Allama Taqi Hadi Naqvi gunned down in Karachi.

KARACHI: Religious scholar Allama Taqi Hadi Naqvi was shot dead near board office located in North Nazimabad area in an apparent incident of target killing here Thursday, News 24 R Team reported.

According to police, the incident took place when four unidentified armed men riding motorbikes opened fire at the rickshaw Allama Naqvi was riding in, resultantly he lost his life on the spot.

The body was taken to the hospital. Police have launched an investigation into the murder.

Majlis e Wahdat e Muslimeen condemning the killing of Allama Naqvi announced to observe three-day mourning.

Meanwhile, Shia Ulema Council (SUC) Chief Allama Sajid Naqvi expressed grief over the killing of Allama Taqi Hadi Naqvi.


Earlier, unknown gunmen opened fire outside a seminary located at Abul Hassan Isphahani Road that killed two persons including the administrator of seminary Qari Ali Hassan and his son.

Pakistan rejects allegations on selling of arms for use in Syria.

ISLAMABAD: Advisor on National Security and Foreign Affairs Sartaj Aziz has rejected allegations of selling of arms for use in Syria or any change in Pakistan's policy towards conflict in that country under Saudi pressure.

Making a statement in the National Assembly on Tuesday‚ he said Pakistan is a responsible state and sells arms only through legal mechanism and by abiding all relevant national and international regulations.

Sartaj Aziz said Pakistan's policy towards Syria is based on principles. It supports sovereignty and territorial integrity of Syria and cessation of hostilities by all sides.

Responding to points raised by Syed Naveed Qamar and Shah Mehmood Qureshi‚ Minister for Kashmir Affairs Ch Barjees Tahir said peaceful polling was held on Saturday for by-election in LA-22 constituency of Azad Kashmir Legislative Assembly.

He said allegations of rigging are baseless. He said on Monday people blocked a road in Baloch area and when police tried to clear the road‚ exchange of fire took place in which several people were injured from both side. Later‚ one injured person expired. He said judicial inquiry has already been ordered and action would be taken against those found guilty. Four bills were introduced in the National Assembly on Tuesday.

The Bills are Constitution Amendment Bill 2014‚ Criminal Law Amendment Bill‚ Control of Narcotics Substances Amendment Bill 2014 and Shaheed Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto Medical University Islamabad (Amendment) Bill.

The House held debate on the foreign policy on a motion moved by Shahida Rehmani.

The mover and other members who spoke on the motion emphasized that Pakistan should seek friendly relations with all countries especially the regional countries. The House will now meet today (Wednesday) at 10:30 am.

Asiana Airlines fined $500,000 for failing to help families after July crash.

The U.S. Department of Transportation on Tuesday fined Asiana Airlines $500,000 for failing to assist families following the crash of Asiana flight 214 in San Francisco in July.

The Korean airline was slow to publicize a phone number for families, took two full days to successfully contact the families of three-quarters of the passengers and did not contact families of several passengers until five days following the crash, authorities said.

The half-million-dollar penalty is the first time the DOT has issued a fine under a 1997 law that requires airlines to adopt and adhere to a "family assistance plan" for major accidents.

Three of the 291 passengers were killed and scores were injured when the Boeing 777 struck the seawall at San Francisco International Airport and tumbled down the runway.

"In the very rare event of a crash, airlines have a responsibility to provide their full support to help passengers and their families by following all the elements of their family assistance plans," Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said in a statement. "The last thing families and passengers should have to worry about at such a stressful time is how to get information from their carrier."

In the DOT order, Asiana said its job was complicated by the limited number of workers at San Francisco's airport and other circumstances. Injured passengers were sent to 13 different area hospitals, and there was no list prepared at the time to help the airline track passengers.

Hospitals also were reluctant to release information to the airline due to privacy laws, the airline said.

Asiana released a statement after the DOT fine was announced saying that it "provided extensive support to the passengers and their families following the accident and will continue to do so."

Under the Foreign Air Carrier Family Support Act of 1997, foreign air carriers assure the Department of Transportation and the National Transportation Safety Board that they will adhere to a "family assistance plan" in the event of aircraft accidents resulting in a major loss of life.

Among other things, airlines must publicize and staff a toll-free telephone number to take calls from families, notify families as soon as practical and commit sufficient resources to carry out the family assistance plan.

According to the DOT, Asiana failed to widely publicize any telephone number for family members of those on board, and the only number generally available to the public that family members could call was Asiana's toll-free reservations line.

Asiana publicized a phone number established by another entity 18 hours and 32 minutes after the crash, the DOT said.

Locating this phone number on Asiana's website required significant effort, the DOT said, and the reservations line did not include a separate menu option for calls related to the crash, requiring callers to navigate through cumbersome automated menus.

