The Coca-Cola company, the largest soft drink manufacturer in the world, is working with Indian laboratories to create capacity for testing of not only beverages but other food items to ensure that pesticide residues were under the norms set by the government, Mr D.V. Darshane, director, policies and standards, global quality of the Atlanta-based company said.

Dr Darshane, an Indian who is based in Coca-Cola’s Atlanta headquarters, told this newspaper here that India needed to develop the methodology to ensure that standards on pesticide residue were uniform for food and beverages in the country. "We need to have scientific standards for determining the safe level of pesticide residues in every item of food and drink.

The Coca-Cola company is working with the Indian scientific community to build capacity for such testing. We are also working with various laboratories in India, including Vimta Labs in Hyderabad, to develop the testing capacity. The American Organisation of Analytical Chemists, the association which decides standards for food and beverages, has indicated it is ready to work in India," Dr Darshane said.

Dr Darshane said that the Coca-Cola company, which makes and markets nearly 400 beverages, adopts the same quality standards that it has in the United States, around the world. "We operate in 207 countries, and the same quality standards in production are implemented in all of them. The production manual, which details how the water and the sugar are to be purified, and the bottling process is the same in India as it is in the United States," he said.

"We have increased the contact time with activated carbon from seven minutes to 27 minutes to ensure the purity of the water," he said.

Hey, if you have a Yahoo! email account, you better keep your eyes on it, folks. Because, a whole bunch of evildoers out there want your ID for their own nefarious purposes, or so says Websense, which keeps tracks of such things. Websense says that its Security Labs has observed a change in the technique used in Yahoo! phishing attacks.

"These phishing attacks attempt to capture a user’s Yahoo! ID and password by displaying a fake Yahoo! Sign-In page. This variant of attack has been on-going for over a year. After the Yahoo! acquisition of Flickr, these attacks have started to shift from targeting Yahoo! Photos to targeting Yahoo! Flickr," says Websense, an employee Internet management solutions provider.

The M.O. of the evildoers? Users receive an email or instant message that claims to be from a friend wanting to show off photos that have been posted to Flickr. The message contains a link to a phishing site, which captures the user’s Yahoo! ID and password. "These phishing sites are primarily hosted in the United States on the free web space provided by the Yahoo! Geocities service," it says. Watch out, girls.

CDMA technology

The battle of claims between CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) and GSM (Global Service for Mobility) is continuing apace, with the CDMA Development Group stating that the worldwide migration to 3G in CDMA techology is accelerating. Citing an in-depth analysis of industry data, CDG says that the increased migration is evidenced by the proliferation of CDMA2000.

"Forward-looking operators around the world are eager to replace their 2G networks with fast, streamlined, and flexible 3G technologies," says Perry LaForge, executive director

of the CDG. "In fact, many operators who chose GSM in the past are making wholesale network changeovers to CDMA2000 to remain competitive and increase their earnings. In the last three years, 126 operators, all of whom had a choice of several 2G and 3G technologies, selected CDMA2000. Around 25 of these operators were GSM operators. 3G CDMA2000 enables operators to lower the cost of delivering voice and data, while supplementing their voice and SMS revenue with lucrative, value-added services."

CDG says that within five years of its introduction, 3G has reached 350 million subscribers worldwide. More than 30 million subscribers are added every quarter, and the 3G adoption rate has far exceeded that of any other wireless technology. CDMA2000 is now available in 72 countries, and in every major world market on all six continents, it says.