Hackers plant false rumours of Mikhail Gorbachev's death

The last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was forced to deny rumours of his death after hackers planted a false report on Twitter accounts of a state news agency.

"I'm alive and well," Gorbachev late Wednesday told the website of Novaya Gazeta newspaper, using a blanked-out Russian expletive to describe his ill-wishers who he said were "hoping in vain".

His indignant response came after two Twitter accounts of the RIA Novosti state news agency posted news of the death of the first and only president of the USSR to sign off on a bloodless breakup of its empire in 1991.

RIA Novosti said that the Twitter accounts of its press centre and its German language news service were hacked into and that the false reports were online for only five minutes before the agency removed them.

The message, published in a screenshot on the website of Kommersant daily, was hardly convincing. It said that "Mikhail Gorbachev has died in the Shoko cafe in Yekaterinburg."

It added that Gorbachev died as he was talking to a maverick politician, Yevgeny Roizman, who is standing for mayor of the Siberian city, suggesting a political motive for the message.

RIA Novosti said it would ask the FSB security service and prosecutors to investigate the hacker attack.

Gorbachev said in his statement on the website of Novaya Gazeta, which he co-owns, that he suspected the hackers were "carrying out the orders of some authorities."

He said he had asked the newspaper to investigate who was circulating the rumours.

Gorbachev, 82, has suffered health problems and his spokesman said in June that he was in hospital for planned treatment of his diabetes.

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Micromax co-founder steps down after arrest in bribery case

Micromax co-founder has stepped down from active duty after he was arrested in a bribery case by CBI on Wednesday.

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Facebook mobile users on the rise in US, UK

The number of users accessing Facebook via their mobile phones in June jumped around 20 percent in the United States and Britain, the social network said, touting its appeal for brands trying to reach consumers during the summer months.

Created in a Harvard dorm room in 2004, the world's largest social network has moved to reposition its business for a world in which consumers' primarily access the Internet via small-screened smartphones rather than computers.

The strategy has started to pay off, with the group's results for the first three months of the year showing mobile advertising revenue gaining momentum and accounting for 30 percent of Facebook's overall ad revenue in the first quarter.

On Thursday, the group said its mobile monthly active users had increased by 18 percent in the United States and by 22 percent in Britain in June compared with the previous year, as brands seek different ways to reach consumers who are often on holiday and not interacting with their usual media.

"We see this as a fantastic opportunity with empirical evidence of people staying engaged on mobile phones and using Facebook," James Quarles, regional director for Britain and Southern Europe, said.

"As people are away and on holiday, it provides a different opportunity for brands to think differently about Facebook."

Though advertisers are keen to harness the boom in mobile phones, few have perfected the art of using mobile devices to target adverts to consumers, with a discrepancy remaining between the amount of time consumers spend on their mobile devices and the advertising dollars companies spend there.

Facebook is seen as one of the most likely ways for mobile advertising to succeed.

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Yahoo working on various methods to increase video views

We're working on various methods in terms of how we can increase our video views, and watching," Mayer said at the Reuters Global Technology Summit on Thursday. "It's clear to me that our video business is something that's growing a lot. It's something that we'd like to accelerate."

Yahoo is currently bidding to acquire Hulu, the online hub for TV programming owned by Walt Disney Co and News Corp, sources with knowledge of the situation have told Reuters.

Mayer would not comment on the bid for Hulu.

The Web pioneer was looking at buying French video site DailyMotion but had to abandon the effort after objections from the French government.

(Also see: France defends blocking Yahoo deal for Dailymotion)

Yahoo also has a growing menu of original video programming, such as the critically-acclaimed Burning Love TV reality show spoof, and it recently acquired the rights to the archive of Saturday Night Live television programmes.

Online video commands higher ad rates than other types of Web content and has become a fiercely competitive arena as it is increasingly viewed as a bulwark against the steady decline in prices for online display ads.

On Thursday, Instagram, the mobile photo-sharing app owned by Facebook Inc, introduced a new feature that allows users to create 15-second videos. Facebook itself is reported to be readying an online video ad format. Google Inc's YouTube, the world's No.1 online video destination, is expected to generate $5 billion in revenue this year, according to RBC Capital Markets.

