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EBay to sell Skype stake to group led by Silver Lake
EBay Inc agreed to sell 65 per cent of its Skype internet-calling unit to an investor group led by Silver Lake for about $2 billion to focus on reviving sales at its main e-commerce site.
The buyers will pay $1.9 billion in cash and will also give EBay a $125 million note, the company said in a statement today. Ebay, which had planned an initial public offering for Skype, will retain 35 per cent of the business. The deal values Skype at $2.75 billion.
The sale lessens Chief Executive Officer John Donahoe’s dependence on a unit that he has said doesn’t fit with the rest of EBay’s operations. The company is improving its Internet- retail operations to stem customer defections to Amazon.com Inc. Donahoe’s predecessor bought Skype for about $2.6 billion in 2005 and wrote down its value the following year.
Karnataka software exports rise 23%
Notwithstanding the global economic slowdown, revenue from software exports in Karnataka grew 23 per cent to Rs 74,929 crore for 2008-09, and constituted 34 per cent of the national software export earnings.
The IT Minister of Karnataka, Mr Katta Subramanya Naidu, and the Software Technology Parks of India (STPI)-Bangalore Director, Ms R. Rajalakshmi, said the sector employed 5.54 lakh people in 2008-09, up from 5.2 lakh people during 2007-08.
During the period, 84 software units were added, which included 35 foreign equity companies, two Indian major and 47 small and medium enterprises, taking the total approved STP units to 2085 and electronic hardware technology park (EHTP) units to 68.
India is tenth in spam generation list: Report
Indian banks faced more than 1,000 unique phishing attacks between July 2007 and June 2008.
The underground economy report prepared by Symantec Corporation for the specified period provides information about the growing underground economy globally. While it says, the value of the total advertised goods on the underground economy servers were more than $276 million globally during this period, it points out that 6 per cent of the total compromised computers across the world, were found in India during September 2008.
A new battle is beginning in branding for the Web - The Financial Express
To marketers large and small, the Web is a wide open frontier, an unlimited billboard with boundless branding opportunities. For the empirical proof, look at the filings with the government for new trademarks that, put simply, are brand names. Applications surged in the dot-com years, peaking in 2000 and then falling sharply for two years, before rising to a record last year of more than 394,000.
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Applications surged in the dot-com years, peaking in 2000 and then falling sharply for two years, before rising to a record last year of more than 394,000.
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Now, companies want to slap a brand on still vaguely defined products and services in the uncharted ephemera of cyberspace—the computing cloud, as it has come to be known.
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Source code theft: techie’s laptop seized
The first ever case of source code theft reported in Hyderabad was cracked by police on Thursday with the arrest of a software engineer K.S. Venkata Ravi Kumar.
A laptop containing several software products, including the three he had allegedly stolen from Tecra Systems he earlier worked with, was seized from him. Proposals and quotes of the company being sent to its clients, confidential documents and billing details were also found in the laptop, Hyderabad Detective Department DCP R.S. Praveen Kumar told reporters.
Kumar did his MCA and took up his first job as IT professional in Tecra Systems which had offices in Hyderabad, and Michigan in the U.S. He was sent to work in the company’s U.S. office in 2005.
By virtue of his seniority, Kumar had access to the company’s administrator software and servers. Taking advantage of this, he copied the company’s source code of three products on his laptop in 2007. Later, he quit and joined iNEK Technologies which also has offices in Hyderabad and the U.S.
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The first ever case of source code theft reported in Hyderabad was cracked by police on Thursday with the arrest of a software engineer K.S. Venkata Ravi Kumar.
A laptop containing several software products, including the three he had allegedly stolen from Tecra Systems he earlier worked with, was seized from him. Proposals and quotes of the company being sent to its clients, confidential documents and billing details were also found in the laptop, Hyderabad Detective Department DCP R.S. Praveen Kumar told reporters.
Kumar did his MCA and took up his first job as IT professional in Tecra Systems which had offices in Hyderabad, and Michigan in the U.S. He was sent to work in the company’s U.S. office in 2005.
By virtue of his seniority, Kumar had access to the company’s administrator software and servers. Taking advantage of this, he copied the company’s source code of three products on his laptop in 2007. Later, he quit and joined iNEK Technologies which also has offices in Hyderabad and the U.S.
Norms for cyber cafes in Kadapa
Kadapa Superintendent of Police Mahesh M. Bhagwat on Tuesday directed cyber cafe owners in Kadapa district to follow prescribed guidelines to check designs of terrorist and extremists who used internet for destructive activities.
Cyber cafe owners should allow persons to use internet only after verifying their identity through any identity card, ration card, PAN card, passbooks or voter identity card and retain a Photostat copy of the identity for perusal by police, he told cyber cafe owners at a press conference here.
