By WSJ Staff

On Saturday night, Sandra Bullock made history by becoming only the second woman to accept her Golden Raspberry award — bestowed by the Razzie Awards for worst performance of the year — in person. Only Halle Berry, who won her Razzie in 2005 for “Catwoman,” has also had the humility (and sense of humor) to accept her award in person.

Granted, Berry and Bullock have the leeway to poke to fun at both their own careers and when films go awry — Berry is a Best Actress Oscar winner for 2001’s “Monster’s Ball” and Bullock is considered the front runner for the same award at this year’s Oscars ceremony, for her role as tough football mom in “The Blind Side.”

When accepting her speech, Bullock wheeled a wagon-full of DVDs for “All About Steve” — the panned comedy she won her Razzie for — on stage with her, and told the crowd everyone would get a copy.

“This is the deal I’m going to make. I will show up next year if you promise to watch the movie, really watch it, and really consider if it really and truly was the worst performance,” she said. “If you’re willing to watch it, I will come back next year and I will give back the Razzie.”

“I brought the shooting script, the final shooting draft,” she added. “And I will go page by page by page of my dialogue. I’m going to read the line the way that I read it in the film and then I want anyone who wants to come give me a line reading back to come up. So we can do this ’til about four o’clock, or you guys can rethink your decision and have me back next year.”

The first International Women’s Day

In 1869 British MP John Stuart Mill was the first person in Parliament to call for women’s right to vote. On 19 September 1893 New Zealand became the first country in the world to give women the right to vote. Women in other countries did not enjoy this equality and campaigned for justice for many years.

In 1910 a second International Conference of Working Women was held in Copenhagen. A woman named Clara Zetkin (Leader of the ‘Women’s Office’ for the Social Democratic Party in Germany) tabled the idea of an International Women’s Day. She proposed that every year in every country there should be a celebration on the same day – a Women’s Day – to press for their demands. The conference of over 100 women from 17 countries, representing unions, socialist parties, working women’s clubs, and including the first three women elected to the Finnish parliament, greeted Zetkin’s suggestion with unanimous approval and thus International Women’s Day was the result.

The very first International Women’s Day was launched the following year by Clara Zetkin on 19 March (not 8 March). The date was chosen because on 19 March in the year of the 1848 revolution, the Prussian king recognized for the first time the strength of the armed people and gave way before the threat of a proletarian uprising. Among the many promise he made, which he later failed to keep, was the introduction of votes for women.

Plans for the first International Women’s Day demonstration were spread by word of mouth and in the press. During the week before International Women’s Day two journals appeared: The Vote for Women in Germany and Women’s Day in Austria. Various articles were devoted to International Women’s Day: ‘Women and Parliament’, ‘The Working Women and Municipal Affairs’, ‘What Has the Housewife got to do with Politics?’, etc. The articles thoroughly analyzed the question of the equality of women in the government and in society. All articles emphasized the same point that it was absolutely necessary to make parliament more democratic by extending the franchise to women.

Success of the first International Women’s Day in 1911 exceeded all expectation.

Meetings were organized everywhere in small towns and even the villages halls were packed so full that male workers were asked to give up their places for women.

Men stayed at home with their children for a change, and their wives, the captive housewives, went to meetings.

During the largest street demonstration of 30,000 women, the police decided to remove the demonstrators’ banners so the women workers made a stand. In the scuffle that followed, bloodshed was averted only with the help of the socialist deputies in Parliament.

In 1913 International Women’s Day was transferred to 8 March and this day has remained the global date for International Wommen’s Day ever since.

During International Women’s Year in 1975, IWD was given official recognition by the United Nations and was taken up by many governments. International Women’s Day is marked by a national holiday in China, Armenia, Russia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Macedonia, Moldova, Mongolia, Tajikistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Vietnam

Imminent enhancements to Google’s Android mobile platform have been revealed this week, in the form of a development effort called “Cupcake.”

Credit: CNET Networks

T-Mobile’s G1, aka the HTC Dream, was the first phone to go on
sale with Google’s Android operating system.

