Tech PIVI

The Indian government has sent legal notices to four Twitter account holders for allegedly posting inflammatory messages and hate content. These account holders have been asked to appear before a committee on September 10 at the office of the Computer Emergency Response Team. The government is also mulling lodging a case against people found guilty of provoking people through 'anti-social' messages on social networking websites such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. “Notices have been sent to at least four people who have Twitter accounts. These people were sent notices as we are sure of their identities. They have been asked to explain their case before the committee,” LiveMint  quotes  a high-ranking official. “For the rest, we have written to Google and Facebook asking for details of accounts that hosted such anti-social information, and were blocked... Once we receive information from Google and Facebook, we will send notices to the rest of the people,” th...

As hackers from around the world converged on Las Vegas, Microsoft doled out a quarter million dollars in prize money to researchers who found ways to thwart attacks on its software. The winners of Microsoft's first Blue Hat prize were unveiled at a hip club at a mobbed party complete with dancers, high-energy DJ, and explosions of shimmering confetti. A top prize of $200,000 went to doctoral student Vasilis Pappas for an advance in countering "the most popular attack techniques we're seeing today," said Microsoft security response center senior director Mike Reavey. "We posed a challenge to the researcher community and asked them to shift their focus from solely identifying and reporting individual vulnerabilities to investing in new lines of defensive research that could mitigate entire classes of attacks," Reavey said of the prize. Microsoft awarded $50,000 to the second-place finisher, and a fortune in software to the researcher who ...

Google has added a new face blurring feature into YouTube in an effort to provide  visual anonymity  for  video  on the network.  Google  says the new feature has been added following a recent observation from human rights group called WITNESS that no  social networking  site offers such  technology . To use the feature, users need to select the video they want to edit within YouTube's Video Enhancement tool, then go to Additional Features and click the “Apply” button placed under the 'Blur All Faces' option. YouTube also lets you have a preview of the video before making it live. There is also an option to delete the non-blurred and original copy of the video from your account. Google has explained the feature with an example of the Arab Spring protests in Egypt. The Internet  giant, however, points out that this feature is an “emerging technology” and that it might not be 100 percent accurate...