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Infolinks can be easily be called as the advertising program which is flexible, easy to use and at the same time keep you motivated and awake. It keeps learning the trends on the web and consistently works to improvise the maintain the set standards.

Infolinks has now come up with Related Tags Ads. It can be in simply explained as the in-line ads on your web page according to the text your page. In a short span of time, Infolinks Related Tags ads have earned some decent amount of respect of thousands of bloggers by multiplying their earnings.

We would like to share our experience with the Infolinks Related Tags which we have started to use very recently. Honestly, we are not very good to fill up our articles with the keywords which really doesn't earn us much of the revenue, however Related Tags solve this problem with just a flip of the finger which we have been dragging all the way till now, it recognizes the words of our page and appear, with just a simple widget wherever you want it.

Some of its key facts we would like to point out about Related Tags are:

• It is very easy to implement, just took us 5 seconds once we finalized the spot on our page.
• It is extremely beneficial and provide desired results if you place it on the Top in middle of your webpage and that is exactly where we have placed it (as you can see it)
• Just couple of days after we placed it on the top of our webpage, our Infolinks earnings were at-least 4 times multiplied.
• If I have to explain this new feature of Infolinks ad in one word, that would be 'Astounding', this move really has the ability to win the hearts of blogger and fill their pockets.
• It has an amazing brain to fit in all sizes and produce the results according to the space of the widget, however only thing which I could see missing is that I could not change the color of the Related Tags to match it up with the text of blog pages.
  

There is full bucket of advantages and no disadvantages at all, really amazing, you are missing a big piece of the pie if you have not yet placed the Infolinks Related Tags on your blog / website.
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Airtel Bharti's CEO Sanjay Kapur has today made an announcement that the largest mobile operator on the basis of subscribers would launch the most talked about gadget during September-October this year.

The iPhone 4 at 9.3 mm is 24% thinner than the previous iPhone 3GS and is available in black and white versions. It has glass front and back with antenna built into the side Video: The phone features video chat called FaceTime and also has a front- facing video camera for video conferencing. iPhone 4 can shoot and edit high definition (HD) video.

It has the software iMovie for video editing Camera: It has a 5- MP camera with LED flash & 5X digital zoom in the back compared to the 3- MP camera earlier Screen: 960 x 640 pixels on 3.5 inch display — four times more pixels than the earlier iPhones Battery: The improved battery life allows for 40% more talk time — 7 hours 3G talk, 10 hours video, 300 hours standby Gaming : It has a gyroscope sensor for improved gaming Internet: Users can also use Microsoft’s Bing for search in addition to Google and Yahoo.

As of now, Airtel offers the 3GS handset at a price of Rs 35,500 for the 16 GB model and Rs 41,500 for the 32GB model, however price of iPhone 4 has not been disclosed yet. At the moment Airtel is in negotiation with US - based Apple Inc. to bring the phone to India and price would be disclosed once the deal is sealed.
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A Bangalore based company Hidden Reflex has developed what it calls the world’s first browser for Indians. Epic, as the browser is called, has social networking widgets, email clients and chat clients pre-installed.

It’s Indian because it allows the user to type in 12 Indian languages including Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Bangla, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Gurmukhi and even Sanskrit. It has over 1500 Indian themes and wallpapers. It also claims it has 1500- plus sidebar applications, in addition to the 10,000 or so Firefox applications that are already compatible since both Epic and Firefox are based on the same Mozilla open source platform.

Perhaps the developers also believe that Indian web users are a bunch of lazy mouse potatoes. Why else would you make all virus scanning automatic? But jokes apart, the look of the browser is pretty neat. It is quick to download and installs fairly without any hassle.

It has a clean look and although it claims it downloads web pages the fastest, our initial reaction was that it is as fast (or slow) as Firefox. ,Banner ads rendering on pages is a problem. For instance, the top banner ad never got displayed in the time we tested the browser. Which, come to think of it, is not really a bad thing because users can now ignore banner ads completely and concentrate on content. The site publishers may not be okay with that though.

