Former Prime Minister John Howard has denied India’s powerful off-field stature is a problem for world cricket ahead of his ascent to the top job in the sport.

Howard will take over as International Cricket Council president in 2012 after he was put forward by Australia and New Zealand as their candidate to become ICC vice-president.

That job comes with the promise of being rubber-stamped as the next president once India’s Sharad Pawar steps down.

India is the sport’s powerbase, rich in both finances and passion for the game and also able to wield more clout than other nations as a result.

But Howard said India’s relative strength and love of the game should be embraced rather than feared.

“India is the second most populous country in the world, it’s cricket-mad, they are plusses,” Howard told ABC Radio on Wednesday.

“I think it’s entirely wrong to look at the Indian involvement in cricket in a negative light.

“I think of those millions of people in India and the sub-continent … who play cricket. They play it with a passion and love it.”

Howard’s impending role at the top of the sport has created little reaction - positive or negative - in the sub-continent.

Indian newspapers were far more interested in the prospect of superstar batsman Sachin Tendulkar being awarded India’s highest civilian honour - the Bharat Ratna - than Howard’s appointment.

The Kolkata Telegraph mentioned the Howard news with the rider that the 70-year-old “is an old Sachin Tendulkar fan”, while the Hindustan Times wrote: “Another election of sorts and another victory for Howard, but the real challenge awaits”.

It was left for New Zealand to provide the only outrage after their highly qualified candidate Sir John Anderson was beaten by Howard to the role despite years of experience in the sport.

The New Zealand Herald said Howard’s only link with the game was as a fan.

“This is not a bleat that a New Zealander did not get the gig, more wonderment that someone with absolutely no cricket experience did,” the paper said.

But Howard hit back at the perception he lacked the skills to take on the job.

“I think the fact I haven’t been involved in cricket administration is explained by the fact I had a day job which made that rather difficult,” he said, referring to his 30-year political career.

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Pakistan National Assembly and Senate Standing Committees on Sports have been left stunned by the Cricket Board’s administrative expenses running into millions with a major chunk of the money going to senior officials as salaries and perks.
According to documents submitted by the PCB, even at a time when Pakistan cricket is facing a financial crunch due to refusal of foreign teams to tour the country because of security problems, lavish salaries and perks are being given to senior officials.
Sources said the senators were surprised to learn that even though PCB Chairman Ejaz Butt is working on an honorary basis, he has already cost the board a whopping Rs 6.4 million.
“The money has been spent on his travelling abroad. The board has spent 1.4 million on his business class air travel and he has claimed another 4.33 million as accommodation expenses and allowances,” one source said.
He pointed out that documents showed since taking charge in November, 2008 Butt has travelled to South Africa, Dubai, London, Singapore, Malaysia, India, Sri Lanka, Germany and Australia.
“Zakir Khan the director international cricket operations has also spent Rs 4.7 million on his official trips abroad while his monthly salary is Rs 335,000,” the source said.

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Twitter users are creating 50 million messages of 140 characters or less per day, the micro-blogging service said.

Kevin Weil, a member of Twitter’s analytics team, said in a blog post that Twitter users were writing 5,000 “tweets” per day in 2007, 300,000 per day in 2008 and 2.5 million per day in 2009.

“Tweets grew 1,400 percent last year to 35 million per day,” Weil said. “Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day - that’s an average of 600 tweets per second.”

Weil said the 50-million figure does not include messages from accounts identified as spam.

The number of actual “tweets” delivered is far higher because many messages are delivered to multiple accounts, he added.

The San Francisco-based Twitter does not release figures on the total number of users of the service, which was launched in August 2006.

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Sony Pictures Entertainment is laying off about 450 people mostly in the United States and leaving 100 positions unfilled in order to cut costs and cope with declining DVD sales.

The movie studio subsidiary of Japan’s Sony Corporation told employees about the cuts in a memo on Monday.

The layoffs represent about a 6.5 per cent reduction in the 6800-strong work force at Sony Pictures.

Most of the cuts will occur by the first week of March and will be in the home entertainment and information technology unit

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Internet browsers Firefox and Opera have experienced a massive surge in downloads since the security flaw in Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) was exposed.

Firefox owner Mozilla claims it has experienced more than 300,000 extra downloads over a four-day period in Germany that started last Friday. Opera downloads in Germany amounted to over 18,000 in a day over last weekend.

Downloads in Australia were up more than 40 per cent for the Norwegian-based browser maker.

Google would not comment on whether or not it had experienced a surge in Chrome downloads.

The Federal Office for Information and Security in Germany and French government owned Certa urged the public to use an alternative browser until Microsoft could issue a fix for the security problem.

The Australian Department of Broadband, Communications and Digital Economy also issued an alert last week, recommending users to switch to Firefox or Apple Safari. But several other Australian security experts said the threat had been overstated, pointing to simple fixes that would make Internet Explorer more secure.

But does it really matter if you switch browsers?

Alastair MacGibbon managing partner of internet security consultancy Surete Group, doesn’t think so. MacGibbon was the former head of the Australian Federal Police (AFP) High Tech Crime unit and senior director of trust and safety at eBay.