Mayer took the top job at Yahoo after a tumultuous period in which the company had churned through several CEOs and many of its top executives and engineers jumped ship.

She has revamped key products such as mail and the Yahoo home page, implemented morale-boosting measures like free food, and jumpstarted acquisitions. On Thursday, Yahoo closed its $1.1 billion acquisition of Tumblr, a blogging service that is one of the Web's most popular hubs of user-generated content.

Yahoo's stock has surged roughly 70 percent since Mayer became CEO. But Wall Street analysts say much of the gain has come from stock buybacks and from Yahoo's Asian assets, including a 24 percent stake in Chinese e-commerce giant and potential IPO debutante Alibaba Group.

Peanut butter and jelly
Yahoo's biggest near-term goal and most important yardstick by which to measure its progress will be the rate of increase in the amount of time users spend on its websites, Mayer said.

"Yahoo's ability to generate revenue for a thousand pages is reasonably good," Mayer said. "The challenge for Yahoo at the moment is traffic. How do we grow traffic? How do we gain usage? Because that ultimately will drive up revenue."

While rivals such as Google have experimented with new revenue streams, including subscription music services and online retailing, Mayer said Yahoo remains squarely focused on advertising.

"I believe in ads, I like ads. We may try some other things but Yahoo is an ad company," Mayer said, but added that it does not mean Yahoo will cut on its own original programming.

The company's headcount has decreased by about 1,000 employees during her first year, through a combination of attrition and ramped-up performance management, with staffers now getting reviewed on a quarterly basis instead of every year, she said.

But Mayer said the company was aggressively pursuing new talent job applications recently peaked at 10,000 a week, more than twice the level of a year ago.

At the same time, Mayer has moved to cut back the thickets of bureaucracy that she said had sprouted across the company over its 18-year history.

Mayer installed a system called PB&J, short for Process, Bureaucracy and Jams. That has eliminated roughly 700 irksome or unnecessary procedures within the company, such as forcing employees to undergo a special orientation for the company gym.

"I understand that we are geeks and we may not be that coordinated but I think we can all figure out how to use a treadmill without an orientation," Mayer said.

Some industry-watchers assumed the PB&J moniker was an homage to the so-called "peanut butter manifesto," in which former Yahoo executives warned of problems plaguing the company.

Mayer said the real story was much simpler.

"Most days for lunch I have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich," she explained. "So sitting there I was like 'Can we call it something simple and fun like PB&J?' And we kind of backed into process, bureaucracy and jams. But it works."

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Facebook says bug exposed 6 million users' contact information

Facebook Inc has inadvertently exposed 6 million users' phone numbers and email addresses to unauthorised viewers over the past year, the world's largest social networking company disclosed late Friday.

Facebook blamed the data leaks, which began in 2012, on a technical glitch in its massive archive of contact information collected from its 1.1 billion users worldwide. As a result of the glitch, Facebook users who downloaded contact data for their list of friends obtained additional information that they were not supposed to have.

Facebook's security team was alerted to the bug last week and fixed it within 24 hours. But Facebook did not publicly acknowledge the bug until Friday afternoon, when it published an "important message" on its blog explaining the issue.

A Facebook spokesman said the delay was due to company procedure stipulating that regulators and affected users be notified before making a public announcement.

"We currently have no evidence that this bug has been exploited maliciously and we have not received complaints from users or seen anomalous behaviour on the tool or site to suggest wrongdoing," Facebook said on its blog.

While the privacy breach was limited, "it's still something we're upset and embarrassed by, and we'll work doubly hard to make sure nothing like this happens again," it added.

The breach follows recent disclosures that several consumer Internet companies turned over troves of user data to a large-scale electronic surveillance program run by U.S. intelligence.

The companies include Facebook, Google Inc, Microsoft Corp, Apple Inc and Yahoo Inc.

The companies, led by Facebook, successfully negotiated with the U.S. government last week to reveal the approximate number of user information requests that each company had received, including secret national security orders

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