US legislators legalizes spamming

Against the advice of all anti-spam organizations, the U.S. House of Representatives has passed the CAN-SPAM Act, a bill backed overwhelmingly by spammers and dubbed the 'YOU-CAN-SPAM' Act because it legalizes spamming instead of banning it.

Deaths in Police Custody

A record 104 people died in the United kingdom while in police custody or in accidents involving police cars last year, according to British Home Office figures.

Ministers said the increase from 70 fatalities in 2001-02 to 104 last year was partly due to a new system of recording which meant every fatality that followed even limited contact with the police was now included.

Three people died in police shootings. Forty were the result of traffic accidents during police chases. A further 40 died in custody or soon after being released, including eight in police stations. These included people who became unwell or took their own lives. The remaining 21 fatalities took place during other types of contact.

Its getting trendy in Britain for women to marry younger men

More and more British women are marrying younger men than ever before as per the Office for National Statistics.

In 1963, when most couples married in their 20s and cohabitation rates were low, 15% of brides were older than their grooms. But by 1998, when more women followed a career first and wed later, 26% chose a husband younger than themselves.

More than a quarter of these older women married a partner at least six years younger. There were about 18,700 such marriages in 1998, compared with 10,500 in 1963.

There were also more "sugar daddy" marriages - women marrying men at least six years older - which had increased from 21% of weddings in 1963, to 25% in 1998.

Improved technology may make long distance telephony free

Care to call home from across the world FREE? VOIP might do the trick!

The basic idea is simple: turn voice into a stream of bits, just like email, and send it on the Internet rather than the telephone company’s lines.

Very soon, Voice Over Internet Protocol will end up being so small a part of the data stream that it alone will not be worth metering.

Internet Community in India demands justice in the murder of IIT engineer Satyendra Dubey

Please sign this petition demanding full inquiry and justice in the murder of IIT engineer Satyendra Dubey.

The Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), which is guilty of leaking Dubey’s name to the very crooked contractors that he had complained against seems unaware about the groundswell of public anger.

The next time a promising young engineer sees corruption and mismanagement in a Government project he’s working on, chances are he will think twice, thrice, several times, before complaining to the political and bureaucratic establishment.

For, the 31-year-old Satyendra Kumar Dubey did that, he sent his letter to the Prime Minister’s Office—and now he’s dead, killed by ‘‘unidentified assailants’’ in Gaya, Bihar last week.

Internet Connectivity in India: Are you getting what you paid for?

Despite strict parameters on quality of service (QoS) laid down by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), a vast majority of the Internet subscribers continue to remain dissatisfied.

With approximately 45 million people using the internet through the dial-up or fixed lines across the country, the average speed for a user is around 10 kbps on 33.6 kbps modem at a cost of Rs 35 per hour, while through a dedicated always on connection, a user can have an access speed up to 100 kbps at Rs 500 per month.

Many subscribers did not know what speeds they were getting. Click Here to find out your internet connection speed.

Even as the TRAI's quality of service report finds that the ISPs have managed to reach these standards, many of the subscribers continue to be dissatisfied. More than 62 per cent of the overall respondents believe that cyber cafes are better and easier means of Internet access.

Loss of jobs due to outsourcing, half to India, sparks anger in the US

The dramatic loss of jobs in the United States, an estimated 1.3 million that would be moved offshore by the end of the decade, half to India has sparked anger in the US.

A two-day conference instructing companies on moving technology work and other jobs overseas drew picketers, in one of the first demonstrations protesting the practice to hit the San Francisco Bay Area.

Faced with an electoral backlash, some U.S. states have legislated to ban government agencies from moving tech services overseas and unions are fighting what they see as an alarming trend.

The outsourcing of jobs to China and India is not new, but lately it has earned a chilling new adjective: professional. Advances in communications technology have enabled white-collar jobs to be shipped from the United States and Europe as never before, and the outcry from workers who once considered themselves invulnerable is creating a potent political force.

But the NASSCOM study by New York-based business research consultancy Evalueserve said a combination of skilled immigration and "offshoring" of jobs was vital to head off a looming labour shortfall of 5.6 million by 2010 that would undermine the U.S. economy.

Arrested for circulating anti government email messages

Fourteen people have been arrested in Zimbabwe for circulating an e-mail calling for protests to oust President Robert Mugabe, state media reports.

In the neighbouring Rwanda, the editor and senior journalists from the independent newspaper, Umuseso, have been taken into custody following the publication of articles critical of the government.

It may be recalled that a few weeks back there was a similar attack on the freedom of press in India which prides in being the biggest democracy in the world.