VARINDIA IT MAGAZINE

Difficult For Users To Delete Account !!! Facebook has been collecting call records and SMS data from Android devices for years. Several Twitter users have reported finding months or years of call history data in their downloadable Facebook data file. A number of Facebook users have been victimised by the recent Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal, prompting them to download all the data that Facebook stores on their account. The results have been alarming for some. The deleted Facebook Zip file contains info on every single phone cellphone call and all the SMS . Others have found a similar pattern where it appears close contacts, like family members, are the only ones tracked in Facebook’s call records. Ars Technica reports that Facebook has been requesting access to contacts, SMS data, and call history on Android devices to improve its friend recommendation  algorithm and distinguish between business contacts and your true personal friendships. Facebook appear...

HP Inc. India has announced its partnership with Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) for the upcomg T20 season. In an effort to better engage with millennials, HP will be the principal sponsor of the highly popular cricket team, led by youth icon and cricketing legend, Virat Kohli. Through the partnership, HP will occupy the commercial space on the front of the RCB playing jersey. With this partnership, HP aims to connect with millions of consumers across India as the leading technology provider. As part of the collaboration, HP will have visibility across retail outlets, on-ground activations, team jersey and will feature in promotions & activations led by RCB team and management. Further, RCB players will be visible in HP led promotions/activations.... Read More

Vodafone Group Plc and Idea Cellular have announced the proposed leadership team of the combined business, which will come into effect after the merger has been completed. This is in line with the original merger announcement of 20 March 2017, which said that the management team of the combined business would be confirmed prior to closing. Vodafone and Idea continue to make good progress in securing the required regulatory approvals for the merger, in keeping with the Modi Government’s commitment to improve the ease of doing business in India, and completion is expected to be in the first half of the current calendar year. The existing leadership teams of Idea Cellular and Vodafone India will continue to manage their separate businesses and be accountable for each company’s operational performance until the merger becomes effective. It is only upon completion of the merger that the two businesses will cease to operate as distinct and competing entities.... Read More

At #FUTURE 2018, The Honourable Chief Minister of Kerala Shri Pinarayi Vijayan announced that the State government will provide connectivity through 1000 free public Wi-Fi hotspots across the State. Enabled by Cisco technology, Kerala has become the first state in India with the largest public Wi-Fi network providing state-wide access. The state-wide network will provide citizens access to the internet with Wi-Fi spots deployed in parks, libraries and other public spaces. As a part of its Country Digitization Acceleration programme, Cisco has worked with the State over the last six months to provide end to end Wi-Fi hardware for these wireless access points. As part of its commitment to accelerating the digital transformation of Kerala, Cisco will install the Wi-Fi network in Phases.... Read More

KLA-Tencor, the chip equipment vendor is said to acquire Israel-based Orbotech for an amount of $3.4 billion. This acquisition, according to the firm will help diversify its revenue base and add $2.5 billion of addressable market opportunity in high-growth printed circuit boards, flat panel displays, packaging and semiconductor manufacturing. The broader portfolio of products and services as well as increased exposure to technology megatrends, the firm says will support its long-term revenue and earnings growth targets. "This combination will open new market opportunities for KLA-Tencor, and expands our portfolio serving the semiconductor industry," said Rick Wallace, KLA-Tencor's president and CEO, in a statement. "Our companies fit together exceptionally well in terms of people, processes, and technology." Read More

With Facebook’s stock value reportedly falling by 11% (Approx $36bn) since Monday 19th March 2018 as the company comes under  pressure from policymakers to explain how data collected from 50 million facebook users was exploited for political gain, Lynnette Luna Principal, Technology Analyst at GloblaData, a leading data and analytics company commented,‘Data privacy has always been bubbling under the surface as a concern for Facebook users.Trust is the lifeblood of Facebook’s business. If it loses that, it will lose more than its stock price in the long run.’ Summary :Is it true for Mr Modi, Mr Trump & Mr Putin according to Brexit ??? - Now Indian Congress also blaming Mr Modi who hired Cambridge Analytica data for its winning...??? - Then what for Russian President Mr.Vladimir Putin who won the electoral Recently.... Read More

