Free internet-calling service Skype is being used by hackers to distribute a 'worm' that infects users Windows PCs.
On clicking an instant message saying "lol is this your new profile
pic?" users are unwittingly downloading a file containing a Trojan horse malware file.
This opens a backdoor allowing hackers to hijack infected PCs and recruit them into a "botnet army".
Users can be locked out of their machines and held to ransom, the BBC reports.
According to the report, Skype said in a statement that they 'are aware
of this malicious activity and are working quickly to mitigate its
impact.'
"We strongly recommend upgrading to the newest Skype
version and applying updated security features on your computer," the
firm said in a statement.
"Additionally, following links - even
when from your contacts - that look strange or are unexpected is not
advisable," it added.
The evolution of computer softwares related to the mining industries started towards the late 70's across the world with the need clearly apparent for the operative gold mines. The sustenance of the gold mines depended on accurate prediction of the nature of the deposit along with the grade estimation. This was crucial to avoid any wasteful mining leading to barren faces. Many of the mining softwares were initiated by the existing mining companies and many were off-loaded to universities for development as a project.
The concept of using computers for exploration, geological modeling and mine planning started in India towards the later half of the 80s. Mining Companies started realising the need for such software for a more accurate and faster prediction of the deposit. These companies also realised that with such softwares, it was possible to estimate reserves as well as grades with variable cutoffs much faster and accurately as compared to manual methods. Thus the race to capture the Indian Mining Market had started with international brands like SURPAC, DATAMINE making their presence felt by appointing distributors for India. Not to be left behind were the indigenous software from CMC and later by RAMCO. Every software vendor claimed their software to be the best and the competition was fierce. Though these softwares were originally designed to cater to a specific segment of the mining industry, but were project as a complete solution for the mining industry in India. With colourful demos and high commitments, the vendors sold their software to the Indian mining houses only to later5 realise that a purchase order is not the end of that client. There is something more important after the selling has been made and that is making the software do what it had been promised to do. This is what changed the position of the existing softwares in terms of market share and dependability. Customers were becoming more matured and demanded that benchmarks be performed on their own data and they would judge which software will suite their organisation. Customers were ready to pay a premium for a particular software that they had seen and tested would do the job. Thus software which had the largest user base within India or abroad were not necessarily the best.
A very few distributors did give any importance to after sales service and technical support to the existing clients. Most of them just forgot the clients after selling them the product which at many places were been dumped without actually being utilised. One of the main reason for this was the lack of any specialised technical support team, well trained on the software, with these distributors. Most of the Indian vendors did have a huge software development team mainly to customise their package to suite that of the clients. One of the distributors to emphasise on a strong technical support team was HCL, then distributing Datamine.
Datamine entered India through then HCL Hewlett-Packard Ltd. in 1990 bagging the Hindustan Zinc Ltd. order at Rampura Agucha and then to bag the other 3 HZL orders under the world bank grant. It also picked up the 3 SAIL orders for the supply of the Datamine software. In 1995, the distributorship rights for the Datamine software were shifted from HCL HP to NIIT Ltd. under a new CAD/CAM division. Datamine grew from having a small 10% market share to capture the entire 100% in the 1996 and still holds the major market share of the mining software business of India. With a modest 20 licences in India, it currently holds more than 80% of the Indian market share (1997-98).
The success of the Datamine range of products, has been its technical edge over that of other softwares available in the market. The development of new features, techniques and new competitive pricing were the major points which helped Datamine capture the market. This is the only software which is constantly being developed to incorporate new, unique features based on the feed backs from the existing users essential to the changing mining scenario. Features like UNFOLD, Auto-Blending had never been present in other mining packages before. We at Datamine, do believe that no software is ideal. Every software has been designed for a specific function and that softwares should be able to import and export data from other similar packages to extract the best of each of the packages. This is what is been done by large mining consulting houses like BHP, CRA, etc. Datamine was again the first software to develop import / export drivers to other international mining packages like SURPAC, MOCROMINE, GDM, WHITTLE and also to standard GIS packages like ArcInfo. Today Datatime can import an AutoCAD drawing file directly as a binary file and convert the same into a 3D datatime file.
