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Facebook "Likes" WhatsApp in a big way, so big, that they bought it for a whooping deal valuing $19 billion. The deal involves paying WhatsApp team a total of $4 billion in cash, $12 billion in stock and $3 billion in restricted stock vested over several years. It is to be noted that this deal is worth more than what Facebook raised in its own IPO, this is not all - the acquisition is not only the company's largest but also bigger than any that Google, Microsoft or Apple have ever done.

WhatsApp strictly stuck to the "No Ads" and "100% Private" no data sharing policy for long maintaining the 450 million monthly active userbase, with this acquisition the big question is "What about privacy and intrusive advertising which facebook is often associated with?". Well both facebook and WhatsApp has written about this as shared below.

SugarSync stopped offering Free usage-tier some time ago, and has now started purging old free accounts. SugarSync is ditching free-users including users like me who promoted SugarSync in there early days and earned free referral bonus (140+GB in my case). This is not all, these guys are so unprofessional that when contacted about the issue few months ago I was told that since I have referral bonus my account will be ok and will not be purged in February, which was not the case. Thankfully I received an automated account-purge notice by email and contacting them again I was told that the earlier support staff was mistaken and all free accounts will get purged.

With account cancellation getting near-by I was left with the task of moving my data to alternative free cloud-storage services, since I am on a slow internet connection downloading and re-uploading was not an option. Thankfully, there are free-to-try services allowing cloud-to-cloud data transfers which comes handy in situations like this where users are left in the lurch.

Sysinternals Process Explorer has been one of the most indispensable utility for diagnosing misbehaving applications and fixing malware's. Process Explorer shows you all the information about any application running on windows including which handles and DLLs processes have opened or loaded, network, security, performance and a lot more. The utility has now get integration for another indispensable tool for researching malware's, the multi-engine anti-virus scanning utility VirusTotal. The integration also shows a rare sight of co-operation between two rivals Microsoft (Process Explorer) and Google (VirusTotal).

Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL), the Indian state-owned telecommunications company is neither known for it's quality of service nor for customer satisfaction. To make their services more user-friendly they started allowing quick online recharge facility from their website, but this service has a data privacy loophole where anybody can check any BSNL subscribers prepaid balance with expiry date. While this may not sound a big security risk the data exposed can be used to device social-engineering phishing attacks, for example - a malicious hacker can fetch this data and utilize it for calling the subscriber as an BSNL employee supplying this information to gain trust of the consumer and asking them to order a highly subsidized online recharge from a fake website.