Now, an e-charkha that can light up your home

Bangalore: It's been an integral part of our freedom struggle and now the spinning wheel or the charkha is all set to get re-launched in a new avtaar — the e-charkha.
The man behind the wheel, R S Hiremath says the e-charkha is special as it not only produces yarn, but it also lights up the users home.
"When you turn the handle to produce yarn, a part of the power that you put in is taken by the generator, so the generator also starts turning and this in turn produces electricity, which can be stored in a battery which is within the e-charkha. After that you can use the stored electricity to operate a light or a radio," says Hiremath.
The invention has caught the fancy of the Khadi and Village Industries Commission.
The Commission plans to introduce 2 lakh pieces of the e-charkha at khadi weaving centres across the country.

Spinning the charkha for about two hours gives back-up power for six to seven hours of basic lighting and it comes at a moderate price of Rs 3000.
"This will have a very different impact on the rural society. One, there will be light for the housewife to cook properly and secondly, there will be light for children to read," says Hiremath.
Gandhiji once said that the spinning wheel to him represents the hope of the masses. Perhaps with different and revamped versions of the good old Charkha hitting the market, it's the hopes and dreams of the Mahatma that can be fulfilled.

76% mails from India are spam

New Delhi: Government on Monday said that as much as 76 per cent of e-mails originating from India are spam mails, although the country accounts for only one per cent when compared with top 25 spam-producing nations.
In a written reply, Communication and Information Technology Minister A Raja informed the Lok Sabha, "As per a study conducted on internet security by one of the international industry leaders, the spam origination in India amounts to 76 per cent."
He, however, said when compared with top 25 spam-producing countries, India accounts for only one per cent of the spam mails.
Replying to another query, he said the Department of Information Technology has received a proposal from CBI seeking funds to set up investigation and training facilities for cyber crime investigations with an outlay of Rs 363 lakh for a duration of one year at CBI Academy, Ghaziabad.
To a question on government's plans to set up one lakh cyber cafes in the country, the Minister said it has approved a scheme to provide support for establishing 100,000 broadband, internet-enabled kiosks termed as Common Service Centres (CSCs) in the rural areas.

The scheme is expected to facilitate the delivery of e-enabled government services at the doorstep of the citizen, he added.
Talking about exports from Software Technology Parks of India units, he said there was an increase of 43 per cent at Rs 1,44,214 crore in 2006-07 as compared to Rs 1,00,965 crore in 2005-06.

Quit illegal download or lose web access: French govt

Paris: Internet users in France who frequently download music or films illegally risk losing Web access under a new anti-piracy system unveiled on Friday.
The three-way pact between Internet service providers, the government and owners of film and music rights is a boon to the music industry, which has been calling for such measures to stop illicit downloads eating into its sales.
Under the agreement — drawn up by a commission headed by the chief executive of FNAC, one of France's biggest music and film retailers — service providers will issue warning messages to customers downloading files illegally.
If users ignore those messages, their accounts could be suspended or closed altogether. "We run the risk of witnessing a genuine destruction of culture," French president Nicolas Sarkozy said in a speech endorsing the deal.
"The Internet must not become a high-tech Far West, a lawless zone where outlaws can pillage works with abandon or, worse, trade in them in total impunity. And on whose backs? On artists' backs," he added.
An independent authority will be set up and put in charge of deciding when to issue Internet users with "electronic warning messages". The authority will be supervised by a judge.
The deal also creates obligations for film and music companies, who pledge to make their works available online more quickly and to remove technical barriers such as those that make music tracks unreadable on certain platforms.
The international recording industry hailed the move. "This is the single most important initiative to help win the war on online piracy that we have seen so far," John Kennedy, head of the industry's trade body IFPI, said.
"President Sarkozy has shown leadership and vision. He has recognised the importance that the creative industries play in contemporary western economies," Kennedy said in a statement.
French consumers' groups and politicians, however, have said the deal, which was signed by several companies on Friday, is too restrictive. Consumer group UFC Que Choisir said in a statement that the deal was "very tough, potentially destructive of freedom, anti-economic and against digital history," arguing that tough anti-piracy penalties are already in place.
Sarkozy said it would take time for the effects of the new system to become clear, but it would achieve its aims. "If it works, we will carry on the same way. If it does not work well enough, we will take the measures to obtain results," Sarkozy said.

