*In response to the unanimously passed U.S. Senate
outsourcing bill on August 5th and remarks made by the American senator
sponsoring the bill, India’s largest social network SMS GupShup polled their
users via SMS on the topic. Over 3500 users responded to the question of
whether America’s growing anger at Indians taking their jobs was justified. In
Bangalore, the IT capital of the country and where India’s leading IT firm
Infosys is located, 46 per cent of those who responded felt that Indians were
taking jobs away from Americans, giving them just cause to be angered. A random
sample of the respondents from Bangalore who said “Yes” were called and asked
for their opinions on the subject. Most of the responses reflected a high level
of self-confidence and a distinct air of nonchalance about America’s latest
measures to curb outsourcing.
*Symantec Corp.(NASDAQ: SYMC) reports that strange stories of celebrities' deaths resulting
from plane crashes or car accidents have suddenly erupted in the spam ring. The
intention of distributing such false news is to spread viruses using HTML or
zipped attachments. This is one more in a series of recent virus attacks seen
in the last few weeks. In one of the campaigns seen, spammers are using subject
lines showing that a celebrity has died. Examples included Beyonce Knowles, Jay-Z. Justin Timberlake and Miley Cyrus. In the message it adds that the celebrity
has died along with 34 other people when their plane carrying the group on a
trip crashed into a mountainside while approaching the airport. For further
details, recipients are asked to open the malicious attachment. Upon opening
the zipped attachment named “[REMOVED]Hot News.zip,” we find an executable. The
malicious content is detected as Trojan.Zbot by Symantec antivirus products. Spammers are known
to create curiosity with their spam messages so that users become interested
and make an attempt to open and perhaps even install the executable. Using
brand names such as well-known news agencies or using a celebrity's name gives
the spammers much needed credibility in order to gain the recipients' trust.
Users should follow standard practices of not opening any suspicious links or
attachments received in unsolicited email or from an unexpected source.
*WhipTail Tech, manufacturer of enterprise solid-state
SAN appliances, has announced the addition of Al Monserrat, senior
vice-president of worldwide sales and services for Citrix Systems, to its board
of advisors. Monserrat is a technology thought leader and industry veteran that
brings with him more than 14 years of executive-level IT experience. In this role,
he will help guide the future direction of WhipTail. Monserrat leads the global
Citrix sales and services organization, which comprises approximately 2,200
Citrix professionals and 4,500 channel and distribution partners worldwide.
Since joining Citrix in February 2000, Monserrat has led all functions within
the sales and services organization including North American sales, the
worldwide channel organization, sales strategy, sales operations, and Citrix
consulting services. He has also been responsible for emerging product sales
with focus on identifying and executing new routes to market for new products,
as well as defining sales strategies for building, incubating and integrating
new sales teams for acquired products.
New Products
*Eurocom has added XTU and XMP support into its new
Panther 2.0 super-notebook. The new Eurocom Panther 2.0 utilizes Intel XTU and
XMP technology to increase the frequency of memory and processors for improved
performance. Intel’s XTU (eXtreme Tuning Utility) is an application that allows
for manual performance tuning, stress testing and system monitoring. XMP
(eXtreme Memory Profile) allows for manual tuning of frequency, latency and
voltage parameters of memory. Intel XMP
is a performance-packed expansion of the standard DDR3 memory specification. The
benefit of XTU and XMP to Eurocom customers is that it gives them the ability
to customize their memory and processor to offer the best performance for their
needs, whatever they may be. With
predefined memory optimizations built into Intel XMP, overclocking on the
Panther 2.0 is easy right away. A user
no longer is required to manually customize their Eurocom notebook; XTU and XMP
offer simplified processor and memory overclocking to optimize performance. The
Panther 2.0 is the newest model from Eurocom to stand atop its line of Mobile
Workstations. It utilizes a 300 Watt AC
adapter, which enabled Eurocom engineers to incorporate the most capable
components on the market into a Mobile Workstation. Eurocom added a 6 core Intel i7 or Xeon
5500/5600 processors, NVidia Quadro and
AtiRadeon Mobility modular VGA technology and up to 4 physical drives
(mechanical or SSD) with over 3TB of storage and choices between RAID 0/1/5/10.
*EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) has announced the
availability of new capabilities for its market leading EMC CLARiiON and EMC
Celerra midrange storage platforms to meet those requirements. Through new EMC
Unisphere management software, EMC enables storage administrators to perform
common tasks with 90 per cent fewer clicks. Unisphere is integrated with VMware
vCenter to also make life easier for VMware administrators. EMC unified storage
integrates out-of-the-box with VMware vSphere and VMware vStorage APIs for
Array Integration (VAAI). FCoE is also built into these midrange arrays. New
Block Data Compression reduces storage capacity requirements by up to 50 per
cent, and new FAST Cache performance optimization technology enables
applications to run twice as fast, and is fully automated - no administrator
intervention required. Additionally, customers will benefit from new FCoE
support built into EMC CLARiiON and EMC Celerra unified storage systems for a
complete Ethernet storage solution. Native FCoE fulfills EMCs commitment to
deliver customers a non-disruptive path to exploiting the advantages of FCoE,
while continuing to offer online upgrades to FCoE for existing CLARiiON and
Celerra customers. Native support helps customers minimize infrastructure costs
associated with multiple Fibre Channel HBAs and multiple NICs, consolidates cabling,
and improves savings associated with power and cooling expenses dramatically.
*Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. (NASDAQ:
CHKP) recently announced its new Multi-Domain Management software blades –
Global Policy and Security Domain – that deliver virtual security management to
businesses of all sizes. The new
software blades enable businesses to segment their security management into
virtual domains while consolidating their hardware infrastructure. In addition,
the new software blades allow for stronger and better security with the
deployment of consistent global policies across all domains. Key features and
benefits include centralized monitoring for all gateways and multi-domain
system components in a single management console, increased management
flexibility and accuracy with enhanced role-based administration and granular
control, increased efficiency with consistent global policies across domains,
and reduced hardware investment and overall lower total cost of ownership.
