Chinese Search Engine Baidu Was Hacked on Tuesday By an Iranian Groups of Hackers around 10:30 a.m. local time (9:30 p.m. Monday EST).

The group of Hackers, Who call themselves Iranian Cyber Army defaced the Homepage of .com version of Baidu by the banner of Iranian Cyber army filled with Logos of various Iran groups and slogan in Farsi.

Below a sentence in Farsi read, “In reaction to the US authorities’ intervention in Iran’s internal affairs. This is a warning,”

This group had also hacked Popular web 2.0 service Twitter Last month in the same way. The Iranina Cyber army has also hacked Iranian reformist Web site few days back.

Baidu released a statement “This morning, Baidu’s domain name registration in the United States was tampered with, leading to inaccessibility. Baidu has been resolving this issue and the majority of services have been restored. Visitors are suggested to use www.baidu.com.cn instead ”

According to Chinese media, the Site was under attack for at least four hours and there is no evidence that the group which hacked the website is from Iran.

Baidu is the China’s biggest search engine, had 63.9 percent of China’s search engine market as of the end of September, followed by 31.3 percent for Google China, according to Internet research firm Analysys International.

India is going to talk with Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s on the controversial issue of Sharing water of Teesta River. Bangladesh Prime minsiter Sheikh Hasina is on her three day visit to India from Jan 10.

The controversy is over the Tipaimukh dam which would help India to tackle floods and also produce hydel electricity. According to report, India has approved the plans of producing 1,500-megawatt of Hydel Electricity from this dam in northeastern Manipur state on the Barak River, which flows through Bangladesh before reaching Bay of Bengal. It was also Proposed by India Government to sell some power generated by dam at cheap prices to Bangladesh.

Bangladesh is against this dam, because of the warnings from experts according to which this dam will affect the life of 20 million Bangladeshis living in the northeastern region and would also dry up the two rivers in Bangladesh the Surma and Kushiara.

The main opposition in Bangladesh is by Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) of former prime minister Begum Khaleda Zia, who have threatened Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to launch a massive protest if Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina would agree to building of Dam by India.

According to Officials, BNP is opposing the issue for political gains in Bangladesh by provoking the anti-India sentiments. Hasina’s government says it is trying to address nagging power shortages that have slowed industries and kept investors away. Hasina is also likely to discuss buying electricity while in New Delhi.

Bangladesh and India already have a water sharing agreement on Ganges

According to an official Report, China had grabbed a substantial amount of Indian land over the last two decades along the line of Actual Control . The report was released in recent meeting at Leh, which was attended by officials from the Jammu and Kashmir government, Ministry of Home Affairs and Army.

It was agreed in meeting, that there is difference of area in maps of various agencies and a proper and adequate mapping of area is needed. Everybody agreed on the fact that, We are going back from the actual LAC and our area shrunk a lot in the period of twenty years. Although the Process is very slow, But we lost a substantial area during this period.

The main agenda of meeting was to ensure proper protection of normadic people in the area who move with their cattle to Dokbug area of Nyoma sector during the winter months every year. In December 2008, Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) had damaged their tents and threatened them to vacate the land.

According to Report filed by Sub Divisional Magistrate (Nyoma) Tsering Norboo ” Chinese threatened the nomadic people who had been using Dokbug area (in Ladakh sector) area for grazing since decades long, in a way to snatch our land in inches. A Chinese proverb is famous in the world – better do in inches than in yards”

France President Nicolas Sarkozy Has asked its government officials to find out the ways to Tax Online Gaints like Google,Yahoo, Facebook and others for the revenues they generate by showing online ads in France.

According to report from France Governement, The money which would be collected from this tax could be used to fund legal alternatives for buying books, films and music on the internet. Currently, Web companies like Google are only being taxed in US where their headquarters are located for all revenues generated worldwide.

According to sources, this tax can generate up to 20 million euros ($29 million) a year to help finance projects to boost online cultural content and to pay artists.

Olivier Esper, director of public affairs for Google France said ” The Proposed tax is a negative sign for the innovative business and it could slow down the innovation process.The better way was to find efficient business models which could support the content creators in much better way”.

Sarkozy also approved the report’s recommendation that France’s competition regulator review the online advertising market to assess Google’s “possible dominant position,”

Kings XI Punjab CEO Anil Srivatsa on Friday Said “Most IPL teams have not made any Profit from IPL (Indian Premiere League) and Kings XI Punjab is one from them. Sponsors have made investments in Kings XI Punjab and it will take time to reap the benefits”

Anil Srivatsa also added “The Franchisee cost of Rs. 350 Crores (USD76 million ) which they had committed to BCCI for Kings XI Punjab for time span of Ten years , and are expecting break even Point by 2011″. According to Srivatsa, Shifting of venues of matches to South Africa increased the cost burden as most of the sponsors were not interested to sponsor matches in South Africa.

Kings XI Punjab Senior vice-president Arivnder Singh said ” We are spending 70-80 crores on Marketing each year and paying 30-31 crores to our players. We are doing negotiation with 7-8 companies from FMCG and Telecom sectors to sign up the sponsorships for IPL this year”.

KXIP, is owned by Bollywood actress Preity Zinta and industrialist Ness Wadia, and current Sponsors of Team are Fly Emirates, Pepsi, Gulf oil, Reebok and UB.

Bangladesh’s telecom regulator has finally Approved the Bharti Airtel proposal to invest $300 million in Abu Dhabi Group’s Bangladesh telecommunications asset, Warid Telecom International Ltd which is the Fourth largest mobile company in Bangladesh.

Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission(BTRC) Chairman Zia Ahmed said “We have approved the Bharti Airtel plan to buy 70 perecent stake of Warid. We have asked Bharti Airtel to submit the detailed plan of the investment to BTRC in 30 days.”

