News Roundup - 26 October 2014

1. In the ongoing Indo-Pak cyber war, hackers have targeted websites of municipal bodies in Karnataka and successfully defaced as many as 66 of them. Even though the home pages and internal pages are not affected, the hackers identifying themselves as “PakCyberPyrates” breached the security and uploaded an index file, causing the defacement. They indicated that the hacking was in retaliation to the defacement of the Pakistan People’s Party’s website a few days ago by an Indian hacker with handle “Bl@ck Dr@gon” in protest against the party leader Bilawal Bhutto’s remarks on Kashmir.
2. Facebook has released an application that lets people create virtual ‘rooms’ to chat about whatever they wish using any name they would like. ‘Rooms’ software introduced in the U.S. and Britain for iPhone made its debut on Friday as Facebook tries to make peace with people unhappy that real identities are mandated for profiles at the world’s leading social network.
3. Hollywood walk of fame’s 2,531^st star given to John Denver, 17 years after his death.
4. The famous theoretical physicist professor Stephen Hawking is now on Facebook. In his first Facebook post, Prof. Hawking said: “I have always wondered what makes the universe exist. Time and space may forever be a mystery, but that has not stopped my pursuit. Our connections to one another have grown infinitely and now that I have the chance, I am eager to share this journey with you. Be curious, I know I will forever be.”
5. Padmaja Naidu Himalayan Zoological Park (PNHZP), popularly known as the Darjeeling Zoo, the highest altitude zoological garden in India, housing rare Himalayan animals such as red panda and snow leopard, has over 200 species of trees, shrubs, climbers, medicinal herbs, fungi and micro flora, says a study.
6. Technology giant Google is teaming up with Oxford University to advance research on artificial intelligence to ultimately enable machines to better understand human users, specifically on the fields of image recognition and natural language.
7. Iran hanged Reyhaneh Jabbari convicted of murdering a former intelligence officer she claimed had tried to sexually assault her, defying international appeals for a stay on execution. Jabbari, an interior designer, was executed for the fatal 2007 stabbing of Morteza Abdolali Sarbandi.
8. Russia is set to turn back its clocks to winter time (GMT plus three hours) permanently in a move backed by President Vladimir Putin, reversing a three-year experiment with non-stop summer time (Greenwich Mean Time plus four hours) that proved highly unpopular. Russia will also revert to the full 11 zones from Kamchatka in the Pacific to Kaliningrad on the borders of the European Union (EU) — reduced to nine by previous President Dmitry Medvedev.
9. A state of emergency came into force Saturday across much of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula after 30 soldiers were killed in a suicide car bombing by suspected jihadists.
10. GSAT-16, the next national communications satellite, reached French Guiana this week and is on its way to the space port near Kourou ahead of an early December flight, European launch service company Arianespace has said. The 3,150-kg satellite is scheduled to be flown on an Ariane-5 launcher numbered Flight VA221. Built at the ISRO Satellite Centre in Bangalore, GSAT-16 was sent on a chartered cargo plane to the French Guiana capital of Cayenne. The satellite carries C-band and Ku-band transponders which will support VSAT (very small aperture terminal) services, television services and emergency communications across the country. ISRO advanced the launch date of GSAT-16 by about six months to meet increasing demand for INSAT/GSAT transponder capacity from various industry and government users, ISRO Chairman K. Radhakrishnan recently told The Hindu . It will replace INSAT-3E, which expired a little prematurely in April, at the same 55 degrees east orbital slot over India. The assembly of the satellite, its foreign launch and insurance cost Rs.860 crore, more than half of it going towards the launch cost. ISROcontracted Arianespace to launch both GSAT-16 and later the GSAT-15 communication satellite. The national space agency is still perfecting its two-tonne-class launcher, the GSLV, and cannot launch these three-tonne-class spacecraft. It is also working on the GSLV Mark-III that can lift four-tonne payloads. The first experimental flight of MkIII is slated for November or December. The GSAT-16 will be put in orbit along with DIRECTV-14, a satellite that will provide direct-to-home television broadcasts across the U.S.

 Credits: The Hindu, Google.