If you’re considering getting started flying drones for recreation, you have your task cut out for you — you have an endless array of choices with wonderful, high-tech models everywhere you look. You have a learning curve ahead of you finding out what kind of choice to make.

Right here, you can start with these quick descriptions of the four major designs in use today.

Multi-rotor drones

The most common drone type seen in many applications, multi-rotor drones have three or more rotors. Designs start from cheap toy models that cost as little as $20 to ones that are powerful enough to carry several pounds of payload and cost as much as $5,000.

Multi-rotor drones have a lot going for them, including low cost, ease of control, an ability to hover like a helicopter, and safety. The spinning rotors on these vehicles are tiny and not very powerful. If you accidentally hit someone, the injuries aren’t likely to be serious.

While multi-rotor models are the cheapest drone variety, they do come with downsides. With their many rotors to spin, their batteries don’t usually last very long. A good, mass-market model is likely to fly no longer than 20 minutes, less if there is a heavy camera to carry.

Fixed-wing drones

Fixed-wing drones tend to look like one of those cool Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit stealth bombers. Unlike multi-rotor drones, these needs to glide to stay aloft — they don’t hover. Extended flight time is the greatest advantage that comes with choosing this design. Since these craft are able to glide on their wings, their propellers don’t need work as hard. A battery-powered fixed-wing drone can stay up two hours, and one powered by a gas engine can fly as long as 16 hours.

On the downside, fixed wing drones are like airplanes — they need space to take off and land, and the take skill to fly. You need to pay attention to technical nuances like angle of attack, pitch and yaw. If you bank wrong or angle too hard into the wind, you’ll face a stall situation. If you’re happy to really invest in learning the skill and don’t need to hover, fixed-wing drones are for you.

Single-rotor drones

Single-rotor drones come in a very familiar form — they look and function exactly like helicopters. While there are models that run on battery power, the most popular ones run on gas engines. Single-rotor drones tend to be large at 6 feet from tip to tail, and are powerful enough to carry movie cameras. With only one rotor to fly on, they do offer a lot more flying time than multi-rotor models that tend to waste a lot of energy. These vehicles can be very expensive, however, and take a great deal of skill to fly.

It’s also important to keep in mind that with their large helicopter-like blades, their weight, speed and size, these are not toys. If they are handled incorrectly, terrible accidents are bound to happen.

Hybrid VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing)

These are large, helicopter-like craft as well, but with a huge difference — they have wings as well as rotors. These are used by companies like Amazon to deliver some of their merchandise. At this point, these are expensive, and you would need special connections to find one. They aren’t in production yet. But when they come on the market, they could be a lot of fun, because they provide both hover and gliding flight, and come with various autopilot features.

According to Drone Enthusiasts (Dronethusiasts Rankings – Top Camera Drones), the kind of model you choose depends on the purpose that you have in mind, the amount of investment that you’re willing to bring to the activity and the amount of skill you’re willing to learn.

If you’re only starting out, multi-rotor craft are likely to work the best.

 

Scams have become a menace these days, affecting millions of computers worldwide. This has also resulted in unnecessary fear amongst people with panic gripping many of the internet users. Taking advantage of the turmoil, scammers have found a new way to swindle off money by luring people into buying fraudulent anti-virus software.Frequent spam emails, adware pop-ups and high pressure sales tactics is the new modus operandi of fraudsters operating online. Very often, users are tricked into sharing confidential information which is then used to loot money from people’s bank accounts.

Unveiling the latest tricks to Scam People

There’s a new trend in market which is catching people off guard is the use of sudden pop-up advertisements.  These ads pop up whenever someone visits a website or scrolling through a webpage, showing a fake warning that the user’s computer has been affected by malware and needs immediate repair. The fraudsters design the whole procedure in such a manner that one cannot hardly differentiate them from the legitimate ones.

These advertisements prompt the user to call some servicemen to deal with the virus issue. Most of the time, novice users fall prey to such social engineering tactics and gets convinced by scamsters that their computer is infected by malicious software. Once the user grants access of their computer to these conmen, they install certain spyware and adware instead of legitimate anti-virus software and gains access to all of user’s personal information and financial transaction.  Aged people and inexperienced users are usually the soft targets of these scam.