Android is in the process of being turned by Google from its own development project into open source. This week, some of the changes made to the mobile operating system by a private group of developers came to light in Cupcake–the Android code the group shares with the outside world. Now, according to the Android road map, the Cupcake enhancements have started to be merged into the wider, open-source Android project.

The private development branch will continue to operate, and the current merging of the new features into the master Android branch will be completed in early January.

Some of the changes coming to Android are bug fixes, affecting elements such as e-mail, conversation-list scrolling, and the alarm clock. Several new features are, however, also being added–for example, the ability to save MMS attachments. The Linux kernel upon which Android runs has been upgraded to version 2.6.27, and “basic x86 support” has been added.

The WebKit browser core has been updated, and support for the new SquirrelFish JavaScript engine has been added. The browser will now support cutting and pasting, and will also include a find function.

Android’s camera functionality has received a major boost, with the addition of video capture. Download functionality has also been enhanced; applications can pause their downloads, and interrupted downloads can now be resumed instead of failing.

Virtual keyboards will also become possible, and third-party developers will be given the application programming interfaces to create their own input methods. A new API for speech recognition is also included, as is A2DP stereo Bluetooth support.

(CNN) — Early each morning, millions of farmers around the world rise to toil in their fields. By night, gangs of mobsters scheme and legions of poker players shuffle up and deal.

Sure, none of it’s real. But the overwhelming popularity of so-called social gaming — simple games that let people play with their friends on networking sites such as Facebook — is changing the face of video games, experts say.

And as the maker of popular titles like FarmVille and Mafia Wars, San Francisco, California-based Zynga has ridden the games’ skyrocketing popularity to the top of that emerging market.

For Zynga founder Mark Pincus, the formula for gaming success on Facebook, MySpace and other sites was as simple as it might seem counterintuitive: create simple games that people like but can easily set aside.

“We built the games so they could be played in a tab on your browser while you’re on a conference call,” said Pincus, a veteran Web entrepreneur who created Zynga in 2007.

Of course, they’ve been helped by the massive growth of Facebook, where the games are so popular they’ve spawned “fan” pages devoted to complaining about having to watch friends play them.

Facebook, with its 400 million users, is where the vast majority of people play FarmVille and Mafia Wars along with other Zynga titles like FishVille, Vampires, Café World, YoVille and Zynga Poker.

In all, more than 65 million people play Zynga games every day, according to media tracking company Developer Analytics.

More than 75 million people a month play FarmVille, Zynga’s most popular title.

Zynga’s top title, FarmVille, is played by an estimated 75 million people each month — roughly equal to the number who have played the classic arcade and desktop game Tetris during its entire existence.

The massive growth was satisfying but not altogether surprising to Pincus, whose previous startups had included Freeloader, a Web-based information-gathering service; tech-support company SupportSoft; and Tribe.net, an early social networking site from 2003.

He said that starting the game company, which he named after his late English bulldog, was an effort to fill what he considered a surprising void in most people’s daily Internet use.

“I thought in 2007 that something had gone oddly wrong with the whole Internet experience,” Pincus said. “I would have thought games would have been one of the top two or three experiences people had on the Internet.”

What Pincus got right, according to gaming expert Scott Steinberg, was a sort of return to the “golden era” of games like Pac-man and Super Mario Bros.

“Video games actually appealed to a huge cross-section. They appealed to everybody,” said Steinberg, publisher of DigitalTrends.com. “What happened is, as we went through the mid-’80s to the mid-2000s, you started to see gaming become more incestuous in terms of 18- to 34-year-old males making games for people just like them.”

Zynga games like Café World draw much higher rates of female players than most video games.

By contrast, three of Zynga’s top five games — FarmVille, Café World and FishVille — have mostly female players, with many players outside the traditional 18- to 34-year-old range.

Those games all operate on the same basic premise. Starting with a simple farm, fish tank or restaurant, the player works to make it bigger and fancier, sharing items with friends and helping each other along the way.

Some of Zynga’s early titles simply mirrored existing board and card games. It was Mafia Wars — in which players team up to whack other gangs – that first exhibited what would become the hallmarks of social gaming: simple, single-player action that’s enhanced by teamwork.

With FarmVille, that formula would become complete.

