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VeriSign's CEO, William Roper, has resigned from the company and its board. Roper has been president and CEO of VeriSign for a bit more than a year -- he was named in May 2007 after VeriSign's previous CEO, Stratton Sclavos, stepped down for undisclosed reasons. VeriSign announced today that its board elected the company's founder and first chief executive, Jim Bidzos, as interim chief executive and president and named him executive chairman.»

On Wednesday night, a federal judge ruled that Google must turn over YouTube user activity which includes videos watched, IP addresses, and usernames, to the media giant, Viacom as part of a long-running copyright infringement case. Kurt Opsahl of the Electronic Frontier Foundation says: "The Court's erroneous ruling is a set-back to privacy rights, and will allow Viacom to see what you are watching on YouTube. We urge Viacom to back off this overbroad request and Google to take all steps necessary to challenge this order and protect the rights of its users." However, according to CNET News, there is a heavy protective order in place that will keep individuals' personal information protected in this ruling. Update: PDF download of court order here.»

Hundreds of Lithuanian government and corporate Web sites were hacked and plastered with Soviet-era symbols and other digital graffiti this week in what appears to be a coordinated cyber attack launched by Russian hacker groups, reports Brian Krebs of the Washington Post. According to reports, Lithuanian officials did not directly accuse Russian hackers of initiating the attacks which are said to have come from foreign computers. However, iDefense, a security intelligence firm, based in Reston, VA, as linked the attacks to nationalistic Russian hacker groups protesting a new Lithuanian law banning the display of Soviet emblems, including honors won during World War II.»

A three-year-old mandate for IPv6 usage, put into place by the White House's Office of Management and Budget, went into effect June 30 -- an order requiring all U.S. government agencies to have the ability to transmit IPv6. But passing of the deadline doesn't mean that U.S. government agencies have actually begun using IPv6 for transit, reports Sean Michael Kerner of InternetNews. In fact, even with experts predicting that the current IPv4 Internet addressing scheme will be exhausted by 2010, the vast majority of all traffic in the U.S. remains IPv4.»

Broadband growth in the United States has effectively stalled over the past five months, a possible victim of the economic slowdown, according to a report released Wednesday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Some 55 percent of all adult Americans now have a high-speed internet connection, or a broadband connection, in their home, according to the report, "Home Broadband Adoption 2008." That number compares with 47 percent of adult Americans with broadband in early 2007, and 54 percent in December 2007. Hence broadband growth over the previous 12 or 13 months has dramatically tapered off.»

Computer security researchers from ETH Zurich, Google, and IBM have suggested that computer software would be more secure if it were labeled with an expiration date -- similar to perishable food product. Firefox 2 is considered to be the most secure browser since 83.3% of its users worldwide are running the current version. The issue of browser security matters more these days because more and more malware is targeting Web browser vulnerabilities. Remotely exploitable vulnerabilities have been on the rise since 2000 and accounted for 89.4% of vulnerabilities reported in 2007, according to the study, which claims that a "growing percentage of these remotely exploitable vulnerabilities are associated with Web browsers."»

The spam attacks which occurred this weekend and claimed to have come from Microsoft, are reported to have used Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) servers. Brian Krebs of Washington Post's Security Fix has investigated this issue -- from the report: "...to spammers and scammers accustomed to paying for all kinds of Web services with stolen credit cards, Amazon's service is another place to host their junk, said Suresh Ramasubramanian, head of anti-spam operations at Outblaze, a Hong Kong-based outfit that has listed all of Amazon's EC2 Internet space on its spam blacklists..." Also reported: "Anti-spam group Spamhaus also has flagged a large swath of Amazon's EC2 Internet address space on its "policy blocklist," which subscribers use to block e-mail from dynamic Internet addresses..."»

The U.S. military is looking for a contractor to patrol cyberspace, watching for warning signs of forthcoming terrorist attacks or other hostile activity on the Web. "If someone wants to blow us up, we want to know about it," Robert Hembrook, the deputy intelligence chief of the U.S. Army's Fifth Signal Command in Mannheim, Germany, told United Press International. "The purpose of the services will be to identify and assess stated and implied threat, antipathy, unrest and other contextual data relating to selected Internet domains," says the solicitation.»

The Wi-Fi Alliance has announced today its plans to make voice a part of Wi-Fi networks, and has introduced a program to certify products. According to the Wi-Fi Alliance, the Wi-Fi CERTIFIED Voice-Personal stamp of approval means a product is capable of making or handling good-quality voice calls in the home or a small office environment. Access points, wireless routers, handsets and laptops can all be tested and certified.»

