Paypal to restore banned personal services to and from India soon

Paypal will soon restore the banned services to and from India soon. The personal payment services arising from India and made in Indian destination are blocked due to issues raised by the partners of Paypal. Paypal is actively working to resolve these services at their earliest. The Paypal has expressed its apology to affect account holders for inconvenience caused due to this ban. The business services of Paypal are unaffected and working smoothly.

Paypal, the online payment service platform has banned selective services to and from India. In the list of services banned in India by paypal, customers can not send and receive money on personal account. Currently withdrawing of funds is not allowed in Indian currency Rupee in  local banks. This implies that any paypal transaction arising for or from Indian territory are stopped.

However the merchant customers of Paypal can continue to use paypal payment services. The Paypal services for personal users have been banned in India since January 28, 2010. The news of paypal stopping services has been posted in their blog.

The suspension of services to and from India will be restored once issues which have cropped up in these schemes are addressed.

Paypal is one of the most popular online payment system. Paypal payment in India are backed by verified credit cards. Paypal is owned by e bay the popular online shopping portal.

The ban on personal and bank services of Paypal in India will be  lifted after issues are shorted out. The latest information on Paypal ban will be provided on the blog.

Facebook Hit By Clickjacking Attack

Facebook is cleaning up after a clickjacking attack that infiltrated the social networking site this week -- and security experts say this won't be the last such attack.

Clickjacking, in which an attacker slips a malicious link or malware onto a legitimate Web page that appears to contain normal content, is an emerging threat experts have been warning about. The attack on Facebook was in the form of a comment on a user's account with a photo that lured the victim to click on it. The embedded link took the victim to a Web page that presented like a CAPTCHA or Turing test, and asked the user to click on a blue "Share" button on the Facebook page.

Once clicked, the victim is redirected to a YouTube video, and then the same post shows up on the victim's account and thus tries to infect his or her friends. Security experts say the attack appeared to be more of a prank or trial balloon, and it affects only Firefox and Chrome browsers, according to security expert Krzysztof Kotowicz, who blogged about the attack this week.

Facebook has now blocked the URL to the malicious site, fb.59.to. "This problem isn't specific to Facebook, but we're always working to improve our systems and are building additional protections against this type of behavior. We've blocked the URL associated with this site, and we're cleaning up the relatively few cases where it was posted -- something email providers, for example, can't do," a Facebook spokesperson says.

Robert "RSnake" Hansen, CEO of SecTheory -- who, along with Jeremiah Grossman, CTO of WhiteHat Security, warned the industry about the threat of clickjacking more than a year ago -- says Facebook and most other sites don't employ much anti-clickjacking protection.

"This could be the beginning of a new wave of anti-Facebook clickjacking worms," Hansen says. "This same concept has already hit Twitter several times. It generally takes a few attacks for companies like this to wake up and realize the problem doesn't magically go away just by blocking one link."

But Facebook's spokesperson says the social networking site is also "working against these attacks on a number of fronts," including deframing scripts and X-Frame options. Hansen recommends employing both of these methods to combat clickjacking.

The clickjacking concept is really nothing new, but Hansen and Grossman last year discovered a brand of clickjacking that spans browser families and doesn't even require a user to click on anything. Just loading a compromised page sets off the attack, and clicking on that page will likely make things worse for the victim, they say. Clickjacking is both a Web and a browser problem, but the fixes likely need to come from the browser vendors. But a fix goes to the way browsers work, which means there's no simple fix.

"Clickjacking is such an easy attack and one that is completely unaddressed. We'll see much more of this, especially across the social networks," WhiteHat's Grossman says.

Kotowicz blogged that the clickjacking attack contains malicious iFrames, and that the reason the attack didn't affect Internet Explorer and Opera is due to an incorrect HTML in one of the pages.

Meanwhile, Facebook is reminding users to be wary of any posts, messages, or links on Facebook or anywhere else that appear suspicious, the Facebook spokesperson says.

Microsoft permanently barred from selling Word

Microsoft has been ordered by a US District Court to halt sales of its popular word processing application, Word. Judge Leonard Davis has ruled that the software-giant is guilty of patent infringement and has prohibited it from selling, importing, testing, demonstrating or marketing any Microsoft Word products able to open XML, DOCX, or DOCM files (XML) files containing custom XML.

Plaintiff i4i sued Microsoft in March 2007 claiming that it violated a 1998 software patent (number 5,787,449) for a document system that eliminated the need for manually embedded formatting codes. One of the fundamental features of the markup language XML is that it is readable by both people and machines. XML allows developers and users to define their own tags for data - unlike other markup languages like HTML which have predefined tags.

Microsoft has already paid $200 million after a federal jury ruled that the XML properties of Word 2003 and Word 2007 infringed on i4i's patent. Redmond accumulated another $77 million in fees after the most recent ruling, $40 million for willful patent infringement and $37 million in prejudgment interest. The company must comply within 60 days and is planning to appeal the verdict.

Microsoft sued over 'Bing' name

San Francisco - Lawyers for a small US technology firm said on Thursday it is suing Microsoft on the grounds its has prior claim to the name "Bing".

Bing! Information Design (BID) filed suit in a circuit court in the state of Missouri accusing Microsoft of trademark infringement, unfair competition, and "tortious interference with business expectancy".

"For nearly ten years my client has been using the Bing! mark," attorney Anthony Simon said in a release.

"Microsoft's use of the identical mark and its aggressive advertising have gutted all of my client's efforts to distinguish its business and created confusion that must be remedied."

Microsoft told AFP on Thursday that it had yet to see a copy of the lawsuit but that the argument is specious.

"We have not been served with a complaint, but are aware of the suit based on media reports," Microsoft spokesperson Kevin Kutz said in an e-mail response to an AFP inquiry.

'Without merit'

"We believe this suit to be without merit and we do not believe there is any confusion in the marketplace with regard to the complainant's offerings and Microsoft's Bing."

He added that Microsoft is looking forward to defending its position in court.

BID creates interactive illustrations, designs, graphics, animations, and technical diagrams, according to Simon.

A BID website on Thursday featured sports stories and quizzes localised for St Louis, the city where the company is based.

Microsoft rolled out its new Bing search engine worldwide in June in a challenge to internet powerhouse Google.

Microsoft entered into a 10-year web search and advertising partnership with Yahoo! in July that set the stage for a joint offensive against Google.

Microsoft has also begun integrating messages from hot micro-blogging service Twitter into Bing and plans to do the same with status updates from Facebook.