Education on the Internet

Zombie botnets attack global DNS servers - 07 Feb 2007 - IT Week

2007-02-08T22:50:00.000-08:00

Zombie botnets attack global DNS servers - 07 Feb 2007 - IT Week:

Sustained attack launched last night
Robert Jaques, vnunet.com, 07 Feb 2007

Zombie Hackers launched a sustained attack last night against key root servers which form the backbone of the internet.

Security firm Sophos said that botnets of zombie PCs bombarded the internet's domain name system (DNS) servers with traffic.

"These zombie computers could have brought the web to its knees," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos.

"While the resilience of the root servers should be commended, more needs to be done to tackle the root of the problem: the lax attitude of some users towards IT security."

Cluley explained that root servers, which manage the internet's DNS, help to convert website names to their numeric IP address, essentially acting as an address book for the internet.

Three of the 13 servers at the top of the DNS hierarchy are said to have felt the impact of the attack, although none is thought to have stopped working entirely.

"If the DNS servers were to fall over then pandemonium would ensue, emphasising the importance of properly defending all PCs from being taken over by hackers," said Cluley.

"A denial-of-service attack like this swamps web-connected servers with traffic from many computers around the globe.

"It is a bit like 20 hippos trying to get through a revolving door at the same time: there is no route through and everything clogs up.

"Fortunately the system is designed to be extremely resilient to these kind of attacks, and the average man in the street will not have noticed any impact. "

Internet to revolutionize TV in 5 years: Gates

2007-01-27T21:39:00.000-08:00

Internet to revolutionize TV in 5 years: Gates
Sat Jan 27, 2007 11:05 AM ET

By Ben Hirschler

DAVOS, Switzerland (Reuters) - The Internet is set to revolutionize television within five years, due to an explosion of online video content and the merging of PCs and TV sets, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said on Saturday.

"I'm stunned how people aren't seeing that with TV, in five years from now, people will laugh at what we've had," he told business leaders and politicians at the World Economic Forum.

The rise of high-speed Internet and the popularity of video sites like Google Inc.'s YouTube has already led to a worldwide decline in the number hours spent by young people in front of a TV set.

In the years ahead, more and more viewers will hanker after the flexibility offered by online video and abandon conventional broadcast television, with its fixed program slots and advertisements that interrupt shows, Gates said.

"Certain things like elections or the Olympics really point out how TV is terrible. You have to wait for the guy to talk about the thing you care about or you miss the event and want to go back and see it," he said.

"Internet presentation of these things is vastly superior."

At the moment, watching video clips on a computer is a separate experience from watching sitcoms or documentaries on television.

But convergence is coming, posing new challenges for TV companies and advertisers.

"Because TV is moving into being delivered over the Internet -- and some of the big phone companies are building up the infrastructure for that -- you're going to have that experience all together," Gates said.

YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley said the impact on advertising would be profound, with the future promising far more targeted ads tailored to each viewer's profile.

"In the coming months we're going to do experiments to see how people interact with these ads to build an effective model that works for advertisers and works for users," he said.

Advertisers are already racing to adapt their strategies to the growing power of the Web, and more and more promotional cash is tipped to migrate from television to Web sites in future.

TIME.com: Person of the Year: You

2006-12-17T17:59:00.000-08:00

TIME.com: Person of the Year: You -- Dec. 25, 2006:

Yes, you. You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world.

By LEV GROSSMAN

Posted Wednesday, Dec. 13, 2006
The "Great Man" theory of history is usually attributed to the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who wrote that "the history of the world is but the biography of great men." He believed that it is the few, the powerful and the famous who shape our collective destiny as a species. That theory took a serious beating this year.

To be sure, there are individuals we could blame for the many painful and disturbing things that happened in 2006. The conflict in Iraq only got bloodier and more entrenched. A vicious skirmish erupted between Israel and Lebanon. A war dragged on in Sudan. A tin-pot dictator in North Korea got the Bomb, and the President of Iran wants to go nuclear too. Meanwhile nobody fixed global warming, and Sony didn't make enough PlayStation3s.

But look at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story, one that isn't about conflict or great men. It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

The tool that makes this possible is the World Wide Web. Not the Web that Tim Berners-Lee hacked together (15 years ago, according to Wikipedia) as a way for scientists to share research. It's not even the overhyped dotcom Web of the late 1990s. The new Web is a very different thing. It's a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it's really a revolution.

And we are so ready for it. We're ready to balance our diet of predigested news with raw feeds from Baghdad and Boston and Beijing. You can learn more about how Americans live just by looking at the backgrounds of YouTube videos—those rumpled bedrooms and toy-strewn basement rec rooms—than you could from 1,000 hours of network television.

And we didn't just watch, we also worked. Like crazy. We made Facebook profiles and Second Life avatars and reviewed books at Amazon and recorded podcasts. We blogged about our candidates losing and wrote songs about getting dumped. We camcordered bombing runs and built open-source software.

America loves its solitary geniuses—its Einsteins, its Edisons, its Jobses—but those lonely dreamers may have to learn to play with others. Car companies are running open design contests. Reuters is carrying blog postings alongside its regular news feed. Microsoft is working overtime to fend off user-created Linux. We're looking at an explosion of productivity and innovation, and it's just getting started, as millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into the global intellectual economy.

Who are these people? Seriously, who actually sits down after a long day at work and says, I'm not going to watch Lost tonight. I'm going to turn on my computer and make a movie starring my pet iguana? I'm going to mash up 50 Cent's vocals with Queen's instrumentals? I'm going to blog about my state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street? Who has that time and that energy and that passion?

The answer is, you do. And for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME's Person of the Year for 2006 is you.

Sure, it's a mistake to romanticize all this any more than is strictly necessary. Web 2.0 harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom. Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred.

But that's what makes all this interesting. Web 2.0 is a massive social experiment, and like any experiment worth trying, it could fail. There's no road map for how an organism that's not a bacterium lives and works together on this planet in numbers in excess of 6 billion. But 2006 gave us some ideas. This is an opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding, not politician to politician, great man to great man, but citizen to citizen, person to person. It's a chance for people to look at a computer screen and really, genuinely wonder who's out there looking back at them. Go on. Tell us you're not just a little bit curious.

From the Dec. 25, 2006 issue of TIME magazine

North Gate News Online :: Microenterprise Loans Lift Women Out of Poverty and Create Jobs

2006-11-30T21:17:00.000-08:00

North Gate News Online :: Microenterprise Loans Lift Women Out of Poverty and Create Jobs:

By Becca MacLaren, November 30, 2006 10:11 AM

SAN FRANCISCO -- A born entrepreneur, Shoshana Frumkin saw a niche in the market and knew just how to fill it. But there was a catch: she had neither savings nor credit and not a lick of experience.

So how did she, in just six years, move off welfare to become head of a thriving massage business? She took out a small loan and launched a microenterprise, called On the Spot Massage, which now provides chair massage services in retail stores around the Bay Area.

Frumkin is just one of hundreds of women who have moved out of poverty by launching a microenterprise, which is defined as a business that employs fewer than five employees and requires no more than $35,000 in start-up capital.

Microenterprise businesses have been growing rapidly in California and accounted for 77 percent of all new job growth from 1999 to 2003, according to the California Association for Microenterprise Opportunity (CAMEO). From 2000 to 2001, when nearly 200,000 jobs were lost to the largest employers in California, micro entrepreneurs created more than 62,000 new ones.

"People think of these businesses as small and not very powerful," said Heather Gray, a CAMEO program manager. "But collectively, they make a huge difference."

One San Francisco non-profit, the Women's Initiative for Self-Employment, estimated that for every $1 it invested in business training for low-income women, its clients generated $23 for the local economy within 18 months. They did this by going off public assistance, creating new jobs, and paying taxes.

State and city legislators are starting to take notice.

Assemblyman Leland Yee (D-San Francisco/Daly City) recently sponsored a bill to provide $5 million for grants to microenterprise development programs. Though the bill was unsuccessful, Yee plans to reintroduce it again next year.

