CircleID

The WiMAX Forum has released an Interactive Deployment Database, providing a resource of more than 300 WiMAX deployments across the world. Available for public use, this tool includes detailed information on each of the operators, stage and type of deployment, as well as spectrum utilized. The database is planned to be updated quarterly with the latest information.»

Online TV viewing has been gaining in popularity according to a recent survey of 10,000 households. Nearly one-fifth of American households who use the Internet watch television broadcasts online, double the viewership from 2006, The Conference Board and TNS reports. The top two destinations for online broadcasts are the official TV channel homepage and YouTube. "The shift from appointment TV to content on demand is well underway," says Michael Saxon, Senior VP at TNS. "Fundamentally, consumers expect content to be available when they want it, and on the screen of their choice -- TV, PC, or mobile. For consumers, PCs enhance content on demand from simply time-shifting to place-shifting. Online content can be viewed in any room in the house, or at work or school."»

Comcast has filed suit against the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) today in order to block the agency's decision to sanction Comcast for blocking certain Internet traffic. Comcast has released the following statement attributed to David L. Cohen, Executive Vice President of Comcast Corporation...»

Some of the harshest criticisms concerning Google's newly released Chrome browser related to its very broad license agreement. Consequently on Wednesday, Google said that it was planning to change Chrome's User License agreement where it appeared to give Google a perpetual right to use anything a user entered into the browser. As of Wednesday 2 p.m. PT, the terms were indeed changed with Section 11 now reading simply: "11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services."»

Security experts warn that there has been a threefold increase in the number of hijacked 'zombie' PCs over the last quarter. Brian Krebs reporting on WashingtonPost: "The estimates come from Shadowserver, a group of volunteers that monitor activity from robot networks or 'botnets,' large armies of hacked personal computers used for spam, phishing and all kinds of criminal activity. Shadowserver saw a rise from roughly 100,000 botted PCs to about 400,000 over the past three months." The apparent increase may be partly due to Shadowserver's deployment of more sensors detecting botnet attacks however it is also noted that criminals are getting more advanced at hiding bots.»

According to a report by the research firm Yankee Group, the global market for high-speed Internet services will be worth nearly $1 trillion by 2012. The broadband market, which includes revenue from services to consumers and businesses, as well as the amount spent on equipment for the underlying infrastructure, is currently worth $590 billion, according to the report. By 2012, the market will grow to more than $903 billion, it projected. The estimates are part of Yankee Group's concept of an "Anywhere" environment, where there is at least one broadband connection for every person on the planet. Emily Green, president and chief executive of Yankee Group, says it took 10 years for the Internet to reach one billion people and it will double its reach by 2012.»

Asia is expected to continue maintaining a strong growth in the mobile market due to sustained demands from China and India -- two of the world's largest mobile markets. However, "even if Asia is the world's largest broadband market in terms of absolute numbers, it lags the United States and Europe in overall penetration, with just 3.6 out of every 100 inhabitants connected to the high-speed Internet, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) said in a report."»

VeriSign today released the Domain Report for the second quarter of 2008, highlighting a continued growth of the Internet globally. At the midpoint of 2008, according to the report, there were 168 million domain name registrations across all Top Level Domain Names (TLDs) -- repersenting a four percent increase over the first quarter of 2008 and 22 percent growth over the same quarter last year. The base of Country Code Top Level Domain Names (ccTLDs) totaled 65 million domain names, a four percent increase quarter over quarter and a 27 percent increase year over year. VeriSign also reports on processing peak loads of more than 48 billion Domain Name System (DNS) queries per day in the second quarter of 2008.»

According to new data from TeleGeography research group, international Internet traffic grew 53% between mid-2007 and mid-2008, down from 61% the preceding year. Traffic growth between the US and Latin America was especially fast, surging 112%. In contrast, traffic on internet backbones between major cities in the relatively more mature US market rose a modest 47%. For the second consecutive year, according to the study, total international Internet capacity grew faster than total Internet traffic, leading to lower utilization levels on many internet backbones. Between 2007 and 2008, average traffic utilization levels decreased from 31% to 29%...»

Picasa Web Albums is the latest of Google's hosted services to be exploited by spammers while Adobe Flash redirection techniques are also being abused by spammers to host Flash-based .SWF, Shockwave Flash, files that cause Web browsers to re-direct to the spammer's site. "Over the course of this year, spammers have been highly focused on using as many of Google's free, hosted services as possible to distribute spam," says Mark Sunner, Chief Security Analyst of MessageLabs. "Not only are the links contained within the spam emails difficult for traditional anti-spam filters to detect as they appear to be legitimate URLs, but it is also much more unlikely such filters will block emails based on the URLs they contain without causing significant collateral damage."»

