Pakistan Government to Expand Cyber Crime Wing
Mobilink Jazz Offers Encyclopedia Services
History of Symbian and its Flight to Dead Pool
Asia Runs Out of IPv4 Addresses
Google Updates Satellite Imagery For Pakistan
Nokia’s Mobile Email Service Faces a Ban in India
Cyber Crime Rises Rapidly in Pakistan
WordPress, Joomla and Drupal [Preview]

Posted: 18 Apr 2011 10:34 AM PDT

PTCL Doubles DSL Speed for 1 Mbps Users is a post from: ProPakistani

PTCL logo1 PTCL Doubles DSL Speed for 1 Mbps Users Pakistan Telecommunication Company LTD (PTCL) has upgraded its 1 mbps connections to 2 mbps for all its existing and new broadband customers, said a company statement issued today.

Under the newly announced package, the 1 mbps connection has been powered up to 2 mbps for the same price of Rs. 1199 per month offering the experience of 2mbps speed to its customers for the rate of 1mbps.

This automatic up-gradation, which started rolling out back in January 2011 is valid for three months from Today (April 18th, 2011). After that period, if desired, the customers can switch back to 1 mbps by dialing 1236 and confirming it with the representative, or he/she can continue with 2 mbps speed with added charges.

SEVP commercial Naveed Saeed viewed this upgradation as a great pleasure for Pakistan Telecommunication Company to provide PTCL customers with an experience of 2mbps speed for the price of 1mbps. He stated:

"This upgradation supports our aim to provide uninterrupted service to all our existing and new customers at extremely affordable rates. This newly offered data rate will have an added effect of segmenting our customers.

Keeping in mind the needs of PTCL customers, we will introduce more such offers to facilitate the users in future; PTCL has always and will always strive to provide its customers with the best and most affordable services."

PTCL Broadband packages now available for customers

1Mb @Rs 1,199
2Mb @Rs 1,499
4Mb @Rs 1,999
6Mb @Rs 4,999
8Mb @Rs 6,999
10Mb @Rs 9,999

Note: PTCL offers wi-fi routers for wireless internet with additional rental of Rs. 200 per month. However, this service has no extra cost for broadband customers having Smart TV.

Pakistan Government to Expand Cyber Crime Wing

Posted: 18 Apr 2011 04:56 AM PDT

Pakistan Government to Expand Cyber Crime Wing is a post from: ProPakistani

The government has decided to expand the National resource centre for cyber crime andit will be made a permanent part of the FIA (Federal Investigation Agency).

According to a news report in The Dawn on April 17, Government Central developmentworking has allocated 468.667 million rupees for the second phase of the project.

A good chunk of the above money, 10 million will be spent on creating awareness in the publicthrough seminars, workshops and other events.

In the first phase, three wings will be set up in the following cities:

Peshawar
Quetta
Rawalpindi

Reported earlier, Cyber crime is on the rise in Pakistan and only 10percent of this crime got reported and 90 percent goes unchecked. There is a strong need for efficient legislation to check cyber crime in Pakistan that must reach to the very accused who iscommitting crime and must be dealt with an iron hand.

Earlier, the ordinance for the prevention for cyber crime 2007 was lapsed in Nov, 2009 afterrepetitive lives and a draft law was presented before the National Assembly committee forreview. However, some law makers have expressed their fear that law-enforcement personnelmay misuse their powers under this proposed legislation. The government should also keep thisview in tact before finalizing any such law.

Mobilink Jazz Offers Encyclopedia Services

Posted: 18 Apr 2011 04:41 AM PDT

Mobilink Jazz Offers Encyclopedia Services is a post from: ProPakistani

Mobilink Jazz has introduced a new service called Jazz Encyclopedia which provides a vast knowledge-base and extensive learning experiences – all on the customers' mobile phones. So, if a question pops up in your mind, there is no need to wait till you get near a computer or open a book. Jazz Encyclopaedia can answer that for you.

As per Mobilink, Jazz Encyclopedia will send the answer in 15 minutes max.

