USER RATED NEWS MAJOR TURNS RACIST

DIGG is widely told by Indians, Pakistanis and Chinese to be Racist in nature. Now a study shows from data collected from an Internet survey that Digg users from these countries are usually banned when they post content saying that they are spamming, the most interesting fact is that they claim that when an American contact posts the same content it gets promoted. It is also claimed that Digg super promotes articles that they want to support. This confirms the popular claim that Digg is influencing people in wrong manner by making some irrelevant articles or websites go to the top for their personal benefits. Some users even went to the extent of claiming that Digg was taking money for bring up results.

This type of manipulation of Internet users is just not right because they are trying to give out an image that they are actually driven by users when they are not. A study showed a NIT C student group registering as an American user and then as an Indian user they used peers in America to get American IP. Then the group posted links from the same site multiple time from the two account. In a days time the Indian account was blocked with no explanation, and two posts from the American account made to front page.
The posts that made to the top:-http://www.digg.com/politics/If_The_US_Is_Ultimately_Leaving_Iraq_Why_Are_We_Building_Mega_Bases

Other Alternatives to Digg
http://www.shoutwire.com
http://www.hypediss.com
Or go here for a list of more than 30 alternatives
http://3spots.blogspot.com/2006/04/all-digg-style-applications-list.html

Google's photo screensaver A great Tool

Google's photo screensaver

This program lets you display photos from a lot of online sources as your screen saver. This can be online Rss , your web album or a million other things.

If you can't find MediaRSS feeds to add, Framechannel lets you create a feed from more than 200 channels of photos that include NASA's photo of the day, travel pictures, images from National Geographic, news and weather. You have to create an account, select your favorite content and copy the URL of your feed. Then add the feed to Google's screensaver. The cool thing is that the URL of the feed remains the same even if you add or remove a channel.

This comes as a part of the google pack.

Vundoo is back Norton,Housecall and many other antiviruses fail to even detect

Trojan.Vundo is a component of an ad ware program that downloads and displays pop-up advertisements. It is known to be installed by visiting a Web site link contained in a spammed email.

This is an old bug but there are new variants running around recently i had Norton running on my system got infected but it did not detect. Then installed Pc doc no use there too. Then finally went to House call and tried no use there too. Thus i concluded that this must be a new version.

The typical infection used to have a prompt like the one shown below.

But in my case nothing like that appeared.

While having the Vundo virus, infectees will notice a slight or large amount of memory being used at set times and/or randomly throughout the day. Pop-ups will tell you that your system is infected and that your performance is deteriorating, and that you must download a program (usually WinAntiVirusPro or SysProtect) to fix this. But due to some reason the pop ups where bieng blocked or the servers they where trying to connect where down. I opened up my fire wall and tried then also they where not displaying anything but failure returns. But some pop ups did work and most of them pointed to WinAntiVirus .

The program downloaded itself is a virus as well. The pop-ups will normally occur through Internet Explorer, but will also seek through to your Default Browser if it is open(in my case FireFox)

The process is a hidden service that is started when the operating system is loaded. There are many hidden files that appear with the Vundo virus. Sometimes, some virus removal programs will remove some of these hidden files but not the actual dll in my case most anti viruses dint see a single infected file meaning the file name have been changed or modified or that this is a new strain.

Windows having a "System File Missing" yellow bubble pop up (on Windows XP) that appears almost in randomly set intervals of 1-8 seconds. and some error messages when loading Windows saying the exact same thing.

Many tools and programs have been written to remove Vundo, although the Trojan's authors often release new versions. Vundo creates a DLL file in the Windows system directory and writes registry entries causing Windows to inject the file into winlogon.exe. This makes it very difficult to remove. In my case most tools did not work

Removing outdated versions of Sun Java used to prevent the infection but that too is not valid any more.

For me VundoFix did not work it was blocked through winlogon

VirtumundoBegone also failed for me it too did not help.

ComboFix helped not that dint last long the strain came back in less than 24 hrs. Finally i backed up my files and reinstalled windows.

Be very care full it is out again and this one is really really irritating. This one is not detected any antivirus i tried.

Cops use Orkut to track murderer

Mumbai: "A caring and loving guy, amazing, awesome and friendly" - these were the words Kaushambi Layek used to describe the man who police say killed her in cold blood.


Twenty-four-year-old Manish Thakur, a naval officer based in Goa, has now been arrested for allegedly shooting Kaushambi, his girlfriend, in Hotel Sun-n-Sheel in Andheri.


