Why Infosys doesn’t want government contracts

Infosys is changing course in its India business to focus more on deals from corporations rather than government.

“Black beauty” meteorite gives insights to Mars history

Mobile app for women in distress launched

A non-profit organisation launched a mobile phone application that helps a person under threat to send out immediate alert to his contacts registered on his phone.

Excessive use of internet by kids may leave them 'brain-dead': Expert

A 'Google generation' which relies on the internet for everything is in danger of becoming 'brain-dead', a leading UK inventor has warned.

Soon, lamps powered by gravity

A British company hopes to bring electric light to 1.5 billion people who live off the grid with an incredible electric light that is powered by gravity.

LONDON: A British company hopes to bring electric light to 1.5 billion people who live off the grid with an incredible electric light that is powered by gravity.

Want to contact a stranger on Facebook? Pay $1

The paid message service will be initially available only in the US and number of messages that can be send to a user will be capped at one per week.

Why no slowdown blues for TCS

Two years on, TCS has shown not only better margin stability, but also a higher growth in revenue and profits compared to its immediate peers.

Two years ago, the chief financial officer of India's largest IT exporter, S Mahalingam had said in an interview to The Economic Times that margins were critical for the company's business, but that was not the only focus.

"We have an ideal margin in our mind that suits our business mix. But our aim goes beyond margins. Our focus is on becoming a full services play across the globe," he had said then. TCS had reported a strong operating margin in the preceding quarter which was just a few notches short of Infosys, the most profitable top-tier Indian IT player.

Groundwater is gold

Since no more water is likely to be pumped from the Cauvery with the completion of the Phase IV Stage 2, it is groundwater that most of the development must depend on.

No individual borewell should be permitted to be drilled and only common use of groundwater under metered and tariff conditions should be encouraged in layouts, says water activist S. Vishwanath

The peripheral areas of cities are seeing an unprecedented growth. Land use is changing from agricultural to non-agriculture use and sites are being developed in ‘layouts’ all across. While infrastructure like roads and electricity can and will eventually reach the layouts, water supply is more difficult.

The Bangalore Metropolitan Regional Development Authority, assisted by 11 Local Planning Authorities, is the planning approval authority for over 8,000 sq. km. of area around the city of Bangalore.

Since no more water is likely to be pumped from the Cauvery with the completion of the Phase IV Stage 2, it is groundwater that most of the development must depend on. Groundwater is, however, getting increasingly overused in the surrounding semi-arid areas of the city.

How can the authority make sure that the people who move into these developments have water in the future? One good way to begin is to get the developer do a yield test for the borewells on site. If this is done in summer it is likely to give a better understanding of reliable yield for the entire layout. A quality test of the borewell water would also establish potability or otherwise.

This should be basic information with the authority as well as what potential buyers of sites or buildings should demand from the developer. No individual borewell should be permitted to be drilled and only common use of groundwater under metered and tariff conditions should be encouraged in layouts.

Implementation & design

While rainwater harvesting is insisted upon by the local planning authorities, a more detailed implementation and design would help both the authority and the consumer. It should be made conditional that all storm-water falling on non-private plot area is completely recharged into the ground. The recharge structures should be site specific and should be based on infiltration and recharge data from each site. Only in case where recharge is not possible should storage and reuse be permitted. In any case, each layout should be designed as a zero run-off area for rainwater.

All conditions imposed should be easily implementable, should bring tangible benefits to the occupiers, should be easy to monitor and should have clear ownership so that they are maintained in the long run and therefore sustainable.

At the macro-level, the BMRDA would be better off generating a detailed micro-watershed map of the area under its jurisdiction. It should then be able to push for the maintenance of these tanks and other water bodies plus their inter-connectedness through adequate policy, legislative and fiscal incentives.

The BMRDA should also map the aquifers, and detailed sub-aquifer maps overlapping with the micro-watershed maps should be generated so that the groundwater situation is better understood and managed with the development that will take place inevitably in the megalopolis area. The Karnataka State Pollution Control Board insists on a sewage treatment plant for each development in the BMRDA zone. While this is motivated with a need to prevent water pollution and to add to reuse and recycling of water, the practical aspects of what happens to these treatment plants and who maintains them should be studied.

Resident Welfare Associations and flat owner associations find it difficult to maintain these units. As units or houses are built incrementally, it is difficult for the treatment plants to become fully functional until occupancy is at least 50 per cent and above.

As a matter of choice individual on-plot sanitation systems like septic tanks and baffled reactors with the right design should be permitted. These have the benefits of being maintained by individual owners and also they demand much less water than piped sewerage. A dual system of grey-water disposal and black-water disposal on plot should be permitted.