How to use?

Subscriber has to send an SMS containing his/her query to 8889

Service Charges:

Rs. 5 + tax per SMS will be charged for using the Jazz Encyclopedia application.

How it Works?

Send any query by SMS to 8889 and Jazz Encyclopedia will search its database and respond immediately with the answer. If the answer is not found in the database or the internet, then the question will be sent to specially designated Knowledge-Agents who are available 24/7. Once verified by these agents through manual search, the answer will be sent to the customer immediately. While the answer is being searched for; the user will receive an SMS, saying that the application is still processing the request.
For Example:

If the user sends an SMS to 8889, asking; "1992 ka cricket World-Cup kaun jeeta tha?

The application will instantly reply through an SMS from 8889, saying: "Dear user, we have received your request. You will receive an answer within the next 10-15 minutes. Thank you for using Jazz Encyclopedia".

After a few minutes, another SMS containing the answer will be sent from 8889 to the user, saying: "1992 ka cricket World cup Pakistan jeeta tha. Thank you for using Jazz Encyclopedia".

History of Symbian and its Flight to Dead Pool

Posted: 17 Apr 2011 10:10 PM PDT

History of Symbian and its Flight to Dead Pool is a post from: ProPakistani

World's most widely used operating system, till date, Symbian evolved from EPOC, a 22 years old term, and is now being planned to put into dead pool, for good.

Back in time, Psion developed a family of graphical operating systems for portable devices by the name of EPOC back in late 1980's. EPOC name was derived from epoch meaning 'The beginning of a distinctive period in the history of someone or something' or the beginning of an era.

The EPOC32 a 32bit graphical multitasking OS developed by Psion in 1997 under the codename 'Protea' resulted in the formation of Symbian Limited in June 1998 together with Nokia, Ericsson & Motorola. Consequently the OS EPOC was renamed to Symbian Operating System.

In 2000 Ericsson released the first ever Symbian handset the R380, a touchscreen phone, based on Symbian OS 5.1.

clip image002 History of Symbian and its Flight to Dead Pool

The R380 user interface (Source: Sony Ericsson)

And form here the new era began, with multiple revisions for Symbian.

Symbian OS 6.0 also called ER6 (EPOC Release 6, previous release was 5) was released in 2001.

EPOC32 supported the development of separate clip image004 History of Symbian and its Flight to Dead Pool Graphical User Interface (GUI's) & the same functionality was ported to Symbian, this resulted in three major User Interfaces being developed; S60 by Nokia, UIQ by Motorola & Sony Ericsson & MOAP(S) by NTT DoCoMo.

From this version on users had the ability to install applications on their phones. The first phone to ship with the S60 UI & Symbian OS 6.1 was the Nokia 7650; it was the first 2.5G phone and had a camera & light sensor.

Some of the features of Symbian OS 6 included Bluetooth, IrDA & External memory support, XHTML, MMS, Java MIDP 1.0, SMTP, IMAP4, and POP3 capabilities.

clip image0071 History of Symbian and its Flight to Dead Pool Symbian OS 7.0 was released in 2003; it added support for Java MIDP 2.0. Besides that the ability to have multiple simultaneous network connections was added (browsing & emailing at the same time) & the ability to select a network connection based on quality of service.

Multimedia performance was also improved with support for multi-threaded media applications e.g. Games, Media Players.

Around 1.18 million Symbian phones were shipped in Q1 2003 compared to 2 million shipped in 2002 as a whole.

Nokia's user interface S60 2nd Edition and 2nd Edition feature pack 1 (FP1) were based on this version.

Symbian OS 8.0 was released in 2004. At that time phones normally had two processors/chips, one to handle the communications and the other to handle the operating clip image010 History of Symbian and its Flight to Dead Pool system and user data or had two operating systems, one for the radio part and the other handled user's data.

Symbian 8.0 was capable of handling both by itself.

This helped reduce the cost of Symbian handsets & made it the first major mobile phone OS to boast this capability.