Mouse click mightier than pens and swords

New Delhi: People of different nations have chosen different weapons of change at different points in history. First it was the swords and the guns, then came the pen and today people aim to change the government with the click of a mouse.
Pakistan, November 2007: The Emergency muzzles conventional media but blogs reflect the people's rage.
China, October 2007: Citizen Journalists expose government corruption, online.
Mynmar, September 2007: The military junta shuts out foreign media. But Burmese youth smuggle news out, online.
Politics on the net has just come of age.
Khai Sien Mung from Mizzima News, Burma says, “Some of the citizen journalists did created blogs on the Internet and posted photographs, footage and information on the blog. When a Japanese journalist was shot dead there were some reporters, undercover correspondents who shot footage of what actually happened there. And this video has been smuggled out through the use of Internet and it is being shown to the world”.
The net isn't partial to dictatorships alone. These government manuals for America's secret prisons were leaked online at www.wikileaks.org.
Military blogs by Iraq and Afghanistan veterans expose life in a war zone like no other media. For Americans, the net is now a way to get real news and express real views — without government filters on the web.
Khai Sien Mung says, “The correspondents can not write stories on what’s happening in Burma and the publications there do not carry the stories of the protests. The only option is to send the news outside the country through the use of Internet and telephone”.
The blogs helped millions track their dead relatives after the 2004 Tsunami. The government wasn't involved — just one man who wanted to help. Jessica Lal, Priyadarshini Matto, Satyendra Dubey, Kashmiri Pandits — all cases that had the net on fire before spilling onto the roads.
Some blogs had news on Nandigram two days before the mainstream media. Online petitions are also now signed by thousands of concerned netizens.
An online activist, Aditya Raj Kaul, says, “Middle class people want to do something. But they do not have the time to get together and protest. The net lets them protest from their computers. Everybody can do that”.

Cleaning Yamuna: Boys pick coins with magnets

Young boys pick up coins and plastic from the riverbed of Yamuna for a living and unknowingly they are actually cleaning up the river. Many boys travel on rafts made of plastic, picking up a bulk of the plastic packets that people throw.

Broken hearts may not heal but damaged organs might

Wisconsin, USA: Stem cell research has just received a sharp fillip.
In a major breakthrough, scientists at Wisconsin University have transformed ordinary human skin cells into batches of cells that look and function as stem cells, but without using any cloning technology or creating embryos.
This may translate into the possibility of having medicines tailored as per needs, using stem cells, but achieving that without negotiating the political, scientific and ethical road-blocks of using human eggs or embryos.
Although it would take quite some time, doctors are hopeful that this technology can soon be used to re-programme damaged organs to repair themselves.
For the moment, it can also be used to study diseases and to screen drugs.
Embryonic stem cells give rise to each and ever cell and tissue in the body.

Dolly's creator abandons cloning!!!!!!!!!!!!

London: Professor Ian Wilmut, Creator of the sheep Dolly has decided to shun cloning, leaving the scientific world in a state of shock. His decision to turn his back on therapeutic cloning came some days after researchers in the United States had announced a breakthrough in the cloning of primates.
Professor Ian Wilmut and his team made headlines around the world in 1997 when they cloned Dolly from an adult cell. But now he has decided not to pursue a license to clone human embryos, which he was awarded two years ago.
"I decided a few weeks ago not to pursue nuclear transfer," the media reported on Saturday, quoting Prof Wilmut, who works at Edinburgh University in the United Kingdom.
In fact, according to Prof Wilmut, a rival method that pioneered in Japan has better potential for making human embryonic cells and will be less controversial than the Dolly method, known as the nuclear transfer.
The scientist has admitted that the Japanese approach is easier to accept socially and can be used for a range of treatments, from treating strokes to heart attacks and Parkinson's.
The Japanese method comes from the research by Prof Shinya Yamanaka at Kyoto University, which suggests a way to create human embryo stem cells without the need for human eggs and without the need to create and destroy human cloned embryos, which is bitterly opposed by the pro-life movement.

