Railway Minister launches SMS-based ticket booking system

Keeping in mind the high mobile phone penetration in India, the railways on Friday launched an SMS-based ticketing system aimed at improving customer convenience.

Launching the service, being run as a pilot project, Railway Minister Mallikarjun Kharge said it will also help the transporter deal with the touts who fleece the passengers.

"This service will be particularly useful for labourers and workers staying away from their homes and who have to book tickets to travel to their native place," said Kharge, adding: "While internet access in India is only about 10 per cent, more than 80 per cent people in the country use mobile phones."

Online booking of tickets is now around 45 percent of total reserved tickets and has eased the rush at booking counters, he said.

However, the real test of the service will be payment options available on the mobile phone as users will have to get an account opened through a bank or an agency approved by the Reserve Bank of India, said officials.

Railway Board Chairman Vinay Mittal said the service will be improved further with provision of more payment options, a user-friendly interface and value added services like alerts and updates.

He said payment through mobile phones was still evolving and banks are working on providing a safe, secured and quick payment mechanism.

As the payment options mature and users get accustomed to SMS based booking, it has the potential of overtaking bookings through internet as well as the booking counters, he said.

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How Email Works

In this diagram, the sender is a human being using their company account to send an email to someone at a different company.

Step A: Sender creates and sends an email

The originating sender creates an email in their Mail User Agent (MUA) and clicks 'Send'. The MUA is the application the originating sender uses to compose and read email, such as Eudora, Outlook, etc.

Step B: Sender's MDA/MTA routes the email

The sender's MUA transfers the email to a Mail Delivery Agent (MDA). Frequently, the sender's MTA also handles the responsibilities of an MDA. Several of the most common MTAs do this, including sendmail and qmail (which Kavi uses).
The MDA/MTA accepts the email, then routes it to local mailboxes or forwards it if it isn't locally addressed.
In our diagram, an MDA forwards the email to an MTA and it enters the first of a series of "network clouds," labeled as a "Company Network" cloud.

Step C: Network Cloud

An email can encounter a network cloud within a large company or ISP, or the largest network cloud in existence: the Internet. The network cloud may encompass a multitude of mail servers, DNS servers, routers, lions, tigers, bears (wolves!) and other devices and services too numerous to mention. These are prone to be slow when processing an unusually heavy load, temporarily unable to receive an email when taken down for maintenance, and sometimes may not have identified themselves properly to the Internet through the Domain Name System (DNS) so that other MTAs in the network cloud are unable to deliver mail as addressed. These devices may be protected by firewalls, spam filters and malware detection software that may bounce or even delete an email. When an email is deleted by this kind of software, it tends to fail silently, so the sender is given no information about where or when the delivery failure occurred.
Email service providers and other companies that process a large volume of email often have their own, private network clouds. These organizations commonly have multiple mail servers, and route all email through a central gateway server (i.e., mail hub) that redistributes mail to whichever MTA is available. Email on these secondary MTAs must usually wait for the primary MTA (i.e., the designated host for that domain) to become available, at which time the secondary mail server will transfer its messages to the primary MTA.

Step D: Email Queue

The email in the diagram is addressed to someone at another company, so it enters an email queue with other outgoing email messages. If there is a high volume of mail in the queue—either because there are many messages or the messages are unusually large, or both—the message will be delayed in the queue until the MTA processes the messages ahead of it.

Step E: MTA to MTA Transfer

When transferring an email, the sending MTA handles all aspects of mail delivery until the message has been either accepted or rejected by the receiving MTA.
As the email clears the queue, it enters the Internet network cloud, where it is routed along a host-to-host chain of servers. Each MTA in the Internet network cloud needs to "stop and ask directions" from the Domain Name System (DNS) in order to identify the next MTA in the delivery chain. The exact route depends partly on server availability and mostly on which MTA can be found to accept email for the domain specified in the address. Most email takes a path that is dependent on server availability, so a pair of messages originating from the same host and addressed to the same receiving host could take different paths. These days, it's mostly spammers that specify any part of the path, deliberately routing their message through a series of relay servers in an attempt to obscure the true origin of the message.
To find the recipient's IP address and mailbox, the MTA must drill down through the Domain Name System (DNS), which consists of a set of servers distributed across the Internet. Beginning with the root nameservers at the top-level domain (.tld), then domain nameservers that handle requests for domains within that .tld, and eventually to nameservers that know about the local domain.