While on-plot sanitation systems can be maintained with as low as 70 lpcd of water, piped sewerage will demand at least 135 litres per person per day especially for self-cleansing velocity requirements.

The sustainable management of water and sanitation outside the BWSSB influence zone is a challenge. The BMRDA has to think wisely and move ahead quickly so as to avert a serious water shortfall situation.

This would be water wisdom for a city.

Misfortune, now fame via Facebook

Special Arrangement ‘Facebook Mania’, the song in which Rinu (seated right) stars, was planned three months ago.

Rinu Srinivasan, arrested last month for ‘liking’ a post, is now singing about the charms of the social networking site in a Tamil album to be released soon

On New Year’s day, a song in Tamil celebrating the magic of Facebook will hit the internet and one of its singers, has an interesting connection to the social networking site.

Rinu Srinivasan, who was arrested in Mumbai last month for sharing and liking a Facebook post will star in the video. “The song is called ‘Facebook Mania’ and was planned almost three months ago. It has nothing to do with the controversy,” says Rinu. The song was recorded and shot at a studio in Thirumangalam.

Last month, Rinu and a friend, Shaheen Dhada, were arrested for a Facebook post put up by the latter criticising the shutdown in Mumbai following Bal Thackeray’s death.

“The song describes how Facebook has changed lives and made us connect with people in different ways,” says Sumith Menon, an IT professional, who has composed the song and sung it, along with Rinu.

The song is part of a music album titled ‘One Roof’ and will be released in four languages — Hindi, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam. It is being produced by a group of IT professionals, led by Saroj Karoidan.

“We have already released two albums in Malayalam.  There is one with Sri Lankan artists in progress. All this would not have been possible had there been no online way to connect,” said Sumith.

Magesh Balakrishnan, the lyricist says, “The cameramen, videographers and actors in the video as well as many of the crew members are from different places and we got in touch only through online communities. We held extensive meetings online to decide everything, in order to minimise travel, he adds.

 The group got in touch with Rinu after a friend told them about her online recordings. For the 20-year-old, the last few weeks have been traumatic, and she is now hoping for some peace and quiet.

“I seem to be travelling constantly. TV shows in Delhi and other cities, interviews, now this recording,” says Rinu, who will be leaving soon for Ahmedabad.

“Shaheen and I have been invited to talk to the students of IIM-Ahmedabad. I am quite nervous. It is not as easy as music recording,” she said.

Rinu’s parents are also in Chennai for now. “Our flat in Palghar, Mumbai, has police protection all the time. There is no threat now, but it is awkward for all our neighbours. They keep asking us when the police will leave but even the policemen don’t seem to know,” said R. Srinivasan, Rinu’s father.

Rinu’s family hails from Kumarakom in Kerala but has lived in Mumbai for the past twenty years.

 Recalling the chaotic month, her father a government employee, says the most unfortunate outcome of all the chaos was the disruption in the locality. “For almost a week, after the arrest, all shops in our area remained closed. Even our domestic help did not come to our home. So many lives were disrupted, in a way because of us. That really hurt us.”

“And though we have been told the charges are dropped, we have not got the legal documents yet,” he added.

While the family will leave for Kerala soon, Rinu will pursue a two-year course in sound engineering at Muzik Lounge School of Audio Technology in Vadapalani.

“I want to go back to Mumbai after my course. It is home after all,” she says.

Shoppers feel short-changed

The site now is as eerily silent as a closed mall. “The Google Great Online Shopping Festival is over for the year,” says Gosf.in, ending with a “Till next year.” After 12.12.12, supposedly India’s version of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the lull.

Are eager shoppers and consumers waiting with bated breath? Venkatesan K, a finance executive from Chennai, certainly isn’t. “I wish GOSF had more genuine deals,” he says. Venkatesan felt that the offers were “just a shade more than they were offered, on items which are regularly purchased” and “discounts were ramped up on out-of-stock items.” He was disappointed that “items not in demand had a higher than normal discount” but would have spent online if the discounts were “genuine.”

Radha Vasudevan, correspondent, Vidya Niketan School, Chennai, agrees. She got different mailers from the websites, promising discounts and “buy one get one free” offers. “I was looking for home furnishing products like cushion covers but found, especially in the ‘buy one get one free’ offers, that the price was inflated to start with,” she says. “I didn’t feel like I was getting a discount.” Ms. Vasudevan describes herself as a “reasonably” regular online shopper and usually shops for books online.

Some other online shoppers used this opportunity to buy products they usually find in a store and try out new vendors. Some wished there was better competition between vendors.

For many, the whole idea of having so many vendors on one platform was exciting. For Brinda Vasudevan, an editor, logging onto the GOSF was important because it was happening. “I wasn’t looking to buy anything specific though I did get an external hard disk,” she says. She had been looking for one for a while and feels she got a “good deal.” “I thought the whole idea was very exciting,” she says. “There were a great number of vendors to check out.”