Mr.Zia also added “We hope that the total investment of Airtel in Bangladesh would cross $1 Billion in few years.” Whatever amount Bharti Airtel would pay to warid for the deal, 5.5% of it would go to BRTC according to the Bangladesh Law.

After the Approval by BRTC, Bharti Airtel has become the first Indian Telecom operator to enter the Bangladesh mobile Market. Currently , Bharti Airtel is one of the leading telecom operators in Asia with more than 113,439,670 customers as of Sep 30, according to the company website and Providing Services in India and Srilanka.

Because of the Tough Competition from Reliance and Vodafone in Indian Mobile Market, Bharti Airtel is looking for its scope in overseas markets with great potential. After failure of its talks with South African firm MTN over dual listing issues, Bharti was desperately looking for an overseas acquisition where growth potentials are huge which it found on Warid.

According to the Report, Both companies, Bharti Airtel and Warid are working on the final MoU which would be signed next week, on the visit of Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to India. This deal would give strong signals of strengthening bilateral investments between both the countries and will be signed on Jan 12, in a joint session of the three chambers -Assocham, Ficci and CII- where Hasina is expected to address

Bharatiya Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) Ludhiana is ready to take action against the defaulters who have not paid its bills and now switched to other Telecom operators.
BSNL is going to issue a press release giving a chance to defaulters and will encourage them to pay their bills with discounts Failing which the Cases would be Filed against them for the outstanding payment.

According to BSNL Report, They have identified more than 2,000 Defaulters in the region including both landline and cellphone connections, where subscribers have not made their payment. According to BSNL Ludhiana officials over Rs 1 crore is due to be recovered from these subscribers.

BSNL had divided the defaulters in to two categories – One group contains defaulters who have to pay more than Rs.5000 and other group contains defaulters who have not paid bills less than Rs 5,000 for over three years.

BSNL general manager C S Bhanot said “The Department is going to give last chance to subscribers to pay the due amount else cases would be filed against them.” On asking about offered Discounts, Bhanot Said “This is due to Cut Throat competition in Telecom Industry. The idea of offering 25% to 30% on pending dues is to encourage defaulters to clear the pending dues and to start using our services again. BSNL would offer the discount to subscribers if they are ready to revert to BSNL”

According to New Deal between Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard, Bing would be the default search engine and MSN.com would be the Default homepage on all HP Laptops and PCs worldwide for the time span of three years.

The Earlier Partnership only covered the consumer PCs sold in the United States and Canada, and was effective for 12 months but the extended deal would cover both business and consumer computers worldwide for three years.

This Partnership would help Microsoft to increase the Market Share of its Search Engine Bing, Which was launched in May 2009.

According to Comscore Statics, Bing has maintained a consistent increase in its market Share since its Debut now capturing a market share of 10.3% in Search Engine Market. Whereas, Market share of yahoo has dropped to 17.5% from 18% last Year, Search Engine Giant Google is still maintaining a 65% market share of Search Engine Market.

This deal would really Help Bing, To increase its visibility and to get a huge exposure which is very important.

Dickson Seow, Google’s Southeast Asia head of corporate communications, said “We welcome competition that helps deliver useful information to users and expands user choice. Having competitors is a huge benefit to us and everyone in the search space–it makes us all work harder, and at the end of the day our users benefit from that.”

Yahoo India research and development Team has signed an agreement with Indian
Institute of Technology (IIT) , Bombay under which yahoo India has provided IIT -B students and its faculty access to cluster of its servers which are using running the open-source Hadoop software.

Apache Hadoop is open source software of Apache Foundation and mainly supported by Yahoo. According to Prabhakar Raghavan, senior vice president and head of Yahoo Labs,Yahoo is Using Hadoop for most of its critical operations and it is not feasible to do all research with in the company. This agreement with IITB would help to continue Hadoop Research more effectively.

The Cluster lab at Mumbai would help students and researchers at IITB to study more about the cloud computing and real time web data. Yahoo had launched the program of deploying servers at various universities in Last June and IIT Bombay , is among the first three universities outside US which are the part of this Program.

According to Raghavan, Servers with hundreds of processors and capability to handle terabytes of data are already deployed at IIT Bombay and the servers are in operation right now.

The partnering of Yahoo with Academic institutions on Hadoop is helping Yahoo to create a pool of engineers who are familiar with Hadoop. According to Raghavan, Yahoo has hired many engineers from these institutions. He also said that Yahoo has also benefited from the ideas number of times given by the academic institutions doing research on Hadoop Platform

Harsha Shettigar, a Bangalore-based software professional (aged 26 years), has filed a PIL(Public Interest Litigation) in Kartnataka High Court requesting the cancellation of CAT 2009 Online examination and to re-introduce the old “pen and paper” mode for CAT which is the most competitive examinations conducted by Top Business schools in the Country.

The PIL states that “There were various incidents reported all over the country about the online CAT Examination and students feel that they are being cheated about how IIM is handling this issue . Even though the online method was claimed full proof various incidents of Cheating , reboots, viruses were also reported across the country.”

He added that the questions were repeated from one slot to another, and questions that had appeared in previous years’ exams were repeated in CAT 2009.

He further said the candidates who appeared from the second day had the advantage as they “mugged up” questions from previous years and so, those tested on the first day were meted out “injustice”.

It also said the questions were “all over the Internet in the CAT window period”.

The writ petition has included “Convenor of CAT 2009, IIM-Ahmedabad”, “Director of IIM-Bangalore” and “Principal Secretary, Union of India, Ministry of Human Resources Development, New Delhi” as respondents. The PIL is presently pending for admission before the principal bench of the High Court.