Another govt website hacked, this time it's target Goa!!!!

Goa: Two wolves, a crescent moon and a star, and words proudly proclaiming that Huseyingazi Turkish Republican Hacker is the man behind this defacement.
That's what greeted people who logged on to Goa government's public information website on Saturday.
The hacker spews venom against the US calling them terrorists and peppered the site with pictures of so called matyrs. The defacement has already spurred the government into action.
“The government is lodging FIR in connection with this case. We will take help of the best experts to get to the origin of this. This hacking seems to be sending some terror messages and so is of serious nature. We are not taking it lightly,” said Ujjwal Mishra, DIG, Goa Police.
But the incident is the latest in a string of defacements. According to a government watchdog:
- 3,000 Indian websites have been hacked this year
- 143 websites were hacked in October alone
- In September, Gmail accounts of key government officials were tampered with.
- Passwords and login names of the National Defense Academy and key Indian embassies were splashed by a hacker on a website.
And it isn't just these public acts of internet aggression, but fraudulent emails that steal data from computers, that's putting the government on the back foot.
“Such groups generally target Government and Corporate websites as these websites are visited by many people. The time has come for all of us make our websites hacker proof as such incidents are on the rise,” said software expert Sangeeta Naik.
While such incidents generally occur around national holidays, this year, the sustained onslaught against the Indian presence in Cyberspace has security agencies worried.

Singapore bans MS video game for sex scene

New Delhi: Singapore has banned a Microsoft Corp video game which contains a scene showing a human woman and an alien woman kissing and caressing each other, a local newspaper reported on Thursday.
The Straits Times said Mass Effect - a highly anticipated futuristic space adventure game from Microsoft - was banned by Singapore's Media Development Authority.
In October, Singapore's parliament decided to keep a ban on sex between men, and Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said that the city-state should keep its conservative values and not allow special rights for homosexuals.
Singapore is the only country to have banned the game, so far, and it is the first Microsoft video game to be banned in the city-state, The Straits Times said.
The move has caused an outcry among local and international gamers who said the decision was too strict, the newspaper said.
The report said Singapore has, in the past, banned at least two other video games - Sony Corp's God Of War 2, for nudity, and unlisted Top Cow Productions' The Darkness, for excessive violence and religiously offensive expletives

Indian super comp is 4th fastest in the world

New Delhi: An Indian supercomputer has been ranked fourth in a list of the fastest super computers in the world, making this a giant step in India's efforts at becoming a global IT power.
The effort by Pune's Computational Research laboratories, a Tata subsidiary, marks the first time India's figured in the global top 100.

The list was released at an international conference for high performance computing at Reno in the US.
The Tata supercomputer, called EKA after the Sanskrit term for one, is a Hewlett Packard Cluster Platform 3000 BL460c system.
The computer has a speed of 117.9 teraflop, a teraflop being trillion calculations per second.
It is expected to help in areas of nanotechnology, seismic data processing and drug discovery.
The list is generally dominated by technologies developed by the US, but this year, computers from India, Germany and Sweden were up at the top of the much-anticipated list.

Battleground Internet: Can Web wars win polls?

A virtual war has begun between BJP and Congress in Gujarat ahead of next month's Assembly polls.
Both parties are now busy uploading videos of speeches by their leaders and starting fan clubs on sites like YouTube and Orkut.
Presidential candidates for the 2008 elections in the US, Hillary Clinton and Obama have used the Internet to their propaganda too and now online campaigning has caught the fancy of Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi.
That was the question discussed on the show Face The Nation - conducted by Sagarika Ghose - With cyber wars in Gujarat, can the Internet become an election weapon? To debate the issue on the panel were Nalin S Kohli, convenor of All India Media Cell, BJP and Tom Vadakkan, media secretary, All India Congress Committee (AICC).