Besides shoppers, GOSF was also about the many online retailers who participated. K. Vaitheeswaran of Indiaplaza, says: “There were two online shopping festivals held in the last few weeks. One was the GOSF by Google and the other was OMG [Oh My god] by CitiBank. We participated in both. We experienced massive jumps in sales in both.” Since this was the first time that a programme like this was being held, most companies weren’t quite prepared for the overwhelming customer load. “Also, we offered discounts mostly on electronics. Now that we know the wide profile of the customers, we will ensure discounts on every variety of items.”

Google India created the festival to be live online for 24 hours with nearly 90 eCommerce sites.

Gen Y and gadgets: the can’t-do (without) attitude

AP Online always: About 90 per cent of Gen Y (aged between 18 and 30) are obsessed with their smartphones, says the third edition of the Cisco Connected World Technology Report. — File photo

Indian youngsters surpass counterparts elsewhere in digital addiction levels

Every now and then, surveys on Internet behaviour — most of them their eyes set on e-commerce environment — remind us that we’re living in an increasingly wired world, that the Internet juggernaut in India is growing, outpacing all other media, and that we’re turning into digital natives.

But the third edition of the Cisco Connected World Technology Report confirms our worst fears: that we’re too wired, too dependent on our gadgets, networks and Web services, and are unapologetically addicted to our digital extension.

Titled ‘Gen Y: New dawn for work, play, identity’, the report surveys 1,800 students and young workers, and 1,800 IT professionals, across 18 countries and quizzes them on various aspects on how they connect to the Internet, how long they spend on their gadgets, and how willing they are to share their personal data on the network.

Interestingly, on many of the parameters the study covers, Indian youngsters surpass counterparts elsewhere in digital addiction levels.

Morning updates

The results are as funny as they are a cause for concern — for instance, one in five respondents say they take it along with them to the bathroom.

For starters, the survey finds that 90 per cent of ‘Gen Y’ (aged between 18 and 30) are obsessed with their smartphones: the first thing they do every morning is spend time on the network. The choice of network varies: some stick to text messages, others check if they’ve got email, and then some others (most of them) log on to social media to tell the world that they’re up and about.

Two out of five confessed that they feel “anxious, like a part of me is missing” without their smartphones. More specifically, 96 per cent of those surveyed in India (compared to a global average of 90 per cent) concede that checking updates on social networks is the first thing they do every morning.

So it’s official: we’re addicted? And are we more addicted than global tech-addicts? Apparently, yes.

While globally, 60 per cent respondents said they are hooked on to email and social networks, 70 per cent Indians said they can’t live without their ‘walls’. Of course, this syndrome is much more acute among IT professionals, where as many as 40 per cent of them say they must check up on their online avatars every 10 minutes!

Just about anywhere

By now we know that smartphones and gadgets are ubiquitous; they’re all around us. But what’s new is that the boundaries are vanishing; we’re using it in our loos (no less than 22 per cent), we’re going to bed with them (84 per cent), no doubt we’re using it to spice up our meal times (56 per cent Indians), but most disastrously, no less than 15 per cent admit that they’re texting while driving.

They’re everywhere! Smartphones are used everywhere, even in the most private of places.

The craving to stay connected means that the lines between work and social life/family life are blurring.

People check for work updates and communicate at all hours from every place imaginable.

Time is elastic: for Generation Y there are no clear markers between “the work day” and personal time, both blend and overlap throughout the day and night.

Apps, of course

We’re using smartphones — with price points getting lower, we’re fast discarding those boring feature phones — so we’re obviously doing more and expecting more out of our gadgets.

Correspondingly, the app space is growing. That 84 per cent Indians surveyed swear by their apps as a form of entertainment, compared to 70 per cent globally, comes as no surprise.

Over 60 per cent of them say they mainly use mobile applications for games and entertainment, while 33 per cent of them mainly use them for work.

Identities and privacy

So, granted. We’re all online, we’re all being ourselves on the Internet; or are we? The survey indicates that we aren’t; that there’s a disconnect between our online and offline identities.

Four out of five (81 per cent) believe that people have different online and offline identities. In India, this number is slightly higher at 87 per cent!

As thick as we draw the line between our online and offline avatars, the survey indicates that we’re not very careful with the real-world details and coordinates we share online.

A statistic that’s at great variance from the global average, 93 per cent of netizens are willing to share their email address with stores and e-commerce sites; all for a few notices and updates on a good bargain at a sale or some new discount scheme.

The global average indicates that youngsters outside the country are a tad sceptical with less than 50 per cent forthcoming with their personal data.