FTC in action

The US government have started their operation against such scams/fraudsters after noticing large increase in internet fraud. The Federal Trade Commission which the chief regulatory body in this regard, is doing all in its capability to book the culprits behind the scam. Pam Bondi, the attorney general of Florida who is known to be operating closely with the Federal Trade Commission has told users to remain alert and report such crimes whenever they occur.

About 16 new enforcement actions by the FTC are said to be in the process of implementation to nab the conmen. Till now, the commission has received more than 96,000 complaints in this regard with people getting conned for a total amount of $24.6 million.

The FTC is working closely with internet giants like Apple and Microsoft to device ways to protect people from such internet scams and frame charges against the scamsters.  Whenever users call numbers given in the pop-up advertisements, they are usually greeted by telemarketers who tries to convince that they are certified servicemen from legitimate companies like Apple and Microsoft. In this way, it’s easy for them to gain trust of the internet users.  FTC warns people not fall for such social engineering tricks and instead call up service centers of Microsoft and Apple directly. It has also warned against replying to spam emails pretending to be from authentic sources.

Last Friday a major ransomware based cyberattack was launched on global scale which left hundreds of computers infected with the WannaCry. Security experts had advised the users to update their Windows in order to minimize the threat of the ransomware. However the major question which is being tackled by the infected users is ‘whether to pay up the ransom or not’?

Most of the security experts had put forward the advice that one shouldn’t pay the ransom in any given scenario. For a number of users paying a sum of $300 isn’t too much to get back their encrypted data stored back to its original state. But paying ransom will only made the attackers resolve stronger and they will be compelled to bring much higher level of threats which can lead massive financial and other losses.

Paying isn’t the right course of action

The people behind the WannaCry ransomware has set up a number of digital wallets to track the Bitcoin payments made for the ransom and it shows quite a number of people are willing to part with their money in order to get their data back. A number of security experts have stated that these people are dealing with the criminals and they shouldn’t expect the honest transaction. The reason behind such statement is that on analyzing the WannaCry it was found that its design doesn’t offer any promises of regaining the access to the files in any way even after paying the ransom.

A UK security firm called Hacker House experts has stated that a usual ransomware works by encrypting all the data present on the computer then asks for a ransom. When the ransom is paid then hackers tend to provide the key which helps in decrypting the data but in case of the WannaCry it requires a manual human operator to activate the decryption process.

 

In simple words paying the ransom will not result in getting back the encrypted data to its original form in any manner in WannaCry hacking. Security researchers had tried to get in touch with the people behind the WannaCry ransomware but they had remained silent. Therefore when the victims try to contact the WannaCry hackers in order to get the key for unlocking the files then it’s doubtful that someone will heed to them.

What you should be doing instead?

WannaCry has mainly targeted the business networks on the global scale by exploiting the vulnerability present in the Windows operating system. All those users who had been affected by this WannaCry ransomware should note that they are not likely to get their data back unless they had backed their data on a spate device earlier.

Therefore people should make a habit of backing up their files on a spate device or a different machine on a regular basis. It is also possible to get rid of this WannaCry ransomware from the device or system but the process is certainly isn’t a straightforward one. A technical support website called Bleeping Computer has set down a guideline for removing the ransomware but it involves downloading of some specific programs.

In 3 simple steps, learn to pick the overall subject (niche) for your blog.

Once an aspiring blogger has decided to start a blog, the next step is to decide on what’s to blog about; it means picking up the correct niche to blog about. There is no dearth of selecting a subject to talk about online but it is necessary to choose one that you have a basic interest. You need not have complete knowledge in the niche but interest is must to expand the knowledge so that, you can engage yourself in compiling an article.

Learning to choose a niche for your blog is the first and important action even before you name your blog. In order to persist a blog for a long term, one must have absolute passion in the subject he chooses to blog about.

Now that you get the first and useful tips, let us go through the 3 quick and easy steps to narrow your interest as you are likely to have more than one interest.

