Facebook phone rumours may ring true on April 4

Facebook fueled fresh talk about its own mobile phone after the leading social network scheduled a press announcement for next week.

Shortly after the Facebook invitation went out for the April 4 event, the technology news site TechCrunch reported the announcement would be a modified version of the Google Android operating system with "deep native Facebook functionality."

Another report on "9 to 5 Google" said Facebook designing the software for the new smartphone, which would be made by Taiwan's HTC.

Indian IT faces difficult times ahead as Gartner cuts growth forecast

After delivering an upbeat growth forecast for IT services in 2013 three months ago, Gartner seems to have toned down its expectations a bit. The global technology research firm on Thursday said worldwide spending on IT services is likely to grow by 4.5% in the current calendar year.

While this is still far higher than the anticipated increase of 1.5% last year, its latest estimate is 70 basis points lower than what it had predicted three months ago. In January, it had guided for 5.2% growth for the current fiscal.

IT websites in India top targets of phishers

While the country is still feeling the heat of the advancement and exponential rise in phishingattacks, the latest Symantec intelligence report on phishing sites in India said that Information Technology sites were the most vulnerable amongst targeted websites by the phishers last year. 

According to Symantec, February intelligence report, the global phishing rate increased by 0.018 percentage points, taking the global average rate to one in 466.3 emails (0.214 percent) since January 2013. In the month of January, the number of phishing URLs associated to Indian brands accounted for 0.15% of the global phishing statistics. 

Saudi Arabia may limit citizens access to Twitter, Report

 Saudi Arabia may try to end anonymity for Twitter users in the country by limiting access to the site to people who register their identification documents, the Arab News daily reported on Saturday. 

Last week, local media reported the government had asked telecom companies to look at ways they could monitor, or block, free internet phone services such as Skype. 

Twitter is highly popular with Saudis and has stirred broad debate on subjects ranging from religion to politics in a country where such public discussion had been considered at best unseemly and sometimes illegal. 

Tumblr goes down due to system crash

Microblogging platform Tumblr has confirmed its entire service had been taken offline earlier this morning, but all network issues have been resolved. 

The latest outage is just the most recent of a series of embarrassing setbacks for the company, which began last December, news.com.au reports. 

A Tumblr spokesperson told internet news site TheNextWeb that they were experiencing networking issues and are working quickly to remedy the situation.