A well-orchestrated crash on Moon

  

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  In this June 1983 photo released by NASA, astronaut Sally Ride monitors control panels from the pilot's chair on the shuttle Columbia flight deck. Ride, the first American woman in space, died on July 23, 2012 after a 17-month battle with pancreatic cancer. Photo: AP
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  This graphic provided by NASA shows the projected paths into the moon by spacecraft Ebb and Flow. Photo: AP

NASA names moon crash site in honour of Sally Ride

A pair of NASA spacecraft crashed into a mountain near the moon’s north pole on Monday, bringing a deliberate end to a mission that peered into the lunar interior.

Engineers commanded the twin spacecraft, Ebb and Flow, to fire their engines and burn their remaining fuel. Ebb plunged first followed by Flow about 30 seconds later.

Afterward, NASA said it had dedicated the final resting spot in honour of mission team member, Sally Ride, the first American woman in space who died earlier this year. By design, the impact site was far away from the Apollo landings and other historical sites.

Ride’s sister, who huddled in the NASA control room for the finale, said it might be time to dust off Ride’s first telescope to view the newly named site.

“We can look at the moon with a new appreciation and a smile in the evening when we see it knowing that a little corner of the moon is named after Sally,” the Rev. Bear Ride said in an interview.

Since the back-to-back crashes occurred in the dark, they were not visible from Earth. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter circling the moon will pass over the mountain and attempt to photograph the skid marks left by the washing machine sized-spacecraft as they hit the surface at 3,800 mph (6,100 kph).

After rocketing off the launch pad in September 2011, Ebb and Flow took a roundabout journey to the moon, arriving over the New Year’s holiday on a gravity-mapping mission.

More than 100 missions have been flung to Earth’s nearest neighbour since the dawn of the Space Age including NASA’s six Apollo moon landings that put 12 astronauts on the surface.

The loss of Ebb and Flow comes on the same month as the 40th launch anniversary of Apollo 17, the last manned mission to the moon.

Ebb and Flow focused exclusively on measuring the moon’s lumpy gravity field in a bid to learn more about its interior and early history. After flying in formation for months, they produced the most detailed gravity maps of any body in the solar system.

Secrets long held by the moon are spilling out. Ebb and Flow discovered that the lunar crust is much thinner than scientists had imagined. And it was severely battered by asteroids and comets in the early years of the solar system more than previously realised.

Data so far also appeared to quash the theory that Earth once had two moons that collided and melded into the one we see today.

Besides a scientific return, the mission allowed students to take their own pictures of craters and other lunar features as part of collaboration with a science education company founded by Ride, who died in July of pancreatic cancer at age 61. About 3,600 classrooms around the world participated, sending back 114,000 photos.

Scientists expect to sift through data and images from the $487 million mission for years.

Obtaining precise gravity calculations required the twins to circle low over the moon, which consumes a lot of fuel. During the primary mission, they flew about 35 miles (56 kilometres) above the lunar surface. After getting bonus data-collecting time, they lowered their altitude to 14 miles (23 kilometres) above the surface.

With their fuel tanks almost on empty, NASA devised a controlled crash to avoid contacting any of the treasured sites on the moon. Mission controllers at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory applauded when they lost the signal, one of the rare celebrations of a spacecraft’s demise.

Mission chief scientist Maria Zuber approached Ride’s family about a month ago about naming the impact site. Ms Zuber said she will also petition the International Astronomical Union to name a mountain after the late astronaut as well.

“We looked very hard to find a very prominent feature on the near side of the moon that didn’t have a name,” said Mr Zuber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Are all your eggs in a basket up there?

Remember, the cloud is not yet a failsafe fortress for all your data

On December 10 and 11 when Google and Facebook went offline, users must have felt like Tom Hanks in Cast Away, abandoned alone on an island. Although the outage lasted only 20 minutes in the case of Google, and a few hours in the case of Facebook, panic and frustration were palpable on Twitter, with #googledown gaining traction within minutes of the outages. These were not part of any orchestrated ‘anonymous’ attacks, or, as a few witty tweeters put it, symptoms of the apocalypse, or of the ‘world going down’ action due later this December.

Google’s outage led to some of its widely used non-search applications such as mail, chat and other cloud-based services going offline. Facebook’s followed, going down for a few hours. Separate infrastructure glitches caused these outages — a buggy software update in case of Google, and Web address translation problem associated with the DNS (Domain Name System) for Facebook.

Although these glitches were not catastrophic in terms of loss of data, they served Internet users another warning against blindly succumbing to the pious platitudes and wholesale endorsements of cloud computing as the next big wave on the Internet.