Mr. Bhagwat directed them to put up closed circuit television sets in cyber cafes and when they pointed out the high cost involved, he advised them to put up webcams within a fortnight to record the portrait of every net user with a 15-days record backup facility.
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Kadapa Superintendent of Police Mahesh M. Bhagwat on Tuesday directed cyber cafe owners in Kadapa district to follow prescribed guidelines to check designs of terrorist and extremists who used internet for destructive activities.
Cyber cafe owners should allow persons to use internet only after verifying their identity through any identity card, ration card, PAN card, passbooks or voter identity card and retain a Photostat copy of the identity for perusal by police, he told cyber cafe owners at a press conference here.
Mr. Bhagwat directed them to put up closed circuit television sets in cyber cafes and when they pointed out the high cost involved, he advised them to put up webcams within a fortnight to record the portrait of every net user with a 15-days record backup facility.
Crime in Cyberia: an incomplete list of offenders - IndianExpress.Com
An unknown Indian hacker has been charged with the greatest cyber-heist in history for allegedly helping a criminal gang steal identities of an estimated eight million people in a hacking raid that could net more than £2.8 billion in illegal funds. The hacker breached IT defences of Best Western Hotel group’s online booking system and sold details of how to access it through an underground network operated by the Russian mafia.
A look at some of the biggest cyber criminals:
Most web users have ‘Scrabulous’ blocked
The networking site, Facebook, has restricted the popular “add-on” application, ‘Scrabulous’ to most users after receiving a letter from Mattel Inc, Jayant Agarwalla, one of the creators of Scrabulous.com, told The Hindu here on Saturday.
Mattel Inc. owns Scrabble rights outside Canada and the United States of America and had approached the Indian courts in February 2008, seeking an order for taking down Scrabulous from Facebook and other servers.
The brothers, Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, and their web-design and technology company, R J Software, were previously served a lawsuit by game-making giant Hasbro Inc., owner of Scrabble rights in Canada and the U.S. , at a New York federal court for violating its copyright and trademarks. Hasbro also sent a notice demanding that Facebook remove the application from the site. “Facebook took the unfortunate decision to restrict most users from accessing Scrabulous on August 22, in response to a ‘take down notice’ from Mattel on August 14,” said Mr. Jayant.
Database of folk artistes planned
Buoyed by the interest foreigners evince in the multifarious folk art forms of the State, the Art and Culture Department has decided to prepare a database of names, addresses and contact numbers of all folk artistes, who are being enrolled with the Folk Artistes Welfare Board, and post the same on the Internet.
There was encouraging feedback from foreign tourists at the dance festival in Mahabalipuram, where classical and folk art forms were given equal importance this time. It was this overwhelming admiration of visitors of various nationalities at the Berlin Tourism Expo, earlier this year for a Madurai-based folk artiste, Muthu, the Secretary for Tourism and Culture, V. Irai Anbu said that stressed the importance of folk artistes and the official establishment was reaching out to them for enhancing their quality of life with an allotment of Rs.1crore for the Board.
The database will also help the establishment in resurrecting those art forms that were near extinction, he said.
There was a huge turnout of artistes at a function organised for their enrolment here on Wednesday. Launching the enrolment, Mr. Irai Anbu informed that about 10,000 folk artistes practising the 100 art forms listed in a special government order have registered as members with the Welfare Board so far, and several thousands were expected to follow suit.
Policy guidelines for IPTV services cleared
The Union Cabinet on Thursday cleared the policy guidelines for the commercial rollout of Internet Protocol TV services, a new cable TV delivery system that would benefit both telecom players and consumers.
“Issuance of the guidelines will bring clarity on defining the parameters within which the service providers will work and clarify how these services will be regulated,” Information and Broadcasting Minister Priyaranjan Dasmunsi said.
The Cabinet also gave its approval to amend the policy guidelines for downlinking of TV channels to allow broadcasters to provide content to IPTV service providers. Currently, downlinking norms allow broadcasters only to share their channels with cable and direct-to-home platforms.
IPTV involves delivery of television and video signals over a broadband network. It uses the Internet to deliver not only television channels but also other value-added services such as time-shift TV, interactive advertising, film shows without advertisements and games.
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The Union Cabinet on Thursday cleared the policy guidelines for the commercial rollout of Internet Protocol TV services, a new cable TV delivery system that would benefit both telecom players and consumers.
“Issuance of the guidelines will bring clarity on defining the parameters within which the service providers will work and clarify how these services will be regulated,” Information and Broadcasting Minister Priyaranjan Dasmunsi said.
