News Briefs

Obama Reinforces Belief in Net Neutrality

Following his State of the Union Speech last week, Obama was asked a number of user-submitted questions via prepared via YouTube. Popular questions included the issue of open internet and neutrality, to which Obama responded: "I'm a big believer in Net Neutrality. I campaigned on this. I continue to be a strong supporter of it. My FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has indicated that he shares the view that we've got to keep the Internet open..." more

UPDATEDU.S. Government Announces Intent to Transition DNS Functions to Global Community

U.S. Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) took a historic step today announcing "its intent to transition key Internet domain name functions to the global multistakeholder community." more

Google Reveals Top 10 Malware Sites From Its Index

While scanning its index, Google in the last two months reports to have found more than 4,000 different websites suspected of distributing malware by massively compromising popular websites. "Of these domains more than 1,400 were hosted in the .cn TLD. Several contained plays on the name of Google such as goooogleadsence.biz, etc.," says Google's security team member, Niels Provos, in a blog post today. more

Weekend Cyberattack on Pakistani bank reported to be a Historic $6 Million Loss, Bank Denies Claim

Karachi-based Bank Islami revealed Saturday morning that it had detected abnormal transactions resulting in 2.6 million Pakistani rupees, roughly $19,500 and precautionary steps where taken immediately. more

Google License to Operate in China Renewed

Google Inc. today announced via its official blog that the Chinese government has renewed its license and that it will continue to operate in China. Google further notes: "We currently automatically redirect everyone using Google.cn to Google.com.hk, our Hong Kong search engine. This redirect, which offers unfiltered search in simplified Chinese, has been working well for our users and for Google. However, it's clear from conversations we have had with Chinese government officials that they find the redirect unacceptable -- and that if we continue redirecting users our Internet Content Provider license will not be renewed (it's up for renewal on June 30). Without an ICP license, we can't operate a commercial website like Google.cn -- so Google would effectively go dark in China." more

NTIA Releases Cybersecurity Road Map for “Building a More Resilient Internet”

U.S. Departments of Commerce and Homeland Security have released a road map setting out steps to stop the cyber threat to nations internet infrastructure, announced NTIA. more

Google’s Holistic Approach to Datacenter: We Must Treat It as One Massive Computer

A recent paper released by by Urs Hölzle and Luiz André Barroso of Google's infrastructure design and operations team provides an introduction into today's high scale computing along with factors influencing their design, operation, and cost structure. From the abstract: "As computation continues to move into the cloud, the computing platform of interest no longer resembles a pizza box or a refrigerator, but a warehouse full of computers. These new large datacenters are quite different from traditional hosting facilities of earlier times and cannot be viewed simply as a collection of co-located servers..." more

Apple Under Criticism for Back-Pedaling on IPv6 Support

Apple Computer's AirPort Utility, Version 6.0 was criticized this week at the North American IPv6 Summit for no longer being compatible with IPv6. The previous Version, 5.6, offered IPv6 service by default. "Comcast, for example, is urging its subscribers that are interested in using IPv6 not to upgrade to AirPort Utility Version 6.0 if they use the OS X Lion operating system because of incompatibilities with IPv6." more

Internet Visionaries Honored with Postel Service Award

The Internet Society has announced the 2024 Jonathan B. Postel Service Award recipients, honoring Steve Crocker and Xing Li for their pioneering work in advancing the global Internet infrastructure. more

Poland to Test a Cybersecurity Program for Aviation Sector

During the two-day Cybersecurity in Civil Aviation conference, Poland announced an agreement to test a cybersecurity pilot program for the aviation sector as Europe's European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) civil aviation authority face increasing threats posed by hackers to air traffic. more

EFF Raises Concerns Over EU’s Proposed Cyber Resilience Act

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has voiced concerns about the European Union's proposed Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), saying it could pose significant threats to open-source developers and cybersecurity. more

Close to Half of America Not Using the Internet at Broadband Speeds, Says Microsoft

The US government’s most recent broadband statistics from the FCC claims 25 million Americans to be lacking access to a broadband connection. more

In Memory of Ray Tomlinson, April 23, 1941 - March 5, 2016

Internet pioneer, Ray Tomlinson has passed away. He died at his home yesterday morning from a suspected heart attack at the age of 74. While best known as the creator of the email messaging system, Tomlinson made tremendous contributions to the field of computing science, evolution of the Internet, and ultimately how the world communicates today. more

The Internet’s Address Crisis: IPv4 Stalls, IPv6 Stagnates

Despite the long-anticipated exhaustion of IPv4 addresses, the Internet continues to function through clever workarounds, market transfers, and cautious optimism, while IPv6 adoption remains slow and the future of global connectivity appears uncertain. more

IANA Contract Extended by One Year, Announces Department of Commerce

United States Department of Commerce on Monday announced the official date for privatization of the DNS to be September 30, 2016 -- formerly set to expire on September 30, 2015. more