News Briefs

Exporting SOPA-Like Rules to Other Countries

"While SOPA may be dead (for now) in the U.S., lobby groups are likely to intensify their efforts to export SOPA-like rules to other countries," says Michael Geist in a blog post today. Geist writes: "With Bill C-11 back on the legislative agenda at the end of the month, Canada will be a prime target for SOPA style rules. In fact, a close review of the unpublished submissions to the Bill C-32 legislative committee reveals that several groups have laid the groundwork to add SOPA-like rules into Bill C-11 ..." more

UPDATEDFeds Shut Down File-Sharing Website Megaupload.com, Seven People Charged

Federal prosecutors in Virginia have shut down one of the world's largest Internet file-sharing sites, Megaupload.com, charging its founder and others with violating piracy laws, the Associated Press reports today. "The indictment was unsealed Thursday, one day after websites shut down in protest of two congressional proposals [SOPA & PIPA] intended to thwart the online piracy of copyrighted movies and TV programs." more

Kuala Lumpur Mandates WiFi for All Restaurants and Bars

A new law passed in Malaysia's largest city, Kuala Lumpur, this month will require all food and beverage outlets to provide wireless internet access to customers by April of this year. The law makes WiFi access for customers a requirement for food operators when applying for a new license for a restaurant or renewing an existing license. Cafes, pubs, bars and club lounges are also required to provide WiFi services, the mayor of Kuala Lumpur, Tan Sri Fuad Ismail, was quoted as saying to a Malaysian newspaper recently. more

China’s Internet Users Pass Half a Billion

The number of Chinese Internet users has surpassed 500 million, with nearly half of them using microblogs, or Weibo, according to latest official figures. About 55.8 million Chinese people became new Internet users last year, bringing the country’s Web population to 513 million, representing an Internet penetration rate of 38.3 percent, according to a report released by China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC). more

White House on SOPA: Protecting Intellectual Property Must Not Threaten Open, Innovative Internet

The White House today released a response to SOPA and PIPA petitions and the legislative approaches to combat online piracy. The response is prepared by Victoria Espinel, Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator at Office of Management and Budget, Aneesh Chopra, U.S. Chief Technology Officer, and Howard Schmidt, Special Assistant to the President and Cybersecurity Coordinator for National Security Staff. more

ICANN Begins Accepting Applications for New gTLDs

ICANN announced today that after over seven years of planning, the organization has initiated the process for accepting applications for new generic top-level domains (gTLDs). "We believe this program will do what it's designed to do, which is open up the Internet domain-name system to further innovation," said Rod Beckstrom, ICANN chairman, during an event at the National Press Club in Washington today. More information on the Applicant Support program can be found on the ICANN New gTLD page. more

Comcast Announces Completion of DNSSEC Deployment

Comcast, a leading ISP in the U.S., has fully deployed Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) according to a company announcement today. Jason Livingood, Comcast's Vice President of Internet Systems writes: "As of today, over 17.8M residential customers of our Xfinity Internet service are using DNSSEC-validating DNS servers. In addition, all of the domain names owned by Comcast, numbering over 5,000, have been cryptographically signed. All of our servers, both the ones that customers use and the ones authoritative for our domain names, also fully support IPv6." more

US House Committee Announces Oversight Hearing on DNS and Search Engine Blocking

House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa today announced that the Full Committee will hold a hearing on January 18 to examine the potential impact of Domain Name Service (DNS) and search engine blocking on security, jobs and the Internet community. The Committee will hear testimony from cybersecurity experts and others from the technology community. more

Vint Cerf: Internet Access Not a Human Right But Only Means to an End

Technologies such as the Internet should be viewed as enabler of rights, not a right itself says Vint Cerf in an op-ed piece in The New York Times. He writes: "The best way to characterize human rights is to identify the outcomes that we are trying to ensure. These include critical freedoms like freedom of speech and freedom of access to information...
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Japan Developing Distinctive Anti-Cyberattack Virus

The Japanese Defense Ministry is creating a computer virus capable of tracking, identifying and disabling sources of cyberattacks, according to reports. The development of the virtual cyberweapon was launched in 2008. Since then, the weapon has been tested in a closed network environment. "The most distinctive feature of the new virus is its ability to trace cyber-attack sources. It can identify not only the immediate source of attack, but also all "springboard" computers used to transmit the virus." more

ICANN Has No Plans to Delay or Restrict New gTLD Program

ICANN will not delay the launch of its much anticipated program to create hundreds, possibly thousands, of new Internet extensions, nor run a limited ‘pilot program’, as reported today by Kieren McCarthy of .Nxt. "Steve Crocker [ICANN's chairman] admitted that the organization’s Board will be holding a special meeting in the first week of January and that the meeting’s focus will be the launch of the new gTLD program the following week." However that meeting will not consider a delay or limited rollout option. more

Botnets: Most Prevalent Threat on the Internet for the Enterprises

Based on the total number of transactions, Zscaler reports botnets as the biggest security risk on the Internet for the enterprises. "Once a host gets infected, the botnet usually spreads quickly within an enterprise. It also generates a significant amount of traffic to the command and control server, to download additional malware or perform other actions." more

Domain Name Registrations Reach 220 Million, Close to 5 Million Added in Q3

Nearly five million domain names were added to the Internet in the third quarter of 2011, bringing the total number of registered domain names to nearly 220 million worldwide across all domains, according to the latest Domain Name Industry Brief, published by VeriSign, Inc. more

UPDATEDICANN CEO: Top-Level Domain Expansion Has Been Anything But Rushed

In response to the Washington Post's December 11 article title "What's the .rush?", directed at the expansion of new TLDs, Rod Beckstrom, ICANN's President and CEO has replied in a letter to the Washington Post stating: ""The program of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to open the Internet to new top-level domain names (TLDs) has been anything but rushed..." more

Typosquatted Domain Names Pose Plenty of Risk But Surprisingly Little Malware

A recent study took an in-depth look at the scale and the risk of domain name typosquatting -- the practice of registering mis-spellings of popular domain names in an attempt to profit from typing mistakes. "Applying every possible one-character typo to the domain names of Facebook, Google, Twitter, Microsoft, Apple and Sophos," Paul Ducklin, Sophos' Asia Pacific head of technology collected HTTP data and browser screenshots from 1502 web sites and 14,495 URLs. In this report, Ducklin analyses the data revealing unexpected results within the typosquatting ecosystem. more