Google has launched a map search service in China for travellers taking trips during the Lunar New Year holiday season, despite a row over cyberattacks and censorship. "The service is available online now," a spokeswoman for Google China, Marsha Wang, told AFP on Tuesday.

The Google Spring Festival Map is based on the company's regular map service but has "more features" targeting users' special needs during this month's holiday, the busiest travel period of the year in China, she said.

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A computer specialist sits in front of a PC. Using a programming language, he writes a code that the machine will understand later on.

He has created a software application. If he delivers it with what he wrote the code is open and the software is free, if it meets all the requirements.

In this case, there’s the possibility that other computer experts can see and change that code. Thus, they would be capable of improving the application or adapt it to specific contexts.

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Concerned over a spurt in cyber crimes in the city, the hub for IT and IT Enabled Services (ITES), the State police has made an urgent request to the State government and got the green signal for setting up a cyber crime police station (ccps) in the Cyberabad Police Commissionerate.

This will be in addition to the already functioning Hyderabad CCPS and will be operating under the detective department. Cyber crimes under the Information Technology (IT) Act jumped by over 300 percent since the beginning of the New Year as compared to the data two years ago. Currently, one offence a day is being recorded on an average. Year 2009 saw a 50 percent increase in cyber crimes over the previous year in the city.

Cases mostly pertaining to Nigerian frauds, portal hacking and data theft are being registered under sections 65, 66 and 67 of the IT Act at the Cyber Crime Cell in the city and the majority of offenders are said to be below 30 years of age.

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 lot has been written this past month about security risks to watch out for in 2010.However, the results of the 2010 CSO Cyber Watch Survey, a cooperative effort between the U.S. Secret Service, Deloitte, the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute (CERT) and CSO Magazine, and a white paper from Deloitte’s New Center for Security & Privacy Solutions, “Cyber Crime:

A Clear and Present Danger,” find that the cybercrime-fueled underground economy continues to breed a sophisticated arsenal of damaging tools and devices (malware, botnets, anonymizers) – and companies cannot keep pace or remain focused elsewhere.
 

Many organizations are focused on stopping random hackers and blocking pornography when they should be concerned with bigger threats from professional cybercriminals, according to a new cybersecurity report.

In a survey conducted last year of 523 IT and security managers, top-level executives, and law enforcement personnel, hackers were rated the biggest threat, followed by insiders and foreign entities--probably because hackers are the "noisiest and easiest to detect," the 2010 CyberSecurity Watch Survey concluded.

However, attackers from nation-states and organized crime syndicates use more sophisticated techniques that can do more economic damage and go undiscovered, said the report, sponsored by Deloitte and conducted in collaboration with CSO Magazine, the U.S. Secret Service, and the CERT Coordination Center at Carnegie Mellon. The report, which was released Friday, did not discuss who the hackers are exactly or whether they may be working for organized criminals or foreign governments.

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Larry Page and Sergey Brin, co-founders of Google, are planning to sell about 5 million of its shares each, The Wall Street Journal reports. The stock sale is part of a five-year stock trading plan, under which the co-founders will reduce their combined holdings from about 57.7 million common shares, or about 18% of outstanding capital stock, to 47.7 million shares, or about 15% of the company.

Page and Brin will also decrease their combined voting shares from 59% to about 48%. The pre-arranged stock trading plans enable its founders to sell a part of their Google stock over time for individual asset diversification and liquidity.

Google (GOOG) may be caught up in an international spat with China, but in the United States the web giant continues its seemingly unstoppable climb upward in search market share, according December data released by internet research group comScore. Microsoft's (MSFT) Bing search engine saw a slight uptick as well, while Yahoo (YHOO) gave up ground.

Bing and Yahoo, both of which have operated in Google's web search shadow for years, are waiting for the Department of Justice to approve a deal that will combine their search ad businesses -- a pact which may represent the last best hope for a truly competitive rival to Google. Approval is expected and could come within the next few weeks.

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David Cameron is pushing the campaign trail further by announcing new plans to defend the UK against cyber attacks.Using the Conservative slogan for the upcoming election – 'we can’t go on like this' – Cameron says that current government departments aren't prepared for the threats we face.

The Tory leader announced in a speech at Chatham House that he'd set up a National Security Council which would include a Cyber Threat and Assessment Centre to tackle increasing online crime. He says technology and computers and the internet are becoming 'bigger and bigger parts of our lives', which means cyber warfare will have a greater effect.

All these plans would come into action 'on the first day of a Conservative government', claims Cameron. The Tories say they would scrap ID cards as well as cutting down on government databases if they won the general election.

Yahoo Inc. was among the companies targeted in the recent cyber attacks that hit Google Inc. and other companies, according to several people briefed on the matter. Yahoo has talked with its Internet rival about the attack, according to two of these people, though it wasn't clear whether the attack on Yahoo resulted in a breach of its systems, as it did for Google.

The Obama administration was set to send a formal complaint to China seeking an investigation of Google's allegations that Chinese hackers compromised its network. Beijing on Friday sought to play down the Internet-search giant's threat to stop self-censoring its Chinese search engine and pull out of the country.

People familiar with the attack on Google say as many as 34 companies were targeted by China-based hackers, but so far only two others—Adobe Systems Inc. and Juniper Networks Inc.—have publicly acknowledged they were victims, as well.

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Yahoo was one of more than 30 companies hit by a sophisticated online attack from China, designed to steal intellectual property and collect information on Chinese dissidents, several news sources reported Thursday.

The news follows revelations Tuesday that Silicon Valley giants Google and Adobe had also been targeted by the hackers, who are thought to be from China. According to sources familiar with the matter, 34 companies in total have been affected -- and more names are expected to come to light in the next few days.

Google has threatened to effectively pull its business out of China, in part, because of the incident. Bloomberg and other news outlets named Yahoo as a victim Thursday, citing unnamed sources familiar with the situation.

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