NASA spacecraft spies on Mercury

For the first time, Earth has a regular orbiting eye-in-the-sky spying on the solar system's smallest and strangest planet, Mercury. NASA's spacecraft called Messenger successfully veered into a pinpoint orbit Thursday night after a 6 1/2-year trip and 4.9 billion miles (7.9 billion kilometers) and tricky manoeuvering to fend off the gravitational pull of the sun.

It is the fifth planet in our solar system that NASA has orbited, in addition to the Earth and the moon. "It was right on the money," Messenger's chief engineer, Eric Finnegan, said. Messenger is in orbit that brings it as close as 120 miles (193 kilometers) above the planet's surface.

"This is as close you can possibly get to being perfect."

"Everybody was whooping and hollering; we are elated," Finnegan said. "There's a lot of work left to be done, but we are there." Mercury is not only difficult to get to, but it's has some of the most extremes in the solar system.

Japan, M-E crisis could spell bad news for IT investment: Infy

IT major Infosys today expressed concerns that indirect impact of the Japan nuclear crisis and the unrest in the Middle-East could hit the IT industry .

"Indirect impact is what we all need to think about... demand for oil will increase ...oil prices could go up again. There are concerns over inflation. There are also concerns over disruption of economic activity, a lot of components for the electronic industry, automotive industry all originate from Japan," Infosys CEO Kris Gopalakrishnan said.

He further added that the concern is over whether the "economic activity will come down, GDP growth will come down, which means investments will come down, which could have an impact on the IT industry".

The company, however, expects the direct impact of the Japanese crisis to be minimal on its business in the short-term. "The percentage of revenue from Japan operations is less than one per cent or approximately one per cent because of which the direct impact is minimal," he said.

"The situation is still unfolding, it is very difficult at this point to say, but it is possible there could be some indirect impact, but the direct impact could be minimal," he reiterated.

Facebook can help in disasters

An Australian academic Friday praised the increasing use of social media during disasters, saying there had been a "beautiful display of humanity" on Facebook during recent catastrophes.

Communications expert Gwyneth Howell said she had been prompted to research the use of social media following last year's major earthquake in New Zealand's second city Christchurch -- which caused damage but no deaths.

The University of Western Sydney academic could not have known more disasters were to follow -- floods and cyclones in Queensland, bushfires in Western Australia, a deadlier quake in Christchurch and Japan's quake and tsunami.

Howell said that interviews with people who established Facebook sites to help victims of Queensland's devastating floods in January had demonstrated a "sense of real community" existed in the virtual space.

"That was the thing that struck me... this beautiful display of humanity and generosity and a sense of 'I don't know you but I want to be able to help'," she told AFP.

Microsoft helps take down spam e-mail network

Microsoft Corp claimed credit on Thursday for taking down one of the biggest producers of spam e-mail in a joint effort with federal authorities across the United States .

The world's biggest software company said its legal action against the operator of the Rustock 'botnet' or network of infected computers programmed to send spam e-mail led to raids across the country on Thursday which effectively shut the network down.

Tech security bloggers who follow the activities of botnets worldwide noticed earlier on Thursday a sharp dip in spam e-mail coming from the Rustock network, which some estimate is responsible for almost half of the spam appearing in inboxes. However, they warned that total eradication requires long-term efforts.

After getting the go-ahead from federal court in Seattle, where Microsoft had filed a lawsuit against the botnet's operators, the company said it worked with the U.S. Marshals Service to raid hosting providers in seven U.S. cities early on Thursday, including Denver, Dallas, Chicago, Seattle and Columbus.

"With help from the upstream providers, we successfully severed the IP addresses that controlled the botnet, cutting off communication and disabling it," said Richard Boscovich , senior attorney at Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit in a blog post on Microsoft's site.

Not closing office in Japan, business will continue: Infosys

Software major Infosys on Thursday said it has not shut down its office in Japan and assured clients there that it would continue to support them.

"Business will continue. The servicing given to clients will continue because they are very very important," Infosys COO Shibulal told reporters on the sidelines of a function here.

"Our model is always onsite, offshore, so we have few people there, lot of people here, few people will move back," he said.

After a massive earthquake and subsequent tsunami last week that caused untold damages to life and property, Japan is now facing the threat of a nuclear catastrophe.

"We have capacity all over India, Japan's works happen in many of our developing centres, it could be Mysore, Bangalore, Chandigarh. People are going back to wherever is the base location of the corresponding programme," he said.

Replying to a query on employees based in Japan and shutting of the office, he said, "We have an office, we have people, we have not shut it down. We have given option to some of our people to come back and few have come back and some others will come back."

To a question on whether it would make similar arrangements for Japanese employees if they wish to move out, he said the company was ready to "work out" solutions if the Japanese employees came up with such requests.

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