The Middle East region will suffer around USD 180 billion in the next four years because of hacking and cyber crimes, experts have said.

Hazem Nabeel, Director of the Egyptian intellectual property society, told KUNA yesterday that a recently conducted conference in Egypt called on countries to allocate large sums of money to fight cyber crimes.

The conference, co-organised by the Information Technology Industry Development Agency (ITIDA) and the association of software producers, aimed at fighting cyber crimes and protecting intellectual property, said Nabeel.

Hacking and cyber crimes are one of the key crimes committed through internet, he said and noted that these crimes caused lots of damage in the Middle East and African regions in 2005 and 2006.

Copied softwares spread by 60 percent in the Middle East and African regions in 2006, a three percent increase than the previous year, said Nabeel.

He said hacking and cyber crimes cost around USD two billion and 1.615 billion in damage in 2005 and 2006 respectively.

Mohammad Omran, head of the technology development authority, said international agencies dealing with hacking should coordinate efforts to combat these crimes.

Speaking to KUNA, Omran said the information technology sector was booming and was creating new horizons for development, but it has opened new ways for illegal trade, thus negatively affecting economies.

Hacking harms everybody, he said.

Courtesy : Expressindia.com

Yahoo Inc is testing an experimental social network service called Mash that makes it easy for Yahoo users to share tidbits of their lives with friends and family online, the company said on Sunday.

Mash, to which a limited number of public users began being invited as testers on Friday, was described by a spokeswoman as a new, next-generation service that is independent from the company's 2-½ year-old Yahoo 360 degree profile service.

While Yahoo was early among Internet companies to embrace the trend toward sharing media with friends by purchasing start-ups like photo site Flickr.com, it has struggled to catch up with the Web's biggest new trend: Social networking.

Mash amounts to a new stab at competing with the likes of News Corp's MySpace, Facebook, Bebo or Google's Orkut, which have attracted tens of millions of users worldwide.

The Silicon Valley company emphasized it is in the early stages of testing the new service. One aspect of the service is the power it gives users to edit their friends profiles and add personal blurbs, subject to approval by the profile owner.

"Ongoing product innovation is important to Yahoo and we continue to test various products and services to gain feedback from our users. Mash, an experimental profile service, is an example of this ongoing testing," a company statement said.

Eventually, Mash could connect to a variety of existing Yahoo services and mini-applications known as Widgets, acting as a personal profile both on the public Internet or among a private group of friends, depending on individual preference. Yahoo has more than 500 million monthly users of its various services including a quarter million Yahoo Mail e-mail users.

Separately, Yahoo said on Friday it had acquired for undisclosed terms a company called BuzzTracker.com.

Courtesy : Expressindia.com