Karnataka govt mulls ban on cow slaughter, beef consumption

New Delhi, May 20: In further relaxation of lockdown rules, domestic flights will begin operations from May 25 in a calibrated manner. Currently, only cargo and evacuation flight services are allowed.

The nationwide lockdown to halt the spread of coronavirus is in place till May 31. However, certain relaxations have been allowed.

All airports and air carriers are being informed to be ready for operations from next week, tweeted civil aviation minister Hardeep Singh Puri.

The standard operating procedures for passenger movement will be separately issued by the ministry, said the minister.

Mangaluru, Apr 4: With the district administration formally confirming three new cases of covid-19, the total number of coronavirus positive cases in Dakshina Kannada today mounted to 12. 

A 43-year-old man from Thumbey in Bantwal taluk of Dakshina Kannada had been to Delhi on March 11 due to personal work and returned on March 22. His throat swabs were sent for testing on April 2 though he was healthy. Today the report of the test claimed that he was infected with covid-19. However, he is still said to be healthy.

In another case, a man from Udupi, who had returned from Dubai on March 21, was under medical observation after he landed at Mangaluru International Airport. The district administration today claimed that he too is suffering from the covid-19. 

A resident of Thokkottu, on February 6, had travelled to Mumbai and then visited Delhi. On March 6 he had returned to Mangaluru. On April 2, his throat swabs were sent for testing and the report today showed positive.

All three have been admitted to Wenlock Hospital for treatment.

New Delhi, Feb 20: Microsoft has begun testing its free open-source software called "ElectionGuard" in a small Wisconsin town in the US that aims to make voting more secure, verifiable and efficient.

"ElectionGuard" will enable end-to-end verification of elections, open results to third-party organisations for secure validation, and allow individual voters to confirm their votes were correctly counted.

It enables government entities, news outlets, human rights organisations or anyone else to build additional verifiers that independently can certify election results have been accurately counted and have not been altered, according to the company.

The software would create a paper trail and assure voters their votes were properly tallied.

"On Tuesday, Fulton residents are using the technology while choosing who will join the local school board and hold a seat on Wisconsin's state Supreme Court," reports CNBC.

With the test, the company aims to see if voters like the experience and make sure everything works fine.

In May last year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced "ElectionGuard".

According to Tom Burt, Corporate Vice President, Customer Security and Trust, voting system manufacturers will be free to build ElectionGuard into their systems in a variety of ways.

"These are exciting steps that enable individual voters to confirm their vote was properly counted, and assures those voters using an ElectionGuard system of the most secure and trustworthy vote in the history of the US," Burt said in a recent blog post.

"ElectionGuard" is not intended to replace paper ballots but rather to supplement and improve systems that rely on them, and it is not designed to support internet voting.

The software provides each voter a tracker with a unique code that can be used to follow an encrypted version of the vote through the entire election process via a web portal provided by election authorities.

During the process of vote-casting, voters have an optional step that allows them to confirm that their trackers and encrypted votes accurately reflect their selections.

But once a vote is cast, neither the tracker nor any data provided through the web portal can be used to reveal the contents of the vote.

After the election is complete, the tracker codes can be used by voters to confirm that their votes were not altered or tampered with and that they were properly counted, said Microsoft.

On the security front, "ElectionGuard" uses something called homomorphic encryption - which enables mathematical procedures "like counting - to be done with fully encrypted data".