"I like my new telephone, my computer works just fine, my calculator is perfect, but Lord, I miss my mind!. "
Beijing: China has blocked the searches on micro blogs so as to restrict any searches on the 'Jasmine Revolution' that was to be staged in Chinese city.
It started with blocking any online searches for the word 'Jasmine'. However, later China suspended searches for all content on the micro blogs. It allowed queries only on screen names, events and other criteria. Following this, another micro blog operated by Tencent also blocked searches relating to the word 'Jasmine' and 'Jasmine Revolution'. On searching for the word Jasmine Revolution online, users were asked to participate in demonstration in 13 cities, across China which included the capital Beijing. The detail of the group or the person who has started this is still unknown. However, recent protests in Egypt and Tunisia seem to have inspired the call. According to sources, Boxun.com, a Chinese site was the first to publish the protest call. The blocking extended to other social networking sites too. For instance, a popular social-networking website, Renren.com also restricted its users from posting anything using the word Jasmine Revolution, asking the users not to publish any politically sensitive, inappropriate or salacious content.
Along with that, after the Egypt's anti-government protests various micro blogs such as Sina have blocked searches for term 'Egypt' too. Searches on micro blog Sina, for the word 'Hillary' and 'Hillary Clinton', were also blocked after U.S. Secretary of State asked China to stop the online restriction.
Earlier, China has blocked the access to search engine Google too. The control has been removed now.
http://www.siliconindia.com/shownews/Faster_cancer_prognosis_courtesy_IISc_and_Apple-nid-70421-cid--sid-.html
Governments in many parts of the world have been aggressively adopting a new generation of controls aimed at filtering and controlling information flow on the Internet, citing concerns such as cyber security, crime and terrorism, according to the Open Net Initiative.
The Open Net Initiative, which says it “investigates and analyses Internet filtering and surveillance practices in a credible and non-partisan fashion,” in its updated study released last year titled, “Access Controlled: The Shaping of Power, Rights, and Rule in Cyberspace,” said that it was fast becoming the global norm to control information flow on the Internet.
The Open Net is a collaborative partnership between the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto, the Berkman Centre for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and the Ottawa-based Sec Dev Group.
Asked whether the trend was likely to become more pronounced, given the recent developments in the Middle East, one of the contributors to the study, Ethan Zuckerman, a senior researcher at the Berkman Centre, said, “In general, we see governments becoming more aggressive and more overt about their Internet filtering.”
The Open Net has described the recent Internet blackout in Egypt as ‘just-in-time-blocking' - when information flow is brought to a halt during critical times such as political crises, elections, or social unrest. Discussions have resurfaced about the deployment of 'Internet kill switches,' a way in which nations could snuff out the Internet when such a crisis occurs.
“For all the talk of Internet kill switches, turning off the Internet is a relatively easy and unsophisticated thing to do. What is hardest to do is filtering on finer, more granular levels,” Mr. Zuckerman told The Hindu.
The first-generation controls were deployed primarily at Internet “choke points,” places in the network where Internet addresses that had been blacklisted by the authorities could be filtered and blocked. These were mainly the gateways run by the Internet Service Providers (ISPs). The number-based IP addresses connected to particular websites or domain names could be used for the blocking. Keywords could also be used in weeding out proscribed sites or pages.
Reports of watchdogs such as the Open Net and Freedom House indicate that though not pronounced, selective filtering has been a part of the Indian Internet scene. Google's Transparency Report for the first half of 2010 also shows that India is among the nations from where a number of government inquiries for information about users and requests to remove or censor content emanate.
“As far as censorship of Internet goes in India it is still first generation in terms of blocking and filtering at the Internet choke points. However, the Indian government has made and is making several moves that continue to undermine privacy and anonymity on the Internet. This has a chilling effect on freedom of expression and information accessing behaviour on the Internet,” says Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society.
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Bangalore: NVIDIA officially announced first quad-core mobile processor, Kal-EI. Also termed as Tegra 3, the chip has two extra processor cores along with 12-core graphic engine. This will help in getting better resolution in mobiles.
The chip will support a better display resolution. The media hardware is a 32-bit LPDDR2 controller. The 12-core GPU will not be a unified shader architecture design unlike Tegra 2. If we look at the pure processing, its overall performance is expected to be double of Tegra 2's performance. For visuals, it will be faster by three times.
According to sources, NVIDIA claimed it is capable of outperforming 2GHz Core 2 Duo T7200 in some of the areas and be at par with notebook processors. The chip is expected to be good when it comes to mobile gaming. Game lovers are up for a treat if rumors of Sony using the chip for its upcoming media/gaming tablet are true.
The production of the chips is likely to begin by August. Though, NVIDA has announced its customers, it might choose tablet designers such as LG and Samsung. Tegra line can make its way to PC notebooks too.