The same Turkish Hacking Group, NetDevilz, responsible for the hacking and defacement of the popular photo sharing site, Photobucket, has been reported to have briefly succeeded in accessing ICANN and IANA domain names yesterday, June 26, 2008, and redirecting them to a page containing the message: "You think that you control the domains but you don't! Everybody knows wrong. We control the domains including ICANN! Don't you believe us?"...»

Gartner says the confusion that surrounds the term "cloud computing" signifies its potential to change the IT market. Gartner defines cloud computing as scalable, IT-related capabilities provided as a service on the internet. "When organizations cross the threshold between the internet as a communications channel and the deliberate delivery of service over the internet, then we truly start to head for an economy based on consumption of everything from storage to computation to video to finance deduction management," said Daryl Plummer, a Gartner analyst.»

Five leading IT vendors have announced the creation of the Industry Consortium for Advancement of Security on the Internet (ICASI), a nonprofit organization that intends to let vendors and customers work together on global IT security threats and resolve them in a government-neutral way. ICASI's founding members include, Cisco, IBM, Intel, Juniper and Microsoft. ICASI will target "global, multivendor cyber threats" to reduce their impact on end users. The group's statement says these attacks target multiple products or protocols in products, giving them a broader impact. These attacks pose problems not only for end user customers, but also for vendors, the group says.»

With Wi-Fi already available in many coffee shops and coming soon to some airplanes, it was only a matter of time before a U.S. carmaker started offering Wi-Fi access for automobiles. Keefe Leung, Advanced Connectivity Strategies for Chrysler says contrary to single broadband cards used with single laptops, turning the entire car into a hot-spot will allow all passengers to access the Internet using any device including mobile and gaming systems. Today, Chrysler introduced UConnect Web, an accessory that provides an in-car hot spot that will be available from Chrysler, Jeep and Dodge dealers starting in September, according to Chrysler's blog site.»

On June 30, U.S. federal government officials expect to declare an early victory on the IPv6 front. But they admit that meeting their much-heralded June 30 deadline for IPv6 compatibility is just the opening salvo of a long-term battle to get their networks ready for the Internet of the future. Under a White House policy issued in August 2005, all federal agencies must demonstrate the ability to pass IPv6 packets across their backbone networks by this deadline.»

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has just approved the relaxation of the rules for the introduction of new Top-Level Domains -- a move that could drastically change the Internet. The new decision -- some calling it of historic importance and others predictable -- will allow companies to register their brands as generic top-level domain names (TLDs). For instance, Microsoft could apply to have a TLD such as '.msn' and Apple apply for '.mac'.»

A major antispam organization is pushing a set of new best practices for ISPs to stop increasing volumes of spam from botnets. The guidelines, from the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG), were drawn up at a meeting in Germany last week and deal with forwarded email and email that is sent from dynamic IP addresses. From MAAWG's news release issued yesterday...»

In a recent interview by Krish Raghav, from Wall Street Journal's LiveMint.com, Howard Schmidt, an information networks expert and a senior cyber-security adviser in the Bush administration, talked about several hot Internet issues, including net neutrality and cyber-attacks. In this report, Raghav starts with the following statement: "In the last 12 months, some 10 Indian government ministry websites have been targets of cyber-attacks. Recently, security experts with Boston-based Core Security Technologies said such attackers could "gain control
of countries' water treatment plants, natural gas pipelines and other critical utilities".»

Charter Communications, the fourth-largest cable operator in the United States, announced yesterday that it has backed off a plan to monitor customers' Internet transmissions. The company had been planning to harvest the stream of data from each Internet customer for clues to their interests and then make money from advertisers who would use the information to target online pitches. The data-collection effort would have protected personal information, Charter officials said in describing the plan, but critics likened the practice to wiretapping.»

U.S. Federal Communications Commission member Jonathan Adelstein and several high-profile technology executives and industry advocates on Tuesday launched an initiative to make broadband access a national priority in the U.S., report Elizabeth Montalbano or IDG news service. At the Personal Democracy Forum in New York, Adelstein and others unveiled InternetforEveryone.org, a movement aimed at fostering a public dialogue among U.S. citizens to advise the government on how to set a national policy.»

The majority of the Internets malware-infected websites are located on Chinese networks, finds a new report released today by StopBadware.org, the university-based research initiative aimed at protecting users from dangerous software. The report also identifies the 10 network blocks that contain the largest number of badware sites. Six of the 10 are located in China.»