Monday, December 4, 2000		Latest in IT world

Site on Mahatma Gandhi

Some expatriate Indian software giants have taken a novel cause of spreading the teachings and thoughts of Mahatma Gandhi by funding an Internet site. The site, which proclaims itself as the official site on Mahatma Gandhi, has already raised over $ 1 million through expatriate Indian software tycoons. This site has been created by none other than Mahatma Gandhi’s great grandson, Tushar Gandhi, and is rated as non-commercial in nature. The major faces behind this site are K.B. Chandrasekhar, chairman of the Internet Data Centre company Exodus Communications; B.V. Jagadeesh, Exodus’ co-founder; and Kanwal Rekhi, former chief technology officer of Novell.

The month of November had been quite tough for the computer users. Earlier during the month, a new virus Romeo & Juliet threatened the computer world. However, later it was discovered that it was a worm which caused more panic and less harm. Now, the Symantec’s AntiVirus Research Centre has discovered a new, more potent variant to the "Navidad" virus, which come as an e-mail attachment and attacks the Outlook Express e-mail program. It arrives in the computer as a reply when a person sends a message to an infected computer with an attachment navidad.exe. If the receiver runs navidad.exe, then a message in Spanish is displayed, which means, "Never press this button." If the button is pressed, a further message reads: "Feliz Navidad, which means Unfortunately you have given in to temptation and will lose your computer." Major anti-virus companies have sounded red alert for this virus, as it is deadlier than its predecessor. The original version of this virus had a buggy code, which used to disable the relaunch feature that was intended to bombard victims with repeated attacks. However that bad code has been fixed in a new version, making it potentially more damaging.

This is a yet another achievement by Yahoo! Besides being one of the most widely used e-mail service in the world, Yahoo! has always been adding new services to its kitty. Earlier, it offered free PC-to-phone calling anywhere in the USA through the Yahoo! messenger in association with Net2 Phone. Now it has introduced the much deserving demand of the e-mail users to provide the service related to emails in encrypted form. Yahoo! has launched its services in association with ZixIt, a Dallas-based e-mail encryption company. Yahoo! will route encrypted e-mail through ZixIt’s SecureDelivery.com Web site. With the introduction of encrypted e-mail service, Yahoo! has also become the first major Web-based e-mail service to provide free encryption facility to the e-mail users. Yahoo! free encryption option handles outgoing e-mail messages in a multistep procedure, however the portal has warned the users that the service is not foolproof.