DNS resolution and transfer process

• There are 13 root servers serving the top-level domains (e.g., .org, .com, .edu, .gov, .net, etc.). These root servers refer requests for a given domain to the root name servers that handle requests for that tld. In practice, this step is seldom necessary.
• The MTA can bypass this step because it has already knows which domain name servers handle requests for these .tlds. It asks the appropriate DNS server which Mail Exchange (MX) servers have knowledge of the subdomain or local host in the email address. The DNS server responds with an MX record: a prioritized list of MX servers for this domain.
  An MX server is really an MTA wearing a different hat, just like a person who holds two jobs with different job titles (or three, if the MTA also handles the responsibilities of an MDA). To the DNS server, the server that accepts messages is an MX server. When is transferring messages, it is called an MTA.
  
• The MTA contacts the MX servers on the MX record in order of priority until it finds the designated host for that address domain.
• The sending MTA asks if the host accepts messages for the recipient's username at that domain (i.e., username@domain.tld) and transfers the message.

Step F: Firewalls, Spam and Virus Filters

The transfer process described in the last step is somewhat simplified. An email may be transferred to more than one MTA within a network cloud and is likely to be passed to at least one firewall before it reaches it's destination.
An email encountering a firewall may be tested by spam and virus filters before it is allowed to pass inside the firewall. These filters test to see if the message qualifies as spam or malware. If the message contains malware, the file is usually quarantined and the sender is notified. If the message is identified as spam, it will probably be deleted without notifying the sender.
Spam is difficult to detect because it can assume so many different forms, so spam filters test on a broad set of criteria and tend to misclassify a significant number of messages as spam, particularly messages from mailing lists. When an email from a list or other automated source seems to have vanished somewhere in the network cloud, the culprit is usually a spam filter at the receiver's ISP or company. This explained in greater detail in Virus Scanning and Spam Blocking.

Delivery

In the diagram, the email makes it past the hazards of the spam trap...er...filter, and is accepted for delivery by the receiver's MTA. The MTA calls a local MDA to deliver the mail to the correct mailbox, where it will sit until it is retrieved by the recipient's MUA.

RFCs

Documents that define email standards are called "Request For Comments (RFCs)", and are available on the Internet through the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) website. There are many RFCs and they form a somewhat complex, interlocking set of standards, but they are a font of information for anyone interested in gaining a deeper understanding of email.

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How Internet Search Engine Works

SEARCH ENGINE OPERATION

There are three major functions for which the search engines are known for: index building and crawling, relevance calculation to provide results and result serving.

Crawling and indexing

The World Wide Web can be determined as a big city subway system with numerous stops. And, these stops are the unique documents ranging from html pages to jpg files to pdf files to mp4 files and others. The search engine’s basic requirement is the availability of the paths through which they can make interconnection between the various documents and these paths are the links.

The automated robots of the search engines better known as the Crawlers or Spiders make an access to the millions of the documents. Once, the search pages are found, the code from these are deciphered by the crawlers following which these codes get stored in the hard drives to be recalled when a search term is entered. Constructed data centers of the search engines are present all over the world, which makes the task of storing billions of pages.

Search engines work hard to provide the search results which are provided in a span of 1-2 secs which is possible because of the thousands of machines which process the large quantities of information.

Providing the results

Search engines are rightly designated as the answer machines. When an online search is made, then two important tasks are performed by these search engines, narrow the search results to show only those pages which are relevant for the search and rank the search results based on their popularity and the traffic.

Here comes the SEO which make the pages both relevant and important. In the initial days search results were only based on the simple word matching which was not very relevant, but nowadays these search engines are much advanced and have hundreds of factors to narrow the searches which make the results very relevant.

Important determination by the search engines

Basically, the important determination nowadays is basically based on the popularity. The more valuable the information contained in a document, the more popular it is. The search engines use metrics to determine popularity which show more satisfying results.

The search engines make use of the carefully crafted mathematical equations, algorithms, and other methods to sort out relevant pages from the billions of pages and rank them accordingly.

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Hacker VS Programmer

1. A hacker beats the system.
A programmer maintains the system.

2. A hacker is trying to get in.
A programmer is trying to stop things getting in.

3. A hacker does things because he believes in them.
A programmer does what he is supposed to.

4. A hacker changes the way things are.
A programmer tries to keep the status quo.

5. A hacker is agile.
A programmer is a small cog in a big slow machine.

6. A hacker has many points of attack.
A programmer has one job.

7. A hacker has to be fast.
A programmer doesn’t.

8. A hacker is self-reliant.
A programmer relies on others.

9. A hacker finds paths that don’t exist.
A programmer guards the old ones that already do.

10. A hacker is about being interesting.
A programmer is about being perfect.

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Airtel, Google team up to provide free mobile Internet to subscribers

Bharti Airtel said it has partnered with Google to launch a service ‘Free Zone’, wherein subscribers will be able to access Google services such as Gmail, Google+ and Google search on their mobile phones without any data cost.  The users, however, have to pay for advanced services such as attachment downloads, the company said in a statement.

