Facebook is stealing a page from Twitter’s social media book and verifying the accounts of famous users.
Facebook requires all of its 845 million members to sign up with their real name, and even celebrities like Stefani Germanotta – aka Lady Gaga – have to use their legal name on the site.

The social network has stuck so strictly to this policy that in November it took down the Facebook profile of novelist Salman Rushdie because his legal first name on his passport is “Ahmed.” Rushdie took to Twitter — where he has a verified account sporting a blue check mark – to lambast Facebook’s policy. That policy is about to change in a few hours, said Facebook spokeswoman Meredith Chin. While public figures must still sign up on Facebook using their birth names, they can choose to display a nickname, with a real name in parentheses.

The verified accounts will help Facebook promote and recommend celebrities while assuring they aren’t imposters. “We wanted to make sure that people were connecting to the people they are actually intending to connect to,” Ms. Chin said. “We want to give people a way to amplify how the public actually knows them.”
In September, Facebook began allowing users to “subscribe” to others, meaning they can receive another person’s public Facebook posts without being friends with them. After launching subscribe, Facebook began making recommendations along the side of the screen for people to follow based on a user’s likes and preferences.

Facebook will begin requiring certain public figures to send a government-issued ID to verify their accounts. Once verified, Facebook may choose to promote these accounts to users. The company won’t reveal the number of users that will receive verification requests because its engineers are still tweaking it, Ms. Chin said. Facebook also won’t indicate that an account is real like Twitter does with its check mark.

Mr. Rushdie ultimately won his battle with Facebook, and his profile with the first name “Salman” was returned. But other famous people with large Facebook followings are currently forced to use a name that most of the world has never heard.

Chinese hackers on Monday attacked Microsoft India's retail website and stole the usernames and passwords of its customers, forcing the company to shut it down temporarily. The online retail site "www.microsoftstore.co.in" deals with computers, computer software and consumer electronics.

Microsoft said the company was investigating the matter and has already sent guidelines to its customers. "We are diligently working to remedy the issue and keep our customers protected," the spokesperson said.
The website showed an error message: "The Microsoft Store India is currently unavailable. Microsoft is working to restore access as quickly as possible. We apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused."
Evil Shadow, a Chinese hacking team that claimed responsibility for the attack, obscured the full username and passwords in the screen shots that were posted on a blog run by an Evil Shadow Team member 7z1. The hacker, 7z1, told Reuters that the data had been found unencrypted on the website.

Indian company Quasar Media, which operates the Indian edition of Microsoft Store, said that the company was investigating the issue. "I am not sure when the site will be up again or what happened," spokesman Rahul Roy said.

Microsoft said it has already urged its customers to immediately change their passwords and usernames if the same were being used for any other sites.

The 54th Annual Grammy Awards was a huge hit across social, digital and broadcast platforms.
Excitement for the return of Adele, as well as the tribute to the late Whitney Houston kept viewers engaged online and off.

CBS reported that 39.9 million viewers tuned in to Sunday’s award show, the second-largest Grammy audience ever and the best ratings since 1984.

New Social TV Records

Of course, broadcast is only part of the story. This year’s Grammy Awards were a hugely social and digital affair. Even with the tape delay (which prevented a real-time social conversation from taking place on the east and west coasts), the Grammys still broke new social TV records.

According to Bluefin Labs, the Grammys earned 13 million social comments. That breaks the record from last week’s Super Bowl and absolutely dwarfs every other entertainment event from the last year. The most-talked about moments included Adele’s performance of “Rollin in the Deep” and her win for Album of the Year, Jennifer Hudson’s tribute to Whitney Houston and Chris Brown’s performance.

As the music community (and Internet as a whole) reacts to the untimely death of Whitney Houston, the Recording Academy is scrambling to arrange a tribute for Sunday night’s Grammy Awards. Executive producers have confirmed that Jennifer Hudson and Chaka Khan have been contacted about performing a tribute, but acknowledged that things are still too raw for a full-blown tribute.

Meanwhile, at Clive Davis’s pre-Grammy Gala, Grammy nominees and attendees are reacting to Houston’s death. Grammy Live is streaming red carpet and live interviews from the event, alongside live Twitter commentary from viewers. Saturday night’s event is particularly bittersweet because Houston was Clive Davis’s biggest star and she was supposed to appear at the pre-Grammy Gala.

Fans are gathering outside the Beverly Hilton Hotel (the location of the Gala and where Houston died) to express their condolences. Social media has already played a strong role in the 54th Grammy Awards and that will continue into Sunday. Mashable will be at the Grammy Awards, tweeting and live blogging live from the show.