The city of San Francisco has also stepped up, setting aside $500,000 for grants to programs that support women's microenterprise.

Microenterprise businesses are proving particularly effective for low-income, minority and immigrant women, who often face limitations in the workplace as a result of poverty, limited education, and care giving responsibilities. In California, wage jobs for women pay 79 cents on the dollar earned by a man.

Microenterprise offers a solution. With a small loan, women can go into business for themselves and—all at once—earn a living, care for dependents, create new jobs and give back to their communities.

It's multi-tasking of the highest order.

Frumkin, 50, has come a long way from the 14 years she spent on welfare.

"I don't worry so much about making it to the end of the month and having food on the table," she said.

To patch together enough money to support her child, she started an informal housecleaning business in the late 1980s.

A certified organic farmer, nutrition consultant and birthing coach, Frumkin had one of her "perpetual ideas" after completing a massage course.

She convinced several of her housecleaning clients to let her visit their corporate offices to offer 10-20 minute chair massages. Lugging a heavy drummer's stool and pillows across the city, she knew she was onto something.

"If I was going to choose, it [massage] was the thing that could be a duplicable business," she said.

About a year later, the massage chair was invented.

In 1998, she took out a $10,000 loan from the Women's Initiative, which allowed her to establish a line of credit with the Small Business Administration.

Today, On the Spot Massage employs 50 independent contractors who offer chair massages at a handful of Bay Area retail stores like Whole Foods and on-site to clients like Amtrak and the Discovery Channel.

"Little by little, I'm casting my net out," said Frumkin. She hired a full-time office manager and plans to take on a sales campaign manager.

Frumkin recently started renting out a storefront space at Crocker Galleria in the heart of San Francisco's financial district.

"We create a great environment where busy working people can get out of rat race for a minute," she said.

Eventually, she wants to make On the Spot "the household name of chair massage."

"I'm pushing to create a bigger team to allow other women to play the game," said Frumkin.

Community-minded businesses with well-paid, flexible jobs are the norm for women's microenterprise. On average, women micro entrepreneurs pay their employees $14.49 per hour, or more than double the state's minimum wage, according to Women's Initiative.

They are also generous. Seventy-five percent of the women surveyed in the Women's Initiative study reported donating money or in-kind services last year.

Linda Jones-Mixon, 58, opened Waddle and Swaddle, a store for new mothers in Berkeley, to provide empathy, resources and information.

The store on Shattuck Avenue has pale yellow-colored walls and neatly stacked piles of baby clothes. There are strollers parked near the door alongside a rack filled with pamphlets and other resources. In the back room, customers find a comfortable spot for breastfeeding or changing diapers.

"New mothers are so cut off," said Jones-Mixon, who has been a doula, or birthing coach, for nearly 20 years. "Women come in [the store] and tell me, ‘It feels so good here,'" she said. "That makes my heart sing."

In 2000, as she prepared to open Waddle and Swaddle, Jones-Mixon had a referral-based clientele from her doula business and a keen sense of what new mothers wanted and needed.

She took a Women's Initiative course on writing a business plan that helped her fill in the blanks.

Jones-Mixon now has three part-time employees, two of whom bring their babies to work.

A sign posted above the cash register alerts shoppers that the baby in the crib is "not (usually) for sale."

"It's hard work and long hours…but I love it," she said.

Connie Rivera, 35, expressed a similar enthusiasm.

"I always encourage women who are scared. I tell them they can do it too," said Rivera, who opened Mixcoatl Arts and Crafts, a store in San Francisco's Mission District, in 2004.

For immigrant women like Rivera, a microenterprise loan is one of the only ways to establish credit. "You feel all the doors are closed to you," she said of her experience seeking traditional bank loans.

More than 40 percent of the Women's Initiative's clients are Latina and their 20-session training program is offered in both English and Spanish. Twenty-eight percent of their clients are African-American and 95 percent are extremely low or very low-income.

These are the women who have the most to gain—and to offer.

"Low income women are hardworking and creative," said Julie Castro Abrams, CEO of the Women's Initiative for Self Employment. "They'll do anything to make a better life for their families."

VOA News - The Internet -- For Better or Worse, Part of the Fabric of Life

2006-11-29T18:51:00.000-08:00

VOA News - The Internet -- For Better or Worse, Part of the Fabric of Life:

It's called the Virtual World, but many people are making it more and more part of their real worlds. It's modern-day life on the Internet. Paul Sisco takes a look at where we are -- and where the Internet could take us from here.

Craig Barrett

The Internet -- the Web -- today truly bringing the world's information to our fingertips. Intel chairman Craig Barrett calls it "the individual's window to the world." "It impacts everything you do, how you work, how you play, how you entertain yourself, how you learn," he says.

From its modest beginnings -- networking four computers at the U.S. Defense Department in 1969 -- it has become a sometimes confusing, beautiful, massive, information network.

Lee Rainie is a computer industry analyst. He is Director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project. "We've asked people about how they feel about the Internet. Some people think it is kind of like the mall. Other people think that the Internet is predominantly a peepshow, and some people think the Internet is more or less a telephone system, and a wonderful way for people to communicate with others.

Tim Berners-Lee

More than a billion people are now online. That's good and bad, says Tim Berners-Lee, credited as the inventor of the World Wide Web. "When you talk about the good side and the bad side, really you're talking about humanity. It's humanity that puts things on the Web and it's humanity which decides what its going to be."

Increasingly this new frontier is creating virtual worlds, like the Web site called "Second Life," where stay-at-home mother-of-two Hilary Connors goes to play.

“I can go out. I can go to live music. Yes, it is an escape, and there's no laundry there at Second Life."

Second Life was founded by Philip Rosedale. "Second Life empowers us to reach out and make social contact with each other in a way that in the real world, we just can't do."

In fact, forecasters say we're likely to be spending more and more time in the virtual world.

Industry analyst Paul Saffo says, "The excitement around this is the same as the excitement was around e-mail 20 years ago. We'll end up spending as much time in these environments, in a decade or two as we do in e-mail today."

Military personnel overseas stay in touch with home by using computers to communicate with text, photos, audio and video

But the so-called "Virtual world" can also be very real -- dealing with real people and their real lives. Sonya Foster, a mother of five stationed in Iraq keeps in touch with her family via the Internet.

So too do Amie Tugwell and her family. Her husband, Wayne, is serving with the U.S. Army in Iraq and "joins them for dinner" when he can. "The Internet has just been my life line." Wayne adds, "I cannot wait to get off work every day, and turn on the Web cam and be with you guys." Amie says it makes a world of difference in their lives “to see his face and his smile, when he sees us, that makes all the difference in the world."

Whether it's part of a virtual world or the real World, the Internet is keeping people all over the world connected.

Internet giants take on battle for Earth in 3D | NEWS.com.au

2006-11-26T13:11:00.000-08:00

Internet giants take on battle for Earth in 3D | NEWS.com.au:

Internet giants have embarked on a race to become the first 3D cartographers of the world.

The result is expected to be an online map that allows web surfers to land in a city from the sky, travel its streets and see its hotels, shops and attractions without having to visit in person.

The rival schemes, costing hundreds of millions of dollars, are based on Google Earth, the search engine's existing 2D photographic map of the world, and Microsoft's Virtual Earth, a similar system.

In a new push, Microsoft last month launched Virtual Earth 3D, which has detailed three-dimensional replicas of the centres of 15 US cities, including New York and Los Angeles.

Both services rely on detailed satellite images from NASA and other space agencies and governments, which enable users to zoom in from 300km in space to pictures of the roof of their own home or of elephants roaming the African plains.

Microsoft is now commissioning photographers to take millions of pictures of urban landscapes from planes, vans and motorbikes. The images are patched together using digital imaging software to create 3D buildings that users can enter, walk past or fly by.

Google is taking the cheaper option of inviting users to create its virtual cities. In March, the company bought SketchUp, an internet tool that lets people create their own 3D images of buildings. It plans to add the best of these to Google Earth this year.