Step 1. Let us assume you have more than one interest. To select among them, you must think hard to find out which one can sustain your interest for a long term. The reason for this is you may quickly abandon your blog if you lose your interest in two or three months. There is no special guide to help you to narrow down your choice. It is for you to decide.

Still, you might ask, “What if I lose my interest?” Well, in that case, start afresh all over and choose another niche. (smile)

Remember, you may have to do a lot of research online on your chosen subject so that you don’t fall short of content ideas in future. If you don’t have a basic passion for the subject you choose, you won’t be interested in doing your content research.

Step 2: If your aim is to earn a second income by blogging, you must analyze the profitability of your selected niche.  This involves doing an in-depth keyword research. Before doing that, you must find out the number of subcategories for your niche. Under your broad subject of blogging, there can be many subcategories and some of them may pose less competition and thus can fetch more money than others. You must be an organized person while doing your keyword research by keep notes of all your findings neatly online.

Tools to do keyword research:

A keyword means the search term that everyone keys in the Google search box to find something. There are some free as well paid tools to do keyword search and analyze.

Some of them are:

Google Trends:  It is a free tool offered by the Google.

SEMrush: This is my personal favorite keyword finding tool. I have used it quite often over the years. It allows me to learn more about overall competition, where they are ranked and what the search volume is etc.

Long Tail Pro: It is a paid tool. Since I have not used personally, I have no idea about its usefulness but it is quite popular and hence must be very good.

Step 3 – You must able to gauge the future of the niche. Some niches selected by you might be very remunerative but may not sustain it after a year or so. For example, if you chose a big sports event or a national election or even an upcoming movie, the public interest will die in due course and the visitors to your blog will finally stop.

By applying these 3 simple steps, you will narrow down your blog niche in a day or two.

There is never a better way for people to share their thoughts and opinion to the world than blogging. Blogging essentially means keeping an online journal or a diary and maintain it on a daily basis.
Not only individuals but businesses also maintain their blog to help increase the amount of sales on their web sites. To achieve increased sales, bloggers must first try to increase traffic to their blogs. It is the prime goal. Every blogger without exception wants to keep his visitors coming back for more. There are four salient methods to enhance blog traffic.

Before explaining about the four ways, I want you to know that blogging is no more a hobby but a real business and if treated as such, the goal of starting and maintaining a blog will be met.

Not only companies but individuals have also started selling goods and services through their blogs. Businesses choose blogging because it is as an inexpensive way to advertise their products or services.
1. Regular content update: The first discipline for bloggers to increase visitors to their blogs is to post content on their blogs as frequently as possible. I would say, at least 3 posts per week is a must. Visitors will stay loyal to blogs that are updated daily. Nowadays bloggers update their blogs daily if not several times a day. Readers are likely to lose interest in your blog if they have to wait several days for new content. In fact search engines too expect a blog to be updated with fresh content frequently. Be aware that there are literally thousands of blogs available on the Internet. If your blog is not updated on a regular basis, you will lose your readers to another blog.
2. Participate in web communities: There are number of discussion forums also known as web communities in the internet. Participating in such discussion forums is a definite way to get new visitors to your blog there by raising the blog traffic. Interacting with the members of forums by way of asking questions and answering others’ queries will slowly expose your knowledge in the topics and you will be considered as an authority in your niche. You can also show genuine interest in others’ blogs and ask them to visit your blog. When you visit others’ blogs, it is advisable to leave meaningful comments on their blog post. This act of yours will be definitely reciprocated by other members of the forum.
3. Tracking the blog traffic: Any website (blog is also a website that can be maintained by anyone without any web development knowledge) will soon die if the webmaster (blogger) doesn’t employ any tracking methods to know:
* The nature of visitors,
*from where they came from,
*for how long each visitor stayed on the site,
*what they clicked
And so on.
The best tracking tool is provided by Google free of cost to every blogger and webmaster. It is called Google Analytics.
4. Include keywords: You blog can gain readership if you methodically input proper keywords that are related to your blog’s topic in your content title and the body. If you are lazy to do this, your blog will not grow at all. Keyword analysis is a laborious task and every blogger cannot afford to evade it.

As mentioned earlier, blogging is a serious business and unless a blogger understands and employs these four ways, he will abandon his blog soon.