Teji Bachchan passes away

MUMBAI: Mother of Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan, Teji, on Friday died in a hospital in suburban Mumbai after prolonged illness. She was 93. Wife of Hindi literary great Harivansh Rai Bachchan, Teji was in the Lilavati Hospital for almost the whole of this year and was shifted to the ICU last month after her condition became worse. Details of the cause of her demise were not immediately available. Earlier, members of the Bachchan family, including sons Amitabh and Ajitabh, grandson Abhishek and his wife Aishwarya, arrived at the hospital after learning that her condition deteriorated. Family friends including Samajwadi party leader Amar Singh and Anil Ambani also visited the hospital. The body is likely to be taken to the Bachchan residence in Juhu before the last rites are performed. The second wife of Harivansh Rai Bachchan, Teji was an amatuer actor as well as a singer. Harivansh Rai, himself a renowned Hindi poet, died in 2003 at the age of 96. Born as Teji Suri to Punjabi parents, she married Bachchan in 1941 after the death of his first wife. She was also close to the Nehru-Gandhi family while the Bachchan family was living in Delhi in the late 1950s. Teji's illness had resulted in the Bachchan family curtailing celebrations at their Juhu residence for the past few years on occasions like Holi and Diwali. Abhishek Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai had visited her in the hospital prior to their wedding earlier this year to seek her blessings. All major family events were usually conducted after seeking her blessings.

Google repairs `Orkut' worm

The search giant Google has reportedly repaired a prolific spam worm launched on its social networking site Orkut.
Earlier this week, a Trend Micro engineer Robert McArdle published a blog entry warning that a worm was replicating itself across Orkut using a Flash object that invokes malicious JavaScipt code. "The attack works due to Orkut allowing users to embed Flash content in their scrap posts (although it does filter for normal XSS techniques)," said McArdle in the blog post. "The author appears to have created a SWFObject that calls the malicious JavaScript and was able to use this to bypass Orkut's filters." The attack began as an e-mail message alerting Orkut users that they have a new Scrapbook (guestbook) entry. On receiving the scraps, the members' browsers then downloaded and executed the embedded virus. After adding its victims to a community called "Infectados Pelo Virus Orkut" or "Those Infected by the Orkut Virus," the worm then started to send messages to members of the affected user's friends list. In an email statement Google representative said that Google takes the security of its users very seriously. "We worked quickly to implement a fix for the issue recently reported in Orkut. We also took steps to help prevent similar problems in the future. Service to Orkut was not disrupted during this time." Orkut, Google's first pass at social networking, was launched in January 2004 and named after its creator and Google employee, Orkut Buyukkokten. The site is reported to have in excess of 67 million registered users overall. By comparison, MySpace boasts 110 million users.