It is absolutely fact that sharing the credit/debit card detail with any website is not at all secure. Whatever the best website it is they can’t claim on it is safe. If anything wrong happens is there is any penalty clause attached to it. There is certain top company websites, they have designed the format in such a way that you need to auto renew the monthly/quarterly and annual subscription. One foolish thing one should never do is fighting with them, on we didn’t click the option for renewal. There are 95% of the people they never take the record/print-out of what they have subscribed. Even though u have taken the printout, when you will challenge , their answer is weather we have signed or received acknowledgment. Since, the subscriber never bother to argue over the small amount what they pay for their Business or entertainment related social media accounts, in the fear of loosing the contacts and social reputation/image.... Read More  

According to a parliamentary panel’s report, State-run electronics firm ITI Ltd will have order booking worth of Rs10,000 crore by end of this month. “The total order booking of ITI will be about Rs 10,000 crore by March 31, 2018. ITI will achieve this target in the year 2018-19,” the report of standing committee on information technology said. The state-run firm has recently bagged an Rs 840 crore order for smart meters, while Rs 8, 000 crore worth orders are expected from ASCON project phase IV. ITI being L1 in many tenders would also get orders of about Rs700-800 crore before March 2018, the report said. The department of telecommunication (DoT) shared with the committee that during 2016-17, Palakkad unit of ITI earned maximum profit and Rae Bareli unit was under maximum loss.... Read More

According to the latest reports, Avaya India has moved the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) against Reliance Communications (Rcom) to recover Rs.7.5 crore.  “Rcom has not paid dues for call centre services from January to September 2017,” said Avaya legal counsel Abhishek Adke. The tribunal has asked Rcom to file its response in the next ten days. The matter is listed for March 23.... Read More

Ness Digital Engineering, a portfolio company of The Rohatyn Group (TRG), has executed a definitive agreement to acquire Linium, LLC, a digital business, engineering, experience and transformation consultancy. “This acquisition will further extend our capabilities in digital operations and business process management and automation,” said Paul Lombardo, Ness Digital Engineering CEO. He further added, “Organizations are under tremendous pressure to be more agile and efficient in their operations, and Linium is highly regarded for its expertise in strategic business process consulting and helping clients use technologies to transform business processes. We share a similar philosophy for how we work with clients: understand their business needs first, then our collaborative, experienced teams apply modern systems design that ensures execution is successful on day one and can evolve as business needs change.” Read More

In line with repositioning itself as The Digital Performance Company, Riverbed Technology has launched the Riverbed Digital Performance Platform and unveiled a new brand identity, accelerating the company’s strategy to deliver solutions to maximize digital performance and fuelling new growth opportunities in a $30 billion+ market. The announcements are the result of a multi-year strategy from Riverbed to lead in the area of digital performance, which included several strategic acquisitions, organic development of digital performance and cloud-based features and functionality, and integration across multiple solutions. “Digital business is now mainstream and digital performance defines business success. Riverbed has also evolved significantly the last few years, with entirely new offerings that have enabled us to deliver a modern IT architecture for today’s digital enterprise,” said Subbu Iyer, SVP & Chief Marketing Officer, Riverbed. “The result of these efforts is the ne...

In its latest ruling, the Supreme Court of India has stated that citizens do not necessarily have to link their Aadhaar numbers to bank accounts and mobile phones. The deadline for mandatory Aadhaar linking with bank accounts and mobile phones stand extended indefinitely till the Constitution Bench pronounces verdict on the validity of the Aadhaar scheme. The top court has said that a biometric ID is mandatory for accessing social welfare schemes and subsidies, but till it decides on whether the government's demand for Aadhaar to be linked to private and public services is a violation of the right to privacy, the 12-digit unique number given to each citizen does not have to be linked to other services. Ever since Aadhaar was launched in 2009 to streamline welfare payments and reduce wastage in public spending, PM Narendra Modi’s govt. has been keen to mandate the use of Aadhaar for everything from filing income tax to the registration of mobile phone numbers and boo...