But what is really impressive about the browser is that its email and chat and social media widgets open in a window on the left of the main browser window so that you can carry on with your work and keep an eye open for a chat message or a new email on the left. I thought it would be obtrusive, but it is not really. I quite like this feature.

Download the browser from http://www.epicbrowser.com/.

On the whole, Epic is a more than just a decent attempt — and although it is certainly not India’s first indigenous browser, it looks to be the “ country’s” most impressive so far.
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Journalists would die rather than endorse a brand in print (well, at least, most of us would), but to not mention Old Spice this week would be to commit a cardinal sin. The Procter & Gamble men’s toiletries brand rewrote every rule of marketing there ever was to create a buzz for a product as mundane as a shower gel.

The concept was so simple it left the geniuses in the advertising world wondering why they did not think of it earlier. But then that’s what simple products do — Velcro and Post- It notes, for instance. What Old Spice did in two days, speculates a Forbes magazine blog writer, could become case studies in the world’s top management schools and indeed corporate boardrooms.

Here is what Old Spice’s advertising agency Wieden+ Kennedy did. They took their already popular Old Spice commercial starring actor and former American football star Isaiah Mustafa and made it interactive in real time by merging three video and social networks — YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

Every single comment that viewers and readers put on the original commercial was remade into another video with Mustafa responding to fan messages.

One such fan asked the Old Spice Man if he would help him ask his girlfriend to marry him.

In the next one hour or so, Wieden+ Kennedy shot, edited and broadcast a request from Mustafa asking the girl to accept his proposal. She did, and the Web went into raptures.

Mustafa’s videos became a rage and before long some of the best known personalities on social media including Twitter CTO Biz Stone, were endorsing the Old Spice Man.

Tech blog TechCrunch reported that Google CFO Patrick Pichette was “impressed” with the campaign.

Stone said, “We are cracking up following @ OldSpice and watching these hilarious responses on YouTube.” When the YouTube blitz reached 140 videos, Stone tweeted again: “Wow, @ oldspice channel has exactly 140 YouTube videos. Does that smell like coincidence or something more powerful?” The 140 reference being, of course, the character limit on Twitter.

In less than 24 hours, the Old Spice page on Twitter had reached 71,000 followers, a rate of growth seen only by true blue celebrities such as talk show host Oprah Winfrey, cricketer Sachin Tendulkar and basketball superstar LeBron James.

To keep up the celebrity quotient, most of the personal replies were to well known people. Some of them included former US President Bill Clinton’s political adviser and TV show host George Stephanopoulos, actor and singer Alyssa Milano, and the grandest name of all, actor Demi Moore, who had tweeted, “Old Spice Guy, I want a special video response now”. Who could say no to Demi Moore? By the way, the Demi Moore response video also took only an hour to be written, shot, edited and uploaded on YouTube.

But how was it done? After all it is not easy to script really funny videos however short they may be (and quite frankly, the shorter the tougher), and then shoot, edit and upload it in less than an hour.
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The Bangalore based firm named Hidden Reflex has developed a new Internet Browser which is powered by Mozilla. It has something different than the other browsers which are available in the market however it would still need to go a long way to compete with the giants like Mozilla Firefox, good old Internet Explorer, Google Chrome and of-course Safari.

Epic has been designed to cater and target the Indian Internet market and that is the primary reason that it supports 12 different languages from different parts of the Country which are Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, Kannada, Telugu, Bengali, Tamil, Malayalam, Urdu and Punjabi..

It can be downloaded free from its website on http://www.epicbrowser.com/

Features which I liked most about it are that it does not store users’ browsing data that could be later accessed by others, it ensures a click private data deletion and it also has the flash cookie deletion system.

So, guys & gals what are you waiting for, try something new everyday and this should be on the top of on the things-to-do list today.

Be Desi & Support Desi.
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This would surely bring a cunning smile on the face of proud owners of Jailbroken iPads and iPhones as Comex brings in a application named Frash by which Flash in iPads can be put by a sort of jailbreak app specially developed for iPads however can work with iPhones i.e. iPhone4 and iPhone 3GS as well.

