VARINDIA IT MAGAZINE

The State Police department of Telengana has geared with the latest technology based system to do the facial recognisation and become the first police force in the country to leverage the technology, that too by bringing it to the fingertips of its officers by incorporating in TSCOP mobile application. The facility will allow Investigation Officers (IOs) to identify potential offenders by comparing person’s face with several lakhs of digital photographs stored in the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and Systems (CCTNS) . FRS is an integrated feature of TSCOP mobile app for assisting investigation officers and efficient services to citizens and therby improving responsiveness, state Director General of Police M Mahendar Reddy said. This will aid investigating officers (IOs) in identifying criminals and suspects across the State in real time and at lightning speed. The tools allows police to identify potential offenders by comparing a suspect’s face with lakhs of digital...

Apple's valuation has crossed $1 trillion, thus becoming the first American public company to achieve it. The stock of Apple passed $207.04 a share and is at an all-time high of $208.38. Apple is now up more than 20% this year. Apple on Wednesday reported earnings that topped forecasts, following which its shares surged. Apple has rallied past the trillion level thanks to solid sales of the iPhone 8 and X - particularly in China and Japan - and surging services revenue from the App Store. Wall Street thinks Apple could go even higher. Thirteen analysts have a price target of above $225 per share for Apple. The most bullish, Brian White of Monness, Crespi, Hardt & Co., has a price target of $275 a share. That would value Apple at $1.3 trillion. There has been a speculation in the market however that the iPhone maker should come up with a new product in order to keep up with sales and profits in a competitive market.... Read More

Jio and SBI are deepening their partnership to bring next-generation bilateral frictionless experience with exclusive digital Banking, Payments and Commerce journeys for their customers.  Jio and SBI are entering into a digital partnership aimed to increase SBI’s digital customer base multifold. SBI YONO is a revolutionary omni-channel platform offering digital banking, commerce and financial superstore services to customers. YONO’s digital banking features and solutions will be enabled through the MyJio platform for a seamless, integrated and superior customer experience. MyJio, one of India’s largest over-the-top (OTT) mobile applications, will now bring in financial services capabilities of SBI and Jio Payments Bank.  Jio and SBI customers will benefit from Jio Prime, a consumer engagement and commerce platform from Reliance. Jio Prime will offer exclusive deals from Reliance Retail, Jio, partner brands and merchants. In addition, with an integration between SBI...

Sophos has released an in-depth investigative white paper on the SamSam ransomware attacks that first appeared in December 2015. Titled “SamSam: The (Almost) Six Million Dollar Ransomware”, this white paper aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of this unique ransomware attack by summarizing key findings about attacker’s tools, techniques, and protocols. SamSam is a thorough encryption tool, rendering not only work data files unusable but any program that is not essential to the operation of a Windows computer, most of which are not routinely backed up. SamSam’s attacking method unique as it is manual and as a result, attackers can employ countermeasures (if needed) to evade many security tools. If the process of encrypting data is interrupted, the malware is capable of comprehensively erasing all trace of itself immediately, hindering any investigation. Furthermore, recovery from the attack may require reimaging and/or reinstalling software as well as restoring backu...

In an attempt to make inroads into the Chinese market, which it had been unable to past several years, Google is reportedly launching a censored version of its search engine in the country. Code-named ‘Dragonfly’, the product has been secretly planned by the tech giant for almost a year. China has blocked Google's search engine, Gmail and YouTube since 2010, when federal regulators, often referred to as China's 'Great Firewall,' shut down more than 1.3 million websites. Development of the search engine sped up after Google CEO Sundar Pichai met with a top Chinese government official in December 2017, as revealed by sources. Several versions of an Android app, called 'Maotai' and 'Longfei' have been created by Programmers and engineers Google and presented to the Chinese government for review. The app would have to comply with China's rigid censorship laws, which would mean restricting access to content that government officials ...