Players plant virtual crops that can be harvested hours, or days, later. Along the way, they invite online friends to become their neighbors and help each other by sending gifts or helping with the farming. There’s no way to “win,” but players take satisfaction in building big, fancy farms that they can showcase to their friends.

“A farm is something that is internationally understood and known. It’s cross-cultural, cross-gender, cross-age,” Pincus said. “A great social game should be like a great cocktail party. If you want it to appeal to absolutely everyone you invite, it has to be broad in its content so that everyone gets it.”

Not that Zynga’s success has come without criticism.

Mafia Wars is popular but prompted claims that it was a knock-off.

With hundreds of smaller companies vying for a piece of the social gaming market, some rivals have accused Zynga of using its hefty venture capital to crowd out less-financed competitors.

Many of its most popular games, including FarmVille, are similar to pre-existing games from smaller companies, a fact Pincus dismisses by noting that video games have always fallen into genres with similar titles from competing companies.

Psycho Monkey LLC, the makers of Mob Wars, filed a lawsuit claiming that Mafia Wars ripped them off. Zynga settled that case in August, said a spokeswoman for the company.

Zynga also was hit with complaints and lawsuits over its original business model, which let players earn in-game rewards for things like signing up for a credit card or video-rental membership.

Critics said some of the offers amounted to scams, leading players to download unwanted software or unwittingly sign up for memberships that appeared stealthily on their phone bills.

Pincus has acknowledged not being vigilant enough with the automated ads that appeared on Zynga games during the company’s early days.

More than 13 million people play FishVille every week, according to Zynga.

“We were playing whack-a-mole,” Pincus said. “Every time we found one of these or got a complaint, we would take them down. Eventually … we realized we had to take a much more aggressive stance than a normal Web site.”

In November, Zynga removed all “lead-generating” ads, relying for revenue instead on the roughly 1 to 3 percent of the player base that pays for in-game items, such as a barn in FarmVille. It has since been putting the advertisements back in, with a new system that lets it more closely monitor what kind of ads show up, Pincus said.

“We’ll see where this goes for the entire industry,” Pincus said. “It was really important to us to maintain a trusted position with our users. We wanted to do the right thing, and I think we did.”

Pincus offers a ray of hope for another vocal group of critics: the social-media users who say they’re tired of seeing all of their friends’ updates about Zynga and other social games.

On Facebook, a group called “I dont care about your farm, or your fish, or your park, or your mafia!!!” had more than 5.2 million members recently.

“Please. No more of this stuff,” wrote one member. “I’ve had all I can take. About to hang up FACEBOOK. Just want a nice cozy place to talk with my friends!”

Zynga Poker was one of the company’s first social games and remains among the most popular.

“We have to evolve,” Pincus said “I think it’s heading to a place that’s more narrow-casting. I think you’ll get to a place where Facebook will be better about showing feeds to people who have a registered interest in them.”

For example, he said, there might eventually be a way to send game notifications only to people who play social games themselves.

“It’s not just games. It’s going to be true for music, for pictures, for status updates,” Pincus said. “I think, over time, these networks are going to start to shape more to … your [registered interests].”

Meanwhile, Zynga will be among the developers continuing to change how people look at video gaming. It’s a change that Steinberg, the gaming guru, says will be for the better.

While heavyweights like Electronic Arts and the popular Civilization series are making inroads into social gaming, Steinberg said, the genre is also opening up opportunities for smaller developers.

“We’re seeing, in many ways, a second renaissance for games,” Steinberg said.

“There’s been an epiphany among the developer community saying, ‘Look at these millions of users that we’ve forgotten to speak to for years.’ This can only be a good thing for the gaming industry in the end.”

Sources have told the Wall Street Journal that Sony is planning on making a challenger to Apple’s iPad that will have all the capabilities of a netbook, a Sony Reader and a PSP, the company’s handheld gaming device.

At a Sony news conference in Tokyo, Sony’s CFO Nobuyuki Oneda didn’t provide any details but expressed the company’s desire to compete against Apple’s newest gadget, due in stores next month.

“That is a market we are also very interested in. We are confident we have the skills to create a [great] product,” said Oneda. “Time-wise, we are a little behind the iPad but it’s a space we would like to be an active player in.”