The app is still in its early stages and is not stable enough for release to the public at large; however Comex has decided to make the app available on GitHub that allows an opportunity for the developers to improve the software for iOS so that it becomes reliable and made available to public.

This app has been speacially designed to Flash to work on iPads however 3 Apple devivces which are iPad, iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 have sufficient RAM to support this app and run Flash smoothly in the mobile Safari browser.

Frash is actually a port of the Adobe Flash plug-in that is available for Android devices and will run on only jail broken iPads in Safari Mobile by way of a compatibility layer.

Absence of Flash support on Apple has been huge disappointment in the owners of its devices whether it is iPad or iPhone which is the result of cold war between Apple and Adobe.

Hopefully, it would make the most talked about the phone 'iPhone' and most wanted gadget 'iPad' more perfect.
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After Samsung announced the 67 days stand by time of a phone, Zen Mobile has launched a dual Sim phone that offers 72 days standby time which is equivalent to 1,728 hours and it assures of talktime of 16 hours which means a user can talk for non stop for 16hours without charging the battery.


Some it features includes 2.4-inch TFT screen, 1.3 megapixel camera, 3.5 mm jack, Bluetooth, FM recorder, FM radio and expandable memory up to 4GB and 500 contacts book and it supports English and Hindi language.

It is priced at mere Rs 3,400 which is quite affordable with extra battery life and dual Sim phone.
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Much Hyped Volkswagen Vento has been launched today in India and like to hit the market by October 2010. Volkswagen is trying to target the mid-sized sedan segment in Indian Market, First Polo and now Vento.

Vento would be available in October in 1.6-liter, Petrol variant which will be powered at 105ps and torque at 153Nm and Diesel variant at 105ps and 215Nm of torque, and will available in both 5 and 6 speed transmission.

Its price is not yet announced, however it is likely to start above Rs 7 lakh with the top end versions going above Rs 9 lakh as it is the league of Honda City.

Vento has some features like tilt adjustable steering wheel, high adjustable front seat, electrical adjustable outside rear view mirror, climatic air condition, multi-function display, air-condition from rear side and rear seat interiors which means co-passenger front seat can be adjusted from the rear seat.

Volkswagen Vento would be in the showrooms for sale by October and would throw an open challenge to Honda City, Hyundai Verna Transform and Ford Fiesta.
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The bad news keeps coming in for Microsoft.

Mozilla’s Firefox web browser has been chosen as the default for all internal purposes at IBM. The opensource Firefox, already a favourite with those who would like to do multiple things with their web browser with third- party apps, will now service close to half a million workers around the world.

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has been trying to regain lost ground for the last three years or so, but without any luck. As a result, IE’s marketshare has dropped from close to 80 per cent in 2007 to less than 55 per cent now, and is expected to fall even further despite the progress it has made with IE 8.

At the same time, Apple’s Safari and the Opera browser have been taking great strides. Time for Microsoft to roll up its innovation sleeves then!
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The not- so- venerable software giant from Redmond, Seattle has decided to bury its smartphone even before some people got to see it.

Well, the Microsoft Kin launched less than two months ago — was supposed to compete with the Apple iPhone. But there was a hitch — the iPhone is a great product. Microsoft Kin was not. The Kin was a stupid product to start with.

Its only redeeming feature was its ability to be a social networking phone. But when you have so many phones with Facebook and Twitter apps as default, why go for the Kin? Good question, and this was answered by Microsoft’s entertainment division which decided to kill the product just six weeks into its US launch. According to the leading technology blog Gizmodo, Microsoft managed to sell just 500 Kins, compared to the 50 million iPhones that have been sold worldwide. Here is what Gizmodo says: “ A major reason it bombed, besides the weird, non- specific faux hipster marketing? Price. Verizon priced Kin's monthly service like a smartphone, even though it wasn't one.