Kolkata recently witnessed the successful conclusion of the 9th EIITF (Eastern India Information Technology Fair - 2018) that was hosted by VARINDIA. Amidst speeches and presentations from corporate houses, the event served as a common platform for the corporates to share ideas, discuss issues and challenges targeting the growth of the ICT sector in the region in particular and the country in general. All in all, the event saw the coming together of 200 senior officials from the IT Department, dignitaries from Central and state government departments and spokespeople from IT Corporates. The special guests who attended the event were V K Bhandari, CMD - Supertron Electronics Pvt. Ltd.; Dr Tinku Acharya, Fellow IEEE, Founder & MD- Videonetics Technology; Manjit Nayak, Addl. Director- STPI; P L Suhasaria, President- COMPASS; Mansi Saha, Regional Secretary (East)- ISODA; Sandeep Sengupta, M.D.- ISOAH; Ranjit Metrani, VP Sales and Chief Revenue Officer- ESDS Software and Ardam...

Union Minister Arun Jaitley has confirmed that GST rates on cement, ACs and televisions will be cut as tax revenues from them increase, and only luxury and sin goods will attract the highest slab of 28 per cent. Jaitley termed the pre-GST indirect tax regime, during which most of the household items attracted a levy of 31 per cent, as "Congress Legacy Tax", in a Facebook post. The past one year, he adds, has seen rate reduction in 384 commodities. Goods and Services Tax (GST), which subsumed 17 local taxes, was rolled out on July 1, 2017. The GST Council in its meeting last week decided to reduce taxes on 88 items, like sanitary napkins, fridge, small screen TV, washing machine, footwear, among others. The new tax rates became effective from today. Only 35 goods, including cement, automobile parts, tyres, automobile equipments, motor vehicles, yachts, aircrafts, aerated drinks, betting and demerit items like tobacco, cigarette and pan masala, attract hig...

A question comes on why the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) Chairman R S Sharma dared to give personal detail of his Aadhar card number in Twitter. In response to a challenge by a Twitter user to publish Aadhaar details online, on Saturday tweeted his Aadhaar number with an open challenge to users to show him any example with “you can do any harm to me.” It always says, PPT (People, Process and Technology), Yet now everyone is getting dependent on Technology, by forgetting the people and the Process. Whereas, People plays the important role in every organisation, then they have to define the process. By getting influenced by the technology companies, vendors and consultants, we implement the technology in the organisation, which we are seeing the result. But the fact is Technology companies are fully aware of the respective country wise laws on how to find the loop holes. Need of the hour is,we would need for a digitally secured Aadhar card/Number.... Read More...

To drive the ambitious Make in India initiative and promote manufacturing in the country, the Government has issued a mandate to give preference to locally produce cyber security products in all public procurement. The intellectual property rights of these cyber security products have to be owned by companies or start-ups incorporated in India. Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) in the order said that Cyber Security being a strategic sector, all the procuring entities shall give preference to domestically manufactured/produced Cyber Security Products. The notification is based on Public Procurement (Preference to Make in India) Order 2017 which aims to enhance income and employment in the country..... Read More

Qlik has announced the acquisition of Podium Data to expand Qlik’s mission, moving beyond analytics to being provider of solutions that democratize data for every user to create a more data literate world. Enterprise data strategies have evolved to rely heavily on the creation of data lakes. However, customers are realizing that these and other data sources aren’t designed to easily and quickly deliver data to the business user. In many instances, data lakes have only increased customer data complexity and management headaches. According to Gartner, “Through 2018, 90% of deployed data lakes will be rendered useless, as they’re overwhelmed with information assets captured for uncertain use-cases.” (Gartner. Derive Value From Data Lakes Using Analytics Design Patterns. 26 September 2017) Qlik believes an organization’s analytics strategy is only optimized when paired with a strong data strategy, and yet most analytics vendors are falling short on delivering in this ar...