Other improvements included enhanced multimedia capabilities, better Java support, OpenGL ES & SDIO (meaning SD memory expansion & support for technologies like DVB-H & fingerprint recognition).

Nokia's first N-Series phone the N90 is based on version 8.1. S60 2^nd Edition FP2 and FP3 were based on version 8.0 & 8.1.

clip image013 History of Symbian and its Flight to Dead Pool

Symbian OS 9.1 was release in early 2005 but version 9.0 was not intended for general public.

In version 9.1 and consequent upgrades more security features were added. Other enhancements include HSDPA and built-in WiFi & Bluetooth 2.0 support, ability to receive IP calls over WiFi.

Version 9.4 added significant performance improvements.

S60 3^rd Edition was based on 9.1, 3^rd Edition FP1 on 9.2 & FP2 on 9.3. S60 5^th Edition or Symbian^1 (S^1) is based on version 9.4.

Symbian OS 9.5 is the latest version of the Symbian operating system series, announced March 2007. It requires 20-30% fewer RAM & reduced startup time for OS & applications.

Some more facts:

The Symbian^3 (S^3) user interface was announced in February 2010.
The Symbian Platform was created with code contributed by Symbian Ltd. (the makers of Symbian OS), Nokia (it's S60 UI), NTT DoCoMo & Sony Ericsson.
In 2008 Nokia bought Symbian Ltd. becoming the major contributor of code to the Symbian Platform.
The Symbian Foundation was launched in April 2009 with the objective to make Symbian open source.
In November 2010 Nokia took responsibility of the Symbian platform as the Foundation announced that it will just be a licensing body with no role in the development activities.

Symbian Anna

With the launch of Nokia X7 and E6 came the new version of the Symbian called Anna.

According to vision mobile approx. 446 million Symbian OS phones have been shipped as of H2 2010. The future of the OS that lived with us all these years & powered the best media phones of its time is unknown as Nokia has decided to partner with Microsoft to use Windows as base OS for its smartphones.

Asia Runs Out of IPv4 Addresses

Posted: 17 Apr 2011 10:08 PM PDT

Asia Runs Out of IPv4 Addresses is a post from: ProPakistani

The Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) has announced that has reached stage three or final stage of IPv4 exhaustion in Asia Pacific, which means that it has released almost all of Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) addresses in its available pool.

IPv4 Exhaustion Stage 3 starts when APNIC reaches its last /8 of available IPv4 address space. At this stage, all new and existing APNIC account holders will be allotted a maximum allocation of a /22 from the Final /8 address space.

APNIC has said that it will prioritize new entrants and those deploying IPv6 for remaining IPv4 addresses.

This way Asia Pacific has become the first region to reach this stage of exhaustion, due to notably high telephony and internet growth and hence the demand for IPs in the region.

Last year, PTA had estimated that IPv4 addresses in Pakistan will exhaust in 2014, which now looks little incorrect, based on above mentioned facts.

APNIC and PTA have been encouraging ISPs to move their systems to IPv6, however, the progress in this regard (in Pakistan) is not very impressive. This marks as a warning call for all ISPs in the country to speed up their pace for moving to IPv6 addresses.

To know more about IPv4 exhaustion and tranistion to IPv6 addresses you can click this or this link.

Google Updates Satellite Imagery For Pakistan

Posted: 17 Apr 2011 10:07 PM PDT

Google Updates Satellite Imagery For Pakistan is a post from: ProPakistani

Google has updated satellite imagery for Pakistan (and many other countries) to be visible in Google Earth and Google Maps. Google has said that these updated images will be made available to Google Maps Mobile and Google Map Maker very soon.

A large size of area received high resolution imagery update in Pakistan. See following screen-shot taken from Google Maps which marks the imagery updated areas for Pakistan in red rectangular.

imgeryupdate Google Updates Satellite Imagery For Pakistan

Via Geography.PK

Nokia’s Mobile Email Service Faces a Ban in India

Posted: 17 Apr 2011 10:05 PM PDT

Nokia’s Mobile Email Service Faces a Ban in India is a post from: ProPakistani

The Indian government has asked Nokia to pull the plugs for its push-email service in the country until it provided the government all the the necessary facilities to monitor messages being sent from and to Nokia handsets.

