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Computerworld notes that Microsoft is on track to offer a new antivirus product to its customers.

Asked if that would hurt sales of competing products, such as Network Associates' McAfee and Symantec's Norton family of products, Nash said that Microsoft said it would sell its antivirus program as a separate product from Windows.

Competitors have long feared that Microsoft might consider bundling antivirus features into Windows, which would undercut and harm their businesses, regularly citing that possibility as a risk in quarterly regulatory filings.

But on Tuesday, Symantec said it welcomed the competition and news that Microsoft would be charging separately for its antivirus software.

The full article can be read here.

BSNL had recently introduced a heavy discount of 60 per cent on leased line services to selective customers. This discount price however, did not include the private ISPs, who happen to be BSNL?s customers as well as competitors.

ISPs see this pricing as a blow to their margins and giving rise to unfair competition. The Internet Service Providers Association of India (ISPAI) had approched Trai for its intervention and action. ?In response to this, Trai had asked BSNL to discontinue the subsidised service to selective customers. BSNL and MTNL are the prime carriers of bandwidth and they should treat all its customers equally,? ISPAI president Amitabh Singhal said.

The Financial Express has this news story.

In a paper published in the journal Nature, NIST scientists say they were able to transfer the quantum state, or list of active properties, of one beryllium atom to another.

In NIST's teleportation experiment, there is no physical movement. Instead, data is transmitted. Such a transfer could speed up calculations in a futuristic computer. "It is quicker than moving the atoms" in such a computer, NIST spokeswoman Laura Ost said.

ZDNet is carrying this article.

A disturbing story at MSNBC tells of the growing problem of online banking fraud.

Nearly 2 million Americans have had their checking accounts raided by criminals in the past 12 months, according to a soon-to-be released survey by market research group Gartner. Consumers reported an average loss per incident of $1,200, pushing total losses higher than $2 billion for the year.

Click here for the full article.

The misery of computer viruses may have just hit mobile phones...

The first ever computer virus that can infect mobile phones has been discovered, anti-virus software developers said today, adding that up until now it has had no harmful effect.

The French unit of the Russian security software developer Kaspersky Labs said that that virus - called Cabir - appears to have been developed by an international group specialising in creating viruses which try to show "that no technology is reliable and safe from their attacks".

Full story at News.com.au.

Indians in the outsourcing industry, are now regularly forced to deal with death threats and wanton abuse.

But now, call centres have inculcated a module during their two month training to deal with such calls. “We advise our executives to give three warnings to the client to use professional language otherwise we hang up,” says Rekhank Pant, a voice trainer with Wipro Spectramind.

The recent spat of protests has resulted in the form of anti-outsourcing laws in the US. After New Jersey, three more states – Connecticut, Missouri and Wisconsin – are planning legislation against outsourcing.

The worst part of the problem is that the threats have assumed racist proportions.

Presidential candidate John Kerry recently introduced the ‘Call Center Consumer's Right to Know Act’, which would require a call centre to identify its location at the commencement of a call.

Click here for the full article.

Robin Sharma best-selling author of the The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari series, is now planning on turning it into a movie that will blend "profound meaning with Hollywood’s entertainment value".

The Economic Times has this story.

One of the largest, tax free, wealth creations in the country happened last weekend with the shareholders of IT majors, Wipro and Infosys Technologies, giving their nod to the issue of one time special dividends to the tune of 1250 per cent and 2000 percent respectively.

At Wipro, the dividend payout for the year ending March 31, 2004 totalled Rs 675 crore. This includes in addition to the one time special dividend, a cash dividend of 200 per cent. Company chairman Azim Premji who owns 84 per cent of the company gets Rs 566 crore. The balance Rs 109 crore will be distributed amongst the other shareholders of the company. It transpires that 96 per cent of Wipro’s shareholders own less than 500 shares in the company accounting for a mere 0.63 per cent of the total equity.

The six promoters and their families including NS Raghavan, who retired from the company a few years ago, who own 26.5 per cent of Infosys, will collectively be richer over Rs 220 crore. The balance of Rs 630 crore will land in the hands of Infosys 67,000 shareholders, of whom a whopping 63,500 are individual shareholders with a voting strength of 14 per cent.

At the present moment, dividends are tax-free. The full article can be read here.

More than a million pages from 19th Century British newspapers are to be put online by the British Library. At present, they are only available by visiting the library in person.

Editorials, advertisements and photographs will be archived, as well as news reports, as they are seen as providing insights into the values of British society at the time.

"Newspapers represent our culture in a unique way," said Sir Ron Cooke, chair of Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) which provided the funds for the digitisation project.

The BBC is carrying this article.

The Economic Times is carrying a story highlighting the success of Infosys' global summer Internship program.

Students of over 49 universities across the globe participate in the InStep programme. For the 70 internship position, Infosys got 8,500 applications from universities like MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Wharton , St Gallen (Switzerland), London Business School and Hitotsubashi (Japan) among others.

Interns are paid a monthly stipend of around Rs 15,000 to Rs 20,000. They have a project mentor and an Infoscian 'buddy' who will help them to acclimatise to the country and introduce them to the cultural heritage.

And it is not just work, as interns are also taken to tourist spots.

Sounds more like a marketing ploy than anything else.. Especially when you consider that there is (afaik) no such program catering to Indians locally..

The full article can be seen here.