Entertainment drives mobile internet growth in BRIC countries
Entertainment-themed websites are the most popular with mobile Internet users in the growing Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC) mobile markets, says a new research report from The Nielsen company.
Entertainment, gaming and music websites rank among t
Cyber Crime Police cannot investigate email scams
Strange as it may seem, the Cyber Crime Police Station cannot investigate complaints of people who are being cheated by email scams. It can only investigate cases involving hacking, source code tampering and generation of obscene content.
Director-General of Police (Corps of Detectives) Ajai Kumar Singh said the local police have to register and investigate cases of cheating and other offences.
“Unless there is hacking, source code tampering and creation of obscene content, cases do not come under our purview,” Mr. Singh said. “Mere use of Internet as a mode for crime cannot be a cause for referring it to us,” he added.
Living in a virtual world - IndianExpress.Com
The world has just opened up for Moushumi Chatterjee, a 43-year-old housewife in south Kolkata’s Tollygunje. Ever since her family got an Internet connection last month, Chatterjee has spent much of her spare time trying to get a hang of the bewildering virtual world. “My children spend a lot of time on social networking websites. I decided to familiarise myself with the Net to keep a tab on what they were up to. But now, I am discovering new things every day,” she says.
What’s obscene? Google could have an answer - IndianExpress.Com
Judges and jurors who must decide whether sexually explicit material is obscene are asked to use a local yardstick: does the material violate community standards?
That is often a tricky question because there is no simple, concrete way to gauge a community’s tastes and values.
The Internet may be changing that. In a novel approach, the defence in an obscenity trial in Florida plans to use publicly accessible Google search data to try to persuade jurors that their neighbours have broader interests than they might have thought. In the trial of a pornographic website operator, the defence plans to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for terms like “orgy” than for “apple pie” or “watermelon”. The publicly accessible data is vague in that it does not specify how many people are searching for the terms, just their relative popularity over time. But the defence lawyer, Lawrence Walters, is arguing that the evidence is sufficient to demonstrate that interest in the sexual subjects exceeds that of more mainstream topics.
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udges and jurors who must decide whether sexually explicit material is obscene are asked to use a local yardstick: does the material violate community standards?
That is often a tricky question because there is no simple, concrete way to gauge a community’s tastes and values.
The Internet may be changing that. In a novel approach, the defence in an obscenity trial in Florida plans to use publicly accessible Google search data to try to persuade jurors that their neighbours have broader interests than they might have thought. In the trial of a pornographic website operator, the defence plans to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for terms like “orgy” than for “apple pie” or “watermelon”. The publicly accessible data is vague in that it does not specify how many people are searching for the terms, just their relative popularity over time. But the defence lawyer, Lawrence Walters, is arguing that the evidence is sufficient to demonstrate that interest in the sexual subjects exceeds that of more mainstream topics.
It is not clear that the approach will succeed. The Florida state prosecutor in the case, which is scheduled for trial July 1, said the search data may not be relevant because the volume of Internet searches is not necessarily an indication of, or proxy for, a community’s values. But the tactic is another example of the value of data collected by Internet companies like Google, both from a commercial standpoint and as a window into the thoughts.
ISO puts standard for Microsoft's OOXML document formats on hold
In another setback to software giant Microsoft, it will have to wait for "several months" before the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) can take a final decision on whether its Office Open XML (OOXML) file format will be an international standard or not.
ISO, which was expected to take this decision shortly, had given participating countries two months' to appeal against its February decision to make OOXML an international standard. In response, four national standards body members — Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela — did so.
"…the appeals are currently being considered by the ISO secretary-general and the IEC general secretary who, within a period of 30 days (to the end of June), and following whatever consultations they judge appropriate, are required to submit the appeals, with their comments, to the ISO Technical Management Board and the IEC Standardisation Management Board," an ISO statement reads. The two management boards will then decide whether the appeals should be further processed or not. If they decide in favour of proceeding, the chairmen of the two boards are required to establish a conciliation panel, which will attempt to resolve the appeals. The process could take several months.
US Judge in obscenity trial has website with explicit photos
A closely watched obscenity trial in federal court here was suspended on Wednesday after the judge acknowledged maintaining his own publicly accessible website featuring sexually explicit photos.
Alex Kozinski — chief judge of the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals — granted a 48-hour stay in the obscenity trial of a Hollywood adult filmmaker after the prosecutor requested time to explore “a potential conflict of interest concerning the court having a... sexually explicit website with similar material to what is on trial here”.
Kozinski acknowledged posting sexual content on his website. Among the images on the site were a photo of naked women on all fours painted to look like cows and a video of a half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal. He defended some of the adult content as “funny” but conceded that other postings were inappropriate.