The hardware hurdle

Soon after the outage, Google promptly reported on the cause of the problem and the actions that it took, in a report published on the Google Apps dashboard. A bug in a “load balancing” software update caused the temporary outage of Google services, it said.

When more than one server is catering to user requests, which is certainly the case when Google is serving content via thousands of servers from hundreds of locations, there is a necessity to balance the load (user requests) on each of the servers. To expose a single server to bombardments of requests, leaving others lazing would deem to be poor network design. The arbitration mechanism used to balance the load between servers and server farms, using intelligent programmes running on powerful switching computers, is “server load balancing”.

Software updates need to run regularly in order to accommodate modifications in the server infrastructure. Google engineers located the 18-minute service outage to a bug in the software that ran on some Google applications. This glitch had affected Google Mail, Chat, Google Drive and the Chrome browsers. But Google’s kingpin, its search engine, was immune to this problem.

Facebook, however, ran into a more mundane problem that websites often face. Facebook spokesperson cited Domain Name System infrastructure changes that were carried out, to be the reason for the temporary unavailability of the social networking site.

DNS is the telephone directory look-up equivalent for translating textual Web address to numeric server addresses (IP address). It is the first, and the most important, step to allow clients to reach the servers. When this look-up fails, the website remains inaccessible. The DNS server reconfiguration seemed to have affected Facebook on the desktop version; the mobile version escaped the problem.

When users put all their apples on the cloud, as they increasingly do, these infrastructural “inconsistencies” can have a dramatic cascading effect. Although Google, Facebook and most cloud service providers claim that they have built in multiple levels of redundancies into their infrastructure, the latest outage is yet another example of how millions of users’ data remains vulnerable to the vicissitudes of global networks.

Of course, it would be wrong to attribute the outages at Google or Facebook to technical incompetence. But surely they are pointers to the risks in putting everything on the cloud, and not anywhere else.

Security and privacy

Reliability is an additional concern to widespread implementation of the cloud. There is already a raging debate on issues such as security and privacy on the cloud. Critics of the wholesale movement to the cloud argue that the world has not yet reached a stage where cloud computing has become inevitable.

Regular incidents of user accounts being wiped off, or hijacked due to weaknesses in the authentication mechanisms of major cloud service providers are certainly discouraging users to bet solely on the cloud.

Security threats in cloud-based services do not just imply lacunae in the cloud infrastructure, but also the hesitation of service providers in admitting that the security is not foolproof. Without this emphasis, users tend to set easy-to-guess passwords, or common passwords between multiple accounts, aggravating the already-existing security flaws.

In conventional websites, that are not cloud-based, if unauthorised access is gained to a user’s account, the ‘cracker’ in most cases would reach a dead end and be unable to invade other accounts of the user; it would also be virtually impossible for him to reach the user’s local drives. The daisy chaining of accounts on the cloud, however, results in a lower-level of protection.

The cloud’s USP is built on the promise: “Take your data wherever you go.” But the downside risk is that like the domino effect, it can bring down much more when compared to its terra firma counterpart. Most cloud-based storage applications, for instance, allow applications to directly access user data on their hard drive, between multiple devices such as smartphones, tablet computers and desktop computers. Breaking into one of these devices implies access to all other ‘connected’ devices.

By signing on to user agreements, they agree that they will remain continuously tracked, and on logs maintained by the cloud-service providers. Privacy is simply absent on the cloud.

The hype about the “revolutionary” potential of the cloud has been tempered by the realisation that its reliability is still not iron-clad. If anything, the recent outages highlight the need for users to spread their risks across multiple service providers instead of putting everything on a single cloud.

Scientists decode how life emerged from Earth’s abiotics

 

AP A new study has offered new insights into how the complex chemistry of metabolism cobbled itself together, the likelihood of life emerging and evolving as it did on Earth, and the chances of finding life elsewhere. This December 1968 file photo provided by NASA shows Earth as seen from the Apollo 8 spacecraft.

A new synthesis by researchers offers a coherent picture of how metabolism, and thus all life, emerged on Earth.

Describing how living organisms emerged from Earth’s abiotic chemistry has remained a conundrum for scientists.

The study offers new insights into how the complex chemistry of metabolism cobbled itself together, the likelihood of life emerging and evolving as it did on Earth, and the chances of finding life elsewhere.

“We’re trying to bring knowledge across disciplines into a unified whole that fits the essentials of metabolism development,” said co-author Eric Smith, a Santa Fe Institute External Professor.

Creating life from scratch requires two abilities: fixing carbon and making more of yourself. The first, essentially hitching carbon atoms together to make living matter, is a remarkably difficult feat.

Carbon dioxide (CO2), of which Earth has plenty, is a stable molecule; the bonds are tough to break, and a chemical system can only turn carbon into biologically useful compounds by way of some wildly unstable in—between stages.