Even cutting the device price drastically didn't alleviate the high cost of the monthly plan.

(The confusing Kin, a Windows 7 Phone by Microsoft flustercluck branding didn't help.) The few people that did buy a Kin will still get support from Microsoft, but the future of promised software updates is up in the air.”
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Nintendo Wii is possibly the world’s largest gaming console, outselling both Microsoft’s Xbox 360 as well as Sony’s PlayStation3. But now, it is reportedly adding a feature that will scare the pants out of Wii’s rivals— 3D. At the Electronics Entertainment Expo (or E3) in Los Angeles, Nintendo released the Nintendo 3dS.

A report in the Wall Street Journal says: “ Most 3- D technologies create the illusion of depth on a flat screen by presenting different images to the left and right eye, typically using special glasses. Creating the effect using a display alone— a technology called autostereoscopic 3- D— is more difficult.

One challenge is that the images generated by such displays can appear blurry, particularly when viewed at an angle.” It added: “ Since TV is typically viewed by more than one person at various angles and distances, most companies rolling out 3- D TVs have opted for battery- powered glasses to present different images to each eye.

TV makers have said it will be at least five years before a glassesfree 3- D television will be ready for mass production.” What the release of James Cameron’s Avatar has done is to inspire those who were in the entertainment industry to go 3D and make it work!
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HTC Evo 4G, a phone that was released in the US on June 4, four days after the announcement of the Apple iPhone 4 and 20 days before its launch on June 24, a date that eventually may be pushed to July 12 because of the unprecedented demand.

In complete contrast with the fanfare that accompanied the iPhone 4 launch, the Taiwanese telecom manufacturer launched its Evo in the quietest manner possible. But can it match up to the iPhone 4? In three words, the answer is: It sure can. And in some feature sets, it’s even better than the iPhone 4. There is one small problem, though.

Purists don’t call it a 4G phone yet; its protocol is half a notch below actual 4G speeds. But who cares as long as it is faster than 3G? And yes, just in case you wondered whether the iPhone 4 has 4G network access, no, it doesn’t.

Compare the two phones. The iPhone 4 has a 3.5 inch display; the Evo 4G has a 4.3 inch screen. Both phones have a dual camera set up for live videocalling, but the iPhone 4 camera is only 5- megapixel while the Evo camera has 8- megapixel resolution.

Apple has not specified the front camera resolution; the Evo has a 1.3 megapixel camera in the front.

Both phones have live videocalling, but the iPhone Facetime video calls are restricted to Wi- Fi networks and Apple said it is working on building new software that will allow it to run over the 3G network too. The HTC Evo is evolved; it already works on 3G and 4G networks.

For the first time since Apple decided to reinvent itself, it is facing the strongest competition in terms of design as well as in content and engineering. As renowned technology writer David Pogue said in his review of the Evo in the New York Times on Thursday: “ It’s another great- looking, blazingly fast app phone made by HTC and running Google’s Android operating system.

Android gives the phone more complexity than the iPhone ( its obvious rival), but also provides some sensational features: speech recognition that lets you type by speaking, almost anywhere; an excellent, free turnby- turn GPS navigation program; and a wireless app store stocked with more than 70,000 little programs.” And lest we forget, it can also run Flash video content which means you can access most of the videos that are on the Web.

The iPhone can’t because of its CEO Steve Jobs’ hatred for Flash and love for the rival software called HTML5.

Meanwhile, another review on Engadget added: “ A big, big part of the EVO's draw is the 8 megapixel autofocus camera with dual LED flash and— drum roll, please— yes, 720p video recording. The shots had a little bit more splotchiness and noise ( er, make that noise reduction) than we would've liked, but they still looked just great scaled down to monitor size; as with pretty much any phone camera, you're not going to want to blow these up and frame them for an art exhibition.” The guys at HTC are leaving no stone unturned to beat the iPhone 4.
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The iPhone 4 at 9.3 mm is 24% thinner than the previous iPhone 3GS and is available in black and white versions. It has glass front and back with antenna built into the side Video: The phone features video chat called FaceTime and also has a front- facing video camera for video conferencing. iPhone 4 can shoot and edit high definition (HD) video.



