Monday, July 23, 2001		Newsscape

A Class XI student of Delhi Public School, Ankit Fadia (16) has a Web site and his first book The Unofficial Guide to Ethical Hacking is being published by Macmillan, India Today magazine reported. The magazine said that Ankit wrote ‘hacking truths and what they do not teach in manuals’ — 624 page in all in 15 days flat, during his summer vacations in 1999. The publishing company, Macmillan, who got experts to vet the book, is sure that the book would be one of the best sellers as they already have 4,000 copies of it. The magazine added that this teenager was approached by Chip magazine also to be a system administrator but they found him too young for the job.

The UK has emerged as the hottest investment destination for Indian companies in Europe, according to The Economic Times. The business daily has quoted Invest-UK, a government agency that promotes UK as an inward investment location. As many as 21 companies have invested in the UK during 2000-01 consolidating Britain’s dominance in attracting investments from India. The UK accounts for 60 per cent of all investments flowing from India to Europe and the aggregate investment flow from India so far stands at 240 million pounds. As many as 220 Indian companies have a presence in Britain, the agency said and added that probably Indian companies feel it is necessary to have some presence in the UK even if it is just a representative office. UK now rivals the USA as the premier destination for Indian overseas investment.

Taliban has banned the use of the Internet to prevent ‘un-Islamic’ influences in Afghanistan, an AFP report stated. Taliban says the ban would continue until the country builds its own telephonic network. Foreign minister of Afghanistan, Wakil Ahmed Mutawakel, told the agency that the ban applied to government officials and ordinary citizens but not to the UN and international relief agencies. Currently, about 8 Afghans out of 1,000 have access to telephones and users have to log on to the ISPs in Pakistan

Econet Wireless expects to have more GSM mobile phone lines than the state-owned Nitel has landlines by the end of the year, newspapers reported. Econet's GSM services will begin on August 9 and it will operate 500,000 new lines by December, business development manager Kamel Okudo said in a speech at the weekend, the independent Punch newspaper reported. A marketing war between Econet and rival private GSM licensee MTN, a subsidiary of South Africa's M-Cell, is intensifying as the government's August 9 deadline for the launch of GSM services approaches. The majority-government owned Daily Times newspaper quoted sources from Econet and MTN as saying they were lobbying for an extension until August 20 to test the interconnectivity.

Leading mobile phone makers will start publishing information later this year about the level of radiation their phones emit. But they do not plan to label the phones with these levels, called Specific Absorption Rates, or put them on phone packages. The information would be in user manuals only. The Consumers Association of Singapore (CASE) told The Straits Times that the move, which comes after years of lobbying by consumer and other groups for a global standard on measuring handset radiation, is not enough. Specific Absorption Rates show the absorption of energy by the human body in watts per kilogram. The maximum safety limit is 2.0, while most phones on the market now show values of between 0.5 and 1.0.