As the rival schemes develop, buildings will become interactive, enabling users to virtually enter them, obtain information, buy goods inside and talk to other cyber visitors. Eventually, landscapes could be included.

The move may bring about a transformation in how people use the internet. Instead of relying on traditional search engines, in which they enter words into boxes on screen, users would be able to navigate the world using a virtual replica.

They could, for example, "walk" the streets of New York online or choose items from a supermarket aisle from their living room while gossiping with fellow shoppers about the prices.

Internet analyst Greg Sterling said: "A seed is being planted that could grow into a range of things that will be very interesting."

Microsoft and Google launched their photographic mapping services last year, since when it is estimated they have each been downloaded more than 100 million times. Microsoft's early 3D service has few extras beyond traffic information and adverts.

The Sunday Times, London, in The Australian

Internet Extends Reach Of Bangladeshi Villagers - washingtonpost.com

2006-11-22T01:10:00.000-08:00

Internet Extends Reach Of Bangladeshi Villagers - washingtonpost.com:

Cellphone-Linked Computers Help Break Rural Isolation

By Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, November 22, 2006; A12

CHARKHAI, Bangladesh -- The village doctor's diagnosis was dire: Marium needed immediate surgery to replace two heart valves.

The 28-year-old mother of three said she was confused and terrified. She could barely imagine open-heart surgery. She had no idea how her family of farm laborers could pay for an operation that would cost $4,000.

The next day, Sept. 16, her father went to see Mahbubul Ambia, who had recently installed the only Internet connection for 20 miles in far northeastern Bangladesh. Ambia sat down at a computer, connected to the Internet by a cable plugged into his cellphone, and searched for cardiac specialists in Dhaka, the capital, 140 miles away. He found one and made an appointment for Marium, who like many people here goes by just one name. The specialist examined her and said she needed only a routine surgical procedure that cost $500.

"I felt a very deep sense of relief," Marium said.

Villages in one of the world's poorest countries, long isolated by distance and deprivation, are getting their first Internet access, all connected over cellphones. And in the process, millions of people who have no land-line telephones, and often lack electricity and running water, in recent months have gained access to services considered basic in richer countries: weather reports, e-mail, even a doctor's second opinion.

Cellphones have become a new bridge across the digital divide between the world's rich and poor, as innovators use the explosive growth of cellphone networks to connect people to the Internet.

Bangladesh now has about 16 million cellphone subscribers -- and 2 million new users each month -- compared with just 1 million land-line phones to serve a population of nearly 150 million people.

Since February, Internet centers have opened in well over 100 Bangladeshi villages, and a total of 500 are scheduled to be open by the end of the year. All of them are in places where there are no land lines and the connections will be made exclusively over cellphone networks.

Before February, analysts said, only 370,000 Bangladeshis had access to the Internet. But now millions of villagers have access to information and services that had been available only by walking or taking long and expensive bus rides, or were beyond their reach altogether.

People now download job applications and music, see school exam results, check news and crop prices, make inexpensive Internet phone calls or use Web cameras to see relatives. Students from villages with few books now have access to online dictionaries and encyclopedias.

"We could not imagine where this technology has taken us in such a short time," said Mufizur Rahman, 48, a grocery shop owner in Charkhai, a town of about 40,000 people whose streets are filled with colorful three-wheeled bicycle rickshaws, and where there are almost no cars.

"For the First World, this is minor," he said. "But this is a big thing for us."

The Internet centers are being set up by GrameenPhone, a cellphone provider partly owned by the Grameen Bank, which shared this year's Nobel Peace Prize with its founder, Muhammad Yunus.

The centers are building on a cellphone network created over the past decade by a Grameen Bank program that helped provide more than 250,000 cellphones in villages. When that program started in 1997, only 1.5 percent of the population had access to a telephone; that has risen to more than 10 percent.

Staying Connected

Goats grazed on litter outside Ambia's little Internet shop in Charkhai, where merchants sell bright red tomatoes and honking ducks in the crowded central market.

Bangladesh, where the United Nations says average annual income is about $440, is one of the most densely populated countries in the world, with its 150 million people crammed into an area roughly the size of Iowa.

Ambia's shop sits wedged between a stall where men sell huge sacks of rice and one selling cheap plastic shoes. By midmorning on a steamy September day, at least 20 people stood in line waiting to use one of Ambia's two Chinese-made computers.

A woman named Aleya, 55, sat down on a small plastic chair and handed Ambia a scrap of paper with a London phone number. She said that her 18-year-old daughter was getting married and that she was calling her uncle in England to ask him to help pay for it. Aleya said her husband is a construction worker who earns about $70 a month, barely enough to feed their five children.

Ambia dialed the number on the keyboard of his computer, connected by a cable to a Motorola cellphone. The call connected using VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) technology, which allows calls to be placed from a computer to another computer or a telephone anywhere in the world -- for little or no cost.

VoIP technology is growing rapidly. One of the biggest brands, Skype, was founded in August 2003 and now has 136 million registered users. Companies such as Vonage and Yahoo also offer the service and are expanding exponentially.

Aleya picked up the small telephone handset connected to the computer and her face lit up. Her uncle, who owns a restaurant in London, promised that he'd make arrangements to send money for the wedding.

The five-minute call cost 8 Bangladeshi taka, about 11 cents.

"An 8-taka call has earned me thousands," Aleya said with a broad smile.

Before Ambia's center opened in February, Aleya said, she would have called her uncle on a borrowed cellphone at a cost of more than $2, her husband's daily wage.

The only other option would have been to take a bumpy bus to Sylhet, a city about 20 miles down the road, to make the call from an Internet cafe there. She said rutted roads and ancient buses making frequent stops often turned that into an all-day errand that would cost her nearly $3.

As Aleya spoke on the phone, Komoruddin, 50, was waiting to make a call to his son, an electrician living in Saudi Arabia. Komoruddin said he and his other son and five daughters live largely on the money his son sends home.

"I used to have to make a plan and spend a whole day to make a call. Now I can just come in here and relax," he said. "I never thought I'd see anything like this here. Some people still don't believe it."

Cyber Vows

Ambia, a lanky 26-year-old, said he was running a small shop doing cellphone repairs when he heard about GrameenPhone's plan to create hundreds of village Internet centers.

"I love browsing the Internet, but I used to have to go to Sylhet to do it," he said. "When I saw the opportunity to combine browsing and business, I took it."

He said his business is growing fast, fueled by villagers' delight at being able to connect with a world beyond theirs. Ambia also sells cellphones in his shop, and each month he signs up about 500 new customers, who pay about $4 to activate a phone.

Ambia said Internet access is a logical next step in Charkhai's digital evolution. In recent months, he noted, local people have been making long walks through the fields and crossing wide rivers to log into cyberspace.

Before, getting a passport application could take weeks, or would require a bus trip to Sylhet. News of overseas job opportunities used to come by word of mouth. But now people browse online employment bulletin boards, then use the center's scanner to submit completed applications for jobs that before they might never have known about.

Students cram into the two-room center to use computers to check results of their standardized exams, instead of walking miles or taking a bus ride to get them.

Ambia has created a database of land and houses for sale around Charkhai, which better-off Bangladeshis in London or the Middle East use to browse for investments in their homeland.

He is working on databases listing doctors and other basic services. He said a program would soon begin to allow local doctors and their patients to hold video conferences to consult with specialists in Dhaka.

"People are just beginning to know about this," he said. "They are excited to get this kind of information."

One of Ambia's most popular services is video conferencing, using the little Hyundai Web camera mounted atop one of his computer monitors.

Entire families crowd in front of the center's camera to hold video conferences with relatives overseas. Ambia said a mother came in recently to hold up a newborn to give the father, working overseas, his first glimpse of his child.

"People even come here to see how things are being cooked in London, how they are cutting the fish," he said.

And Ambia was preparing to add a 21st-century twist to a traditional ritual, by hosting his first video conference wedding.

Aslam Ahmed, 25, said he planned to sit in front of the Web camera in Charkhai and marry his girlfriend, Jasmine, 17, who would be in front of a Web camera in her home in London.

