Petroleum Ministry(India) for immediate hike in retail fuel prices!

The Petroleum Ministry has proposed a Rs 10 a litre hike in petrol, Rs 5 per litre increase in diesel and Rs 50 per cylinder rise in LPG prices, as the Finance Ministry was unwilling to cut duties to cushion the impact of crude prices on oil companies.

Oil Minister Murli Deora, who first met Finance Minister P Chidambaram seeking lowering of customs and excise duty, also called on External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee and finally Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to explain the Rs 225,000 crore burden the spike in global prices was putting on oil PSUs this fiscal.

Chidambaram is believed to be against cutting customs duty on crude to zero, reducing import duty on petrol and diesel to 2.5 per cent from 7.5 per cent and halving excise duty on the two fuel as sought by the Petroleum Ministry, official sources said.

A proposal to levy a cess or surcharge on all direct and indirect taxes also did not find favour with Chidambaram, as he felt it is tantamount to taxing people not using subsidised fuel.

Sources said even after the hike in petrol, diesel and LPG prices, duty cuts, giving retailers oil bonds worth Rs 35,000 crore and upstream firms like ONGC chipping in Rs 30,000 crore, a gap of Rs 51,000 crore was left to be covered.

BPCL and HPCL have cash to buy crude oil only till July while Indian Oil can finance imports till September. The three firms face huge liquidity crisis as they are unable to realise full value of products sold.

"We don't want to see scarcity of petroleum products particularly kerosene and LPG," Deora told reporters. "PSUs are in a precarious state and a solution needs to be found."

Deora said some proposals were discussed but "nothing has been agreed."

CBSE class X results on May 29

The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) will declare the class 10th examination results on May 29th, at 8:00 am IST.

After announcing the class 12th results for the Delhi, Guwahati and Allahabad regions today, CBSE Chairman Ashok Ganguly said that the results of one or two regions could be announced on May 28th.

CBSE Results 2008

He further added that, "The official date for publishing the class 10th results has been fixed as May 29th. The results of one or two regions may be declared on May 28th."

A beta release of Flash Player 10 is available for download. What has Adobe got for us to look forward to?

GPU hardware acceleration is high on my list. There seem to be too much Flash content around that consumes a huge proportion of the available CPU cycles to carry out what appears to be fairly simple animations. This probably means they are badly written, but with any luck offloading some of the work to the GPU will free up my CPU for more useful work.

A comment made by an early user is encouraging. Grant Skinner, CEO and chief architect of gskinner.com said "With Flash Player 10 beta, developers can enable SWF content to render through the memory bandwidth and computational horsepower of the GPU hardware processor, freeing up the CPU to do more - such as render 3D content and intricate effects, and process complex business logic."

Designers will probably be more impressed with provision for custom filters and effects to augment those provided by Flash. Adobe is also providing the Pixel Blender toolkit to allow creation of these filters and effects.

Flash 10 also features a new text engine to give greater control over the appearance of text, including vertical, right-to-left and bidirectional layout.

If you want to dip a toe into the waters of Flash 10, the beta can be downloaded here and once it is installed, you can see some demonstrations here.

In related news, Google this week announced the Google Maps API for Flash, allowing developers to incorporate Google Maps into Flash projects.

A Zero-day exploit has been identified that redirects the Adobe Flash Player to malware infected servers. The threat is expanding.

Investigations are continuing around a known Zero-Day exploit of Adobe Flash Player versions 9.0.124.0 and older.

According to a Security Focus advisory recently released; “Adobe Flash Player is prone to an unspecified remote code-execution vulnerability.

An attacker may exploit this issue to execute arbitrary code in the context of the affected application. Failed exploit attempts will likely result in denial-of-service conditions.

Adobe Flash Player 9.0.115.0 and 9.0.124.0 are vulnerable; other versions may also be affected.”

The exploit consists of redirection scripts posted in infected websites. The script does a quick check of the version of Flash Player installed, based on the result it then runs an associated .SWF file (shockwave) to take control of the users computer

A further announcement from Security Focus expands on the threat indicating that though the exploit was firstly discovered in a couple of Chinese language websites, it looks to be spreading. According to Security Focus; “Continued investigation reveals that this issue is fairly widespread. Malicious code is being injected into other third-party domains (approximately 20,000 web pages), most likely through SQL-injection attacks. The code then redirects users to sites hosting malicious Flash files exploiting this issue.”

Adobe have briefly acknowledged the issue.

In direct response to this issue Symantec have raised their ThreatCon indicator to 2 (medium: increased alertness). An indication that malicious code threats have reached a moderate risk level.

Network administrators should be aware of the issue and be prepared to block ip addresses in firewalls and proxy servers as they come to hand.