Baidu, a Chinese online search giant, has named Qi Lu, former Microsoft business group head, as its COO and Group President. According to the company, at Baidu, Lu will be in charge of products, technology, sales, marketing and operations. “A key strategic focus for the company over the next ten years will be artificial intelligence,” Baidu Chairman & CEO Robin Li revealed. “Li is counting on Lu's leadership experience and knowledge of AI to help the company attract the necessary expertise to become a global leader in the field,” he said.... Read More

According to the recent reports, Facebook has decided to ban all the ads promoting cryptocurrencies and ICOs, after the implementation of their new policy on advertisements.  According to the company, the new policy prohibits ads that promote financial products and services that are frequently associated with misleading or deceptive promotional practices, such as binary options, initial coin offerings and cryptocurrency. Rob Leathern, Product Management Director, in a statement, said, “Two of our core advertising principles outline our belief that ads should be safe, and that we build for people first. Misleading or deceptive ads have no place on Facebook.” The company does not want its users to fall for scams or any other deception through its ads, the statement said, adding that the companies that are advertising binary options, ICOs and cryptocurrencies are not currently operating in good faith.... Read More

Huawei Enterprise Business Group has announced its partnership with Savex Technologies to further strengthen its partner network and grow its enterprise footprint in India. The partnership will create maximum value for Indian enterprises with its innovative ICT solutions and services backed by strong ecosystem. Savex will support Huawei in developing resellers to market and promote products and services products to Huawei enterprise customers in India. Savex is the third largest information and communication technology distributor in India and as a part of this strategic tie-up, will be responsible for Huawei’s channel partner network technical training and development.... Read More

If, for any reason, you need to observe your tracks while you are browsing the web on your desktop, you have plenty of options to keep anonymous. Thanks to Mr. Orbot, Android users, too, have a splution to use the Tor network to anonymise their web browsing sessions and avoid being monitored. Now, thanks to Onion Browser ($0.99), iPhone and iPad users also finally get an easy option to tunnel their web traffic through the Tor network. Now a days each and every browsers are trending to be equipped with exactly on demand features. There are bookmarks or easy access to search, and after all for advanced feature like remember password, block cookies etc. are driven by cookies (temporary storing data in a Virtual medium), enable user agent spoofing on the same IP and machine. As world wide web trafic is on action, and all these browsing activities should channelise through a secured transport layer, which is called secured socket Layer (SSL) and is a part of dedicated HTTPS mechan...

Google has launched its Tez person-to-person payments app last year and now it is adding a chat feature to it. As per latest reports, the feature is being rolled out and lets users send messages related to each transaction. The feature will apparently be helpful for tracking the context of payments and so on. It may be yet another messaging solution from Google, and comes at a time when WhatsApp has just launched its own in-app payments system for India. The WhatsApp payment system is seen to have a big potential and be a huge deal since the messaging service has over 200 million Indian users, representing the majority of smartphone owners in the country. Paytm, India's largest mobile payments company, also has more than 200 million users, and added a similar chat option late last year..... Read More

Acer has become the “No.1 Gaming Brand” in India across laptops, desktops and monitors as per IDC’s Q4 2017 report. Acer has emerged as the leading brand with 25.4% market share in the gaming laptops and 41.9% marketing share in gaming monitors and beats Dell, HP, MSI and Asus by a significant margin in Q4 2017. Acer gained the top spot in the gaming market with its critically acclaimed and widely popular Predator and Nitro gaming series. Acer in India has the widest portfolio of PC gaming products which includes laptops, desktops, monitors and accessories specifically designed for beginners to professional gamers. Commenting on the achievement, Chandrahas Panigrahi, CMO & Consumer Business Head, Acer said, “We are extremely delighted to achieve the No.1 position in the gaming category across laptops, desktops and monitors. Our strong commitment in developing exceptional gaming notebooks, desktops, and monitors has helped us to win the hearts and minds of our custom...

HP Inc has announced a new line of sanitizable and secure laptops, displays, and all-in-one desktops. Designed for healthcare workers in hospitals and clinics, the new laptops can be easily cleaned with germicidal wipes, without the worry that moisture will damage the electronics. The products address the problem of health care-associated infections (HAIs), which result in 1.7 million illnesses in the U.S. each year - and 99,000 deaths. The laptops have integrated radio frequency identification (RFID) readers for single sign-on authentication, which allows workers to sign in by tapping their badges on the laptop’s touchpad. It also has fingerprint identification. HP has announced the products at the HIMSS18 health care event.... Read More