The WSJ also reported Sony is making a new smartphone – containing Sony Ericsson mobile technology and capable of playing PSP games – to compete against the iPhone. Both devices are expected to work with Sony Online Services, an online store due to launch in March and sell music, movies, books, and other downloadable applications for mobile products.

The iPad challenger and the new smartphone are expected to launch sometime in 2010, but no details about specs, price or design have been released.

Sony has tried to get into the phone/gaming gadget arena in the past. A patent was filed in 2006 for a device that looked like a PSP on one side and a smartphone on the other, but such a device has never hit the market.

Apple sold 8.7 million iPhones in the last three months of 2009. The company announced Friday that the iPad will be available April 3.

Twitter hit a major milestone late Thursday – when someone hit the “update” button on the networking site’s 10 billionth tweet.

The question Friday morning? Who was it and what did they say?

Unfortunately for the curious masses, it appears that the landmark tweet was posted by someone who has set their feed to be private by default.

A search for tweet No. 10 billion – individual posts on the site are identified by a number – yields a message saying that page is unavailable.

It was unclear whether Twitter was pursuing the user to see if they’d like to go public. The site’s spokespeople were notably quiet – with no mention of the milestone on their official Twitter feed and no new posts on their blog.

The two nearest misses, however, were public and show the range of ways the micro-blogging site is used.

Tweet number 9,999,999,999 was by a user with the handle @lelamarques, who posted a link to a gallery of “urban decay” photographs – a genre that celebrates the hidden beauty of abandoned buildings.

The user lists her address as Sao Luis, Brazil, and most of her posts are in Portugese – a nod to Twitter’s increasing international popularity.

Twitter has been lauded as a game-changing tool during such internationally notable events as the Iranian election protests and post-earthquake fundraising in Haiti.

But tweet Number 10,000,000,001 likely won’t impress those who consider it a hotbed of meaningless chatter.

In a feed from a woman who says she lives in Bronx, New York, the tweet read simply, “$Pretty N Paid$.”

Her feed is filled with profanity and misspelled words, often written in all caps – considered poor form by many Internet users. [NOTE: Since Friday morning, that user has switched her feed to private].

Interest in the milestone was high on the micro-blogging site, which has seen astronomical growth since it started in 2007. Thursday evening, the site for GigaTweet, an app that tracks the number of Twitter posts in real time, was down – presumably from overuse.

While the total number of Twitter users appeared to flatline several months ago, the sites activity levels has continued to spiral upward.

Twitter saw its 1 billionth tweet about a year ago and hit 5 billion tweets about four months ago.

According to a Wednesday night e-mail from Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, the number of Twitter accounts has grown 1,500 percent in the past year.

The company’s low-key response to the much-anticipated tweet, at least in the first several hours that followed, is in stark contrast to how Apple greeted a similar milestone recently.

When the company’s online store sold its 10 billionth download, the lucky customer got a $10,000 Apple gift card and a personal phone call from Steve Jobs.

Roseanne Cash, the daughter of the music legend whose song was purchased, also was on the call to thank Woodstock, Georgia’s, Louis Sulcer for buying one of her dad’s songs.

(CNN) — Apple’s eagerly anticipated iPad will be available in the United States on April 3, the company said Friday.

Wi-Fi models of the tablet-style computer will go on sale that Saturday, while ones with Wi-Fi and 3G networks will be released later in the month.

Customers can start pre-ordering the iPad on Apple’s online store on March 12.

“iPad is something completely new,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs said in a Friday post on the company’s Web site. “We’re excited for customers to get their hands on this magical and revolutionary product and connect with their apps and content in a more intimate, intuitive and fun way than ever before.”

Unveiled on January 27, theiPad is designed to act as a sort of “missing link” between the smartphone and the laptop computer.

It has a nearly 10-inch screen, runs existing apps from the Apple apps store and is available in 16-gigabyte, 32-gigabyte and 64-gigabyte versions. It’s a half-inch thick and weighs a pound-and-a-half.

Prices start at $499 for the 16-gigabyte version, $599 for the 32-gig version and $699 for the 64, Jobs said at the company’s glitzy announcement in San Francisco, California.