As hard as it is to do, fixing carbon is necessary for life. A carbon molecule’s ability to bond stably with up to four atoms makes it phenomenally versatile, and its abundance makes it suitable as a backbone for trillions of compounds.

Once an organized chemical system can harness and manipulate carbon, it can expand and innovate in countless ways.

Researchers Smith and Rogier Braakman mapped the most primitive forms of carbon fixation onto major, early branching points in the tree of life.

They have drawn from geochemistry, biochemistry, evolution, and ecology to detail the likeliest means by which molecules lurched their way from rocks to cells.

Their study presents a new, coherent picture of how this complex system fits together. What started as wonky geochemical mechanisms were sequentially replaced and fortified by biological ones, the researchers said.

“Think of life like an onion emerging in layers, where each layer functions as a feedback mechanism that stabilises and improves the ability to fix carbon,” said Braakman.

Braakman and Smith describe specific features of metabolism and sub—divide helper metabolites by their functions. For example, vitamin B9, a complex molecule in the ’cofactor’ class, facilitates the incorporation of one-carbon compounds into metabolism.

In mapping the chemical pathways to life’s emergence, the researchers touch on a more existential question: How likely was it for life.

The study was published in the journal Physical Biology.

Shaheen back on Facebook, wants to ‘move around without fear’

“I am back and dying to roam around Palghar’s streets. Now I want to move around without any fear,” Shaheen told TOI.

MUMBAI: Palghar girl Shaheen Dhada has reactivated the Facebook account she disabled last month following a row over her comment on the region-wide shutdown in the wake of Bal Thackeray's death. The doughty youngster announced her return on the site with a new photo—her face no longer draped in a dupatta—and the words "I am back..!!".

Keeping the promise to restore normalcy in her life, the 21-year-old has reactivated her cellphone number and is readying her two-wheeler to travel through the lanes and bylanes of Palghar. For nearly a month, even these simple freedoms had eluded her.

Shaheen uploaded the photograph on Facebook at around 8am on Saturday. The picture was marked by the absence of the dupatta that veiled her face frequently since her arrest on November 19. "I am back and dying to roam around Palghar's streets. Now I want to move around without any fear," she told TOI.

Her return to Facebook on Saturday elicited several comments.

Within minutes, three friends welcomed her back. One friend, Ankit Upadhyaya, commented, "Back with a bang...Gr8". To this, Shaheen replied: "Yaaah." To others' greetings, Shaheen responded with thank-yous. Within hours of the account's reactivation, six people sent her friend requests. All of them she accepted.

A self-confessed Facebook addict, Shaheen expressed delight at reconnecting with the world after a month. Though she loves commenting on city news, she told TOI that she will be more careful now about what she posts on her account. On Sunday, she did not use the account.

Shaheen and her friend Rinu Srinivasan were arrested on November 19 by police on the complaint of the local Shiv Sena unit after Shaheen lamented on Facebook the region-wide shutdown on the day of Thackeray's cremation and Rinu 'liked' the comment. Police hastily applied the stringent IPC section of 295 (a) against them for hurting religious sentiments, but later changed it to IPC section 505 (2).

The nationwide outrage over the arrests forced police and the state to backtrack. Transfer orders were given to two senior policemen and a Palghar court magistrate too was moved out. Not soon after, as the Supreme Court questioned the legality of the arrests, the state director general of police and the government decided to drop the charges against Shaheen and Rinu.

The continuing support for Shaheen is evidenced by the two-dozen Facebook profiles in her name, like 'Shaheen Dhada Official' and 'Support Shaheen Dhada'. Called to share their experiences with students and faculty, Shaheen and Rinu will travel to Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, on December 21-22.

But for now, Shaheen is waiting for the closure report in her case and for the police security outside her house to be lifted. "It feels like ages since I left home."

The most common ways of attack by cyber criminals is through social networks, malicious mobile apps, gift scams, fake charities and bogus gift cards, McAfee said.

NEW DELHI: Think before you click on links appearing on mobile devices on online buying of Christmas and New Year gifts as social networks and malicious mobile apps, among others, are the most common ways of attack by cyber criminals, says security software maker McAfee.

"Scammers use channels like Facebook and Twitter just like email and websites to scam consumers during the holidays," said the '2012 Holiday Shopping Study', conducted online among over 1,100 Indian adults.

"Be careful when clicking or liking posts, while taking advantage of contests, ads and special deals that one gets from "friends" that advertise the hottest Holiday gifts (such as the new iPad Mini), exclusive discounts at local stores and holiday-related jobs postings," it added.

The most common ways of attack by cyber criminals is through social networks, malicious mobile apps, gift scams, fake charities and bogus gift cards, it said.

