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India developing national cybersecurity architecture India is in the midst of developing and implementing a national cybersecurity architecture that is aimed at preventing sabotage and espionage of its core IT systems and networks. In a report Monday , the Economic Times said that the system will protect critical information infrastructure and networks by monitoring activities, while designated government agencies will offer certification to vendors and service providers to provide additional safety measures. "It will also involve capacity and authority for operations in cyberspace," said Shivshankar Menon, national security advisor for India, in the report. "The goal is to prevent sabotage, espionage, and other forms of cyber attacks that could hurt us," he added.Menon said that the National Security Council has approved the architecture in principle, and implementation details are being worked out with the ministries and agencies. Following this, ...

The inside story of the Raspberry Pi Eben Upton's overwhelming emotion at having co-created a $35 Linux computer that sold in the hundreds of thousands last year is surprise. The 34-year-old chip architect is genuinely taken aback that demand for the Raspberry Pi proved to be orders of magnitude larger than a small pool of aspiring UK computer engineers. "We honestly did think we would sell about 1,000, maybe 10,000 in our wildest dreams. We thought we would make a small number and give them out to people who might want to come and read computer science at Cambridge," he told ZDNet. The first inkling of the fervour the credit card-sized board would create came in May 2011, when the first public outing of the Pi in a BBC video generated some 600,000 views on YouTube. Upton and his colleagues revised their initial run of boards up to 10,000, thinking that would be more than enough to meet demand. It wasn't. The 10,000 boards sold out within hou...

Microsoft buys home-automation startup R2 Studios   It's official. Microsoft has purchased id8 Group R2 Studios , the home-automation startup, for an undisclosed amount. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Microsoft had beat Google and Apple to the punch in the quest to buy R2 Studios . But it wasn't until Microsoft issued the confirmation on January 10 that the Softies confirmed the deal was done. R2 Studios founder Blake Krikorian will be Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment Business (IEB), which is the home of the Xbox. Krikorian will report to Marc Whitten, Chief Product Officer for IEB, Microsoft officials said. Krikorian was the co-founder, chairman and CEO of Sling Media Inc., inventor of the Slingbox. Microsoft's press release didn't detail how or when R2 Studios' technologies and patents will fit into Microsoft's product line-up. But Microsoft, like R2 Studios, has been active in the home-au...

Microsoft's 'Orleans' cloud programming model gets a Halo test drive Whenever anyone from Microsoft describes a Microsoft Research project, there's almost always a disclaimer -- specifically, "There's no guarantee when and if this technology will ever see the commercial light of day." Given that caveat, it's interesting when a Microsoft Research project takes a step forward. Recently, that seems to have happened with "Orleans," a cloud-programming model I last blogged about back in 2010. When perusing the end-of-year research roundups, I found this interesting tidbit buried in the eXtreme Computing Group's list of accomplishments for 2012: "The cloud-systems team celebrated a year of successful deployment of its distributed cloud technology—Orleans—in production for Microsoft’s Halo team, and the team has scaled its system very significantly since then." That's one pretty impre...