Thus with the presence of a competent technical team and a powerful software, NIIT entered into the phase of consultancy using the Datamine software for various virgin deposit. It successfully completed jobs for deposit. It successfully completed jobs for M. N. Dastur and Gujarat Mineral Industries Consulting Services Ltd. Besides doing consulting job on its own, NIIT also tied up with various organisations like Indian Bureau of Mines, MECL for jointly performing such jobs.
With the growth in the number of clients and a large potential for consulting jobs, it was imperative that the technical team should be expanded to meet the future challenges. Again the existing Indian clients should get the same level of support for which Datamine is well known globally. All these factors led to the opening up of the first International Mining Software house in India. Launched in the Month of April 1998, this office operates as a branch office to the Datamine International Ltd., UK and is responsible for all sales, support and consulting within India. The long term objective of this office is to expand its territory to cover the entire Asia-Pacific. The reaction of the existing clients can only be proven by the fact that today 80% of the clients have entered into maintenance as compared to 45% before the formation of this branch office. Today Datamine International Ltd., India Branch Office guarantees responses to technical queries within 24 hrs of receipt. Also, all our Indianclients have access to our international technical staff situated across the world. Therefore, with globalisation, where ever a user goes, he / shed has the access to a Datamine technical support person within the same time zone to cater to his / her specific query.
source : Sandeep Ray
Country Manager, Datamine International Ltd.
HP, Intel Corporation and Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO) today announced the creation of a global, multi-data center, open source test bed for the advancement of cloud computing research and education. The goal of the initiative is to promote open collaboration among industry, academia and governments by removing the financial and logistical barriers to research in data-intensive, Internet-scale computing.
The HP, Intel and Yahoo! Cloud Computing Test Bed will provide a globally distributed, Internet-scale testing environment designed to encourage research on the software, data center management and hardware issues associated with cloud computing at a larger scale than ever before. The initiative will also support research of cloud applications and services.
HP, Intel and Yahoo! have partnered with the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany to form the research initiative. The partnership with Illinois also includes the National Science Foundation.
The test bed will initially consist of six “centers of excellence” at IDA facilities, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Steinbuch Centre for Computing of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, HP Labs, Intel Research and Yahoo!. Each location will host a cloud computing infrastructure, largely based on HP hardware and Intel processors, and will have 1,000 to 4,000 processor cores capable of supporting the data-intensive research associated with cloud computing. The test bed locations are expected to be fully operational and made accessible to researchers worldwide through a selection process later this year.
The test bed will leverage Yahoo!’s technical leadership in open source projects by running Apache Hadoop – an open source, distributed computing project of the Apache Software Foundation – and other open source, distributed computing software such as Pig, the parallel programming language developed by Yahoo! Research.
“The HP, Intel and Yahoo! Cloud Computing Test Bed furthers our commitment to the global, collaborative research community that is advancing the new sciences of the Internet,” said Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo! Research. “With this test bed, not only can researchers test applications at Internet scale, they will also have access to the underlying computing systems to advance understanding of how systems software and hardware function in a cloud environment.”
Researchers at HP Labs, the central research arm of HP, will use the test bed to conduct advanced research in the areas of intelligent infrastructure and dynamic cloud services. HP Labs recently sharpened its focus to help HP and its customers capitalize on the industry’s shift toward cloud computing, a driving force behind HP’s vision of every thing for its service . With Everything as a Service, devices and services will interact seamlessly through the cloud, and businesses and individuals will use services that anticipate their needs based on location, preferences, calendar and communities.
“To realize the full potential of cloud computing, the technology industry must think about the cloud as a platform for creating new services and experiences. This requires an entirely new approach to the way we design, deploy and manage cloud infrastructure and services,” said Prith Banerjee, senior vice president of Research at HP and director of HP Labs. “The HP, Intel and Yahoo! Cloud Computing Test Bed lets us tap the brightest minds in the industry, academia and government to drive innovation in this area.”
