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eBay is apparently the most trusted American company in terms of privacy, according to a survey of 6,300 people. Google didn't make it to the top 20.

Web search leader Google Inc., which has recently come under fire from privacy advocates for its plan to deliver advertising based on key-words in messages sent through its planned Gmail service, received a positive ranking but did not place among the top 20.

Consumers said they cared most about a company's overall reputation for product and service quality, followed by whether it limits the collection of customers' personal information. Third most important was whether companies use advertisements and solicitations that respect consumer privacy.

eBay also owns PayPal, an online payment service. CNN Money is carrying this story.

Infosys CEO, Nandan Nilekani has states that the controversy in the United States over job losses from offshore outsourcing is showing signs of easing.

Reuters has the full story.

SpaceRef is carrying a Jet Propulsion Laboratory press release along with photos of Cassini's fly-by of Phoebe, on of the larger moons of Saturn.

"What we are seeing is very neat. Phoebe is a heavily cratered body. We might be seeing one of the chunks from the formation of the solar system, 4.5 billion years ago. It's too soon to say," said Dr. Torrence Johnson, Cassini imaging team member at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "It's important to see the big picture from all of the other instruments to get the global view on this tiny moon."

All planned 11 instruments operated as expected and all data was acquired. Scientists plan to use the data to create global maps of the cratered moon, and to determine Phoebe's composition, mass and density. It will take scientists several days to pour over the data to make more concrete conclusions.

The full article is here.

The Guardian is carrying an unusual story about 'hackers' in Russia, who are willing to DDOS sites for 6 hours for as little as USD 60.

Several hackers have posted a menu of services on the internet. The most popular is a Direct Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, in which a website and server can be disabled by being bombarded with emails and other information.

The Vedomosti newspaper reported on Thursday that one hacker, Masha, offered to shut down any website for six hours for $60 (£33). The official website of President Vladimir Putin, www.kremlin.ru, could be shut down for a week for $2,000, said Masha.

The full story can be seen here.

NTL, one of Britain's largest telcos, has proceeded with plans to block all major Internet ports to help prevent worms from spreading across its network.

Last month it blocked port 135. Now it is blocking (inbound only): 137 (UDP), 138 (UDP), 139 (TCP), 445 (UDP & TCP), 593 (TCP), 1433 (TCP), 1434 (UDP) and 27374 (TCP).

"This 'port-blocking' should have little or no effect on your use of the Internet but it will significantly reduce the vulnerability to infection from variants of the Welchia and MSBlast worms," NTL explains in a notice to subscribers.

The Register is carrying this report.

ZDNet reports that German residents have been subjected to a deluge of racist emails, infected with the Sober. G virus.

The email deluge started just after 2 a.m. on Thursday morning in Germany. The majority of emails came from a computer at the University of Rostock and have been traced to the IP address of one student, although there is no indication so far that any employee or student of Rostock University was involved.

This is thought to be the first time that right-wing extremists have used wide-scale spamming to reach their audience. The emails included stories about the alleged criminality of foreigners and their abuse of the German health and social welfare system, which has led to suggestions that the European elections may have been the trigger for the spam attack.

The full story is available here.

The Economic Times is carrying a detailed article on the growing trend of Indian BPO companies to acquire medium to small American and European firms.

Essar, Datamatics, Godrej and Intelenet, jointly owned by TCS and HDFC, form a growing list of Indian companies that have in the last few months acquired BPO businesses overseas following HCL, which pioneered the process by a buying a BPO company in Northern Ireland in 2002.

Reuters reports that the FBI have successfully made arrests in several countries over the theft of Half-life 2 sourcecode from Valve last year.

Valve officials said the online gaming community tracked down the purported hackers within days of the company's announcement last fall that the release of "Half-Life 2" would be delayed because of the Internet break-in.

"It was extraordinary to watch how quickly and how cleverly gamers were able to unravel what are traditionally unsolvable problems for law enforcement related to this kind of cyber crime," Valve Chief Executive Gabe Newell said in a statement.

The full story is available here.

Reuters is carrying a report stating that Microsoft has filed eight lawsuits against spammers.

Microsoft has said it plans to try to eradicate spam by deploying technology, promoting legislation and suing spammers. Microsoft, which filed its first major lawsuit against spammers last July, says it is pursuing more than 80 lawsuits around the world against senders of unsolicited e-mail. Of those, 51 lawsuits were brought in the United States.

Go Bill! Go Microsoft! ;)

Vuunet is carrying an article on a recent announcement by IBM and Cisco of plans to jointly design and build what they claim will be the world's most complex programmable custom chip.

The aim is to produce a chip capable of delivering 40Gbps data throughput over Cisco's recently hyped CRS-1 IP Carrier Routing System.

The Cisco Silicon Packet Processor is a 40Gbps application-specific integrated circuit featuring 38 million gates, more than 187 million transistors and 188 high-performance programmable 32-bit Risc processors. The device will be able to execute 47 billion instructions per second.

The full story can be seen here.