“I don’t think there’s such a thing as a totally secure browser,” MacGibbon says. “Switching browsers because of exploits is a knee jerk reaction.”

MacGibbon says even if people do switch browsers it won’t necessarily be enough to protect them from further vulnerabilities. What they should consider is how quickly the browser provider will react to the flaw, manage it and how they will prevent it from happening in the future.

“In the Internet Explorer case, these were very targeted attacks, so the question should be asked as to what type of security these companies had in the first place. Blaming the browser seems a bit rich,” MacGibbon says.

It was recently revealed that sophisticated China-based cyber attacks on Google and 20 other businesses exploited a flaw in the Microsoft web browser. The attack on Google targeted Gmail accounts of human rights activists.

Microsoft will be releasing a security update tomorrow to help conquer the problem, but in the meantime its advising IE6 and IE7 customers to upgrade to IE8.

“It addresses the vulnerability related to recent attacks against Google and small subset of corporations, as well as several other vulnerabilities,” Microsoft said in a statement.

MacGibbon says it doesn’t really matter what type of internet browsers people or corporations are using because they should have proper security measures in place to protect against internet vulnerabilities and exploits.

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MELBOURNE has its first super computer. It’s big and powerful - the fifth most powerful super computer in the world - and the only one dedicated to studying human diseases.

It will provide researchers from across the state with enough ”computer grunt” potentially to crack the code of diseases such as cancer, epilepsy, Alzheimer’s and HIV/AIDS, while patients will benefit from improved diagnostic tests and treatment based on their unique genetic profile.

Melbourne University molecular geneticist Melissa Southey said the computer’s arrival in April meant the opening up of new research frontiers.

”For example, we can expect that the majority of breast cancer genes would be identified within five years, possibly three,” Associate Professor Southey said. ”I think that’s very realistic. In fact any disease research that involves genetics is going to benefit.”

Patients are set to benefit from improved diagnostic tests and more tailored medication, especially people with epilepsy.

Royal Melbourne Hospital’s head of medicine, Terry O’Brien, a clinical neurologist and epilepsy specialist, said the super computer would be able to identify markers in a patient’s genes to predict if they would respond to a particular medication better than another.

Currently establishing the correct medication type and dose for epilepsy is a process of elimination, which can waste time and money.

Professor O’Brien said the computer, capable of a trillion calculations a second, would speed up time when processing data by up to 10,000 times.

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Australian customers will have to stump up almost double the US price for some versions of Microsoft’s new Windows 7operating system that arrived in Australian stores yesterday.

The company cited taxes, freight costs and currency fluctuations as key reasons that the retail price for full and upgrade versions of its software were substantially higher than in the US.

“We see the same questions being asked about most consumer electronics products,” David McLean, Microsoft’s regional director of entertainment and devices, said.

Spiros Giokaris buys the world’s first copy of Windows 7 from Gerry Harvey at Harvey Norman’s midnight launch last night.

“We are priced very similarly to the rest of the category. Is it parity? Probably not. It is a business decision we have made and we think it is equitable in this market.”

The most basic version of the software will cost $199 to upgrade here compared with $US119 ($129) in the US, but, at the top end of the range, Australian customers must pay $429 to upgrade to the Ultimate version, almost double the $US219.99 ($238) price tag.

“Retailers operate with much tighter margins in the US than Australia. That is a fact. Taxes in this market are very different to Australia. That is a fact. We are a large country and we need to freight products from overseas and that is a fact. These things do affect pricing in this market,” McLean said.

However Choice spokeswoman Elise Davidson disagreed that these costs could mount up so substantially.

“Australians don’t mind paying a little bit more for reasons such as the size of our market, our large land mass and delivery costs. People understand this and accept it. But when you’re looking at almost double the cost of what you can buy in other markets, even taking taxes into account, we are being ripped off.

“We looked at this with Vista as well and Choice doesn’t think this price discrimination is fair for Australian consumers,” she said.

Despite recent shifts in the exchange rate, Australian wallets are also being hammered in electronics shops where exorbitant pricing persists for consumer electronics goods. This week, CommSec chief economist Craig James recommended sourcing new tech gadgets and other items overseas instead of waiting for local retailers to react to the soaring Australian dollar and lower the price of products.

However Davidson warned that software companies such as Microsoft were able to use technology to stop Australians from getting a better deal by banning international IP addresses and credit card numbers from internet sales.

Microsoft said it expected Australian retailers to set their own competitive pricing for the software with bundles and deals to suit a wide range of users.

“We set [the] base price, trying to provide stability for the ecosystem, but the price ends up being the margin position the retailer wants to take,” Jeff Putt, Windows consumer lead at Microsoft Australia, said.

Microsoft is offering a free upgrade of Windows 7 to anyone who bought a Vista PC from the end of June to the end of January. Some experts have suggested that other Vista and XP users wait until they buy a new PC before embracing the platform. Davidson predicted that the high cost of upgrades would prevent many users from adopting Windows 7.

