Posted 04/06/09 at 05:14:12 PM by Andy Salisbury

A software engineer at Tata Consultancy Services was found dead in his apartment in Velachery, India late last Friday.

The engineer, Vijayakumar, was living in the apartment with two other roommates, Vignesh and Ram Prasad. The latter of the two was home during the accident, but was in another room at the time.

Vijayakumar’s body was found charred in a suspected computer blast, according to Police. “We are yet to ascertain the cause of the blast. The computer was completely damaged and the deceased was charred,” stated an official. “Ram Prasad had gone to take bath. He told us that suddenly he heard a blast and when he rushed out he saw the charred body of his friend and fainted. It sounds quite unbelievable. We have not heard of such a case before. But the scene of the accident seems to suggest that the youth was killed in an accident as his body was in the sitting position in front of the burnt computer.”

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Posted 03/26/09 at 10:30:32 AM by Paul Lilly

Citing an internal document, The Wall Street Journal reports IBM, who was recently ranked No. 3 on the "Corporate Citizens" list, plans to issue its largest number of layoffs in terms of revenue and employment, with 180,000 employees worldwide. Of them, IBM will cut a "large number" of US employees in its business service unit and look to India to fill the void, the Journal states.

According to "people familiar with the situation," the number of US jobs being cut isn't known, as IBM typically remains tight-lipped when it comes to layoffs. However, earlier this year IBM had sent notices of layoffs to roughly 4,600 US employees in its software, sales, semiconductor, and finance groups.

While this might be the largest shift in IBM's history, the company has also been linked to acquisition talks with Sun Microsystems. According to a New York Times article last week, IBM is considering spending nearly $7 billion to merge with Sun. Layoffs and job shifts would be one way to help fund the venture, which would have IBM and Sun accounting for about 65 percent of the market share for server computers running Unix and 42 percent of the total server market.

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Posted 02/02/09 at 12:01:37 PM by Paul Lilly

Forget about the mythical $100 laptop, India's $10 laptop project not only serious undercuts the former price point, but it supposedly exists. The low-cost portable PC represents the efforts of the Indian government's ministry of science and ministry of technology, and a prototype is expected to be unveiled tomorrow in Tirupati, India.

Despite the impending release, specifications still haven't been announced. However, some reports say the $10 laptop will come with 2GB of memory, WiFi connectivity, storage expansion options, and consume just 2W of power.

How it all translates to a single Alexander Hamilton greenback is a mystery, or even the current pre-production cost, which sits at about double. "At this stage, the price is working out to be $20 but with mass production it is bound to come down," R P Agarwal, secretary, higher education said.

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Posted 08/05/08 at 09:53:57 AM by Pulkit Chandna

Wi-Fi theft is turning into a menace of inordinate proportions and home-based wireless networks are sitting ducks for bandwidth thieves, a demographic that now also includes wily terrorists. A case that has come to light in India will insure that some of the benevolent Wi-Fi hosts will never turn off their firewalls or show vacuous disregard towards bandwidth theft.

An American national, Kenneth Haywood, was nabbed by the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) from his Mumbai residence after it was found that e-mails claiming responsibility for heinous serial blasts in Ahmedabad, India on 26th July – that claimed 46 innocent lives and wounded many more – emanated from his IP address.

He is fortunate that the cyber experts of the ATS bought his plea, that his Wi-Fi might have been used by the terrorists to send the e-mail without him being in the know. Of course, their preliminary investigation also seems to suggest the same, as he hasn’t been booked under any law. However, he has been told not to leave the country until further notice.

Several fear-mongers have prophesied about the threat cyber terrorism poses. This isn’t the deadly manifestation of cyber terrorism that they talk about, it is a sinister beginning all the same.

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