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Bangalore: HTC and Qualcomm announced a new partnership on multi-core processors at the Mobile World Congress (MWC). With this alliance, they will bring multi-core processors to HTC forthcoming line of devices.
According to Dr Paul Jacobs, Chairman and CEO of Qualcomm, HTC and Qualcomm are working together so as to bring next-gen platform for HTC's smartphones and tablets. As of now, HTC's new smartphones and its tablet-Flyer have single-core chips. With this deal, it is likely that HTC and Qualcomm will come up with new range of devices featuring dual-core or quad-core processor.
Qualcomm has already announced that its Snapdragon SOCs (System on Chips) will come up with different chips sets-singe, dual and quad. These new chip sets will be based on a 28nm scale. It is likely to increase the speed up to 2.5GHz per core and improves the energy efficiency by 75 percent. There are also expectations that the performance will be 12 times better.
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About 36 hours of videos are uploaded every minute on YouTube, the video—sharing website owned by global search giant Google Inc.
A top official of Google India told reporters here Wednesday that tens of hundreds of Indian movies from the classics of 1960s to the latest ones were available on YouTube.
The website is working actively to bring Hindi movies online, said Vinay Goel, head of products, Google India.
Salman Khan starrer “Dabaang” was the latest full-length Hindi movie made available on YouTube. Millions in India watched it for free.
Goel said many movie houses were bringing their films online. Several soap operas on various television channels are also available on YouTube.
Last year, 55 million people across the world watched Indian Premier League cricket live on YouTube, he said, pointing out the volume of information available online in various media formats.
“The amount of information being created on daily basis is mind-boggling. Last year, we created 800,000 of petabytes of data. One petabyte is a million gigabytes. You need 75 billion iPads required to store this data,” he said.
According to him, 100 billion non-spam e-mails and IMs (instant messages) are sent every day and 500 million people users visit various social sites.
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Britain may either rent or buy high-speed bullet trains manufactured by a Chinese firm, an official said.
The high-speed bullet trains are produced by the CSR Corporation, China Daily Thursday quoted the 21st Century Business Herald as reporting.
Gao Hucheng, China’s international trade representative, said British Prime Minister David Cameron has showed willingness to cooperate with China in Britain’s infrastructure construction and high-speed railway construction.
The media report said that CSR will lend a batch of train equipment to Britain for their high-speed railway reconstruction. Thereafter, a joint venture may be established when the cooperation is further strengthened.
This is the first time that China’s high-speed rail technology will enter the British market.
Britain plans to develop high-speed railways in the country over the next 15 years and promote high-speed bullet trains with a highest speed of 362 kph, the daily said.
China last year produced a high-speed train that set a world speed record during a trial run.
The train hit a maximum speed of 416.6 km per hour on its journey between Shanghai and Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang province.
The train is designed to run at a speed of 350 km per hour on the 202-km-long track between the two cities. A one-way journey previously took two hours. But the new train would lessen that to around 40 minutes.
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New Delhi: Can India dream of witnessing emergence of $35 tablet ever? HCL, the only hope also turned their back towards the tablet project. HCL Infosystems has denied its association with Sakshat project of the ministry of human resource development to manufacture access and computing device to be priced $35 a piece.
"It has been wrongly reported that we are associated with the project," Ajay Chowdhry, a co-founder of HCL and Chairman, HCL Infosystems said. Chowdhry mentioned that HRD ministry has recently floated a Request For Proposal (RFP) for the project and some companies have participated in it. When asked about HCL's participation in the RFP, Chowdhry told that his company will not participate in the RFP. "We will not apply for RFP," Chowdhry said on the sidelines of 'Electronics for You' expo. Chowdhry did not comment on the reasons for not participating in the RFP for Sakshat.
Kapil Sibal, union minister for human resource development has unveiled an access-cum-computing device designed by experts at Indian Institute of Technology and Indian Institute of Sciences and named the product 'Sakshat'.
The ministry is licensing the same to companies desirous of manufacturing the system. The product has been widely termed as $35 tablet. There were reports which claimed that HCL has launched 'Sakshat' that Chowdhry denied.
As usual, Indian government always disappoints people with false promises. Earlier in the beginning of 2009, Indian Government unveiled a $10 educational laptop which turned out to be a substandard flop receiving various negative views about it. Now it is $35 tablet's turn. There are a lot of speculations happening about the project. Earlier there were accusations regarding the product that it was not an Indian product and it is completely outsourced from China.
The big question that arises at this moment is why HCL didn't react about the news earlier? HCL's name was always associated with 'Sakshat' ($35 tablet). It was also reported that they denied security deposit of $60 crore at that moment but it never denied having an association with it.
http://www.siliconindia.com/shownews/Videocon_launches_new_range_of_handsets-nid-70077-cid-31.htm