FICCI has announced in an official statement that it has appointed Dilip Chenoy as its Director General. Chenoy had been the Managing Director and CEO of the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC), from which he resigned in late 2015 amid reports that the government was unhappy with the functioning of the skills development body. He was appointed by the previous Congress-led UPA government. In his earlier stint, he served as the Director General (DG) of SIAM and Deputy DG .... Read More

Hackers infiltrated Tesla (Electric Vehicle Company) which is in Amazon cloud environment and stole computer resources to mine for cryptocurrency, according to the security firm RedLock.  There is a new trend in security called cryptojacking. With this a question mark is on whether the public cloud is safe to deploy? Breaches at cloud service providers were almost never the fault of the hosts like Amazon, Microsoft, Google as the public cloud security is a shared responsibility. Organizations of every stripe are fundamentally obliged to monitor their infrastructures for risky configurations, anomalous user activities, suspicious network traffic, and host vulnerabilities. Public cloud environments are ideal targets due to the lack of effective cloud threat defense programs. According to RedLock’s Cloud Security Report-alert, the electric vehicle company was reportedly running one of hundreds of open-source systems and they found it accessible online without password pr...

Malware sophistication is increasing as adversaries begin to weaponize cloud services and evade detection through encryption. This is used as a tool to conceal command-and-control activity. To reduce adversaries’ time to operate, security professionals said they will increasingly leverage and spend more on tools that use AI and machine learning. This has been reported in the CISCO annual cybersecurity report. The report also shows 50 percent of organizations in India are reliant on automation, 53 percent are reliant on machine learning, 51 percent are highly reliant on AI. While encryption is meant to enhance security, the expanded volume of encrypted global web traffic (50 percent as of October 2017) - both legitimate and malicious - has created more challenges for defenders trying to identify and monitor potential threats. Cisco threat researchers observed more than a threefold increase in encrypted network communication used by inspected malware samples over a 12-month per...

Microsoft has announced the completion of its first renewable energy deal within the Karnataka state of India. The agreement will see Microsoft purchase 3 megawatts of solar-powered electricity from Atria Power to help power its new office building in Bangalore. This will meet 80 percent of the projected electricity needs at the new facility. This deal is part of a state government of Karnataka program to encourage investments in local solar energy operations, in line with the larger Indian government goal to ramp up solar power generation to 100 gigawatts by 2022, as part of India’s efforts to mitigate the effects of climate change. “Investing in local solar energy to help power our new Bangalore office building is good for Microsoft, good for India and good for the environment,” said Anant Maheshwari, President, Microsoft India. “We are proud to be deepening our long history of partnership and investment in India with this agreement. This deal will help us grow sustainabl...

Bharti Airtel (“Airtel”) and Gulf Bridge International (“GBI”) announced a strategic agreement to unlock the capacity on GBI’s India-Middle East-Europe submarine cable system. Under the agreement, Airtel will acquire the ownership of the India leg of GBI’s India-Middle East-Europe submarine cable. Airtel will also pick up a significant capacity on Middle East-Europe leg of GBI’s cable system. Airtel and GBI have also agreed to formulate joint Go to Market strategies and leverage the footprint of their respective global networks to serve global customers. Ajay Chitkara, Director and CEO for Global Voice and Data Business, Bharti Airtel said, “We are delighted to announce this agreement with GBI. With this, we are adding a large capacity to meet the growing data, content demand in markets like India as well as serve the connectivity needs of global carriers and enterprise customers. The agreement offers great synergies to Airtel and GBI as both partners will able to build...

Nokia has announced the appointment of Sanjay Goel as President of Global Services and member of the Group Leadership Team (GLT) from April 1, 2018. Goel will report to Nokia President and Chief Executive Officer, Rajeev Suri. Igor Leprince, who previously held the Global Services position, will support Goel during a transition period and then leave Nokia to pursue opportunities outside the company. "I want to thank Igor for his contributions to Nokia. I warmly welcome Sanjay to the GLT, and look forward to working together to further strengthen Global Services," said Rajeev Suri. Goel was most recently head of Global Services Sales. He brings with him the experience of senior leadership roles in Services over the last ten years at Nokia. He has a Bachelor's Degree in Engineering with a specialization in Electronics and Communications from the Manipal Institute of Technology in India.... Read More