It has the software iMovie for video editing Camera: It has a 5- MP camera with LED flash & 5X digital zoom in the back compared to the 3- MP camera earlier Screen: 960 x 640 pixels on 3.5 inch display — four times more pixels than the earlier iPhones Battery: The improved battery life allows for 40% more talk time — 7 hours 3G talk, 10 hours video, 300 hours standby Gaming : It has a gyroscope sensor for improved gaming Internet: Users can also use Microsoft’s Bing for search in addition to Google and Yahoo.

It has Quad band HSDPA radio & 802.11n WiFi link, too New ops: A4 processor with more than 100 new features Price: $ 199 with a two- year contract in the US only Release: June 24 in 5 countries, expanding to 18 nations by July & 88 nations by September New Apps : iAds to make money for app developers; iPhone users can play Farmville India launch: Vodafone Essar will launch Apple’s iPhone 4 in India in the coming months.
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Direct TV Customers faced some strange problems today in the morning. When they tried to change the channels they couldn't as the remote control was not working and the TV sets were on one channel.

The most frustrating part is that customers were not able to locate the numbers on Direct TV homepage. It only lists a sales number where new service or equipments can be ordered.

Direct TV Customer Service Phone Number : 888-777-2454
Direct TV Home Alternate Office Phone Number : 1-800-531-5000, 1-310-535-5000

Here is the link http://www.directv.com/DTVAPP/content/contact_us which provides all the information one need to talk & contact to customer service and get the issues resolved.
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Japanese camera major Fujifilm has launched a camera in India that allows up to 30 times optical zoom.

The HS10 is a pro- am camera, meaning you can get as close to owning a professional DSLR camera without heaving the accompanying bulk. The specifications are superlative, and the cost— Rs 28,000 on retail— sounds quite modest for a camera with so many features and a lens that gives up 720 mm zoom.

An interesting feature is the Motion Remover Mode, which takes away the moving subjects from the shot. For instance, you could shoot up to five frames in this mode in quick succession and then combine all of them to get one compact picture even while you remove the moving objects in the five exposures. And yes, it also shoots HD movies.
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After Months of speculation and drama that included a raid at the house of a technology blogger, Apple will release its iPhone 4 next week in the US. The event will be held in San Francisco as part of Apple’s Worldwide Developers’ Conference ( WWDC). Company CEO Steve Jobs, as usual, will be giving the keynote speech on Monday night ( around 10: 30 pm India time) and release the iPhone 4.

The iPhone 4 is the next iteration to the 3Gs, currently available in India at a price of Rs 41,500 for the 32 GB model.

Close to 50 million iPhones have been sold worldwide, making it possibly the single largest selling phone of all time.

In terms of technology and interface, iPhone 4 is surely the most advanced of all iPhones and perhaps could beat the hell out of all other smartphones, including the BlackBerry models. The Taiwan based Digit Times said that Foxconn, the company that makes iPhones for Apple in Taiwan, “ will ship 4.5 million units in the first half and 19.5 million units for the rest of 2010.” The new display screen will have a phenomenal 960 × 640 resolution.

Compared with the iPhone 4, Google supported Androidbased smartphones have a 854 × 480 display as the highest resolution. This puts the iPhone out of reach— for the time being— of all its competitors in terms of screen resolution.

It will have a RAM capacity of 512 MB, which is double that of the 3GS, thus making multitasking less cumbersome and operations much faster.
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Three weeks ago, Microsoft updated its Live Messenger, giving it some nifty features. This week it previewed the new Hotmail. Microsoft officials say that it’s going to be gradually launched over the next two to three months, and it will be based upon which server in the world your account resides.

The new Hotmail is basically a catchup game. It has features that Gmail and Yahoo have had for years, and some of the new clever features such as drag and drop images and videos from a search engine within the Hotmail window may not make you go back to Hotmail.