Hitachi Vantara has announced its intent to acquire REAN Cloud LLC. This acquisition will reinforce Hitachi Vantara’s ability to accelerate secure enterprise cloud adoption across multi-cloud environments and strengthen its ability to manage and operate traditional applications as well as emerging workloads in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Hitachi Vantara shares REAN Cloud’s passion for creating leading-edge solutions and will leverage REAN Cloud’s expertise to speed delivery of transformative digital solutions for its combined customers and partners. Bobby Soni, Chief Solutions and Services Officer of Hitachi Vantara, says, “Enterprises today want the ultimate flexibility in selecting the right environment for their varied workloads and development requirements. Moving and managing data and applications across environments requires careful orchestration through a unified cloud platform. Hitachi Vantara already offers trusted and reliable private cloud solut...

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has announced new features to HPE 3PAR, so that users can focus on unlocking the economic value of their data. HPE InfoSight is a cloud-based AI platform built on a unique approach to data collection and analysis, predicting and automating resolution to problems and continuously improving to make HPE storage smarter and more reliable. HPE InfoSight delivers HPE 3PAR customers a predictive analytics framework to anticipate and prevent issues across the infrastructure stack. This is in addition to the cross-stack analytics made available to HPE 3PAR customers, which provides IT the ability to resolve performance problems and pinpoint the root cause of issues between the storage and host virtual machines. Since releasing these capabilities, HPE InfoSight has already predicted and auto-resolved 85% of more than 1,500 complex, priority cases across the HPE 3PAR installed base. HPE InfoSight enables a new and better product experience that...

President Donald Trump, the Republican leader has said in an interview that he is willing to hit all Chinese goods imported to the US with tariffs if necessary. Trump administration will start imposing tariffs on Chinese imports worth $34 billion from Friday. On China's part, it will promptly strike back with tariffs on an equal amount of US exports. Trump has said in his speech that he is not doing this for politics but as a right thing for his country. He also added that they had been ripped off by China for a long time. US has imposed 25 per cent tariffs on approximately USD 34 billion of Chinese mechanical and technological products. Starting Friday, the US will tax 818 Chinese products, worth $34 billion a year. It won't target the 284 additions, worth $16 billion until it gathers further public comments. The move has sparked an immediate response from Beijing, which said would hit back dollar for dollar.... Read More

Fuchsia is laden with Google’s Material design found all over its Android and Chrome OS products. Every few months we hear a little bit more about Google’s not-so-secret Fuchsia operating system. The project is open source, and first became publicly available on GitHub in August 2016. We expect Google Fuchsia, when it finally comes out, to take over as Google’s singular, united operating system for phones, tablets and laptops. Fuchsia is a hybrid OS that is still very much in development. The entirety of Fuchsia OS is comprised of two distinct but connected user interfaces (UI): a phone-centric one codenamed ‘Armadillo’ and a traditional desktop UI known as ‘Capybara’ internally. It is expected that, Fuchsia is going to accomplish much of what Microsoft and Apple already have in Windows 10 and iOS-to-macOS Sierra Continuity, respectively, but in a very Google way. A report says, since Fuchsia OS was built from scratch and isn't based on Linux, like Android, there ...

On Friday government woke up as 74% of the cash dispensers are processing on outdated software and are prone to fraud and lack basic security features. The automated teller machines (ATMs) run by public sector banks may be easily accessible to frauds as they are running on outdated software by leaving it vulnerable to cyber attacks.The government, however, did not disclose details of such ATMs that were run by private sector lenders. Most ATMs in India Are Easy Targets for Hackers & Malware Attacks. A question arises on why do people wait for such attacks to happen to bring about a change? A huge number of machines in the country are operated by public sector players, state run-banks control close to 70% of the business, comprising lending and deposits, and the report says, government telling Parliament that close to 89% of the ATMs belong to this category. The development came at a point when several ATM fraud incidents have been reported in different parts of the countr...