Three out of four (71 per cent) of those surveyed said they planned for using mobile devices. Even while they were aware of risks, they were willing to give away their personal information if they can get something they value in return, it said.

"Using multiple devices provides the bad guys with more ways to access your valuable 'Digital Assets' such as personal information and files, especially if the devices are under-protected," McAfee Labs Director Paula Greve said.

Among those Indians planning to use smartphones and/or tablets to purchase gifts this holiday season, almost 72 per cent said they were specifically planning to use apps for shopping and/or banking during the holiday season.

"As such, mobile devices have proven irresistible to cybercriminals, and now they are targeting mobile users through malicious applications...Indians are more likely to be a victim of a cyber scam. More than 23 per cent of polled Indians have been victims and almost 25 per cent of the polled Indians know someone who has been a victim," McAfee said in the study.

Though Indian respondents said they were concerned about personal information being stolen while using a mobile app on the smart phone or tablet, the highest compared to other countries (67 per cent), 95 per cent said they are willing to provide some level of personal information in order to receive an offer that is of value to them. India also scored highest on the ranking of sharing credit card details in order to receive such offers.

E-commerce in India may touch $34 billion by 2015

Online shopping in India is poised to witness significant growth in the next few years, with the industry likely to touch USD 34.2 billion by 2015.

NEW DELHI: Online shopping in India, which is at a nascent stage, is poised to witness significant growth in the next few years, with the industry likely to touch USD 34.2 billion by 2015.

"It is estimated, that around 27 million (in India) are active mobile internet users. Currently 4 per cent are buying products through mobiles and in next four years time, it can go up to 20 per cent," Homeshop18.com CEO Sundeep Malhotra told PTI.

Going by the current trend, the industry is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 57 per cent and is likely to reach USD 34.2 billion by 2015, he said.

The number of mobile users in the country is expected to touch 1200 million by 2015, Malhotra said.

Meanwhile, in order to boost online shopping, an industry-wide initiative was carried out in the country on December 12.

Under it, Google India partnered with a host of e-commerce players like Flipkart, Snapdeal, Homeshop18, IndiatimesShopping and Makemytrip to bring its own version of 'Cyber Monday'.

As part of this event, internet users could log on and get deals for 24 hours on that day from over 50 partners across e-commerce, local and classified, online travel sites and BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance) industries.

"Seeing the surge in traffic and sales, we believe that this phenomena is expected to be a tremendous success in India as well," Malhotra said. He recalled that "Homeshop18.com witnessed 300 per cent increase in sales with majority of its electronics and lifestyle offers sold out by afternoon on December 12.

The significant growth in online activity in India reflects that the evolving nature of the market and the Indian consumer, he said. Opportunity in e-commerce are huge because of a large population base, changing consumer lifestyle and lack of infrastructure for bigger brick and mortar stores.

With more than hundreds of websites currently operating in the sphere and many more to join the space, it is obvious that e-commerce is going to be a game changer in India, he said.

"We believe that such an industry initiative is definite to grow and improve the overall online shopping trend", he added.

Huawei bags BSNL contract for core IP network

Both Huawei and ZTE have denied these allegations levelled by the US, but have reportedly agreed to reveal there source codes to the Indian government to ease security concerns.

KOLKATA: State-owned BSNL will shortly award a crucial equipment contract to China's Huawei for expanding its countrywide core Internet network, that may stoke fresh security concerns over procurement of telecom gear from Chinese vendors.

Top executives with direct knowledge told ET that BSNL's core IP network will be capable of handling data, voice and video traffic, and would be the principal communications backbone carrying sensitive personal information of Indian citizens for a host of central broadband initiatives like the national optic fibre network (NOFN), the National Knowledge Network and the government's ambitious Aadhar program that plans to give a unique identity to the country's 1.2 billion residents.

Sources in the communications ministry conceded there is pressure to keep Chinese network vendors out of sensitive projects on security grounds although the Indian government is yet to take any definite stand on a recent report by the US Congress Panel about Huawei and ZTE posing a security threat owing to their reported links with the Chinese military.

Both Huawei and ZTE have denied these allegations levelled by the US, but have reportedly agreed to reveal there source codes to the Indian government to ease security concerns.

BSNL's chairman & managing director RK Upadhyay did not reply to ET's specific email query on the security implications of buying equipment from Huawei for its core IP network expansion, but asserted that the state-run telco ensures strict compliance with DoT's security guidelines in all its procurements.

"BSNL, in all its procurements, follows security guidelines issued by DoT," wrote Upadhyay in a text message, adding that "this process is also in accordance with the company's procurement manual".