A seemingly impressive feature is that you can upload up to 10 gigabytes of online images in a single email. Assuming you want to do that ( I don’t given the speeds we have in India), Microsoft has cleverly used SkyDrive ( its ‘ cloud’ service) so that you don’t really have to clog your hard disk.

Hotmail’s within- mail search is much weaker that Gmail. Microsoft says its new categorisation will help people save time by classifying mail beforehand.

But let’s say we search using Gmail, the difference in time is really a matter of two or three seconds. Gmail still wins.

Gmail Labs lets you integrate any new feature into the mailbox in a matter of seconds. Hotmail has no Labs feature, but it has an integrated Live Messenger into its main screen, to which our response is – duh! Four years too late, guys! The biggest disappointment though is the design. It looks clunky even though it may not be. And here’s an idea, Hotmail: text ads.

The only redeeming feature about the new Hotmail is the Active View for photographs, which allows you to view photos in full screen mode without having to download them. Will I go back to Hotmail after three years of dormancy? Don’t think so.
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A TEAM of scientists has discovered a new species of frogs at the highest peak of the Western Ghats. The same team had earlier found the purple frog whose ancestors had evolved alongside the dinosaurs.

In this week’s cover story of Current Science published from Bangalore, S. D. Biju of Delhi University and Franky Bossuyt of the Free University of Brussels have assigned it a new name — Raorchestes resplendens.

The first part of the generic name of this relative of the shrub frogs honours Prof C. R. Narayan Rao ( 1882 – 1960), for his contributions to the study of amphibians. Rao taught zoology at Central College in the city.

The latter part of the name, Raorchestes, is based on the first ever generic name coined for frogs — Orchestes.

The species name, in Latin, means ‘ bright- coloured, glittering, resplendent’. Bright orange to reddish, bulging with several big glands, having very short limbs, the frog showed its uniqueness in genetic tests.

Belonging to the rhacophoridae family, which has about 300 species spread across tropical Asia and Africa, they usually make foam nests, doing away with the free- swimming tadpole stage. They breed from the soil to the forest canopy — hence the name tree frogs The frogs are orange in colour with several big glands and short limbs.

and bush frogs.

The researchers located a pair of frogs in bamboo thickets on the mountaintop late in the afternoon.

By that night, the female burrowed the eggs under the moss- covered forest floor, deep inside the base of bamboo clumps. Later they observed the eggs hatching from what looks like glass bubbles in their lab.

The species is likely to be found in less than 3 sq km on the Anamudi summit in Kerala, 2,695 metres above sea level, where temperature dips to minus 3 degree Celsius.

The scientists have suggested top- priority conservation for the new frogs.

Western Ghats, an ancient mountain range, is a treasure trove. In 2003, Biju and Bossuyt had found the rare purple frog or the Jurassic frog ( Nasikabatrachus sahyadrensis).

Its close relatives were found in the Seychelles archipelago, 3,000 km and an ocean away suggesting there was a single undivided land mass called Gondwana long ago.

In a parallel study published later Sushil K. Dutta ( now at North Orissa University, a coauthor of the new paper) and team had also found the purple frog in the Ghats.

Scientists say any discovery of a new family among vertebrates ( advanced animals with backbone) is a rare event.

In an earlier comment, Prof Raghavendra Gadagkar of the Centre for Ecological Studies at the Indian Institute of Science said the Western Ghats helps in study of evolution of life on earth over 100 million years.

“ These fragile mountain ecosystems are under severe onslaught because of developmental activities,” he said.
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From a distance, it looks like a grand tinted mirror framed by polished aluminium. Come closer, and you discover it’s a television. Interesting? Read further. On its back, a wall bracket swings out the screen up to 45 degree for viewing from different locations. Or you can even tilt it while sitting on the floor playing games on your Sony PS3. Now, this is a stunning piece of technology viewing or should I say a work of art hanging on your wall from the brand Bang & Olufsen.

