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President Issues Cyberwar Warning
As if we didn’t have enough to worry about, serious cybersecurity concerns are quietly but steadily growing. And it was the President himself who has sounded the latest alarm. Several days ago, President Obama issued a warning in an op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal. Continue reading
Some Big Providers To Quietly Begin Monitoring Users
The people who want control over the Internet are nothing if not persistent. They are quite capable of learning from their mistakes, too. So it should perhaps come as no surprise that they have licked their wounds and regathered their forces after the resounding defeat of SOPA. They’ve come up with a new scheme to protect their precious copyrights; a kinder, gentler version of SOPA that, while it enables spying, supposedly has education more in mind than punishment. Continue reading
Posted in News, Security
Tagged CAS, DMCA, file sharing, Net neutrality, peer-to-peer, privacy, Protect IP Act, SOPA
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Domain Applications Reveal Amazon’s Daunting Ambitions
The dust is starting to settle from the latest land-grab on the Internet. While it’s not over yet – there will probably be a year or more of behind the scenes wrangling – the claims on the various turfs have been filed. And the results show just how ambitious some of the movers and shakers have become; in particular, the merchandising giant, Amazon.com. The cyberturf in question are the latest extensions to the top-level domains. The Domain Name System, (DNS), regulated by ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigning Names and Numbers), gives names to websites that enables users to locate them. They are organized into broad categories of some 300 total top-level domains, consisting of 22 generic classes (like org, restricted to non-profit organizations) and 280 country codes (us for US, uk for Great Britain, ca for China and so on). By far the most popular is com, for commercial enterprises, in which there are millions of websites. This has led to intense competition for names, domain squatting and parking, and other practices. So, over the last decade, ICANN has been slowly moving to open up the system. In its latest effort, some 2,000 top-level domains revealed here (note: long list, loads slowly) have been applied for at a cool $185,000 per name (plus in case of disputes, up to $122,000 or more). So obviously only wealthy speculators and major Internet entities have applied. And presumably, with such money and … Continue reading