5 SMS per day limit comes into effect

 NEW DELHI: To check spread of rumours which has led to exodus of northeastern people from certain states, government banned from today bulk SMSes and MMSes for 15 days across the country.

"We have banned bulk SMSes and MMSes for 15 days," Union Home Secretary RK Singh told PTI.

The decision was taken after reports of widespread circulation of SMSes and MMSes containing misleading information about Assam violence, threats to people of northeastern origin living in other parts of the country and doctored videos.


The Home Ministry has asked Department of Telecommunications to implement the order through the telecom operators.

From today onwards, no one will be able to send more than 5 SMSes in one go and more than 20 KB of data through mobile phones during the ban period. Though the limit on SMS is on bulk messages, some operators have reportedly levied this cap on person-to-person SMSes as well.

The ban came into force after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said that spread of rumours by miscreants had led to people belonging to the north east to flee from Bangalore, Pune and some other parts of the country.

Noting that the guilty should be brought to book, the Prime Minister said that at stake was not just unity and integrity of the country, but also communal harmony.

"Any miscreant fanning rumours should be brought to book," he said.

Read More

Google to include personal email in web search results

San Francisco: Google is trying out a new feature which would enable its web search engine results to integrate information from users’ personal email accounts such as Gmail.

“Sometimes the best answer to your question isn’t available on the public web – it may be contained somewhere else, such as in your email,” Amit Singhal, Google’s senior vice president in charge of search, wrote in a post on the company’s blog.


“Starting today, we’re opening up a limited trial where you can sign up to get information from your Gmail right from the search box,” Xinhua quoted him as saying.

Singhal noted that the new feature is an attempt to make Google’s search results to be “truly universal.”

As an example cited by Google, when signed up users search for “my flights” on Google’s public web search engine, they will see their flight confirmation emails for any upcoming trips right on top of the search results.

Google said the field trial of the new feature is now only accessible on its search website google.com in English.

Singhal also announced that an enhancement to its search service, called Knowledge Graph, will now be extended to users in every English-speaking country after its launch in the US in May 2012.

With the Knowledge Graph, users will see a panel on the right-hand side of the Google search results page, which provides a summary of key facts about users’ search with the most useful and interesting information related to the particular topic.

According to Google, the Knowledge Graph feature is based on its database which now includes more than 500 million real-world people, places and things with 3.5 billion facts about and connections among them.

In another update to its search engine, Google Wednesday said that it will soon offer voice search in its search applications for users of Apple’s iPhone and iPad following the availability of the function on devices running Google’s Android operating system.

Read More

Cabinet Gives Green Light For India''s Mars Mission

 The Union Cabinet on Friday cleared the Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) mission to Mars next year.

The project, which comes on the heels of the Chandrayaan mission to the moon, envisages putting a spacecraft in the red planet’s orbit to study its atmosphere, with the help of the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV).

India joins the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan and China in undertaking such an effort.

The launch is slated for November next year from Sriharikota. The Space Commission gave its clearance for the mission in December last.


The spacecraft will have a scientific payload of 25 kg and is proposed to be placed in an orbit of 500x80,000 km around the planet.

Why November

Sources in the ISRO said November was chosen, as the planet would be closest to the earth that time.

The next such opportunity will come only in the summer of 2018.

NASA is also said to be working on a Mars mission in November next year.

The mission is estimated to cost about Rs.450 crore. An initial provision of Rs.125 crore was made in this year’s budget to kick-start the work.

Read More

It's official now: Anna engineering students to finally get free laptops

Those admitted under management and NRI quotas not eligible for freebie

The long wait for free laptops promised by the State government finally comes to an end, at least for some students. Final year engineering students of Anna University will be given the laptops from next week, according to a communication from the IT department to the University administration. This will include 991 students from the College of Engineering Guindy, Anna University of Technology Chennai, School of Architecture and Madras Institute of Technology.


As per the earlier plans, students studying in second and last year of engineering were supposed to get the laptops. “Now, all final year B.E. and B. Tech students and fifth year students of School of architecture will get them,” says M. Sekar, dean, College of Engineering. However, students admitted under the management quota and NRI quota will not be eligible.

As five per cent of the laptops need to be checked manually for errors, Anna University has already designated a committee of 27 professional engineers to look into the working of the machines. “The Ramanujam Computing Centre has been assigned the job and distribution will start three days after we receive the machines. Every student receiving a laptop will be given a serial number that will be registered and also stuck on the laptop. This will help us identify the laptop and also send it for servicing if needed, said Prof. Sekar.

