Foie Gras and Caviar Ice Cream

Japan is still the king of weird ice cream flavors, but France isn’t far behind after gourmet ice cream maker Philippe Faur released the … foie gras and caviar ice cream!

Michael Jackson, the child star turned King of Pop who set the world dancing but whose musical genius was overshadowed by a bizarre lifestyle and sex scandals, died on Thursday. He was 50.

Jackson was pronounced dead at 2:26 PM PDT (2126 GMT) after arriving at a Los Angeles hospital in full cardiac arrest, said Fred Corral of the Los Angeles County Coroner’s office. The cause of death was not known and an autopsy would likely take place on Friday, he said.

Jackson was taken ill at home and his personal physician tried to resuscitate him but could not, his brother Jermaine told reporters. Jackson was taken by paramedics to the hospital, where doctors worked for more than an hour to try to revive him before pronouncing him dead, the brother said.

Known as the “King of Pop,” for hits that included Thriller and Billie Jean, Jackson’s dramatic, one-gloved stage presence and innovative dance moves were imitated by legions of fans around the world.

His lifetime record sales tally was believed to be around 750 million, and with his 13 Grammy Awards and boundary-breaking music videos he was one of the most successful entertainers of all time.

But Jackson’s belief that “I am Peter Pan in my heart,” his preference for the company of children, his friendship with a chimp, his high-pitched voice and numerous plastic surgeries also earned him critics and the nickname “Wacko Jacko.”

Jackson led a reclusive life after his acquittal in 2005 on charges of child molestation, the second time he had faced ultimately unproved allegations of abuse of young boys.

“For Michael to be taken away from us so suddenly at such a young age, I just don’t have the words. I’ve lost my little brother today, and part of my soul has gone with him,” Quincy Jones, who helped arrange the music on the album “Thriller” and produced the “Off the Wall” album, told MSNBC.

Sold-out shows

Jackson had been due to start a comeback series of concerts in London on July 13 running until March 2010, and had been rehearsing in the Los Angeles area for the past two months. The shows for the 50 London concerts sold out within minutes of going on sale in March.

Detectives from the Los Angeles Police Department’s Robbery Homicide division searched Jackson’s home in the Holmby Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles, saying they had been directed to do so by Chief William Bratton because of the media frenzy.

“The Los Angeles Police Department handles death investigations every day,” said officer Gregg Strenk. “Robbery Homicide was assigned to this case due to the high profile nature of it. Don’t read anything into it.”

The flying car is on its way. An American company Terrafugia Transition, based near Boston, is set to unveil the dual-purpose car-cum-plane vehicle called ‘The Transition’ as early as 2011. The two-seater vehicle can let you fly if you wish to avoid the congested city traffic.

If you want to drive on the road, just touch the road. The vehicle will fold up its wings in 30 seconds and transform itself into a car.

The flying car can travel up to 725 kilometres in the air at a speed of more than 115 kilometres per hour.

Fuelled by gasoline, it has front wheel drive on the road and a propeller for flight. With its wings folded, it can be parked in your ordinary car garage.

Its initial cost is expected to be around $200,000 (nearly Rs.1 crore), says the company which has already orders for 60 vehicles.

The CEO of the company told Canadian TV (CTV) network here that they have successfully test-flown car as many as 28 times. The tests have shown that the vehicle can drive, fly and switch from being a plane to a car in just 30 seconds.

If you like to search for “music lyrics” or “free” things, you are engaging in risky cyber behavior. And “free music downloads” puts 20 per cent of Web surfers in harm’s way of malicious software, known as “malware.”

Searches that use “free,” “music” and “download” are at increased risk of malicious software.

A new research report by US-based antivirus software company McAfee has identified the most dangerous Internet search words that places users on pages with a higher likelihood of malware.

The study examined 2,600 popular keywords on five major search engines- Google, Yahoo, Live, AOL and Ask - and analysed 413,000 Web pages.

“Just in the past year, we’ve seen a pretty dramatic shift in what we call malware,” David DeWalt, president and CEO of McAfee, told Richard Quest for CNN’s Quest Means Business.

“It went from a hacker in a basement, to organized cybercrime to now, literally, terrorism and other forms of organized geopolitical attacks,” he said.