“We expect that, apart from those who remain dissatisfied with Vista, most will be simply waiting until they upgrade their own computers before bothering to get the new operating system from Microsoft,” she said.

Stephen Baker, a consumer analyst for NPD Group in the US expressed his disapproval in June at the way Microsoft had priced upgrades, given the general level of dissatisfaction with Vista.

“I am mightily disappointed in a couple of aspects of Microsoft’s upgrade plans for non-PC buyers. First is the pricing on the Windows 7 Home Premium upgrade. Besides the fact that $US119 is a price point that fits nowhere in these economic times, it is still way too much for the software.

“It is in Microsoft’s best interests to erase all vestiges of Vista from consumers’ homes and, by making the upgrade expensive, Microsoft is creating a large disincentive for consumers to move to a far superior platform with a better user experience,” he said. He was also disappointed that it included only a one-user license.

“In a world where most homes are moving into a multiple PC environment, it would enhance the consumer home experience if they could upgrade all their home PCs at a single low price with a single boxed purchase,” he said.

The company has since launched a family pack for multi-user households, but this is available only in limited markets and does not include Australia.

“We are going to test it in a few markets around the world. If it is successful there, we will launch it within three to six months in other regions,” James DeBragga, general manager of Windows consumer product marketing, said.

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US government analysts believe a Chinese man with government links wrote the key part of a spyware program used in hacker attacks on Google last year, the Financial Times reported on Monday.

The man, a security consultant in his 30s, posted sections of the programme to a hacking forum where he described it as something he was “working on,” the paper said, quoting an unidentified researcher working for the US government.

The spyware creator works as a freelancer and did not launch the attack, but Chinese officials had “special access” to his programing, the report said.

“If he wants to do the research he’s good at, he has to toe the line now and again,” the paper quoted the unnamed US government researcher saying.

“He would rather not have uniformed guys looking over his shoulder, but there is no way anyone of his skill level can get away from that kind of thing. The state has privileged access to these researchers’ work.”

The report did not say how analysts knew about the man’s government ties.

The allegations over the spyware are the latest episode in a dispute that has pitted Google and the United States against China, with its wall of Internet controls and legions of hackers.

In January, the giant Internet search engine company, Google, threatened to pull back from China and shut its Google.cn Chinese-language portal over complaints of censorship and sophisticated hacking from within China.

Washington has backed those criticisms and urged Beijing to investigate hacking complaints thoroughly and transparently. Beijing has said it opposes hacking.

The Financial Times report also quoted unnamed sources backing a New York Times report that analysts had traced the online attacks to two Chinese educational institutions, the prestigious Shanghai Jiaotong University and the Lanxiang vocational school.

The two establishments have denied the reports. And the allegation that the latter, a high-school level institute that also trains hairdressers, chefs and car mechanics, could take on one of the world’s most powerful Internet firms, have been widely mocked in Chinese cyberspace.

“How can these future cooks be such powerful hackers?” a web user from Zhejiang province said on the portal www.163.com.

The use of the school’s IP address could simply mean that hackers had taken over its computers to hide their tracks.

But Lanxiang’s website also claims to have the “biggest” computer laboratory in the world, a boast it says is confirmed by Guinness World Records.

There was less online comment about the well-respected Jiaotong University, which attracts top graduates and has a School of Information Security Engineering.

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February 20, 1985

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Are you lifecasting yet? Nokia, on Monday, unveiled in India, the new addition to its Nseries range, Nokia N97 mini, which among other things

enables the user to lifecast. N97 mini comes with Lifecasting with Ovi that would open up the next innovative chapter of personal and location-aware internet.

Offered in partnership with the world’s largest social network, Facebook - Lifecasting with Ovi is the first application to let people publish their location and status updates directly to their Facebook account from the home screen of a mobile device.

Lifecasting goes beyond just publishing your status - it is about building deeper and closer connections between people. It triggers new kinds of communication patterns, such as sending messages or status updates or even navigating to a friend or a place. Lifecasting with Ovi is available on Nokia N97 mini via Nokia Beta Labs.

The new device was launched during Nokia N-Tour-Age, an interactive-technology-solutions showcase of Nokia’s premium devices and services.

Designed for the style-conscious consumer, who is active on social networks, the Nokia N97 mini is a smaller mobile computer with stylish stainless steel cues, featuring a tilting 3.2” touch display, QWERTY keyboard and fully customizable homescreen that makes each Nokia N97 mini as unique as a fingerprint.

The Nokia N97 mini delivers a truly personal internet experience in a compact handset based on the iconic design of the Nokia N97.

Users can personalise the homescreen of their device even further with thousands of different applications and services available from the Ovi Store.

From games, videos and podcasts to productivity tools and web services, Ovi Store is the easiest way to fill the Nokia N97 mini’s homescreen with applications that reflect individual tastes.

Available in three stylish colors, viz, Cherry black, Garnet and White, the Nokia N97 mini will start shipping in the last week of November 2009 at an MRP of Rs 30,939/- only.

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