The state-run telco, it is learnt, had little option since Huawei and ZTE were the sole bidders for upgrading its IP core network, internally known as 'MNGT' or MPLS-based next generation transport system.

State-owned research body C-DoT has already exhorted the telecom department to isolate Huawei and ZTE from sensitive government projects on grounds that both companies have been barred from competing in US tenders on security grounds, following which several European countries, Australia and Canada have also reportedly stopped buying from them.

In fact, the telecom ministry had sought Cabinet nod earlier this year to keep foreign vendors out of "sensitive projects", which included the Rs 20,000-crore NOFN initiative to lay optic fibre connecting all panchayats in the country.

The government has already unveiled a new security framework which requires telcos to get their networks audited once a year by reputed international agencies for bugs and other security breaches. Prior to these norms, security concerns, especially regarding Chinese gearmakers, had rocked India's telecom sector for nearly two years, delaying expansion plans of several mobile phone companies.

DoT has also unveiled norms to encourage domestic manufacturing of network gear, under which, mobile operators are mandated to source 80% of their gear and related infrastructure from domestic makers by 2020.

It has said that companies owned by Indians and located here must get 65% of all telecom network orders by 2020. Which means the manufacturing units of Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia Siemens, Huawei and ZTE among others will account for 15% of equipment orders by 2020.

14,000 websites hacked till Oct: Government

Over 14,000 websites have been hacked by cyber criminals till October this year, an increase of nearly 57 per cent from 2009.

NEW DELHI: Over 14,000 websites have been hacked by cyber criminals till October this year, an increase of nearly 57 per cent from 2009.

While the number of websites hacked in 2009 stood at 9,180, it grew to 14,232 in 2011 and in the first 10 months of this year itself it has already crossed the 14,300-mark.

About 16,126 websites were hacked in 2010, while 14,392 websites were hacked in the year 2012 (till October), as per the information tracked and reported by Indian Computer Emergency Response Team ( Cert-In).

To check hacking and cyber crimes, the government has conducted six cyber security mock drills since November 2009 to assess preparedness of organisations to withstand cyber attacks, minister of communications and IT Kapil Sibal had said in Parliament.

He had said ministries and departments have been advised to carry out their IT system audit regularly to ensure robustness of their systems.

A total of 294 websites belonging to various ministries and government departments were hacked in the January-October 2012 period.

During May-June, 2012, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks were launched against a number of government websites by various hacker groups. A DDoS attack is an attempt to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users.

Sibal said there is, however, no proposal to establish an autonomous institution on cyber security.

Further, he stated that according to National Crimes Record Bureau (NCRB) a total of 696, 1,322 and 2,213 cyber crime cases were registered under the IT Act and cyber crime related IPC sections in 2009, 2010 and 2011, respectively.

A total of 1,184 persons were arrested for cyber crime under the IT Act, while 446 people were arrested under IPC section of cyber crimes in 2011.

A total of 157 cases were registered for hacking under IT Act in 2011, while 65 persons were arrested for the same. For loss/damage to computer resource/utility, 826 cases were registered and 487 persons arrested.

Likewise, 496 cases were registered for obscene publication/transmission in electronic form and 443 persons were arrested.

Under the IPC sections of cyber crime maximum number of cases were registered for forgery (259) in 2011 and 277 people were arrested for it. For criminal breach of trust/fraud, 118 cases were registered and 129 people arrested.

HCL eyeing non-traditional markets like China, Japan

Nontraditional markets will drive HCL Technologies’ next wave of growth, its chairman Shiv Nadar said.

BULANDSHAHAR(UP): Nontraditional markets will drive HCL Technologies' next wave of growth, its chairman Shiv Nadar said.

Reluctant to detail growth numbers, Nadar said that the next big growth drivers for the company would be from newer geographies like Japan, China, Korea. "These are big economies where HCL is not present in any significant way, I see these as huge business opportunities for the company and growth drivers in three to four years and beyond," Nadar said. For the quarter ended September 2012, HCL Tech earned 57% of its revenues from the US, 27.9% from the EU and 15.1% from rest of the world.

As the IT industry is through global economic slowdown and consequential issues relating to growth and profitability, HCL Technologies grew revenues by 36.25% for the quarter. "The best of HCL Tech is yet to come," Nadar said. "The new breed of young managers who have joined the company are very aggressive. They are going to be driving the growth story for HCL Tech," he said.

Nadar spoke to TOIon the sidelines of third anniversary of VidyaGyan School, set up by his philanthropic foundation. Shiv Nadar, who hails from the Nadar community from Southern Tamil Nadu, (a community which is known for entrepreneurial pursuits in setting up provision stores and acting as vessel merchants), is among the tallest Nadar community businessman. He has committed to 10% of his personal wealth for philanthropic activities , essentially in the education space.