Weddings conducted over the telephone are common in this part of Bangladesh. Many marriages are still arranged between conservative Muslim families, and often the bride or groom is living overseas.

A marriage certificate is also a fast route to getting a work visa to leave Bangladesh -- and conducting the wedding by phone is faster and cheaper than arranging for the overseas partner and family to travel home for a wedding.

An imam is present at both ends of the call, along with a civil official who certifies the vows. Duplicate sets of paperwork are then exchanged by mail for everyone's signatures.

Ahmed and his bride had planned a wedding by cellphone and knew they would have to pay $30 or $40 just for the call. The video conference over the Internet, however, would cost a fraction of that, so the imams conducting the ceremony would not have to rush through the prayers to save money.

Jasmine's family moved to London in 1986. Ahmed said he had met her just once, in 2002, when her family came back to Charkhai to visit. They spoke on the phone and exchanged e-mail regularly after that -- and once Ambia's center opened, they saw each other regularly by video conference, even though they live 5,000 miles apart.

"I don't know what other people say, but as far as I'm concerned she's Miss World," Ahmed said.

Blog the Vote on NOW

2006-11-20T20:17:00.000-08:00

About the Show 9/15/06
Video

Left-leaning political bloggers - people who share their opinions through online journals - are determined to demonstrate their real world influence in the upcoming mid-term elections. But will they finally make political headway, or just more hype?

NOW visited one of the blogosphere's biggest events, the YearlyKos convention in Las Vegas, to see if the bloggers can turn their online advocacy into on-the-ground results. One of the bloggers' favorite national candidates is Montana Democrat Jon Tester, who's now locked in a close race for the US Senate seat held by Republican Conrad Burns. But how much of a role did bloggers play in Tester's initial success? Will they be able to push him on to victory in November?

Now also visited with Montana blogger Jay Stevens, who's doing his best locally to help Tester. "I'm a middle-aged guy with two kids, a mortgage, and a car. I think that's what most bloggers are like," says Stevens. He rejects the stereotype that bloggers are a bunch of radical, left-wing crazies. "The question shouldn't be, 'Why are there so many radical bloggers?' The question really should be 'Why are there so many angry people blogging?'"

NOW also talks to Markos Moulitsas, founder of DailyKos, one of the Internet's biggest and most influential political blog sites. "You have a couple million people reading liberal blogs...and they're looking for ways to get involved. And they're looking for ways to participate and take hold of their own democracy. And that is powerful," says Moulitsas.

"What's important, if this movement is to succeed, is for the people who are reading DailyKos and other blogs to then turn off their computers and go talk to people off-line. And that's where the 'preach to the choir' part ends."

Find blogs in your state:

Progressive/Liberal Blogs, state by state

Conservative Blogs, state by state

US: Newspapers losing ground to Internet in US

2006-11-20T17:45:00.000-08:00

US: Newspapers losing ground to Internet in US

Major newspaper owners face rapid decline in readership and scrambling for ways to sustain themselves

Dawn
Sunday, November 19, 2006

By Rob Lever

Washington --- The US newspaper industry is facing growing turmoil as readers and advertisers increasingly turn to newer media, pressuring some of the industry's most prominent players.

Uncertainty over the future of Tribune Co., an industry leader that owns the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, is highlighting the shake-up in newspapers and other media.

The Chicago-based company, under pressure from shareholders, is exploring strategic options to boost the company's value, and has been entertaining interest from other media groups and private equity investors to sell all or part of the group.

This year, Knight-Ridder Newspapers was bought out and broken into several pieces, placing prestigious dailies such as the Miami Herald and Philadelphia Inquirer under new ownership.

Elsewhere in the media sector, Readers' Digest was sold this week to a private equity firm for $2.4 billion. And reports have been swirling that other papers, including the Boston Globe, now owned by the New York Times, might be up for sale.

Meanwhile, newspaper readership has been sputtering.

A recent survey showed just 49.9 per cent of US adults read a daily newspaper in 2006, down from 58.6 per cent in 1998 and a far cry from the 80.8 per cent in 1964, according to the Newspaper Association of America

The Audit Bureau of Circulation said the 770 newspapers it surveys had a combined circulation in 2006 of 43.7 million, a drop of 2.8 per cent in a year.

For Sunday papers, readership was 47.6 million, down 3.4 per cent.

By contrast, 56.9 million people visited a newspaper website at least once during September, up from 53.1 million last October.

Advertising revenues for newspapers grew just 1.5 per cent last year to $47.4 billion even though the companies saw a 31 percent jump in online advertising.

"The newspaper industry is going through a transition and it is going to be bumpy for a while," said John Morton, a veteran industry analyst and consultant who operates Morton Research.

Morton said profit margins "will be under pressure" but that newspapers as a whole have margins that were "still quite high" of around 18 per cent this year for the major publicly traded firms.

Date Posted: 11/19/2006

Clearwire plugs in wireless Internet service

2006-11-15T18:27:00.000-08:00

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Clearwire plugs in wireless Internet service
PR campaign touts high-speed network

By JOHN COOK
P-I REPORTER

Clearwire is sparing little expense in introducing its high-speed wireless Internet service in the Seattle area.

Beginning at 7 Wednesday night, the heavily funded Kirkland company will put on a laser light show at the Space Needle that will enshrine the landmark in Clearwire's blue and green colors and logo. For those who can't view the Space Needle, the company has hired trucks to drive around the city and project the Clearwire logo on buildings.

The PR stunts follow a barrage of newspaper, radio and taxicab advertisements over the past few weeks, with slogans such as "Change is in the Air."

Although Clearwire is not saying how much it is spending on the marketing campaign, it does highlight the importance of Seattle to its overall goals.

And it is not just because this is the hometown of Clearwire or its billionaire founder, cell-phone pioneer Craig McCaw.

The network Clearwire is unveiling today -- which allows customers to connect to the Internet wirelessly wherever one can find a power outlet -- is the biggest in the three-year history of the company.

Stretching from Everett to Tacoma and east to Issaquah, the network covers a metropolitan area of about 2 million people. That represents about a 25 percent increase in terms of potential customer base, said Ben Wolff, who, along with McCaw, serves as co-CEO of Clearwire.

Before the Seattle launch, Clearwire operated in 12 states and 31 markets, with networks covering cities such as Amarillo, Texas; Duluth, Minn.; and Lewiston, Idaho. Its network now covers areas with a population of about 8 million people, with Wolff saying that the company has more than 160,000 subscribers nationwide.

The service provides a wireless connection through a Clearwire modem that plugs into any power source, such as a power outlet or a car cigarette lighter.

Moving into a large city such as Seattle has numerous regulatory and network hurdles.

"When you look at putting up hundreds of cell sites in a single market as opposed to 20 to 30 in a smaller market, from a logistics perspective, it is a lot more to get done and have come out at the same time," Wolff said. He declined to disclose the cost of the Seattle network, which has been under development for about 18 months.

Clearwire faces plenty of competition in Seattle, from cable Internet operators such as Comcast to DSL providers such as Qwest. Wireless giants Verizon and Sprint Nextel also have upgraded their data networks recently.

Some Seattle-area customers who have signed up with Clearwire in recent weeks have been pleased, while others say it is not quite as fast as cable Internet. For $42 per month, Clearwire offers connection speeds of 1.5 megabits per second. Meanwhile, Comcast, the largest cable Internet provider in the state, touts speeds of 6 Mbps at a cost of $42.95 per month.

"If you look at our high speeds, those are things that Clearwire can't match," Comcast spokesman Steve Kipp said.

Wolff notes that speed isn't everything.

"It really depends on what your application is going to be; certainly (Clearwire) has other features and benefits than just focusing on speed," said Wolff, touting the portability that allows people to take their Internet connection with them.

Ryan Murphy has discovered some of those benefits. The 25-year-old account manager recently chose Clearwire for his Central District home because Comcast does not offer service in his neighborhood. He also does not have conventional telephone service, which ruled out DSL.