Mumbai Police say Thakur's profile on Orkut, the social networking site, helped them zero in on him.


Kaushambi and Manish went to the same school in Jharkhand and were reportedly dating each other since school days. Kaushambi then moved to Mumbai for a job, and Thakur used to come down from Goa often to visit her.


Kaushambi's family is distraught and are alleging blackmail.


Meanwhile, well wishers are pouring in onto Kaushambi's site on Orkut to offer their condolences, even as the Naval authorities in Goa are handing Manish over to the Mumbai police for further investigation.

HRD hopes to make $10 laptops a reality already at 47$.

Having rejected Nicholas Negroponte’s offer of $100 laptops for schoolchildren, HRD ministry’s idea to make laptops at $10 is firmly taking shape with two designs already in and public sector undertaking Semiconductor Complex evincing interest to be a part of the project.

So far, the cost of one laptop, after factoring in labour charges, is coming to $47 but the ministry feels the price will come down dramatically considering the fact that the demand would be for one million laptops. “The cost is encouraging and we are hopeful it would come down to $10. We would also look into the possibility of some Indian company manufacturing the parts,” an official said. The two designs with the ministry are from a final year engineering student of Vellore Institute of Technology and a researcher from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.

Due to reasons of Intellectual Property Rights being insisted by the two designers, the ministry is not parting with the design except giving out some of the major details. The laptop would be made on a single board which would make it easy to find faults and rectify it, say sources. A meeting of industry and academia is to take place in IISc, Bangalore, later this month to go through the two designs and invite more suggestions. Simultaneously, HRD ministry has been told by Semiconductor Complex, a Chandigarh-based PSU, that it would like to be part of the project. HRD ministry wants the company to get involved in the fabrication of laptops.

Six anchor groups set up by the ministry to be in touch with experts in critical areas and remove bottlenecks have been meeting regularly. Institutions like IITs and IISc have been identified as anchor institutions for the project and have been entrusted with the task of research and development of cheap laptops. Sources say it would be another two years before the laptops become a reality. “We do not want to rush into it. Many issues remain to be resolved like royalty to the designer after the design is patented. Prototyping would also take time. We would even conduct destructive testing and create a proper maintenance network,” said one official. Ministry sources also say that it has received offers from MNCs, but none of them was adhering to the $10 cost tag.

The below was an offer that HRD got but rejected

XO-1 (laptop)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Manufacturer
Quanta Computers
Type
Subnotebook
Connectivity
802.11b/g /s wireless LAN3 USB 2.0 portsMMC/SD card slot
Operating System
Fedora Core-based (Linux)
Camera
built-in video camera (640×480; 30 FPS)
Media
1 GB flash memory
Input
KeyboardTouchpadMicrophoneCamera
Power
NiMH battery pack
CPU
AMD Geode LX700@0.8W + 5536
Memory
256 MB DRAM
Display
dual-mode 19.1 cm/7.5" diagonal TFT LCD 1200×900

The XO-1, previously known as the $100 Laptop or Children's Machine, is a proposed inexpensive laptop computer intended to be distributed to children around the world, especially to those in developing countries, to provide them with access to knowledge and modern forms of education. The laptop is being developed by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) trade association. OLPC is a U.S. based, non-profit organization created by faculty members of the MIT Media Lab to design, manufacture, and distribute the laptops.
The rugged and low-power computers will contain flash memory instead of a hard drive and will use Linux as their operating system.Mobile ad-hoc networking will be used to allow many machines Internet access from one connection.
The laptops will be sold to governments and issued to children by schools on a basis of one laptop per child. Pricing is currently expected to start at around US$135–175 and the goal is to reach the US$100 mark in 2008. Approximately 500 developer boards (Alpha-1) were distributed in summer 2006; 875 working prototypes (Beta 1) were delivered in late 2006; 2400 Beta-2 machines were distributed at the end of February 2007; full-scale production is expected to start in mid-2007. Quanta Computer, the project's contract manufacturer, said in February, 2007 that it had confirmed orders for one million units. They indicated they could ship 5 million to 10 million units this year because seven nations have committed to buy the XO-1 for their schoolchildren, including Argentina, Brazil, Libya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Thailand and Uruguay.
The OLPC project has stated that a consumer version of the XO laptop is not planned.[4] However, Quanta will be offering machines very similar to the XO machine on the open market.