Asiana also took two days to send a sufficient number of trained personnel to San Francisco, and initially lacked an adequate number of staff able to communicate in the languages spoken by the flight's passengers, the DOT said.

According to the DOT, $400,000 of the penalty is due within 30 days. Up to $100,000 will be spent on multiple industry-wide conferences and training sessions to provide others with lessons learned from the Asiana crash aftermath.

If You Used This Secure Webmail Site, the FBI Has Your Inbox

While investigating a hosting company known for sheltering child porn last year the FBI incidentally seized the entire e-mail database of a popular anonymous webmail service called TorMail.
Now the FBI is tapping that vast trove of e-mail in unrelated investigations.
The bureau’s data windfall, seized from a company called Freedom Hosting, surfaced in court papers last week when prosecutors indicted a Florida man for allegedly selling counterfeit credit cards online. The filings show the FBI built its case in part by executing a search warrant on a Gmail account used by the counterfeiters, where they found that orders for forged cards were being sent to a TorMail e-mail account: “platplus@tormail.net.”
Acting on that lead in September, the FBI obtained a search warrant for the TorMail account, and then accessed it from the bureau’s own copy of “data and information from the TorMail e-mail server, including the content of TorMail e-mail accounts,” according to the complaint (.pdf) sworn out by U.S. Postal Inspector Eric Malecki.
The tactic suggests the FBI is adapting to the age of big-data with an NSA-style collect-everything approach, gathering information into a virtual lock box, and leaving it there until it can obtain specific authority to tap it later. There’s no indication that the FBI searched the trove for incriminating evidence before getting a warrant. But now that it has a copy of TorMail’s servers, the bureau can execute endless search warrants on a mail service that once boasted of being immune to spying.
“We have no information to give you or to respond to any subpoenas or court orders,” read TorMail’s homepage. “Do not bother contacting us for information on, or to view the contents of a TorMail user inbox, you will be ignored.”
In another e-mail case, the FBI last year won a court order compelling secure e-mail provider Lavabit to turn over the master encryption keys for its website, which would have given agents the technical ability to spy on all of Lavabit’s 400,000 users – though the government said it was interested only in one. (Rather than comply, Lavabit shut down and is appealing the surveillance order).
TorMail was the webmail provider of choice for denizens of the so-called Darknet of anonymous and encrypted websites and services, making the FBI’s cache extraordinarily valuable. The affair also sheds a little more light on the already-strange story of the FBI’s broad attack on Freedom Hosting, once a key service provider for untraceable websites.

Freedom Hosting specialized in providing turnkey “Tor hidden service” sites — special sites, with addresses ending in .onion, that hide their geographic location behind layers of routing, and can be reached only over the Tor anonymity network. Tor hidden services are used by those seeking to evade surveillance or protect users’ privacy to an extraordinary degree – human rights groups and journalists as well as serious criminal elements.
By some estimates, Freedom Hosting backstopped fully half of all hidden services at the time it was shut down last year — TorMail among them. But it had a reputation for tolerating child pornography on its servers. In July, the FBI moved on the company and had the alleged operator, Eric Eoin Marques, arrested at his home in Ireland. The U.S. is now seeking his extradition for allegedly facilitating child porn on a massive scale; hearings are set to begin in Dublin this week.
According to the new document, the FBI obtained the data belonging to Freedom Hosting’s customers through a Mutual Legal Assistance request to France – where the company leased its servers – between July 22, 2013 and August 2 of last year.
That’s two days before all the sites hosted by Freedom Hosting , including TorMail, began serving an error message with hidden code embedded in the page, on August 4.
Security researchers dissected the code and found it exploited a security hole in Firefox to de-anonymize users with slightly outdated versions of Tor Browser Bundle, reporting back to a mysterious server in Northern Virginia. Though the FBI hasn’t commented (and declined to speak for this story), the malware’s behavior was consistent with the FBI’s spyware deployments, now known as a “Network Investigative Technique.”
No mass deployment of the FBI’s malware had ever before been spotted in the wild.
The attack through TorMail alarmed many in the Darknet, including the underground’s most notorious figure — Dread Pirate Roberts, the operator of the Silk Road drug forum, who took the unusual step of posting a warning on the Silk Road homepage. An analysis he wrote on the associated forum now seems prescient.
“I know that MANY people, vendors included, used TorMail,” he wrote. “You must think back through your TorMail usage and assume everything you wrote there and didn’t encrypt can be read by law enforcement at this point and take action accordingly. I personally did not use the service for anything important, and hopefully neither did any of you.” Two months later the FBI arrested San Francisco man Ross William Ulbricht as the alleged Silk Road operator.
The connection, if any, between the FBI obtaining Freedom Hosting’s data and apparently launching the malware campaign through TorMail and the other sites isn’t spelled out in the new document. The bureau could have had the cooperation of the French hosting company that Marques leased his servers from. Or it might have set up its own Tor hidden services using the private keys obtained from the seizure, which would allow it to adopt the same .onion addresses used by the original sites.
The French company also hasn’t been identified. But France’s largest hosting company, OVH, announced on July 29, in the middle of the FBI’s then-secret Freedom Hosting seizure, that it would no longer allow Tor software on its servers. A spokesman for the company says he can’t comment on specific cases, and declined to say whether Freedom Hosting was a customer.
“Wherever the data center is located, we conduct our activities in conformity with applicable laws, and as a hosting company, we obey search warrants or disclosure orders,” OVH spokesman Benjamin Bongoat told WIRED. “This is all we can say as we usually don’t make any comments on hot topics.” Report By News24r Team.

