Ryan Clothier

Guy Kawasaki - a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who was partially responsible for marketing the Macintosh in 1984 - has almost 140,000 Twitter followers. Many of those followers likely thought it was strange that Kawasaki was suddenly into shilling porn, when a link purporting to host a pornographic video of "Gossip Girl" star Leighton Meester appeared on June 23. Anyone who downloaded the video discovered a virus that ravaged both PCs and Macs.

Anti-virus organization Sophos posted a YouTube video explaining how the attack worked. As the Sophos video shows, the attack affected Macs. It can be taken for granted that the malware also infected PCs, because, well, everything infects PCs.

The malicious link has been disabled and no longer prompts visitors to download viruses.

Kawasaki claimed no responsibility for spreading the malware. He told his followers that his account was not hacked, but rather a page or its feed that he linked to was hacked. Kawasaki's Twitter account is hooked up to NowPublic, a user-contributed news site, and this tasty tidbit was filtered through into his account. Kawasaki also claims to have no idea who Leighton Meester is.

Twitter is no stranger to malware. Earlier this month, Twitter spam spread a worm that crippled Windows-based machines. There were also the Twitter worm attacks of April and May.

Twitter itself does not, and will not, filter links. It's the responsibility of the user and the reader to make judgment calls about whether they'd like to read about the Iran elections or expend kempt-up energy on porn. The difficulty comes in the form of condensed URLs - many users have no idea what they're clicking on, and by the time the mistake has been uncovered, it may be too late. It's particularly troubling when infected links appear on ultra-popular user sites that many people have grown to trust.

The Kawasaki Incident shouldn't tarnish your trust of all Twitter users, especially the megalithic ones. But if Oprah sends you off to scope out a raunchy video of Twilight's Edward Cullen, exercise a little self-restraint.

U.S. protectionism targeting Indian outsourcers may be met by retaliatory measures such as blocking access to Indian markets, India's National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom) said on Tuesday.

Describing the U.S. tax system as "broken", U.S. President Barack Obama said in May that it's a tax code "that says you should pay lower taxes if you create a job in Bangalore, India, than if you create one in Buffalo, New York".

Though the changes proposed to the tax code are not likely to impact the Indian outsourcing industry, the statement by Obama has been widely interpreted in India as targeting the country's large outsourcing industry which gets over 50 percent of its revenue from the U.S.

Legislation introduced in April by Senators Chuck Grassley, (R-Iowa), and Dick Durbin, (D-Ill.) aims to put curbs on the use of H-1B visas, so that the visa program "should complement the U.S. workforce, not replace it".

As unemployment goes up in the countries to which Indian's outsourcing industry exports services, there are likely to be increasing demands for creating jobs in those countries, said Som Mittal, president of Nasscom.

"Once you take protectionist measures, it doesn't stop there," Mittal said. India is a large market for a variety of products including defense equipment, and there could be a trade war, he cautioned.

Nasscom is focusing on conveying to the U.S. and other countries that Indian outsourcing companies can help their companies get more efficient and cut costs in the economic downturn. It wants the Indian outsourcing industry to be identified as "part of the solution and not the problem", Mittal said.

Indian outsourcers are also taking steps to increase services delivery closer to customers, which will mean creation of jobs in countries like the U.S., said Pramod Bhasin, chairman of Nasscom.

Indian business process outsourcing (BPO) companies will have to change their business model in the future to deliver services from multiple locations worldwide, so that they deliver from where the customers want it, he said.

Profit margins will not get affected by the higher costs in those locations, because the work done there will be high-end, he added.

The Indian BPO industry is expected to post a revenue growth of about 15 percent this year, despite the global economic downturn which appears to have bottomed out, Bhasin said.