Intel is a leading provider of platform technologies, including processors, chipsets, networking and SSD (solid state drives), for cloud computing data centers. Current platform features such as Data Center Management Interface (DCMI), Node Manager (NM) and virtualization have been designed to improve the manageability and energy efficiency of data centers. This open, collaborative research effort will give researchers full access to the system’s hardware for further innovation of existing and future platform features.
“We are pleased to engage with the academic research community – open collaboration with the academia is in our DNA at Intel Research,” said Andrew A. Chien, vice president and director of Intel Research. “Creating large-scale test beds is important because they lower barriers to innovation and provide the opportunity to experiment and learn at scale. Intel’s support of Tashi, an open source cluster management system for cloud computing, and this HP, Intel, Yahoo! Cloud Computing Test Bed are a natural extension of our ongoing, mutually beneficial partnerships with the research community, such as the Universal Parallel Computing Research Centers.”
IDA will facilitate research in the test bed by providing its users with the computing resources required to develop cloud computing software and applications. IDA will also leverage the test bed and its industry partnerships to train local students and professionals on the technologies and programs associated with cloud computing.
“With the ready and available Internet-scale resources in Singapore to support cloud computer research and development work, we can collaborate with like-minded partners to advance the field,” said Khoong Hock Yun, assistant chief executive of the Infrastructure Development Group at the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore. “Cloud computing is considered by many to be the next paradigm shift in computer technology, and this may be the next ‘platform’ for innovative ecosystems. Partnerships like this will allow Singapore to leverage this new paradigm for greater economic and social growth.”
These post were used to provide information to the users from different sources.
IBM has recently announced the launch of 20 new products based on its Jazz platform by the end of 2008. The announcement was made by the company at its Rational Software Development Conference which was attended by 5000 customers, business partners and developers.
“Currently, organizational, geographical and technical silos inhibit business agility and return on software investments. In a globally integrated enterprise, organizations need to transform how they collaborate to get the job done," said Steve Robinson, Vice President, Worldwide Sales, Rational Software, IBM. "The Jazz platform breaks down location, infrastructure and organizational barriers, transforming the practice of global software delivery," he added.
The company will introduce IBM Rational Requirements Composer to help software delivery teams gain consensus on how a project should be designed using familiar business artifacts such as storyboards, sketches, scenarios and models. Currently in beta, this new software will help teams visualize commitments thereby reducing rework and review cycles on requirements.
It is also announcing the beta of IBM Rational Quality Manager, comprehensive test planning and process software which will provide a single view into all aspects of a quality plan. With 100% distributed access and Web 2.0-based collaboration, this new software will trace the status of a project in the software delivery cycle to help key stakeholders prioritize issues for resolution.
These new offerings use will Jazz collaborative technology to help geographically distributed software delivery teams work together in an open, real-time and transparent manner to more effectively deliver and source software solutions. Jazz is a collaborative technology which provides a platform of services enabling powerful integration by supporting interoperability across a broad array of collaborative application lifecycle management solutions.
The company is developing Jazz and future products in conjunction with the software development community at Jazz.net where members of the community can transparently collaborate, provide input on requirements, report bugs and ultimately contribute to the development of on the company’s software delivery platform. The community will drive the evolution of standards and common components incorporated in future IBM software releases.
Independent software vendors, through the Ready for IBM Rational software validation program, are working with the company on integrating and validating their offerings to the Rational Team Concert and other Rational Jazz-enabled offerings.
IBM Rational Team Concert incorporates social networking technologies, such as instant messaging and presence awareness, into the management of a software delivery project on a global scale. The software which helps teams collaborate in real time in the context of specific roles and processes includes automated data gathering resulting in significantly less documentation and provides real-time project health information required to reduce project risk.