Srinivas Padma: Personal Musings on Life, Growth, and Connections

Ramalinga Raju may face 10 year jail Satyam Computers’ chief, B. Ramalinga Raju, ambushed investors and Corporate India on Wednesday, admitting to long-running fraud of about Rs 8,000 crores in accounting and said the company did not have the money that it had claimed it had. He resigned later, saying his last-ditch efforts to fill the “fictitious assets with real ones” through the attempt to acquire Maytas failed. Mr Raju, who faces arrest, added that no other board member was aware of the financial irregularities. His brother and managing director, Mr B. Rama Raju, stepped down as well, days ahead of its January 10 board meeting. Mr Raju will still be the chairman of Satyam Computers till the board is expanded. The news sent Satyam shares and the equity markets into a tailspin. The stock lost 90 per cent wip ing off more than Rs 10,000 crore market capitalisation. Trading in Maytas Infra was stopped because of the size of its fall. The New York Stock Exchange halted trading in Satyam...

By Corinne Heller JERUSALEM (Reuters) - If you are at work, chances are you are probably doing it right now. Walk into any large office, and you will most likely hear the telltale computer bleeps of chat programs and online games, accompanied by furious mouse-clicking. Employees may seem busy, but many are wasting time on the Internet, or " cyberslacking ". Studies worldwide suggest employees spend about a fifth of their work shifts engaging in personal activities. Their favourite time waster? The Internet. Patricia Wallace, author of the 2004 book "The Internet in the Workplace: How New Technology Is Transforming Work", said employees have always found ways to avoid working too hard. "The issue is now you have something that seems to be genuinely irresistible because it's such a gateway to the whole planet that's right there on your desk and easily concealed to people passing by," said Wallace, a professor at Johns Hopkins University in Balti...

Credit card thieves are becoming big time charity donors, but it's not out of the goodness of their hearts. According to Symantec Corp. the criminals are starting to use charitable donations as a way to check whether their stolen credit card numbers are working. Fraudsters have been using a similar technique for years, but until recently they tended to make minor purchases on online retail sites. Now, as these sites have become better at identifying and blocking these transactions, the criminals have begun looking elsewhere, said Zulfikar Ramzan, senior principal researcher with Symantec Corp . "Using a charitable organization as a way to verify a credit card number is a relatively new technique, and it's probably being used by a minority of the more innovative guys," he said. Credit card numbers are bought and sold in underground "carder" forums, which bring together the people who have stolen the credit card numbers with those who want to use them. ...

San Francisco: Google has expanded its popular mapping technology to allow users to create their own personalised maps complete with their own pictures and locations. The new features launched on Thursday allow creators to share maps, giving them the possibility of creating localised maps of points of interest in specific neighbourhoods. Users can choose whether to make their maps public or private. Maps can be further customised by specify ing the scale of the map, the order the landmarks appear in the sidebar, and even the design of the landmark icons on the map. They can also be toggled between map and satellite views. The Silicon Valley company is hoping the simplicity of the new features will generate millions of highly specialised maps to be stored in its search index. Google Maps is currently the thirdmost popular map site, after AOL’s Mapquest and Yahoo Maps.

If a screeching buzzer is not enough to get you moving in the morning, consider Clocky. This alarm clock doesn’t just make noise, it breaks the snooze-button habit: after the first snooze period, Clocky rolls off the nightstand and runs away. Clocky generated Internet buzz in 2005 when it was just a conceptual design project by Gauri Nanda, then a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is now an actual product, available for $50 at www.nandahome.com . The clock can survive a two-foot drop and the alarm beeps randomly, ensuring that its frantic squalling won’t be easily forgotten. It comes in white, light blue and light green.

Deccan Chronicle: SHAUKAT H. MOHAMMED If you think that the mails you have seen sending or forwarding e-mails using Yahoo! of Gmail or other free Web-based mail cannot be traced, think again. Each and every mail can be tracked back and you could be in a world of hurt if you have forwarded sensitive stuff, or vulgar stuff for that matter. The following case should illustrate just how careful you need to be with your emailing habits. Admittedly this has happened, is happening, in the United States, but it is equally germane anywhere around the world . First, some quick facts of the case: A former employee, let’s call him Mr. X, of Source Media, which publishes financial market information, has been arrested and charged for reading confidential e-mails about pending personnel moves and for sending e-mail messages to the affected employees, tipping them off that their jobs were in jeopardy. Mr X had been director of information technology at Source Media, which employs over 1,000 people, b...