"I'm sure Comcast is faster, but for the money and lack of hassle, Clearwire seems to have the advantage," he said. "One of the main attractions to me was that we weren't tied to the cable jack; you can locate the modem wherever you like."

Murphy also said he was happy with the installation, saying it took less than five minutes to get the Internet connection running. "It was definitely the best setup process I've every gone through," he said.

That simplicity is one the five pillars of Clearwire's business, with Wolff rattling off the other four: speed, portability, reliability and affordability.

Wolff said that Clearwire is accustomed to competing with established Internet service providers in each of those areas.

"The real reason we get traction in markets is because our service is so different from what else is available," he said.

John Chapple, a former executive at McCaw Cellular who most recently ran Kirkland-based Nextel Partners, thinks customers will take a serious look at Clearwire.

"I think it is fair that a lot of people will be assessing it," he said. Customers will have plenty of chances to decide, with Clearwire opening 10 retail operations in the Seattle area and selling service through 180 independent dealers.

He said it is too early to say whether WiMax providers such as Clearwire or traditional wireless companies such as Verizon will win the battle.

But Chapple said that his old boss has a knack for competing against established players. "There were a lot of people in the 1980s that said Craig McCaw will never be able to put together a national wireless network. And guess what? He did. I would never bet against Craig McCaw."

Some big-name investors are certainly betting on McCaw. Clearwire has raised more than $1 billion in capital this year, with the bulk of the money coming from Intel and Motorola.

P-I reporter John Cook can be reached at 206-448-8075 or johncook@seattlepi.com.

Internet Advertising Inches Up

2006-11-15T18:24:00.000-08:00

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Internet Advertising Inches Up

Despite the headlines about $4 billion in ad money, according to the Internet Advertising Bureau, revenue from online advertising in Q3 was up just 2 percent over the second quarter of this year. While that's a 33 percent jump over a year ago, the rate of growth between quarters has slowed from last year.

Last year online ad revenue grew by 4.7 percent between the second and third quarters, so could we be seeing the brakes slowly being applied to online advertising?

Earlier this month JupiterResearch said that four categories -- media and entertainment, financial services, travel, and automotive -- will continue to represent the majority of spending in online advertising (57 percent) through 2011. Wasn't Yahoo just attributing its slowing growth to financial and automotive spending? Maybe these industries are where the slowdown in Q2-3 spending occurred.

Jupiter says that one quarter of all search advertising will come from media and entertainment, which bodes well for video ads since you would expect them to use rich media ads. Today that's not really happening -- I searched for Bruce Willis on Google, Yahoo and MSN, and got zero rich media ads in return. For shame. Posted By John Gartner at 12:37 PM

Reporters sans frontières - International

2006-11-07T23:02:00.000-08:00

Reporters sans frontières - International:
24 hours against Internet censorship launched, list of the 13 Internet enemies in 2006 published

The list of 13 Internet enemies

Three countries - Nepal, Maldives and Libya - have been removed from the annual list of Internet enemies, which Reporters Without Borders publishes today. But many bloggers were harassed and imprisoned this year in Egypt, so it has been added to the roll of shame reserved for countries that systematically violate online free expression.

Countries in alphabetical order :

- Belarus

The government has a monopoly of telecommunications and does not hesitate to block access to opposition websites if it feels the need, especially at election time. Independent online publications are also often hacked. In March 2006, for example, several websites critical of President Alexandre Lukashenko mysteriously disappeared from the Internet for several days.

Burma

The Burmese government’s Internet policies are even more repressive than those of its Chinese and Vietnamese neighbours. The military junta clearly filters opposition websites. It keeps a very close eye on Internet cafes, in which the computers automatically execute screen captures every five minutes, in order to monitor user activity. The authorities targeted Internet telephony and chat services in June, blocking Google’s Gtalk, for example. The aim was two-fold: to defend the profitable long-distance telecommunications market, which is controlled by state companies, as well as to stop cyber-dissidents from using a means of communication that is hard to monitor.

China

China unquestionably continues to be the world’s most advanced country in Internet filtering. The authorities carefully monitor technological progress to ensure that no new window of free expression opens up, After initially targeting websites and chat forums, they nowadays concentrate on blogs and video exchange sites. China now has nearly 17 million bloggers. This is an enormous number, but very few of them dare to tackle sensitive issues, still less criticise government policy. Firstly, because China’s blog tools all include filters that block “subversive” word strings. Secondly, because the companies operating these services, both Chinese and foreign, are pressured by the authorities to control content. They employ armies of moderators to clean up the content produced by the bloggers. Finally, in a country in which 52 people are currently in prison for expressing themselves too freely online, self-censorship is obviously in full force. Just five years ago, many people thought Chinese society and politics would be revolutionised by the Internet, a supposedly uncontrollable medium. Now, with China enjoying increasing geopolitical influence, people are wondering the opposite, whether perhaps China’s Internet model, based on censorship and surveillance, may one day be imposed on the rest of the world.

Cuba

With less than 2 per cent of its population online, Cuba is one of the most backward Internet countries. An investigation carried out by Reporters Without Borders in October revealed that the Cuban government uses several levers to ensure that this medium is not used in a “counter-revolutionary” way. Firstly, it has more or less banned private Internet connections. To surf the Internet or check their e-mail, Cubans have to go to public access points such as Internet cafes, universities and “youth computer clubs” where their activity is more easily monitored. Secondly, the computers in all the Internet cafes and leading hotels contain software installed by the Cuban police that triggers an alert message whenever “subversive” key-words are spotted. The regime also ensures that there is no Internet access for dissidents and independent journalists, for whom communicating with people abroad is an ordeal. Finally, the government also relies on self-censorship. You can get 20 years in prison for writing “counter-revolutionary” articles for foreign websites. You can even get five years just for connecting to the Internet illegally. Few Internet users dare to run the risk of defying the regime’s censorship.

- Egypt

Aside from a few sites linked to the Muslim Brotherhood’s religious movements, Egypt does little online filtering. But President Hosni Mubarak, who has been in power since 1981, displays an extremely disturbing authoritarianism as regards the Internet. Three bloggers were arrested in June 2006 and were held for two to three months for calling for democratic reforms. Others have been harassed, such as Coptic blogger Hela Hemi Botros, who was forced to close down her blog in August under pressure from the police. Finally, a Council of State administrative court recently ruled that the authorities could block, suspend of close down any website likely to pose a threat to “national security.” This could open the way to extensive online censorship.

- Iran

Repression of bloggers seems to have declined in 2006. Whereas around 20 were imprisoned in 2005, only Arash Sigarchi is in jail at the moment. But Internet filtering has stepped up and Iran today boasts of filtering 10 million “immoral” websites. Pornographic sites, political sites and those dealing with religion are usually the ones most targeted. But since the summer of 2006, the censors have concentrated on online publications dealing with women’s rights. The authorities also recently decided to ban broadband connections. This could be explained by a concern not to overload the very poor-quality Iranian network, but it could also be motivated by a desire to prevent the downloading of Western cultural products such as films and songs.

North Korea

Like last year, North Korea continues to be the world’s worst Internet black hole. Only a few officials are able to access the web, using connections rented from China. The country’s domain name - .nk - has still not been launched and the few websites created by the North Korean government are hosted on servers in Japan or South Korea. It is hard to believe this is simply the result of economic difficulties in a country which today is capable of manufacturing nuclear warheads. The North Korean journalists who have found refuge in South Korea are very active on the Internet, especially on the www.dailynk.com website.

- Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia does not hide its online censorship. Unlike China, where website blocking is disguised as technical problems, Saudi Arabia’s filters clearly tell Internet users that certain websites are banned. Censorship concentrates on pornographic content, but it also targets opposition websites, Israeli publications, or sites dealing with homosexuality. Blogs also pose a problem to the Saudi censors. Last year they tried to completely block access to the country’s biggest blog tool, blogger.com. But they backed off a few days later and now they just block the blogs that are deemed unacceptable. In June of this year, for example, the intimate diary of “Saudi Eve,” a young woman who dared to talk about her love life and criticise government censorship, was added to the blacklist.

