India IT News Capsule - July 2006, Issue 3

  • RediffMail gets a makeover: RediffMail, one of the largest free e-mail providers in India, has re-designed its email offering using XML and AJAX technologies that allow it to provide more user based options without sacrificing precious bandwidth. Rediff has also introduced the facility of writing email in 11 different Indian languages. It has also tied up with mobile operators in the country to provide 3 free SMSs every day to its email service subscribers. Every reply generated would further earn 3 more free SMSs that could be sent via the mail service.
  • World e-Book Fair Opens on Internet: Indian book lovers can rejoice for a whole month this July and August with the opening of the World e-Book Fair on the Net. Accessible at www.worldebookfair.com, the site allows free e-book downloads for an entire month. Boasting of 3,30,000 e-books in the form of PDFs in 110+ languages divided into 120 categories, the fair is spearheaded by the Gutenberg association that aims at digitizing all the world's books. The fair is open till August 4th, 2006
  • Red Hat and IIT, Bombay offer software scholarships: Under the Ekalavya Open Source Initiative, Red Hat and IIT Bombay offered scholarships worth 4.5 lakhs to engineering students who won the open source programming competition conducted by them. The winners in order were IIT Bombay, Cummins college, Pune and JC college, Mysore.
  • NASSCOM releases Cyber Crime book of cases: NASSCOM, the body representing Indian IT and ITES companies along with KPMG has released a book that presents 16 cyber crime cases in India, how the law dealt with them and how the guilty were punished. Titled 'India Cyber Cop Awards 2005: Compilation of cases', the book is intended to act as a reference guide in dealing with future cyber crimes.
  • India mulls amendment of IT Act to give it more teeth: The Indian IT Act 2000 will shortly be amended to make it more effective announced Dayanidhi Maran, cabinet minister communications & information technology at the 'Cyber Crime : Today and Tomorrow' seminar recently held in New Delhi. This amendment will chiefly aim at appointing an examiner to study all digital evidence and provide assistance to the police and the courts. Currently, major cyber crimes reported in India are denial of services, defacement of web sites, spam, computer virus and worms, pornography, cyber squatting, cyber stalking and phishing.

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