Law, Spam
/ May 14, 2008 12:52 PM PST
A federal judge in Los Angeles has awarded MySpace close to $230 million in its lawsuit against "Spam King" Sanford Wallace and his business partner Walter Rines. Judge Audrey B. Collins of United States District Court in the Central District of California ruled in MySpace's favor on Monday after the two men failed to show up in court, according to MySpace... While many spammers have been designated "Spam King," Wallace earned the title back in the late 1990s as a result of spam messages sent by his company Cyber Promotions. ›››
At the request of ICANN, Paul E. Black, a computer scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has developed an algorithm that may guide applicants in proposing new Top-Level Domains (TLDs). As new TLDs are added to the familiar .com, .info, and .net, the algorithm checks whether the newly proposed name is confusingly similar to existing ones by looking for visual likenesses in its appearance. ›››
Paul Twomey, chief executive of ICANN and member of the British-North American Committee, advises chief executives of the risks to business from cyber-espionage and how to deal with them... "There are reports of cyber-espionage against the US defense industry and the UK by China," said Twomey on Wednesday. ›››
Google search is available over IPv6 at ipv6.google.com (you'll need an IPv6 connection to view it)... From the official blog: "We hope that by allowing every computer and mobile device on the network to talk to each other directly -- an idea known as the "end-to-end principle" that was crucial to the original design of the Internet -- IPv6 will allow the continued growth of the Internet and enable new applications yet to be invented." ›››
Seven NATO nations gave their backing on Wednesday to a new cyber defense centre in Estonia, the ex-Soviet state which last year faced weeks of attacks on its Internet structure after a row with Russia. Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Spain agreed to help fund and staff the centre in the Estonian capital Tallinn. The United States will initially send an observer to the project, aimed at boosting defenses against such attacks. ›››
Security, Spam
/ May 12, 2008 8:51 AM PST
Researchers at Information Security Research Team (INSERT) have dissevered a serious flaw in Google's Gmail service. The group demonstrates how anyone with no special Internet access privileges other than being able to connect to SMTP (TCP port 25) and HTTP (TCP port 80) servers is able to exploit a single Gmail account in order to be granted nearly unrestricted access to Google's massive whitelisted SMTP relay infrastructure. Read more from the report... ›››
Public Interest Registry, the organization in charge of ".org" top-level domains, disclosed a planned fee increase in a May 1 letter to ICANN [PDF]. The fee increase does not require the ICANN's approval. PIR did not cite a reason in its letter. Earlier this year, VeriSign Inc., the company in charge of managing ".com" and ".net," also announced price increases. ›››
With IPv4 addresses in short supply, they could become increasingly interesting and marketable goods. This is a concern for Regional Internet Registries (RIR) that are in charge of managing IP address allocations. Heise Online reports: "If they officially permit transfers or sales in the future, they will be implicitly accepting commercialization and privatization. Any attempt to insist on the return of addresses to the RIRs could drive trading, which is probably inevitable, underground..." ›››
Internet address space long ago issued to San Francisco Bay Packet Radio, an organization that was involved way back in the 1970s in testing ARPANET, a predecessor to the global commercial Internet that we all use today. That organization was given the rights to do whatever it wanted with 134.17.0.0/16 address block. That entire swath of Internet space is now registered to an entity in Westminster, Colo., called SF Bay Packet Radio LLC, but except for a similar name, this company has no relation to San Francisco Bay Packet Radio... ? ›››
Spam
/ Apr 25, 2008 10:20 AM PST
Thirty years ago next week, Gary Thuerk, a marketer at the now-defunct computer firm Digital Equipment Corporation, sent an email to 393 users of Arpanet, the US government-run computer network that eventually became the internet. It was the first spam email ever. That commercial message, sent on 3 May 1978, drew a swift and negative reaction. ›››
The Internet is slowly inching closer to ratcheting up the security of its Domain Name System (DNS) server architecture: The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN ) plans to go operational with DNSSEC later this year in one of its domains. ›››
Google, in partnership with DomainTools, is now offering a Whois search capability which allows users to find registration and expiration dates of domain names when followed by the word 'whois' in Google's search box. A similar short-lived service was offered by Google a few years ago. ›››
Speaking at a Westminster eForum on Web 2.0 last week in London, Jim Cicconi, vice president of U.S. telecommunications giant AT&T has claimed, current systems that constitute the Internet will not be able to cope with the increasing amounts of video and user-generated content being uploaded. "The surge in online content is at the center of the most dramatic changes affecting the Internet today," he said. "In three years' time, 20 typical households will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today." ›››
Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) has posted its Change of Privacy Status... "As of June 10, 2008 the dot-ca (.ca) WHOIS will no longer release information about individual Registrants and their Adminstrative and Technical contacts, providing more thorough privacy protection for many of our Registrants." ›››
Seeking to make money from mistyped domains, some of the United States' largest ISPs instead created a massive security hole that allowed hackers to use domain names of eBay, PayPal, Google and Yahoo, and virtually any other large site. The vulnerability was a dream scenario for phishers and cyber attackers looking for convincing platforms to distribute fake websites or malicious code. The hole was quickly and quietly patched last Friday after IOActive security researcher Dan Kaminsky reported the issue to Earthlink and its technology partner, a British ad company called Barefruit. Earthlink users, and some Comcast subscribers, were at risk. ›››
The Soviet Union may be in the dustbin of history, but there's one place the socialist utopia lives on: cyberspace. Sixteen years after the superpower's collapse, Web sites ending in the Soviet ".su" domain name have been rising -- registrations increased 45 percent this year alone. ›››
The Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) has announced that Canadian Internet users have registered one million dot-ca (.ca) domains. Dot-ca ranks as the seventeenth largest Internet domain name registry when compared to generic domain names like dot-com and country specific domain names like dot-uk (United Kingdom). ›››