Categories that had the highest risk of run-ins with malware: screensavers, free games, work from home, Olympics, videos, celebrities, music and news.

Riskiest terms: word unscrambler, lyrics, myspace, free music downloads, phelps, game cheats, printable fill-in puzzles, free ringtones and solitaire.

The study shows how cyber criminals are increasing in sophistication.

“We can have massive outages with a hacker in the basement - we saw that recently with the ‘Twitter worm,’ a 17-year-old in his basement basically perpetrated tens of millions of (computer) outages, or we can see an organized attack bringing down infrastructure,” DeWalt said.

Antivirus software companies lag behind latest developments by cyber criminals. “We’ve been way behind, that’s true for the entire world, the global infrastructure of the Internet has grown dramatically - 50 per cent of the world’s PCs are unprotected,” he said.

Despite the increased risk, DeWalt doesn’t believe there will be a “cyber Armageddon” causing widespread destruction of computers and Internet infrastructure.

“Last week, you saw President Obama in the United States talk about a major cyber-security initiative sponsored by the government, other governments are sponsoring this as well,” DeWalt said. “I think we’re learning this can happen, and if we get ahead of it, we can prevent it.”

Twitterers and users of Facebook, beware for hackers as accounts on your popular social networking sites maybe hoodwinked into revealing your identities, warn experts.

Last week, hackers attacked Facebook twice, causing a host of users to reveal their personal information.

The hoax cleverly duplicated the site’s messaging service to send messages to the users. Those gullible enough to click on the link were transported to a look-alike log-in page and asked to re-enter their credentials.

Those who complied ended up divulging their personal information.

“Phishing and spam will continue to increase on social networks as users migrate large portions of their Internet activity such as e-mail to these properties,” said Chief Executive and Managing Director of MicroWorld Technologies Govind Ramamurthy.

The MicroWorld Technologies is an anti-virus, anti-phishing solutions provider.

Identity theft or phishing (pronounced ‘fishing’), as it is known in Internet parlance, is when a fraudster sends out e-mails pretending to represent an established company or bank to extract personal information.

Though hacking has been prevalent since the World Wide Web became popular, experts say hackers are re-inventing themselves to gain access to confidential information.

In fact, for opportunistic scammers and spammers looking for an issue to exploit, nothing is too trivial, not even swine flu.

Following its global outbreak, “spamvertising” links to pharmaceutical scams and bogus “Swine Flu Survival Guides” have sprung up across the web using search engine optimisation techniques.

Result: users searching for swine flu information on Google were directed to bogus sites.

“When one goes fishing, he throws his net in the area where there would be maximum number of fish. Similarly, social engineering sites have the maximum number of catch for hackers,”said Head of Information Security Global consulting firm KPMG Akhilesh Tuteja.

What’s particularly alarming is that people can be trapped even when browsing for something innocuous on Google.

“What we read in fiction has now become real. Sometimes, when you are searching for the link to your bank, a thousand other links pop up. One needs to be sure of the link one is clicking on,” Ramamurthy told IANS.

“More than 12 banks have been phished in 2008-09 in India including ICICI and Bank of India.” he added.

So how safe are the solutions against phishing?

“No solution promises 100 percent secure network. It is the user who has to be careful and cross-check any link or URL before clicking on it,” Ramamurthy said.

“Though anti-phishing solutions flush out most fake websites, it’s always possible hackers will infiltrate through e-mail or SMS on your mobile.”

According to Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) under the Communications and Information Technology Ministry, 505 security incidents were reported last month. Of these, about eight per cent were phishing-related.

Anti-virus Internet security firm Symantec, in a recent Internet Security Report to CERT-In, said, global malicious code activity continued to grow at a record pace through 2008, primarily targeting confidential information of Net users.

“Due to a rapidly growing Internet infrastructure, a burgeoning broadband population and rampant software piracy, India is expected to witness increased malicious activities,” Symantec Managing Director Vishal Dhupar said.

“Over the past year, Symantec has observed a 192 per cent increase in spam detected across the Internet as a whole, from 119.6 billion messages in 2007 to 349.6 billion in 2008.”

The report said 55,389 cases of phishing were detected in 2008, a 66 per cent growth over the previous year.

According to Tuteja, it is vital that anti-malware solutions are installed instead of a simple anti-virus solution. “Awareness remains the key,” he said.