Indeed, luxury knows no bounds. Today, TVs are intuitive, beautiful and satiate your viewing desire the moment you settle in your couch and pick up the remote.

So, get all your friends together and go to the matches in your pyjamas . Why wait in a line for a live experience when you can enjoy it in your own living room? Confused? 3D LED TVs, the latest in TVs, revolutionise the home viewing experience, by adding a third dimension in your life for a breakthrough picture quality. Cheer for your favourite team, see the ball hitting the goal posts, all in real, oh, I mean, hyper real. Says Ravinder Zutshi, MD Samsung India, “ Watching a match in the 3D mode makes you feel as if you are right inside the stadium and it’s so exciting. ” Samsung is the industry’s first, to come out with this innovation and other companies are soon to follow suit. Says Takakiyo Fujita, GM, marketing, Sony India, “ We would come up with the 3D TV during the FIFA so that people get to see football matches in an all new action- packed way.” Manish Sharma, Head of Marketing, Panasonic India, shares, “ A sequel of Mr India is in the making in 3D mode that would further popularise the technology.” However, Prasoon Banerjee, Director, Consumer Electronics, Haier India disagrees. He says, “ 3D TVs are at an initial stage. There’s not much content to show. But yes, people with a lot of disposable income might go for it.” So, what are you waiting for? With the screen size as big as 65”, treat your eyes with a fabulous 3D show. And as you enjoy, don’t forget the popcorn!
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A ROUTINE anti- virus update from Web security firm McAfee confused a valid Windows file with a virus on Thursday, disrupting computers around the world.

Universities, hospitals and businesses across the US were among those reporting problems after the update misidentified a valid Windows system file as malicious code and caused computers to continually reboot.

The problem hit corporate users of Microsoft’s Windows XP Service Pack 3 operating system, according to McAfee, which released another update later in the day to fix the problem and urged customers to download it. The Internet Storm Center, an initiative of the SANS Technology Institute which monitors problems on the Web, said the affected systems will enter a reboot loop and lose all network access.

The centre said it received reports of networks with thousands of down machines and organisations who had to shut down for business until this is fixed. “ The McAfee software slip pretty much took Intel down on Thursday,” said analyst Rob Enderle of Enderle Group in Silicon Valley.

Enderle told of being at the computer chip titan’s headquarters in Northern California for an afternoon of meetings when laptop computers began crashing around him.

“ Much of Intel was actually taken out,” Enderle said. “ I imagine most companies running Intel and McAfee were literally taken out.” It was not immediately possible to determine how many computers had been affected around the world by the faulty update, but the number was likely to run into the tens of thousands.

McAfee said, “ We are not aware of significant impact on consumers. We believe that this incident has impacted less than one half of one per cent of our consumer base and enterprise accounts globally,” it said.

Micro- blogging service Twitter was flooded with complaints by users about Santa Clara, California- based McAfee, one of the world’s leading providers of anti- virus software and computer security systems.

“ It is not often that a security vendor takes out a large number of their clients,” Enderle said. “ Customers don’t forget this stuff any time soon. This is going to hurt McAfee.” Among the US universities reporting problems was the University of Michigan. The website AnnArbor. com said 8,000 of the 25,000 computers in the university’s health system and medical school were hit.

Syracuse, New York’s Upstate University Hospital saw 2,500 of its 6,000 computers affected, the website Syracuse. com quoted a hospital spokeswoman.

McAfee said the faulty update was quickly removed from all McAfee download servers, preventing any further impact on customers and that it was taking measures to prevent this from reoccurring.

NEW DEMON

PC Killer

Corporate users of Microsoft’s Windows XP Service Pack 3 operating system in the US faced problems after a routine McAfee anti- virus update misidentified a valid Windows system file as malicious code & caused computers to reboot losing all network access.

Impact

Most firms running Intel hardware & McAfee were literally taken out. Universities, hospitals and businesses were hit.

Remedy

McAfee released an update to fix it & urged users to download it. The faulty update was removed from McAfee servers.
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