The iPad will be released in late April in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK, Apple said in the post on its site.

Prices in those countries will be announced in April and iPad will ship in additional countries later this year.

— This week’s arrests of three men in connection with one of the world’s largest computer-virus networks may seem like great news — perhaps even a sign authorities are starting to win the war against cyberthieves.

(CNN)

But the real situation is more complicated.

Internet crime is up, but arrests of “mastermind” hackers are rare. And the whole get-the-bad-guys effort, while it makes for good drama, is a futile way to secure the Internet, some computer security experts say.

“The virus writers and the Trojan [horse] writers, they’re still out there,” said Tom Karygiannis, a computer scientist and senior researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. “So I don’t think they’ve deterred anyone by prosecuting these people.”

A Trojan horse is a seemingly innocuous piece of software that, once installed, gives malicious users access to a computer system.

It would be smarter, Karygiannis said, to develop new anti-virus technologies and to teach people how to protect themselves from Internet crime.

On Wednesday, Spanish authorities announced the arrests of three men in connection with a “botnet” network of nearly 13 million infected computers, which is believed to be one of the largest in the world. The infected network, called Mariposa, or “butterfly” in Spanish, was used to steal financial or personal information from people in at least 190 countries.

Botnets are networks of compromised, or “robot” computers controlled by a master for the purpose of stealing data or perpetrating other online crimes.

Some see the arrests as a sign that technologists and law enforcement officials are getting better at tracking large virus networks back to the people who author and propagate them.

Mustaque Ahamad, director of the Georgia Tech Information Security Center, which helped track down the arrested men, said preventing viruses from infecting computers was the old model for fighting this type of Internet crime. Today, going after the “bad guys” is the better long-term option, he said.

Laura Sweeney, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Justice, said there has been a recent string of high-profile cybercrime arrests in the United States. Last August, for example, Albert Gonzalez was arrested and accused of running an Internet scheme in which 130 million credit card and debit card numbers were stolen.

The United States could always do more to fight cybercrime, but these arrests are a deterrent, she said. “We prosecute cases. That’s what we do. We’re not going to stop doing that because [cybercrime is] a big problem,” she said.

It’s impossible to say how many cybercrime prosecutions and arrests the United States has made in recent years, Sweeney said, because the federal government does not track cybercrime as a specific statistical category.

A number of cybersecurity experts, however, characterized the recent arrests as relative anomalies. They criticized efforts to prosecute cybercriminals as a waste of time and said the people who are arrested are rarely the right people: They’re often the middlemen instead of the kingpins, experts said.

Starting a botnet like Mariposa “takes no more skill than it takes to run Microsoft Office,” said Vincent Weafer, vice president for security response at Symantec, a company that makes anti-virus software.

All a person has to do is download the program from the Internet. Such programs are still available for easy purchase, he said.

The people who actually write these programs — the keys to cybercrime — are almost impossible to catch and prosecute, said Marty Lindner, principal engineer with Carnegie Mellon University’s Computer Emergency Response Team.

The reason it’s difficult to find these masterminds has to do both with technology and the law.

Lindner said it’s unclear if the authors of malicious code are doing anything illegal.

“The U.S. doesn’t have jurisdiction on the [entire] planet Earth, so even if you can identify the author [of the malicious program], that doesn’t give us the legal authority to get him, one, and two, it’s not clear he’s committing a crime,” he said. “It’s not illegal to write bad software. It’s illegal to use it.”

Plus, botnets travel from computer to computer without the help of humans, making it very difficult to use Internet addresses to track the code back to its source, said Weafer, of Symantec.

“Viruses and botnets by their nature are anonymous,” he said.

Meanwhile, cybercrime continues to increase.

Symantec says it identified 2.9 million individual viruses in the last 15 months, which the security company says is more than the total it found over the last 18 years. Complaints about cyberattacks are up, too. The federal government received 275,284 such complaints in 2008, a 33 percent increase from the previous year, according to a report from the Internet Crime Complaint Center.

“Systems are constantly under attack,” said Karygiannis, of NIST.

