Monday, May 7, 2001		Latest in IT world

Indian wins victory for H-1B visa holders

In a legal victory for hundred of thousands of foreign hi-tech workers in the USA on H-1B visas, an Indian computer programmer has successfully sued his Silicon Valley recruitment firm to escape a work contract that levied steep fines for leaving early. Dipen Joshi left Gujarat, India in March 1998 to work on a H-1B visa for California-based recruitment firm Compubahn, where he signed a contract requiring him to remain with the firm for 18 months or pay stiff penalties. But when he tried to leave for a full-time job at software giant Oracle before his contract ended, the recruitment firm handed him a bill for some $77,000 in fees and penalties. Joshi sued in San Mateo Superior Court where Judge Phrasel Shelton eventually ruled Joshi’s contract was "void and unenforceable" because it violated state unfair competition statues. In doing so, Shelton also struck down conditions on all similar Compubahn contracts that required such things as "finders fees," or levied fines for leaving early. The judge also ordered Compubahn to pay Joshi some $215,000 in legal fees and other expenses.

Hotmail, the world’s largest e-mail service provider, will soon have something for those desirous of using the e-mail facility in Hindi. The launch date for the Hindi service has not been decided upon as yet and the move is being seen as an attempt to capture a large market share in India where there are more than 2 million registered users already. Hotmail, a much-frequented service from the Microsoft stable, is already providing service in Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Portugese, Spanish, English, French, German and Italian. Besides this, Microsoft will also launch MSN-messenger service in Hindi. Keyboard and a system supporting Hindi would be all that would be required to avail this service.

Saudi Arabia is planning to bar access to another 200,000 Internet sites within the next two months, a Saudi newspaper reported. The Iqtisadiyah daily quoted IT sources as saying that the forthcoming ban would double the number of sites users cannot access.The move is part of the conservative Muslim kingdom’s drive to censor media that the government deems immoral or un-Islamic. "This censorship is necessary to prevent users from seeing illegal sites," the newspaper said, without giving details. Oil-rich Saudi Arabia, which introduced access to the Internet in 1999, also bans the consumption of alcohol and forbids women from driving. The state telecommunications authority is the nation’s only Internet provider.

Top US computer security experts played down the significance of a spate of Web vandalism bearing the hallmarks of pro-Chinese and anti-US sentiments. Rob Clyde, chief technologist of Symantec Corp., an Internet security company, estimated about half a dozen high-profile US Web sites had been defaced by purported Chinese hackers, including ones at the Departments of Labour and Health and Human Services and United Press International, a news agency.

— Agencies