HP EliteBook 820 G1 review

HP’s Elitebook line has had difficulty competing with Lenovo’s ThinkPad. Price has generally been to blame, as even systems with mundane specifications often sold well above $1,000. This was justified, for enterprise users, by the company’s elaborate suite of security and network management software, but consumers have less use for such tools.
Now it appears that HP is changing tactics. The new Elitebook 820, a 12.5-inch laptop that offers 4th-gen Intel Core processors, starts at only $874. Our review unit, which boasts a Core i5-4200U CPU and a 180GB solid state drive, costs $1,274, but this price is reasonable compared to past systems. For example, the Folio 9470m we reviewed less than a year ago was $1,549.
Cutting the MSRP has required some sacrifices, however, most notably the luxurious (and heavy) metal construction that the Elitebook is known for. Does this make the 820 a light-weight that packs a punch, or a shadow of HPs past?

The benefits of plastic 

The new 820 sets itself apart from past Elitebooks by abandoning heavy use of metal construction in favor of a mostly plastic chassis. Predictably, this cheapens the notebook’s look and feel, resulting in a system that seems geared towards buyers on a budget. Even low-end HP Pavilions and Envy systems use more attractive materials.
However, switching to plastic has its benefits. Weight has been cut down to just under three pounds, which makes the 820 over a half-pound lighter than the preceding Elitebook 2560p, and the chassis is barely more than 8/10 of an inch thick. Previous Elitebooks felt like bricks, and the new model is a feather-weight by comparison.

 

And while plastic will never have the premium feel that metal does, HP has made sure the materials used are put together well. Panel gaps are tight, the display lid is coated with a grippy finish that prevents accidental drops, and the screen is lined with a rubber barrier designed to prevent display damage if the system is dropped while closed or if a heavy object is placed on top of it. These touches give the 820 a rough-and-tumble attitude.
Connectivity is a plus on 820, and includes three USB 3.0 ports, DisplayPort, VGA, Ethernet, and a combo headphone/microphone jack. Our only complaint is the location of the ports, most of which are far forward and thus might conflict with the use of an external mouse. However, many similarly sized systems offer just two USB ports and one video-out, so the 820 still earns a check plus in this area.

Not the keyboard you’re looking for 

HP’s Elitebooks have always lagged behind ThinkPads in keyboard quality, and the new 820 is no different. There’s a surprising amount of space given this system’s 12.5-inch display, but key feel is spongy and a bit vague. We also wish the keys had a bit of a curve, as the HP’s flat keycaps provide poor feel when touch-typing. However, we didn’t note any problems with accuracy when using the keyboard.
The Elitebook 820 is part of a new generation, but it makes familiar mistakes.
Though our review unit includd backlighting, it does not come standard on the 820. There are just two brightness settings, but they’re calibrated well. Light-leak is minimal, a minute amount does manage to escape via the area near the function keys.
The HP’s touchpad is about two inches tall and three inches wide, which is rather small. However, the system also comes with a track-pointer in the middle of the keyboard. We prefer to use this when it’s available because it makes mouse navigation possible without shifting from a comfortable typing position. Tactile left/right mouse keys are provided for both the touchpad and trackpointer, and multi-touch gestures work well, though the lack of surface area can sometimes make it difficult to pull them off.

Pixel wars? What pixel wars?

While other laptops wage war with increasingly pixel-dense panels, the HP 820 gets by with a simple 1366 x 768 non-touch display. The small size of the screen means the panel still looks acceptably sharp, but rough edges are noticeable when viewing fine fonts or watching HD video.
The matte screen uses SVA-panel technology, a combination that results in poor image quality. We measured a maximum contrast ratio of just 70:1 and very bright black levels, which means that media doesn’t have the depth and vibrancy most users would expect. We appreciate that HP is targeting work, not play, but Lenovo has already shown that a display can be functional and beautiful at the same time. Report By News24r Team.