“…Free Zone powered by Google, will give Airtel mobile customers access to mobile web search and feature phone friendly versions of Gmail and Google+ in India. The first page of a website linked from search results is provided at no data cost,” Airtel said.

The company added when users leave the Free Zone to navigate deeper into a website or download an attachment they are informed about the data charges and given the option to purchase an appropriate data package.


Airtel logo is seen in this file photo. Screengrab.

“In this market, where feature phones predominate, our association with Google to bring Free Zone to India will encourage millions of users to discover the power of mobile Internet for the very first time and leverage the amazing world of information search, email and social collaboration – at no incremental cost,” Bharti Airtel Chief Marketing Officer (Consumer Business) N Rajaram said.

Users can have unlimited access to Gmail from their mobile browser but if they click on a link or attachment within the email they are directed to a page where they can purchase a data package.

In the same way, subscribers can search Internet and access the first page of websites from the results for free. If they click further into a website after that, they are directed to a page where they can purchase a data package, it added.

“The mobile Internet user base is growing really fast in India… We hope this initiative will encourage more Indians to experience the value of the Internet and gain from it,” Google India VP and Managing Director Rajan Anandan said.

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Facebook aims to drive revenues by making it easier to advertise

 
The overhaul of advertising on Facebook is "part of an ongoing process to make the advertiser's life easier," Facebook director of product marketing Brian Boland said at a media event to explain the company's new approach. (Jessica Guynn / Los Angeles Times / June 6, 2013)

 
In a bid to get marketers to spend more money, Facebook is addressing a common complaint from Madison Avenue: The giant social network has too many different types of advertising and it's too complicated and confusing for advertisers to figure out which one will work best for them.
During a media event Thursday at its headquarters, the company pledged it would make it easier to set up advertising campaigns on Facebook.
Facebook is under pressure to grow its advertising revenue, which accounts for 85% of its total revenue. Facebook shares are down about 30% since its initial public stock offering one year ago and about 15% so far this year. Shares have fallen nearly 21% in the past month alone on fears about its long-term business prospects. Shares closed Thursday slightly up, at $22.97.
Facebook said it is planning to dump about half of its 27 advertising formats and, going forward, Facebook advertisers will be able to buy ads based on what their objective is, be it getting users to install apps on their mobile devices, raising brand awareness, getting people to "like" their page, increasing foot traffic in stores or boosting online sales, executives said.
One of the ad formats that Facebook is ditching is "Sponsored Stories," which it is folding into other types of advertising on Facebook. "Offers" ads, which distribute product discounts or coupons, will no longer be an advertising format for online merchants but will remain for brick-and-mortar merchants.
PHOTOS: Tech giants' new headquarters
The overhaul of advertising on Facebook is "part of an ongoing process to make the advertiser's life easier," Facebook director of product marketing Brian Boland said.
Boland declined to discuss the financial implications of the changes to how marketers buy advertising on Facebook.
Just days before Facebook went public, General Motors said it would pull its paid advertising from the service. Ever since, Facebook has faced persistent doubts whether it can significantly grow its advertising business.
Executives say they have dedicated time and effort to figuring out how advertisers can reach their target audiences at Facebook and gauge the effectiveness of their ads on the service. It has also won back GM as an advertiser.
Facebook will grow advertising revenues 31% to $5.6 billion this year, according to estimates from research firm EMarketer. It had nearly $4.3 billion in advertising revenue in 2012. Mobile ad revenues will reach $1.5 billion in 2013, EMarketer estimates, up from $470 million last year. In its effort to make advertising easier to buy, Facebook is relying on research over many months into which strategies have worked for advertisers, executives said. Facebook said it will begin automatically suggesting advertising formats that would work best for an advertiser’s objective, but advertisers will still have control over the advertising settings.
The changes will roll out over the next six months and will make advertising on Facebook appear more visually consistent for users, too, the company said.
"What we realized is that even though every ad product is really good on its own, the whole is less than the sum of its parts," said Fidji Simo, a Facebook product manager for ads. "It should really be simpler."

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