On Friday, the Indian government gave its sanction for the firms to be tried for serious crimes such as fomenting religious hatred and spreading social discord, offences that could land company directors in prison.

Lawyers acting for the search engine and social networking site told Delhi High Court Justice Suresh Kait that they were not responsible for material posted by users on their platforms.

“Search engines such as Google cannot control websites being searched by users,” Google-India’s lawyer Neraj Kishan Kaul told the packed court.

“(The) summons reflects a complete lack of understanding in how it works,” Kaul told the judge, referring to a summons issued to the Internet companies by a lower criminal court on December 23.

Kaul also insisted that Internet companies could not be held responsible for filtering content.

“There are serious constitutional issues of freedom of speech,” the lawyer said.

Facebook India’s lawyer Sidharth Luthra said evidence presented against the defendants by the complainant, 39-year-old journalist Vijay Rai, needed to be “tested” before it could be admitted at trial.

Rai has submitted a compact disc of evidence he says was taken from the Internet that risks causing religious strife.”Unlike search engines, Facebook is a closed group and even as we trying to create a global community we try and respect local laws,” Luthra told the judge, adding that Facebook has safeguards against abuse and obscenity.

Google and Facebook’s lawyers told the court that they act to remove content deemed to contravene laws in the countries in which they operate.

The government’s sanction to prosecute at the weekend represents an escalation of a recent tussle between social networks and government officials, in particular Communications Minister Kapil Sibal.

Sibal last month pledged a crackdown on “unacceptable” online content and urged the social networks to exert more control over the photos, videos and users’ comments uploaded on their platforms.

The trial will resume on Thursday.

In the past week Yama Tough has released fragments of source code from Symantec products along with a cache of emails. The hacker says all the data was taken from Indian government servers.

(Reporting By Frank Jack Daniel)

Apple now caters to both companies, but the devices are not designed to operate on each other’s networks; Verizon’s works on the CDMA standard, while AT&T’s iPhone 4 operates on a GSM network, the dominant global wireless technology and the standard in Europe.

While the iPhone 5 has been long rumored to be a CDMA/GSM world phone, Verizon’s iPhone has always had this capability, although it’s not activated. Teardowns of the device showed that it sports the Qualcomm MDM6600 chip, the same chip that’s used in the Droid Pro world phone.

TechCrunch concluded that a dual-mode phone would suggest that the iPhone 5 would not support LTE. However, Apple’s latest developer builds for iOS 5 contain a snippet of code that mentions LTE, according to enthusiast site MacRumors, prompting speculation that the company may be testing 4G internally.

The hotly anticipated next edition of Apple’s smartphone is expected to be released in October.

Source: CNET.com

(CNN) – Maybe the cash-strapped U.S. government should start selling iPads. According to the latest statement from the U.S. Treasury, the government had an operating cash balance Wednesday of $73.8 billion. That’s still a lot of money, but it’s less than what Steve Jobs has lying around.

Tech juggernaut Apple had a whopping $76.2 billion in cash and marketable securities at the end of June, according to its last earnings report. Unlike the U.S. government, which is scrambling to avoid defaulting on its debt, Apple takes in more money than it spends.

This symbolic feat — the world’s most highly valued tech company surpassing the fiscal strength of the world’s most powerful nation — is just the latest pinnacle for Apple, which has been on an unprecedented roll.

Its Macs, iPhones and iPads remain hot sellers, its stock has surged past $400 a share and Apple just became the world’s largest smartphone vendor by volume.

There’s been a lot of speculation about what Apple might buy with its piles of cash — Facebook and Sony being two of the more high-profile examples — but the company doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to make a move.

“We don’t let the cash burn a hole in the pocket or make stupid acquisitions,” CEO Jobs said last fall. “We’d like to continue to keep our powder dry because we think there are one or more strategic opportunities in the future.”

Offering Uncle Sam a short-term loan is probably not one of them.

There have been mixed reviews of users about the new version. Some users are complaining about the change, but it seems to be a very small minority of Twitters 100+ million users. Although the social media company launched the newer version more than nine months ago but it is taking it too long to convince the people to user the newer version.

The email archive includes approvals and rejections for a variety of visas and passports, among other requests and correspondence.

“It’s near the election’s anniversary. We had to do something,” said one of the Iranian members of Anonymous from #OpIran.

He said they take down Iranian government servers on a regular basis for operation days, but that obviously retrieving information required a different approach to the group’s signature DDoS attack.

He also indicated an as-yet unannounced attack. “For the election’s anniversary, we have a complete DDoS attack day” planned, he said.

It’s not clear who the specific target of the day will be, but it will be part of the Iranian government.

“We don’t attack the media,” said my source, though he indicated that propaganda masquerading as news was fair game. For instance, this site publishes photographs of “rioters”, asking other citizens to identify them so the government can subject them to any of a number of horrific punishments.

If you need to get into Iran, now would be a good time to talk to Anonymous. “Are you sure you don’t want a visa?” was the last thing my source said to me.

The device’s battery life would take a substantial hit from 4G data transfer, Bachman explained. He opines that the next iPhone release will be “more evolutionary than revolutionary” and might feature “a better camera and perhaps different casing.”

Business Insider reports on a Bernstein analyst’s note. This analyst predicts that the “iPhone 5″ will not include Near Field Communication technology, which would allow the device to transfer data with another device by touching the two together or waving one across the other.

The New York Times has written that Apple is considering releasing an iPhone with NFC capabilities, but that the forthcoming device may skip the feature.

If you’re interested in hearing more iPhone rumors, we’ve got recent speculation about the device’s possible name, wireless carrier options, display size and camera parts. You can also visit our iPhone rumor guide for a quick look at the hottest predictions about Apple’s next handset.