Kozinski, 57, said that he thought the site was for his private storage and that he was not aware the images could be seen by the public. He also said he had shared some material on the site with friends. He then blocked public access to the site.
Kozinski is one of the nation’s highest-ranking judges and has been mentioned as a possible candidate for the US Supreme Court. He was named chief judge of the 9th Circuit last year and is considered a judicial conservative on most issues. He was appointed to the federal bench by President Reagan in 1985.
After publication of an latimes.com article about his website on Wednesday, the judge offered another explanation for how the material might have been posted to the site. As controversy about the website spread, Kozinski was seeking to shift responsibility, at least in part, to his adult son, Yale.
China, US lead in Net attack origination
India figured among the top 10 Internet attack traffic originating nations, while China and the US emerged as the largest sources of Internet attack traffic (including viruses, bots, worms or malicious codes) in the first quarter of 2008, according to a latest report by Akamai Technologies.
As much as 30 per cent of such traffic originated from the US and China.
“During the first quarter of 2008, Akamai observed attack traffic originating from 125 unique countries around the world.
The top 10 countries were the source of about three-quarter (75 per cent) of the attacks measured,” Akamai – which provides managed services for powering rich media, dynamic transactions and enterprise applications online – said.
China and the US accounted for 16.77 per cent and 14.33 per cent of the attack traffic, while Taiwan, Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, Japan, South Korea, Turkey, and India, competed the top 10 list.
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India figured among the top 10 Internet attack traffic originating nations, while China and the US emerged as the largest sources of Internet attack traffic (including viruses, bots, worms or malicious codes) in the first quarter of 2008, according to a latest report by Akamai Technologies.
As much as 30 per cent of such traffic originated from the US and China.
“During the first quarter of 2008, Akamai observed attack traffic originating from 125 unique countries around the world.
The top 10 countries were the source of about three-quarter (75 per cent) of the attacks measured,” Akamai – which provides managed services for powering rich media, dynamic transactions and enterprise applications online – said.
China and the US accounted for 16.77 per cent and 14.33 per cent of the attack traffic, while Taiwan, Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, Japan, South Korea, Turkey, and India, competed the top 10 list.
Army to introduce biometric system in recruitment
The Indian Army is contemplating to introduce biometric system in the recruitment process shortly. The Army is toying with the idea to put an end to the problem of possible impersonation and malpractices in the recruitment process, said Ravi Varman, Deputy Director General (Recruiting) of the Chennai Recruitment Zone.
The biometric system would help in preventing impersonation during physical tests. Sometimes, it happened that physical tests were attended by persons other than the actual candidates. Such malpractices could be minimised with the proposed biometric system, he explained.
DoT removes cap on number of bandwidth resellers
In a move that would improve the availability of cheaper international bandwidth in the country, the Telecom Commission, the apex policy making body of the Department of Telecom, has given its approval for allowing unlimited number of bandwidth resellers in the country.
Bandwidth resellers are companies, which do not own any infrastructure, but buy capacity from large international long distance service providers like VSNL or AT&T and then resell it to consumers like business process outsourcing units. This could result in cheaper Internet services and international long distance calls.
The move will benefit larger consumers of bandwidth such as ITeS companies, BPOs and Internet service providers who will be able to buy bandwidth from the resellers at much lower costs.
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In a move that would improve the availability of cheaper international bandwidth in the country, the Telecom Commission, the apex policy making body of the Department of Telecom, has given its approval for allowing unlimited number of bandwidth resellers in the country.
Bandwidth resellers are companies, which do not own any infrastructure, but buy capacity from large international long distance service providers like VSNL or AT&T and then resell it to consumers like business process outsourcing units. This could result in cheaper Internet services and international long distance calls.
The move will benefit larger consumers of bandwidth such as ITeS companies, BPOs and Internet service providers who will be able to buy bandwidth from the resellers at much lower costs.
AP: NREGS software bags Stockholm Challenge Award
The software developed by Tata Consultancy Services in coordination with Rural Development Department for the implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme has bagged International Stockholm Challenge Award for 2008.
It was presented to K. Raju, Principal Secretary, Rural Development, at a function in Stockholm on May 22, according to an official release here on Friday.
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The software developed by Tata Consultancy Services in coordination with Rural Development Department for the implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme has bagged International Stockholm Challenge Award for 2008.
It was presented to K. Raju, Principal Secretary, Rural Development, at a function in Stockholm on May 22, according to an official release here on Friday.
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The software was developed two years ago soon after NREGS was launched in the State.
As many as 95 lakh individuals from 59 lakh families benefited from the scheme during the last two year
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