- Syria

Syria is the Middle East’s biggest prison for cyber-dissidents, with three people currently detained for criticising the authorities online. They are systematically tortured and subjected to inhumane conditions. The government bans access to Arabic-language opposition sites and sites dealing with Syria’s Kurdish minority.

- Tunisia

In 2005, Tunisia had the honour of hosting the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), a big UN event about the Internet’s future. Yet President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali’s Internet policies are among the most repressive in the world. All the Internet cafes are state-controlled. They filter web content and are under close police surveillance. It is, for example, impossible to access the Reporters Without Borders website from inside Tunisia. The security services also constantly harass independent bloggers and opposition website editors to ensure that self-censorship prevails. One cyber-dissident, Mohammed Abbou, has been imprisoned since March 2005 for criticising the president in an online newsletter.

Turkmenistan

With less than 1 per cent of the population online, this is one of the world’s least connected countries. President Separmurad Nyazov is a central Asian Kim Jong-Il, wielding total control over the media. Not only is the Turkmen Internet censored, it is also forbidden territory for the vast majority of the population.

- Uzbekistan

Official censorship seems to have become even tougher since the bloody crackdown on the pro-democracy protests in Andidjan in May 2005. The iron-fisted government led by President Islam Karimov blocks access to most independent websites dealing with Uzbekistan, which are usually hosted on servers in Russia, and to NGO websites that criticise its human rights violations.

- Vietnam

The Vietnamese government is negotiating its admission to the World Trade Organisation and is in the uncomfortable position of being squeezed by the international community. Unlike neighbouring China, it is unable to completely ignore the demands of foreign diplomats. It therefore seems to be tending to soften its control over news and information, and hesitates to crack down on dissidents. Several cyber-dissidents, the most famous of whom was Pham Hong Son, were released in 2005 and 2006. This relative forbearance seems to have breathed new life into Vietnam’s pro-democracy movement, which is making admirable use of the Internet to organise and circulate independently-sourced news domestically. A group calling itself “8406" even launched an online petition in the summer of 2006, signed by hundreds of people using their real names, calling on the government to begin political reforms. This use of the Internet by young democrats alarms the authorities, who are still often ready to use force to silence these cyber-dissidents. Ten people have been arrested this year for what they said on the Internet. Four of them are still detained.

Countries removed from the list

- Libya

Reporters Without Borders confirmed, during a fact-finding visit, that the Internet is no longer censored in Libya. Furthermore, no cyber-dissident has been detained since Abdel Razak Al Mansuri’s release in March 2006. Reporters Without Borders nonetheless still regards President Muammar Gaddafi as a press freedom predator.

Maldives

No cyber-dissident has been imprisoned in the Maldives since Fathimath Nisreen, Mohamed Zaki and Ahmad Didi were released between May 2005 and February 2006. President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom is still viewed by Reporters Without Borders as a press freedom predator but his policies towards the Internet no longer justify keeping his country on the list of Internet enemies.

- Nepal

Reporters Without Borders has observed a marked improvement in freedom of expression since King Gyanendra backed down and democratic rule was restored in May 2006. The Internet is no longer censored and no harassment or arbitrary detention of any blogger has been reported.

November 2006 Web Server Survey

2006-11-06T09:30:00.000-08:00

November 2006 Web Server Survey - Netcraft

There are now more than 100 million web sites on the Internet, which gained 3.5 million sites last month to continue the dynamic growth seen throughout 2006. In the November 2006 survey we received responses from 101,435,253 sites, up from 97.9 million sites last month.

The 100 million site milestone caps an extraordinary year in which the Internet has already added 27.4 million sites, easily topping the previous full-year growth record of 17 million from 2005. The Internet has doubled in size since May 2004, when the survey hit 50 million.

Blogs and small business web sites have driven the explosive growth this year, with huge increases at free blogging services at Google and Microsoft. Domain industry juggernauts Go Daddy (U.S.) and 1&1 Internet (Germany) have also seen strong demand for low-priced domain names and shared hosting accounts.

The first Netcraft survey in August 1995 found 18,957 hosts, with the NCSA web server dominating with 57 percent market share, leading CERN (19%) and a newcomer named Apache (3.5%). Microsoft's Internet Information Server launched in February 1996, and by the survey's fifth birthday the server market was largely divided up between Apache and IIS. This month Apache leads with 60.3% market share, with Microsoft at 31.0% and Sun at 1.7%.

Previous milestones in the survey were reached in April 1997 (1 million sites), February 2000 (10 million), September 2000 (20 million), July 2001 (30 million), April 2003 (40 million), May 2004 (50 million), March 2005 (60 million), August 2005 (70 million). April 2006 (80 million ) and August 2006 (90 million).

Total Sites Across All Domains August 1995 - November 2006

ElectricNews.net:News:Berners-Lee fishing for net knowledge

2006-11-05T18:46:00.000-08:00

ElectricNews.net:News:Berners-Lee fishing for net knowledge:

Friday, November 03 2006
by Emmet Ryan

The 'Father of the World Wide Web' is casting a net across the Atlantic as MIT and the University of Southampton join him in a project to research the web.

Tim Berners-Lee, the British scientist who first conceived the hypertext software that underpins the world wide web, announced that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of Southampton will collaborate on the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI). The initiative will perform research in an effort to understand the scientific, technical and social challenges that lie ahead with the continued growth of the web.

The research will focus on the volume of online information, how it documents aspects of human activity and knowledge, and assess the reliability of this information as well as the social and legal ramifications.

"As the Web celebrates its first decade of widespread use, we still know surprisingly little about how it evolved, and we have only scratched the surface of what could be realised with deeper scientific investigation into its design, operation and impact on society," said Berners-Lee.

The British scientist first proposed the web while developing ways to control computers remotely at CERN, the Geneva-based European Organisation for Nuclear Research, in 1989.

The aim of the WSRI is to allow researchers to scientifically study the web and to find means that will allow the web to grow and be used to its full potential. The initiative will provide a forum for scientists and scholars to collaborate on what is the first scientific research effort specifically designed to study the web and to develop a new discipline of science for future generations of researchers.

The WSRI will be based at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT and at the University of Southampton's School of Electronic and Computer Science. The project's initial plans include joint research projects, workshops and student and faculty exchanges between the two institutions.

The WSRI has received financial backing from Google and IBM and the universities intend to raise more funds from corporations. The initiative will have four founding directors: Berners Lee, Wendy Hall and Nigel Shadbolt from the University of Southampton, and Daniel Weitzner from MIT.

Google takes aim at fast e-mail for mobile phones

2006-11-02T23:09:00.000-08:00

Thu Nov 2, 2006 1:44 PM GMT

By Eric Auchard

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Google Inc. aims to close the gap
between the classic way people get e-mail -- sitting at a
computer -- and the slow-as-molasses reality of receiving
e-mail on cell phones, the company said on Thursday.

The Web search leader is introducing a custom version of
its Gmail e-mail service that can run on any phone with Java
software, or close to 300 different mobile phone devices.

"Because it is an application and not running through a
browser ... it looks and feels like Gmail on the desktop," said
Tony Hsieh, product manager for the Gmail on mobile service.

Gmail for mobile, as the new service is known, promises
computer-like response times for viewing e-mail. And it retains
many of the features users expect when running Gmail in Web
browsers on their personal computers, Hsieh said.

These include the ability to search through one's e-mail
history, to organise e-mails according to conversation, and
automatic synchronization so any e-mail read on the phone show
up as already read when you sign on a computer the next time.

Initially, the service is available in the United States on
phones from Sprint Nextel Corp., T-Mobile and Cingular, which
is a joint venture between AT&T Inc. and BellSouth. Google
later plans to expand Gmail for mobile to other countries and
languages.

The phones need to be able to run or support Java software,
a programming language commonly used in cell phones to create
games and other applications.

Gmail for mobile also allows phone users to receive
document attachments, including Word or Adobe Acrobat files and
photos, which are instantly viewable and automatically resized
to fit the user's phone screen.