Your Songs & Voice Will Always Remain Alive In Our Hearts. May Your Soul Rest In Peace.

Regards: Cyber Technology News.

Google will reportedly soon jump into the consumer electronics market with a “home entertainment device,” according to the Wall Street Journal. The fabled device will first work as a wireless music streaming unit, but could later be updated for other purposes.

Google announced its signature Chrome browser would start to roll out to Android phones on Tuesday. If you’re one of the lucky ones running Ice Cream Sandwich, also known as Android 4.0, you’ll be able to download Chrome on the Android Store.

As you can see from the above gallery of screenshots taken from both Google and our experience running Chrome on a Galaxy Nexus, tabbed browsing is a big highlight of Chrome for Android. It also boasts the ability to have simple private browsing sessions.

Most importantly, Chrome for Android blends in with other Google services seamlessly, such as Google Maps and YouTube. It was easy for us to import tabs from our computer browsers as well.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has been under fire from world leaders to step down this week. He’s also under fire from hacktivist group Anonymous, who leaked hundreds of his office’s emails on Monday.
While Anonymous is infamous for its hacking know-how, it doesn’t take a genius computer programmer to guess one of the passwords commonly used by Assad’s office accounts: 12345. The string of consecutive numbers is the second-weakest password according to a 2011 study.

Anonymous broke into the mail server of the Syrian Ministry of Presidential Affairs, accessing some 78 inboxes of Assad’s staffers, according a report from Israeli daily Haaretz. The password 12345 was associated with several of the accounts. Mansour Fadlallah Azzam, the minister of presidential affairs and Bouthaina Shaaban, Assad’s media adviser, were among the victims of the inbox hacks.

Haaretz obtained and published one email that included documents intended to prepare the Syrian leader for his December 2011 interview with Barbara Walters. In the interview, Assad claimed the Syrian government was not killing its people.

Nikon keeps looking for more mountains to climb. A little after unveiling its new D4 flagship DSLR and a point-and-shoot with world’s longest zoom, the company has announced a new special-format camera that’s said to be able to capture photos with higher resolution than any commercially available DSLR on Earth.


The camera is called the D800, and it snaps photos at a whopping 36.3 megapixels, more than double the maximum resolution of the D4, which maxes out at 16.2MP. The D800 can capture those ultra-crisp photos thanks to its full-frame CMOS sensor, which Nikon calls FX format. “Full frame” means the image sensor is the same size as a frame of 35mm film — significantly larger than a typical APS-C sensor in a normal DSLR.

When you have that many pixels, you need performance that can handle it, and the D800 boasts a new image processor called the Expeed 3. With the full-frame sensor and processing engine, Nikon says the camera’s pixel count is the world’s highest, though it qualifies the claim by only including DSLRs with interchangeable lenses with full-frame sensors. Medium-format cameras, such as ones made by Hasselblad or Phase One, can have pixel counts much higher.

Nokia announced plans to cut 4,000 jobs as part of a restructuring of its manufacturing operations. Factories in Komarom, Hungary, Reynosa, Mexico and Salo, Finland, will be affected. The measures follow a review of smartphone manufacturing operations, announced by Nokia last September. Aiming to increase its competitiveness, Nokia on Wednesday announced it will shed 4,000 jobs, or 7% of its global workforce, as it shifts device assembly to Asia.

This forms part of attempts by the handset maker to catch up in the smartphone market, where it has been losing share to Samsung and Apple. The three factories will in future focus on smartphone product customization, serving customers mainly in Europe and the Americas. Device assembly will be transferred to Nokia factories in Asia, where the majority of component suppliers are based. Nokia said the move should help it reduce the time to market and more quickly introduce innovations in its smartphones.

As a consequence of the plans, the number of steps in manufacturing and the amount of work carried out at the sites in Komarom, Reyno sa and Salo are expected to decrease substantially. The job cuts will be phased through the end of 2012, with staff receiving financial support and assistance with local re-employment.

The company’s continuing decline in market share prompted another round of cuts in April 2011 that included the loss of 4,000 jobs in Denmark, Finland and Britain. The company also transferred 3,000 employees working on Symbian to Accenture. As of Wednesday afternoon, EST, Nokia’s stock price was up about 1% on the news.