The Internet has been called the thermometer of the elite class. So how effective could it really be in reaching out to the voters? Doesn’t it only reach only a very small percentage of the elite?
“I’m not sure it’s a very small percentage. The point is that it’s one extra medium we’re talking about. Young India is connected through the Internet and SMSs in real time. But whether it would translate into votes is the real question,” said Nalin Kohli.

But is the BJP getting trapped in the Shining India Syndrome where you use cyber space which is basically just staying with the affluent and the middle class not reaching aam admi?
“They are still living in a time capsule of what I earlier suspecting as the Golden Age. The point is that the person is not voting on the internet, whether it’s the Internet or the intranet. This is essentially just a medium,” Tom Vadakkan. He questioned the real influence of the medium, saying India still had a long way to go as opposed to the US, a country that was effectively using cyber space in campaigning for the 2008 Presidential elections.

BJP’s online campaign apart, the Congress, too has a number of very Net-savvy MPs. “We are using the Net only as a medium. We have gone a step ahead using intranet, connecting from our party headquarters directly to satellite. But when you are communicating your action plan, don’t confuse the messenger for the message. This is what’s happening,” said Tom Vadakkan.

Amazing Circuitry that's 200 times smaller than red blood cells

San Francisco: Intel Corp, the world's biggest microchip maker, unveiled fast new processors on Sunday made with new techniques that can etch circuitry nearly 200 times smaller than a red blood cell.
The chips are the first in the world to be mass-produced with a 45-nanometer process, about one-third smaller than current 65-nanometer technology. A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter.
"Across all segments we're increasing performance and increasing energy efficiency," said Tom Kilroy, general manager of Intel's enterprise group.
Known by the project name Penryn, the chips hold little in the way of fundamental design advances but are an important step in continuing the industry's track record of delivering chips that get smaller and faster every two years or so.
They use a new kind of transistor — the basic building block of microchips — that Intel unveiled earlier this year in what was hailed as one of the industry's biggest advances in four decades.
Penryn is the "tick" in Intel's "tick-tock" strategy of shrinking an existing chip design to a smaller size, then following up the next year with an all-new blueprint, known as a microarchitecture.
"They are taking a successful product and making it smaller, and in the process of making it smaller, it gets faster," said Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst of consultant Insight 64.
Brookwood said he reckoned the new chips, to be sold under Intel's Xeon and Core 2 brands, would be able to run most software up to 15 percent faster.
The 45 nanometer shift is also important to Intel because it means the company can make more chips from a single platter of silicon, boosting productivity and helping recoup investment on factories, which cost about $3 billion to build.
The company expects to make the majority of its processors on 45 nanometer by the middle of 2008, mirroring the progress of its 65 nanometer products, Kilroy said.
"We feel this tick-tock model is on track and our cadences allow us to ramp pretty fast," Kilroy said.
It cements Intel's manufacturing lead over rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc, which only started making chips on 65 nanometers earlier this year but plans to try to roll out 45 nanometer technology in 2008.
Intel will initially sell a dozen versions of the chips for server computers that power corporate networks, with prices ranging from $177 to $1,279. A version for high-end consumers such as gaming enthusiasts will sell for $999.

Google's Android can hi-jack your phone

New Delhi: Cyber giant Google is now all set to conquer cellular phones.
Different cellphone brands use different platforms for their basic mobile interface. But with Google's latest offering, they will use the same operating system.
Google along with more than 30 industry biggies such as Intel, Samsung and Motorola has developed an operating system that almost all phones across networks can use. The company is calling it Android and claim that it will not only make mobile web browsing simpler and faster, it will also unleash an entire whole new slew of cellphone software for the users' delectation.
An huge benefit of Android is that it is not just free but is also Linux-based, which means that any developer can create new and better applications and launch them in the open market. The increased user input in the operating system can only improve the the platform, and would make it cheaper and faster.
With nearly three billion cellphone users worldwide, Android could give Google a much larger captive market.
For Indians, however, using Android would depend on network operators. Though Google and Bharti already offer mobile internet and local address searches on mobile, neither is confirming if they would be partners once Android is launched.
Meanwhile, speculation about the Gphone - touted as the next big thing in mobiles - continues.
Google has projected the release date of Android-powered phones as early as 2008.