The move follows the similar demands on the Blackberry messaging platform, which is still being argued by the company as to how it can comply with the government demands.

"In view of the Intelligence Bureau’s report, Department of Telecommunications is requested to advice the Telecom Service Providers not to launch Nokia’s proposed pushmail/powermail service without putting in place monitoring facilities to the satisfaction of the LEAs," Ministry of Home Affairs said in a communication to Department of Telecom.

It is estimated that around half of Nokia’s E-Series phones sold in India have the push email service activated at the point of sale.

Via Cellular News

Cyber Crime Rises Rapidly in Pakistan

Posted: 17 Apr 2011 10:04 PM PDT

Cyber Crime Rises Rapidly in Pakistan is a post from: ProPakistani

The cyber crimes of various types in Pakistan have increased in numbers by five times over the past four years, reported CRI, citing cyber crime investigation officials.

Quoting a Cyber Crime Unit (CCU) offical, newswire reported that 62 cases were reported to the unit in 2007, 287 cases in 2008 and the ratio dropped in 2009 but in 2010 more than 312 cases were registered in different categories of cyber crimes.

According the officials, these registered cases are even less than 10 percent of actual crimes, while other crimes go un-reported, due to lack of awareness and the law.

There are a number of cyber crimes in Pakistan mainly including cyber pornography, sale of illegal articles, online gambling, intellectual property crimes, email spoofing, cyber stalking, forgery, unauthorized access to computer systems/networks, theft of information contained in electronic form, virus attacks, Trojan attacks, Internet time theft, password cracking and financial cyber crimes (hacking of ATM card numbers and bank accounts).

Via CriEnglish

WordPress, Joomla and Drupal [Preview]

Posted: 17 Apr 2011 10:00 PM PDT

WordPress, Joomla and Drupal [Preview] is a post from: ProPakistani

If you are a novice to CMSes and want to proceed, it is worth taking a look at popular CMS (Content management systems) key features. By the way, you don't have to be a HTML expert for launching a basic website with cookie-cutter CMS solutions.

Three most popular content management systems are WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. Following are the key features of these three CMS in brief:

clip image0022 WordPress, Joomla and Drupal [Preview] WordPress:

WordPress is in fact most popular and easy to use blogging CMS. It offers a wide variety of themes both free and paid. Even a novice can handle it and use and customize it effectively for both publishing and updating content online.

First released in May 2003 by Matt Mullenweg, its version 3.0 has been downloaded over 32.5 million times.

WordPress has many interesting features including a plug-in architecture and a template system.

WordPress is being used by over 13% of the 1,000,000 biggest websites. In 2009, WordPress won the best open source CMS award.

Joomla:

Joomla literally meaning "Total" or "altogether" is another open source CMS for publishing content online. It has features like page caching, RSS feeds, news flashes and support for language internationalization.

Joomla is written in PHP and uses object oriented programming (OOP) techniques.

Though its stable release held in March 2011 it is in market since 2007. More than 21 million downloads of Joomla reported between March 2007 and Feb 2011. There are over 6000 free and commercial plug-ins available from the Joomla extension directory.

Joomla is ideal for fantastic looking website designs.

Drupal:

Drupal, a CMS released in Jan 2001 offers a sophisticated programming interface for developers; however no skills are required for basic website installation and administration.

Drupal presentation layer allows designers to create highly usable, interactive experiences that engage users and increase traffic. Drupal themes offer a wide variety and support rich customization. Major Drupal sites include whitehouse.gov and data.gov.uk.

Majority of people in blogging world in Pakistan may not know much about the Joomla and Drupal as WordPress is dominant CMS as it offers almost every thing for bloggers and it is as easy to use and customize.

While Joomla is making a name for itself in recent months with its greater advertising campaign but it will certainly take some time before it can replace the WordPress as no.1 CMS.