There also are a number of notable mass-computer infections for which no mastermind was ever pinpointed, including the Conficker outbreak last year, in which 5 to 10 million computers were compromised.

In lieu of using the justice system to deter cybercrime, researchers are trying to develop new technologies and increase education efforts.

At Symantec, they’re working on a new method of virus protection that looks for harmful files based on their reputation and behavior on the Internet.

This differs from current models, in which anti-virus software looks for a “signature” that says whether the file is safe for download.

“If I see a guy walking down the street and he’s got a facemask on, and he’s walking up to a bank, I’m probably going to determine he’s a bank robber without him doing anything else,” said Weafer. “And that’s exactly what happens with behavioral protection.”

At Georgia Tech, researchers are looking into remote monitoring for computers to ensure that users have updated their anti-virus software and can protect against attack, Ahamad said.

People who want to prevent cyberattacks are best served by working on all fronts — searching for new tech, helping people protect themselves and chasing down hackers, said Weafer.

But, he said, consumers can do more than they are today to protect themselves.

“The weak link in all this is still the user education,” he said.

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Atithi Tum Kab Jaoge

Hindi movie Atithi Tum Kab Jaoge is available to download online for free. All the parts and/or mirrors are listed below. Download and watch Atithi Tum Kab Jaoge online absolutely free. Atithi Tum Kab Jaoge is directed by Ashwani Dhir and the music was composed by Pritam Chakraborty. The funding of this movie is made possible by the producer Amita Pathak. Furthermore, Atithi Tum Kab Jaoge has the following stars: Ajay Devgan, Konkona Sen Sharma, Paresh Rawal, Satish Kaushik, Akhilendra Mishra, Sanjay Mishra, Viju Khote.

Music: Pritam Chakraborty
Director: Ashwani Dhir
Producer: Amita Pathak
Cast: Ajay Devgan, Konkona Sen Sharma, Paresh Rawal, Satish Kaushik, Akhilendra Mishra, Sanjay Mishra, Viju Khote

Atithi Tum Kab Jaoge Movie Review
It tells the story of Puneet [Ajay Devgn] and Munmun [Konkona], a married couple living in Mumbai. Their lives take an interesting turn when a distant relative, Chachaji [Paresh Rawal], turns up unannounced at their doorstep from a far-off village. The guest overstays his welcome, so much so that the exasperated couple come up with various ploys to hasten his departure.

ATITHI TUM KAB JAOGE? is a light-hearted entertainer that tickles your funny bone at several points. The best part is, you not only laugh at the funny one-liners, but also at situations, which are so life-like and which makes you connect with them instantly.

ATITHI TUM KAB JAOGE? rests on three characters primarily – Ajay, Konkona and Paresh – and director Ashwni Dhir and his team of writers [Robin Bhatt, Tushar Hiranandani] have ensured that there are ample [enjoyable] scenes that you carry home. What really takes you by surprise is the devotional factor that has been smartly injected in the screenplay. The traditional Indian audiences would love the Mata ki aarti, the Ganesh Chaturthi festival and the sanskaar that the atithi instils in Ajay and Konkona’s child.

But the writing wanders into unwanted areas, which could’ve been avoided in the first place. The raid at the hotel, where Ajay, Konkona and their son move into, seems unnecessary. Ditto for the subsequent scene at the cop station. Immediately thereafter, Ajay hires the services of a Bhai to get rid of Paresh, which looks far-fetched. These three incidents, which come back to back, only add to the length of the film. Also, Paresh breaking wind [gas/flatulence] looks funny in a scene or two, but why make it a recurring occurrence? An overdose is embarrassing!

However, the climax, which starts with the sthapna of Lord Ganesh’s idol in Ajay’s home, till the culmination of the story, makes the goings-on immensely watchable. Director Ashwni Dhir, best known for penning comic shows, proves that he’s at ease handling dramatic [interval point] and emotional [climax] scenes with gusto. Pritam’s music is ordinary, but the songs fit well in the narrative, especially the two devotional tracks. The title track [Amit Mishra] is quite catchy. Aseem Bajaj’s camerawork is first-rate. Dialogues [Ashwni Dhir] are excellent.