True e-mail obsessives have other options, but they are
pricey and out of reach of most consumers. Millions of
professionals have become instantly available via Blackberry
phones. Millions more use more or less copycat e-mail services
on smart phones.

Virtually all mobile phones sold worldwide for the past 18
months come with a Web browser. Just be prepared to wait 30
seconds to a minute to sign on and download each e-mail.

Users of Gmail, or rivals like Yahoo Mail, can already view
their e-mail this way, but it's slow and hard to use.

Mobile users can go to http://gmail.com/app on their Java
phone browser to download the application. Gmail for mobile is
free of charge from Google, although data charges by phone
carriers may apply for downloading lots of mobile e-mail.

World Internet Conference ends with promise and concern for future

2006-11-02T22:57:00.000-08:00

canada.com network

World Internet conference ends with promise and concern for future

Canadian Press

Thursday, November 02, 2006

VOULIAGMENI, Greece (AP) - The first UN-hosted conference on the Internet ended with promise of breakthrough technologies to accelerate online access in developing countries and concerns of growing government interference globally.

Key participants said Thursday the four-day meeting had at least helped clarify differences among governments, industry and online groups ahead of the next Internet Governance Forum, scheduled for next year in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

"In my country, India, you have arranged marriages and usually in the first meeting the boy and the girl tend to scope each other out and discuss everything," chief UN organizer Nitin Desai said.

"In the second or third, they talk about specific things - what are your tastes in this or that area - and it's quite a while before they actually start holding hands. Let's treat this as a first meeting."

The conference was dominated by disputes about online censorship, efforts to make the Internet appeal to non-English-speakers and concerns about how the global network is run.

The UN International Telecommunication Union renewed a challenge to the U.S. organization that oversees global Internet functions, arguing governments worldwide will inevitably play a greater role in the future regulation of the Internet.

"For better or for worse, the Internet will in due course not be governed or regulated in a way that is fundamentally different from the way that other things are governed," ITU Secretary General Yoshio Utsumi said Monday as the forum opened.

This week's gathering grew out of last year's UN World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia. The United States refused to cede control of the computers crucial for directing Internet traffic and agreed, instead, to set up a multinational forum to discuss other matters, such as co-operation in fighting cybercrime.

Since then, the U.S. government announced it would relax oversight over the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, the agency that handles the day-to-day tasks related to those key directories. The European Union applauded the United States, supporting ICANN's eventual independence, instead of its replacement.

At the Internet Governance Forum in a resort near Athens, ICANN announced it is in final testing of technology to allow full Web addresses using non-Latin characters.

Other innovations discussed included the spread of Web-enabled cellular phones, taking advantage of two billion users worldwide, or twice the number of current Internet users. A California-based technological aid agency, Packet Clearing House, said it is developing a system aimed at giving illiterate people Internet access.

Human rights groups, meanwhile, warned government censorship online is growing. Amnesty International singled out China, Vietnam, Iran and Syria, while accusing U.S. companies like Google Inc. of assisting those governments with their filtering; Google has been offering a censored version of its search engine in China.

Vint Cerf, one of the Internet's founding fathers who is now a vice-president at Google, said the company's actions help Chinese people, despite filtering.

"Google has offered service in conditions we don't like...but it's (one) of those games of patience where you just keep pushing like water eroding rock," Cerf said.

"In order to defray the costs, it's important that we reach a very large number of people, so we certainly would not want to cut off one-fifth of the world's population, potentially."

The UN meeting was billed as a "global town hall" to discuss Internet development, without necessarily producing any resolutions.

Desai, the forum organizer, said the problem of Internet security is likely to remain high on the agenda at the next world forum. Another worry is the growing vulnerability of infrastructure networks to cyberattack.

"Most national infrastructures - water, electricity, nearly everything else - is based on networking," said David Belanger, chief scientist of AT&T Inc. labs.

"Right now, they're probably based on more classical networks which are far more closed. But since nearly all communications networks are moving to (Internet technologies) over time, I think that we will have to be extraordinarily careful in trying to create nearly bulletproof networks."

Cerf said he thought the forum would help solve problems, despite the lack of "specific action ideas."

"I've come away with new ideas, new views on some of the problems the Internet still has," Cerf said.

"For a first meeting of this kind, it was very effective."
© The Canadian Press 2006

Email servers strain under doubled spam load

2006-11-01T14:53:00.000-08:00

Email servers strain under doubled spam load:

viruses, posted: 1-NOV-2006 14:30

If you have noticed a big increase in spam lately, you're not alone. My mail server is getting hammered by spammers, and half of Ihug's customers experienced a day-long delay in receiving email.

Much of the spam comes as images - that is, spammers make pictures, with the "sales pitch" text in them. Just about all the image spam I've seen is for illegal pump-n-dump penny stock scams, and they're getting through the spam filters.

I just got a press release from Secure Computing, which included the below chart that says image spam volumes have doubled lately:

This is vendor supplied information, and should be treated with as such, but everything I've seen so far points to Secure Computing being right. Other sources such as McAfee reckon image spam makes up for around forty per cent of the total spam volume now.

Stopping this kind of spam is difficult, especially since some images are rendered dynamically according the text in them and thus vary in size. I've found some useful rules for Spam Assassin at Wonko.com but have yet to install FuzzyOCR, an optical character recognition plug in for SA. Having to use resource intensive OCR doesn't seem like the right way to go. I'm going to see if I can make use of pf's ability to fingerprint connections from specific operating systems, and firewall off say Windows desktop ones.

Have also heard that "greylisting", which temporarily defers reception of email, is effective here.

Image spam takes up more bandwidth than text-based stuff, which in turn may be one reason the Internet seems to be in go-slow mode at the moment. Haven't had any confirmation about this yet though, so pure speculation on my part.

Where does the spam come from then? Well, it could be your Windows box, compromised using for instance the recent SpamThru trojan horse. The recent spam-flood has been accompanied by many more trojans being emailed out to users as well, I note. Clearly, the spammers are seeking more recruits to their bot armies.

By Juha Saarinen

STRATO Launches Email Security Solution

2006-11-01T14:50:00.000-08:00

STRATO Launches Email Security Solution:

1st November 2006

ServerSide Security, an anti-spam, anti-virus and anti-phishing solution combats the increasing security risks associated with damaging emails.

STRATO, a web hosting company, today announced the launch of ServerSide Security, an anti-spam, anti-virus and anti-phishing solution.

According to STRATO, it discovered that 80% of all emails reaching their users consisted of a combination of spam, phishing emails or email viruses. As a result, STRATO formed a partnership with the Institute of Machine Learning at the Humboldt University in Berlin, to combat the increasing security risks associated with damaging emails.

Damian Schmidt, CEO of STRATO, said: "Spammers and phishers are constantly attempting to fool email security filter systems with new methods of conning the customer. We make sure we work with the experts to keep one step ahead of them, through the constant updating of our email security offering and by pre-empting future email security attacks. By providing ServerSide Security free as part of our web hosting packages we enable our small to medium customers receive the same level of security protection as that of an enterprise."

SiliconRepublic.com: Drop in email virus level continues as spam soars

2006-11-01T14:49:00.000-08:00

SiliconRepublic.com: Drop in email virus level continues as spam soars:

Drop in email virus level continues as spam soars

01.11.2006 - Email virus rates in Ireland dropped below the 10pc mark last month — less than half the levels recorded earlier this year and the lowest since July of last year. The spam problem continues, however, with the highest rates yet: more than one in two messages are now junk email. According to tracker data released today by IE Internet, 9.78pc of Irish emails in October contained a virus. The top five infections accounted for almost three quarters of the total, the figures show. As in previous months, the two most commonly found viruses were Zafi.B and Netsky.P, which have been in the wild for more than two years.

Welcoming the fall in virus rates, Ken O’Driscoll, chief technical officer with IE Internet, still sounded a note of caution. “The rate of virus infected emails was exceptionally high in the first place — averaging around 15pc in the last 24 months — so it stands to reason that as older (infected) home PCs continue to be replaced with new clean PCs pre-loaded with antivirus software, the rate will drop in exponential proportion,” he said.