The Electronics Corporation of Tamil Nadu Ltd (ELCOT) had, by tender process last year, decided on six vendors to provide the laptops. These include Lenovo India Pvt. Ltd that was assigned the largest order of 300,000 laptops, followed by HCL Infosystems Ltd and Acer India Pvt. Ltd, with orders of 200,000 laptops each, Hewlett-Packard India Pvt. Ltd with 65,000, RP Infosystems Pvt. Ltd with 75,000, and Wipro Ltd with 50,000 laptops.

The delivery of most of these vendors, barring Lenovo, was hit by the hard disk shortage created by recent floods in Thailand. “Most manufactures procure their hard disks from companies, including Western Digital, which were much affected by the floods. There is a huge shortage of PCs and laptops. Only bigger companies that have procured them in bulk earlier have managed to keep the flow on,” says an official from the Manufacturers' Association for Information Technology (Mait), which represents hardware companies in India. The association had earlier urged the government to renew its tender or postpone it, considering the sudden shrinkage in the supply of laptops.

The State government had planned to distribute 9,12,000 , as part of its plan to give away 6.8 million laptops over five years to students of government-aided higher secondary schools and colleges. Of these, nearly 6,600 were distributed on September 15.

Read More

Yahoo confirms 4 lakh user accounts stolen by hackers

Yahoo has confirmed that hackers had stolen around 4,00,000 account credentials from its computer system.

In a statement to technology blog TechCrunch on Thursday, Yahoo said that "approximately 4,00,000 Yahoo! and other company users' names and passwords" were stolen July 11, reported Xinhua.

The company said it is fixing the vulnerability that led to the theft, changing passwords of affected users and notifying the companies whose user accounts may have been compromised. But it did not reveal the exact number of the compromised accounts or identify those other companies affected.


Late on Wednesday, a hacking group known as D33Ds Company posted 453,492 account credentials in plain text on a public website, claiming that it did so as a "wake-up call" rather than a threat to Yahoo.

"There have been many security holes exploited in web servers belonging to Yahoo! Inc. that have caused far greater damage than our disclosure. Please do not take them lightly," said the group at the end of the post.

D33Ds added that some sensitive information they had got was not posted to avoid further damage.

Security firm TrustedSec said the hacked service may be Yahoo Voices, a Yahoo division focusing on online publishing which was formerly called Associated Content.

"The most alarming part to the entire story was the fact that the passwords were stored completely unencrypted," said TrustedSec in its blog.

Read More

Yahoo's new chief, Marissa Mayer stands as the role model for women

Marissa Mayer has blazed trails in Silicon Valley - as Google's first woman engineer, as one of its most high-profile executives when she oversaw its search business, and as a serious technologist who was also willing to show her feminine side.

Now she will blaze a new trail, as a pregnant woman taking the helm of a major public company.

On Monday, the same day she became Yahoo's chief executive, Mayer wrote on Twitter that she and her husband, Zachary Bogue, a financier, are expecting a baby boy, their first child, on Oct. 7.


Part of the reason that Mayer is an anomaly is her age, 37. Most executives reach the top level later in their careers, after their childbearing years. Just 20 companies in the Fortune 500 have women chief executives, and all but three of them, including Mayer, are over 50.

Some people who study women in business were reluctant to discuss Mayer's pregnancy, saying that it is irrelevant to her ability to run Yahoo and that the children of male chief executives are not news.

"Many of the women CEOs of major corporations like Yahoo have children, and pregnancy is a short period in one's life," said Toby Stuart, director of the entrepreneurship center at the University of

California, Berkeley Haas School of Business, who has studied gender in the tech business. "Among career-oriented professional women, relatively late pregnancies are common."

But others said that by taking a powerful job while she is expecting a baby, Mayer is a role model for working women.

"We finally have reached a point where a woman could be pregnant and stepping into that kind of big job," said Sharon Vosmek, chief executive of Astia, a nonprofit group that advises female entrepreneurs. "Her age makes it exciting, not just because she's quite youthful but because she's also in this prime stage of life when so many women feel they have to step out or step back."

As a role model, Mayer is joined in the tech industry by Sheryl Sandberg, 42, Facebook's chief operating officer who often talks about how she balances work and family.

Mayer, who faces a big challenge in turning around struggling Yahoo, plans to take just a few weeks of maternity leave and continue to work while she is out, she told Fortune, which first reported her pregnancy.

Yahoo's board "showed their evolved thinking" by hiring her in the final months of her pregnancy, she said in the Fortune interview.

Read More