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Canara Bank, one of India's oldest banks, has chosen Red Hat Linux as its platform of choice, in branches across the country.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux will be deployed on more than 1,000 servers and 10,000 desktops at Canara Bank to provide a robust, secure and scalable solution for powering the bank's business critical IT infrastructure. Under the first phase of deployment, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has been rolled out at approximately 500 branches in a record span of three months. Close to 500 Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers and 5,000 Red Hat Desktops have been deployed in this phase.

President A.P.J. Kalam expressed his concerns over the security ramifications of mapping software alá Google Earth, in a speech to the National Police Academy in Hyderabad. In his presentation, he drew attention to the availability of high-resolution images of sensitive Indian installations and noted the lack of appropriate national and international laws to control the dissemination of such data.

Full Speech and presentation: President Of India Website.

The last week has seen HCL and Sahara Computers both announcing personal computers priced under the Rs.10000 mark.

However, just as with the Xenitis group's Aamar/Apna/Namma PC lines, these prices are all pre-tax, pre-shipping, pre-freight, pre-handling, pre-forwarding, pre-insurance, pre-installation, pre-... The final price balloons up to somewhere between the 12k and 15k mark.

The above prices include a Linux distribution, usually RHEL. Factoring in a legal Windows XP (starter editions or otherwise) installation will push the final price bracket even higher.

Huawei, the Chinese telecom equipment manufacturer which is currently trying to buy out its troubled British competitor Marconi Corporation, was the cause of much debate in the British parliament over its close ties to the Chinese government, and its involvement in military technology.

This follows last week's declaration by the Indian IT minister Dayanidhi Maran, that Indian telecom companies had to only use equipment that was "Made In India" (and other restrictions), thereby obliquely thwarting Huawei's rock-bottom bid on BSNL's USD 5 billion tender for the supply of GSM equipment.

Bharti Infotel has been issued a show cause notice by the Indian government for violating its ISP license. This is apparently because Bharti's networks were used to receive VOIP traffic, which were subsequently routed illegally to the public telephone network by the end user. The DoT has submitted Bharti with a bill of Rs.10.1 crore, besides asking for an additional performance bank guarantee of Rs 3.6 crore.

Assocham and ISPAI, among others, are not satisifed with some of the changes in the proposed IT Act 2005.

“The new Act will scare away foreign clients from Indian BPOs as they will not be held liable for any data theft/breach. The deletion of section 66, which deals with hacking will abet cyber crimes in India. We must take great caution as laws cannot be amended every now and then” Mr Duggal added.

Bombay's Park Plaza Towers is reportedly going to be offering its residents Broadband over Power Line (BPL) Internet access. The service is being provided by PLC Network Solutions, a subsidiary of Trimax Corporation (formerly KIWI Network Solutions Inc. and Koala International Wireless previous to that).

PLC's new 205 mbps devices will provide The Park Plaza Towers with symmetrical upload and download speeds of 20-30 mbps -- enough to fully exploit high-bandwidth applications such as VoIP, video-on-demand and IPTV.

Intel is all set to offer PCs customised to withstand rural conditions in India. The computers are said to come with special screens and filters to handle extreme heat and dust conditions, and will also have the option of being powered using a standard car battery to ensure that the lack of power is not an issue. Coupled with Intel's interest in promoting WiMAX everywhere, it probably makes sense to assume that these PCs will be supplied Wireless-enabled.

No prices have been announced thus far, but the PCs are scheduled to be launched by the end of this year.

An interesting Reuters article on the state of the semiconductor industry outlines plans to lure AMD, Intel et. al. to set up their massive fabrication plants in India. India has a growing number of design firms, including Intel's Whitefield centre, but thus far has apparently not had the infrastructure or governmental support for setting up the massive 4 billion dollar fab units.

Microsoft have decided to price the localised Windows XP starter edition at Rs.1000 (minimum). This India-specific edition will (eventually) provide language support in nine Indian languages besides English.

Microsoft is of the view that the low price edition will help curb the rampant piracy in India (reported as 73%) and allow sub-10k computers to be shipped with a legal copy of Windows.

The Windows XP starter edition, while providing enhanced localisation, has not had much in the form of favourable press, due to the serious limitations placed upon it. A related story was covered on quillem last week.