Google India and Facebook have removed web pages considered offensive to India’s political and religious leadership to satisfy a court order in a censorship case. Indian prosecutors are suing a host of Internet companies on behalf of a Muslim religious leader who has accused them of hosting content that insults Islam.
Google India did not reveal which sites were removed, but the company has stated it will take down anything which violates Indian law. Reuters reports Facebook also removed content from some “Indian domain websites” and that the company would make a statement later.

According to Indian media and the Associated Press, a New Delhi court Monday issued Google, Facebook, YouTube, Blogspot and other Internet companies a two-week ultimatum for delivering plans to actively supervise their networks.

The Indian government has been aggressively lobbying 22 online companies to scrub content deemed “anti-religious” or “anti-social.” Indian officials consider American Internet standards unacceptable for the country’s 100-plus million online citizens.

The Indian government’s efforts to censor the web have alarmed proponents of online free speech around the world. But Indian government officials dismissed those fears, citing a goal of national unity in a country with over 2,000 ethnic groups and subscribers to every major religion. “There is no question of any censorship,” said Indian communications minister Sachin Pilot. “They all have to operate within the laws of the country.”

Last April, the Indian government passed regulations that required websites to remove any material considered “grossly harmful, harassing, blasphemous,” “ethnically objectionable,” “disparaging” or that impersonates someone else. And in December of last year, India’s government called for Internet companies to screen content before users posted it, a task considered impossible by many.

According to Google’s Transparency Report, the Indian government asked the company to remove content 68 times between January and June of last year, and 51% of those requests were at least partially complied with. Earlier, Facebook India gave a compliance report to the court Monday while also saying that no public complaints have been lodged against the company. India, with more than 43 million Facebook users (second highest in the world) is Facebook’s third-fastest growing market.

Do you think the Indian government is justified in trying to remove objectionable content from the Internet? Sound off in the comments below.

 

Leading motorcycle player Bajaj Auto on Monday, January 30, 2012, unveiled a new model of its popular bike brand Pulsar, called Pulsar 200NS. "A little more than 10 years since the original Pulsar was launched, Bajaj Auto today unveiled the next gen Pulsar 200NS. This new Pulsar is all set to re-define motorcycling technology and design as much as the original Pulsar did way back in 2001," the company said in a statement.

The new Pulsar has a 200 cc gasoline engine while its chassis comprises a pressed steel perimeter frame and a rectangular tube section swing arm delivering over three times the lateral stiffness of a P220 frame.  "The Pulsar 200NS is best middle-class sports bike. It will be commercially launched beginning next fiscal through 600 dealers across the country. The price is expected to be below Rs 1 lakh," Bajaj Auto Managing Director Rajiv Bajaj told reporters here.

 

The largest military contract in India's history for 126 Medium Multi-Role Combat Aircraft (MMRCA) worth $10.4 billion, which has been in the pipeline for almost a decade, appears set to go to French company Dassault. Though no official confirmation is available yet, various reports say Dassault's bid is the lowest.

India's order for the Rafale fighter aircraft, which currently serves only the French Air Force and Navy, will be a huge win for the French company, which has only succeeded in winning a small contract to sell a few planes to Brazil until now.

For the Indian contract, the Rafale was fighting it out with the multinational Eurofighter consortium, and it was touch and go between the two.

India will be the second international client for the French Jet and will possibly resurrect the flagging fortunes of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who was desperately hoping for a blockbuster deal. It will also continue the Indian Air Force's love affair with French aircraft.

Dassault Aviation has been one of India's longest-standing defence suppliers. In the 1950's and 1960's, India used both the Ouragan and Mstytere fighter jets, and despite skipping the famous Mirage III fighter, because India preferred using Soviet hardware in the 1970's, India became one of the first and longest standing users of the Mirage 2000 purchased in the mid-1980's.

In fact, in late-2011, India signed a $3 billion agreement to upgrade its fleet of 51 Mirage-2000 aircraft to keep them airworthy for another 20-25 years as well as purchasing 490 MICA air-to-air missiles which can also be used on the Rafale.

In hindsight, the deal for the missiles should have given everyone a clue that the French were leading the MMRCA race, but such big military deals are not easily decided.

Hopefully, the Rafale jets should start coming to India by the end of 2012 or early 2013 and local production should begin from 2014 (as is specified in the deal). Now, if the government and the defence ministry got moving on the deal to purchase new heavy artillery to replace close to 30-year old Bofors guns, that would be useful.

Facebook Inc., the world’s largest social-networking service, chose Morgan Stanley to take the lead on its planned initial public offering, according to sources. Facebook will file plans with regulators on Feb.1 to raise $5 billion.