Rajesh Rege joined as the Country General Manager & Leader, Solutions & Cloud Technologies Group, Microsoft India. He quite as the Managing Dircetor, Redhat India/South Asia Operations ,who was global leader for the open source solutions. Over the last 3 years, helped establish Red Hat firmly in India/South Asia with an upsurge in visibility, recall and opportunity participation. Acquired a multitude of new customers with inroads into new sectors/ segments. Built a dynamic, action-oriented team who in turn have made Red Hat a magnet for great talent. On-boarded senior internal stakeholders to the India opportunity driving investments and support. Elevated partnerships into formidable multi-pronged engagements for reach & scale with several joint successes. Worked closely with media, analysts, policy makers & industry associations (member CII committee on IT/ITES) to champion open source & Red Hat.... Read More

Robotic process automation (or RPA or RPAAI) is an emerging form of business process automation technology based on the notion of software robots or artificial intelligence (AI) workers. Every sunrise sector requires a focussed roadmap and people with a deep understanding of the opportunities and challenges, to place it on the fast track. RPA tools have strong technical similarities to graphical user interface testing tools. These tools also automate interactions with the GUI, and often do so by repeating a set of demonstration actions performed by a user. RPA tools differ from such systems including features that allow data to be handled in and between multiple applications, for instance, receiving email containing an invoice, extracting the data, and then typing that into a bookkeeping system. The data manipulation aspect is not something one would normally find in a testing tool. There are eight technologies, identified in a survey by NASSCOM which are part of the “F...

European Union regulators have awarded a fine over android antitrust case in favour of Google with a record of $5.06 billion for using its Android mobile operating system to squeeze out rivals, and ordered changes to its business that could loosen the company’s grip on its biggest growth engine: mobile phones. As Android is an open-source and free operating system, device manufacturers still have to obtain a license, with certain conditions, from Google to integrate its Play Store service within their smartphones.

The European Commission levied the fine Wednesday, saying that Google has broken the law by forcing Android smartphone manufacturers to pre-install its own mobile apps and services, like Google Search, Chrome, YouTube, and Gmail, as a condition for licensing. Secondly, Google's app and services an unfair preference over other rival services, preventing rivals from innovating and competing, which is "illegal under EU antitrust rules."... Read More

The big bets placed on machine learning by Kai-fu Lee the former Apple, Microsoft and Google executive turned as investor, a key figure in the Chinese technology industry leading the way for China With a portfolio of 300 companies. Lee is among the leading investors in Chinese AI startups through his venture fund Sinovation Ventures, a $1.8bn dual currency fund, which also invests in the US. “The State Council paper laid out China’s desire to be a hub of AI innovation by 2030, and these papers have teeth in terms of very strong local execution,” says Kai-Fu Lee. This isn’t a divination by a researcher or academic, it’s government policy from Beijing. A State Council document, issued in July last year, resolved to position China as the world’s pre-eminent practitioner of artificial intelligence (AI) in both research and application within the next 12 years. Governments across the world are rushing to support innovation in AI, but none has published as coherent a plan as Chin...

UK speed tester, OpenSignal has stated in its recent report that India’s 4G download speeds are slower than that of its neighbours - Sri Lanka (13.95Mbps), Pakistan (13.56Mbps) and Myanmar (15.56Mbps). The average 4G LTE data speed in India has been about 6.1Mbps for more than a year. According to a list prepared by OpenSignal, 4G download speed in India is the slowest among 88 countries spanning 6 continents. The speed in India has been calculated to be a dismal 6.01 mbps, while the fastest in the world is in Singapore at 44.31 mbps. USA also struggles with a lowly rank. 4G speed in America has been calculated to be 16.31 mbps. The methodology used to prepare this report is based on the real-world experience of consumers on mobile networks in their usual, daily lives. However, when it comes to availability of 4G connections, India performs far better. India ranks 14 out of the 88 countries with a very encouraging 86.26%. It does not come as much of a surprise conside...