Just hours after the launch of Google's new web browser, reports have surfaced about its security vulnerability to carpet-bombing that can expose Windows users to hacker attacks. If exploited, hackers could potentially run unauthorized software on a victim's computer and then used to execute web-based computer attacks. Researcher Aviv Raff has discovered that it is possible to combine this vulnerability (also at one point affecting Apple Safari which uses the same WebKit technology used by Google's Chrome browser) and a Java bug discussed at this year's Black Hat conference, to trick users into launching executables direct from the new browser.»

Google announced on Monday that it has been working on an open-source browser known as Chrome and that it is going to release a beta version today in 100 countries. News about the launch of Google Chrome (originally planned for announcement after the holiday weekend) was accidentally emailed to outside sources according to reports. The new browser features include "isolated" tabs designed to prevent browser crashes and a more powerful JavaScript engine. Chrome is based on the open-source software Webkit which is also used to build Google's mobile software Android.»

Last week a DNS researcher proposed a method to limit the DNS cache poisoning attacks by addition of a single character to the popular BIND name server software. Robert Lemos of SecurityFocus reports: By changing a '<' to '<=' in a trust check in the Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND) server software, the patch would prevent a previously unknown server from poisoning the cache, unless the time to live (TTL) -- a limit on the age of a name server entry -- had expired. The suggestion, made by computer scientist Gabriel Somlo, would make exploitation of name server caches more difficult. However, the "one-character patch" also has some serious side effects, Dan Kaminsky..."»

Everyone knows that some people get more spam than others, but new research shows that it may have something to do with the first letter of your email address. Richard Clayton, a security researcher at the University of Cambridge in the U.K., says he found evidence that the more common the first letter in your email address is, the more spam you get: in other words, alice@company.com typically gets a higher volume of spam than quincy@company.com, or zach@company.com. He says that's simply because there are more combinations of names that begin with "A" than with "Q" or "Z."»

While Russia and Ukraine are generally regarded as today's main cybercrime hubs, "a lot of their infrastructure is housed in the west, in the United States to be precise," writes Vincent Hanna of Spamhaus Project. "Without exception, all of the major security organizations on the Internet we know of agree that the 'Home' of cybercrime in the western world is a place known as Atrivo/Intercage. We ourselves have not come to this conclusion lightly but from many years of dealing with criminal operations hosted by Atrivo/Intercage, gangs of cybercriminals -- mostly Russian and East European but with several US online crime gangs as well -- whose activities always lead back to servers run by Atrivo/Intercage..."»

Kenneth Corbin reporting on InterneNews: "On the eve of what could be a seismic shift in government, talk has been heating up about tech policy in the United States. But it's worthwhile to remember that it is the World Wide Web, and in that spirit researchers from Elon University and the Pew Internet and American Life Project canvassed the world's leading Internet activists to get an idea of what a global tech policy should look like. Pew today released the responses from the attendees of the second annual Internet Governance Forum (IGF), held November in Rio de Janeiro. A solid majority (66 percent) of respondents said there should be some form of global Internet bill of rights...."»

Kim Zetter reporting on Wired: Two security researchers have demonstrated a new technique to stealthily intercept internet traffic on a scale previously presumed to be unavailable to anyone outside of intelligence agencies like the National Security Agency. The tactic exploits the internet routing protocol BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) to let an attacker surreptitiously monitor unencrypted internet traffic anywhere in the world, and even modify it before it reaches its destination.»

Aircell, the company that provides the new Gogo Internet service on some American Airlines flights, is reported to be signing another airline to its service. Aircell management expects there will be some 2,000 commercial airplanes offering Gogo by the end of next year... "American Airlines has installed Gogo on 15 airplanes for flights between New York and Los Angeles, Miami, and San Francisco, and Delta says it'll have Gogo available across its domestic fleet of 330 commercial jets within a year. Delta is expected to expand that service to Northwest Airlines flights if the merger of those two companies goes through as planned..."»

Following last year's report on the Unity trans-Pacific submarine cable project, research company, TeleGeography reports today that "Google is working with a consortium of carriers planning to build an intra-Asian submarine cable system. The new cable, dubbed the Southeast Asia Japan Cable (SJC), would link Unity's landing station in Japan to Guam, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Thailand and Singapore." Report further indicates that the work is still in the planning phase. 'Given the current flurry of undersea cables under construction, the SJC cable will probably not be ready for service until 2011 at the earliest,' said TeleGeography analyst Alan Mauldin.»

An exclusive report from Scotland's Sunday Herald newspaper says that an international criminal gang has managed to steal the identities of an estimated eight million guests of the Best Western hotel chain in a hacking raid that could ultimately net billions of dollars in illegal funds. According to the report, late on Thursday night, a previously unknown Indian hacker successfully breached the IT defenses of the Best Western Hotel group's online booking system and sold details of how to access it through an underground network operated by the Russian mafia. It is a move that has been dubbed the greatest cyber-heist in world history. The attack scooped up the personal details of every single customer that has booked into one of Best Western's 1312 continental hotels since 2007.»