Massive power outages and chronic load shedding have forced Balochistan’s farmers to look for alternatives. PHOTO: FILE

“About 30 people, mostly farmers, visit our shop daily and inquire about the costs and installation of solar panels. Barely anyone ever returns, since it’s beyond their reach,” Amir Khan, a dealer for solar panels based in Quetta told The Express Tribune. A single panel costs Rs 47,000 while a complete kit, which generates one kilowatt of electricity, costs Rs175,000. For running a tubewell, one requires a kit with at least 1.6kW generation capacity.

There are two companies dealing in solar panels in Quetta, and despite having their franchises flooded with prospective customers every day, their turnover in the past three months has been negligible.

“The equipment is imported from Dubai and therefore the prices are high,” said one of the dealers.

Dire circumstances

According to Quetta Electricity Supply Company (Qesco), Balochistan is facing an electricity shortfall of 650 megawatts against a total demand of 1,250 megawatts, forcing Qesco to manage the load through long hours of load shedding. While the provincial capital faces five to six hours of load shedding every day, electricity is available for barely two to three hours in remote areas.

Frequent insurgent attacks on high transmission lines add to the consumers’ woes.

Ideal for renewable energy

Balochistan is ideal for utilising renewable energy sources for electricity generation since the population is thinly scattered over the province’s vast expanse.

Given settlement patterns in the province, whereby a hundred families live in a cluster and each cluster is 50 to 100 kilometres away from another, using solar panels or a wind turbine would be more feasible than establishing a grid station for each of these clusters, said Nasir Baloch, manager engineering for Alternative Energy Development Board (AEDB), Rural Electrification Project Southern Balochistan.

He said the AEDB had submitted a comprehensive report in this regard but the project was placed on the back burner when the new government took over.

A billion rupees can electrify a village through a kit comprising 80 solar panels, he said, adding that there would be no recurring costs in this case.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 2^nd, 2011.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute have leveraged the latest browser technology to create GigaPan Time Machine, a system that enables viewers to explore gigapixel-scale, high-resolution videos and image sequences by panning or zooming in and out of the images while simultaneously moving back and forth through time. Viewers, for instance, can use the system to focus in on the details of a booth within a panorama of a carnival midway, but also reverse time to see how the booth was constructed. Or they can watch a group of plants sprout, grow and flower, shifting perspective to watch some plants move wildly as they grow while others get eaten by caterpillars. Or, they can view a computer simulation of the early universe, watching as gravity works across 600 million light-years to condense matter into filaments and finally into stars that can be seen by zooming in for a close up.

“With GigaPan Time Machine, you can simultaneously explore space and time at extremely high resolutions,” said Illah Nourbakhsh, associate professor of robotics and head of the CREATE Lab.

“Science has always been about narrowing your point of view — selecting a particular experiment or observation that you think might provide insight. But this system enables what we call exhaustive science, capturing huge amounts of data that can then be explored in amazing ways,” added Nourbakhsh.

An enabling technology for time-lapse GigaPans is a feature of the HTML5 language that has been incorporated into such browsers as Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari. HTML5, the latest revision of the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) standard that is at the core of the Internet, makes browsers capable of presenting video content without use of plug-ins such as Adobe Flash or Quicktime.

Once a Time Machine GigaPan has been created, viewers can annotate and save their explorations of it in the form of video “Time Warps.”

Cuckoos have evolved plumage patterns that give them a hawk-like appearance to scare the birds whose nests they invade, say scientists.

A study has shown that reed warblers – a cuckoo host species – are less likely to attack more “hawk-like” cuckoos.

Cuckoos and sparrow hawks have almost identical patterns on their underbellies

This helps the parasitic birds to lay their eggs undisturbed.

The visible similarity between cuckoos and sparrow hawks was already clear, but this is the first study to show the effect the trickery has on host birds.

The findings are published in the journal Behavioural Ecology.

Playing hawk

Cuckoos are brood parasites; after laying an egg in another bird’s nest, they leave the unsuspecting host to raise their chick.

To fool their victims into caring for their young, cuckoos first need to lay an egg in the right nest, without being “mobbed” or attacked by the nest’s owner.

“We noticed in another experiment that great tits and blue tits were just as afraid of cuckoos as they were of sparrow hawks,” explained Dr Justin Welbergen from the University of Cambridge, UK, who led this research.

Since these species are not targeted by cuckoos, they have no reason to fear them, so Dr Welbergen decided to find out if a cuckoo’s appearance might have evolved to help it to scare its hosts.

To study this, he and his colleagues placed stuffed dummies of cuckoos and sparrow hawks near reed warbler nests.

“The most striking similarity between a cuckoo and a sparrow hawk is the bar patterns on [both species'] underbellies,” Dr Welbergen explained.

So he and his team covered the bellies of the cuckoo and sparrow hawk models with white cloth, to hide their barred bellies. They then studied the reed warblers’ reactions to both the covered and uncovered models.

“We found that the reed warblers were more reluctant to approach the birds if the dummies had barring on their chests,” said Dr Welbergen.

“So if we made a cuckoo look less hawk-like – if we removed this bar pattern – it was more likely to be mobbed.”

Dr Welbergen said this showed how “hawk mimicry” helps cuckoos to gain better access to reed warblers’ nests in order to lay their eggs.

The findings represent just one part of an evolutionary arms race between cuckoos and the species whose nests they target.

The birds lay parasitic eggs that are very similar in colour to the host’s own eggs, and a recent study found that cuckoo chicks have evolved to mimic the calls of the hosts’ offspring.

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