O’Driscoll also pointed out that virus writers are changing tactics to make their work harder to detect and remove, using peer-to-peer networks as an alternative to email for delivering infections.
“As an industry, we are making it harder and harder for virus writers to successfully infect PCs via email so it stands to reason that virus writers will in turn move towards less protected avenues of infection,” he told siliconrepublic.com.

By contrast with the ongoing decline in viruses, spam was at its highest ever rate during October, IE Internet’s data showed. The rate of spam was 57.26pc, meaning that more than one in two emails in the average Irish inbox was unwanted junk. It is the highest level since IE Internet began releasing these figures three years ago, when the level was just 14.08pc.

The UK has steadily grown as a source of spam mail and accounted for 8.56pc of all spam coming into Ireland last month. India has also started to appear on the radar and was in third place with 13.11pc of the total.

“One of the big things that we noticed in October is a marked increase in very aggressive brute force or ‘dictionary attacks’ against business email users,” said O’Driscoll. This is where a spammer tries to send their email to a very large combination of invented email addresses. According to O’Driscoll, the reasoning behind this tactic could be that some anti-spam systems would register such an increase in load that they simply turn off their filters to avoid a denial of service situation and let everything through.

“These brute force attacks mostly come from distributed locations or networks so one could possibly class them as distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks also as they do consume resources and could conceivably knock out a small site,” he warned.

By Gordon Smith

At U.N. Internet summit, calls for change | CNET News.com

2006-11-01T07:58:00.000-08:00

At U.N. Internet summit, calls for change | CNET News.com:

By CNET News.com Staff

Last modified: November 1, 2006, 6:07 AM PST

Athens summit tackles the dominance of the English language, censorship vs. free speech, and other online issues.

Delegates: English isn't good enough

Participants at U.N. summit demand more internationalization, saying that the English language enjoys an unfair Net monopoly.
November 1, 2006

Attendees blast Cisco, others on China cooperation

At summit, delegates target tech companies abiding by Chinese censorship policies, call for global free-speech regulations.
October 31, 2006

China: We don't censor the Internet. Really

Chinese government official draws incredulous stares at U.N. summit when denying that the Great Firewall of China exists.
October 31, 2006

No Internet at United Nations 'Internet' summit

blog The wireless connection in the main conference hall appeared briefly before dying and leaving attendees bereft of the Net.
October 31, 2006

U.N. official invokes spirit of Socrates

blog During opening ceremonies, Yoshio Utsumi sets out to challenge beliefs on how the Internet should be governed.
October 31, 2006

U.N. proposes changes to Net's operation

Official takes aim at "self-serving justifications" for permitting the U.S. to preserve its unique influence and authority online.
October 30, 2006

U.N. summit revives concerns about Net control

Diplomats head to Athens for a summit that will resume a long-simmering debate about the United States' role on the Internet.
October 27, 2006

Must-Have Browser Upgrades - washingtonpost.com

2006-10-29T09:47:00.000-08:00

Must-Have Browser Upgrades - washingtonpost.com

By Rob Pegoraro Sunday, October 29, 2006; F01

Your view of the Web is in for a change -- in some cases, whether you like it or not.

This can happen with either of two new browsers. One's the second major update to Mozilla Firefox in a year. The other is more of a surprise: It comes from the company that sat out the last half decade of browser innovation, Microsoft. And it will be automatically installed on Windows XP machines starting next week.

Don't be alarmed. If you're still using Internet Explorer 6, much less any older version, you need this upgrade. You've been stuck with a browser that lends you too little help in staying on top of the Web, and out of trouble on it.

Competing browsers, such as Firefox, Opera and Safari, have provided solutions for those problems for years. As a result, Firefox in particular has carved a chunk out of IE's once-overwhelming market share.

But some users can't or won't make the effort to download and install new software. So now Microsoft will do it for them. Starting Wednesday, its new, Windows XP-only Internet Explorer 7 ( http://www.microsoft.com/ie ) will be automatically installed on their computers through XP's Windows Update mechanism. (The one exception: An illegitimate copy of XP that fails Microsoft's "validation" test can't get this version of IE.)

Microsoft's mandatory upgrade is a gutsy, perhaps pushy move. Unlike almost every other patch or bug-fix sent through Windows Update, IE 7 brings major new features and a new front end. This update forcefully yanks an obsolete browser into the 21st century -- which may confuse some IE vets.

Users of other browsers, however, may feel right at home. Like them, IE 7 offers tabbed browsing, which cures screen gridlock by letting you view multiple Web pages in one window, and a search shortcut at the top right that sends a query to your choice of search engines. It also can subscribe to free Web feeds, which spare your keyboard's refresh key by letting Web sites tell you when they've posted new items.

Microsoft has made its own tweaks to these borrowed features. For example, if you've opened so many pages in tabs that you're getting lost, clicking a "Quick Tabs" button fills the window with miniature views of each open page. And when you preview a Web feed by clicking on an orange icon in IE 7's toolbar, a little search form lets you peek into its archives to see how often a topic of interest has been covered.

Internet Explorer 7 can also look out for "phishing" sites, the phony pages that impersonate banks and credit card issuers: If desired, it will check every new page against a blacklist of known phishing offenders, then block your access to any site on it. Meanwhile, IE 7 highlights legitimate financial sites that use encryption to keep out online snoops by putting a big lock icon in the address bar.

(It's a sad comment on the state of the Web these days that a browser's selling point can be how well it bars you from parts of the Web.)

IE 7 adds further defenses against browser hijacking -- attempts by sites to force-feed your computer hostile software by exploiting flaws in the browser. But since it continues to support one of the most popular hijacking targets, Microsoft's ActiveX technology, it still presents a bigger target than other browsers.

The Web may look a little sharper overall in this browser, thanks to its improved support for Web standards. And when you print pages, IE automatically resizes them so they don't get cropped at the sides. You can also resize a page on the screen by clicking on a magnifying glass icon.

But none of those features will be as immediately noticed as IE 7's new interface. This browser, like many recent Microsoft releases, ditches traditional text menus in favor of toolbar buttons that sometimes double as drop-down menus. This sleek design takes up much less space, but it also lacks consistency and bumps some often-used functions, like the home-page button, to odd locations.

In any case, if you've been using IE 6 for years, you may not know where to click when IE 7 lands on your computer.

But rebelling against this forced upgrade by turning off automatic updates in XP is not a good idea. You need Microsoft's security fixes far more than you need to avoid disruption from a new browser. Besides, you can better express any disapproval by switching to the new Firefox 2 (available for Win 98 or newer, Mac OS X 10.2 or newer and Linux at http://www.mozilla.com/ ).

This free, open-source browser, used by a growing minority of users, may once have had the reputation of being a cult favorite among geeks, but compared with IE 7, it's a much easier upgrade. Its interface features a lineup of menus and toolbars that any IE user would recognize, but it also offers all the power-browsing features that IE 7 has added -- and then some.
For instance, if you close a tab by mistake, Firefox lets you undo it to bring that page back up. Its Web-search form allows some search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, to complete search terms for you, based on what other users have looked for. Firefox allows a choice of RSS-feed readers, both other programs and such sites as Google Reader or Bloglines. Like Microsoft's new browser, Firefox includes a phishing filter -- although it missed a couple of phishing sites that IE 7 flagged.

Firefox 2.0 can also spell-check what you type into Web forms. And if the browser shuts down accidentally (as it did when my laptop crashed with a "blue screen of death" Thursday night), it will restart where you left off, with the same set of pages you had open before.
That capability alone makes Firefox 2 worth the upgrade.

Firefox also fits better for an often-overlooked group of users -- everybody still running pre-XP versions of Windows. By releasing IE 7 only for XP, Microsoft has given them the clearest signal possible: Goodbye and good luck.

This can be a lot of change to deal with for people who haven't had to adjust to a new browser in this decade. But it should be welcomed. It's called competition, and it's about time it returned to the browser market.

Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro at robp@washpost.com.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company