News Briefs

Video Dominates Internet Traffic As File Sharing Networks Overall Traffic Continues to Fall

Video continues to be the trend to watch as devices and tablets cater to higher definition content with larger screen sizes enabling the market for longer form video on mobile, reports Sandvine in its latest Internet traffic trends report. more

Google Beats Facebook in Popularity Because it Supports More Languages (For Now)

John Yunker co-founder of Byte Level Research and author of The Web Globalization Report Card writes: "The big story this year is that Facebook and Google finished in a numerical tie. But because Google supports more languages (for now), it edged out as the winner. ... Even as we look across all 225 web sites, the number of languages continues to increase. Although the rate of language growth slowed over the past two years -- due in large part to the global recession -- growth continues. This year, the average number of languages increased to 22, up from 20 languages in 2008." more

Gold Dragon Helps Olympics Malware Attacks Gain Permanent Presence on Systems, Reports McAfee

A report recently released by McAfee Advanced Threat Research (ATR) revealed a fileless attack targeting organizations involved with the Pyeongchang Olympics. more

Russians Not So Eager to Embrace Cyrillic Domain Names

Clifford J. Levy of the New York Times reports: "[Russian] computer users are worried that Cyrillic domains will give rise to a hermetic Russian Web, a sort of cyberghetto, and that the push for Cyrillic amounts to a plot by the security services to restrict access to the Internet. Russian companies are also resisting Cyrillic Web addresses, complaining about costs and threats to online security." more

M3AAWG Releases Anti-Abuse Best Common Practices for Hosting and Cloud Service Providers

Jointly published by the Internet Infrastructure Coalition (i2C) and the Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group, the new document outlines proven activities that can help Web hosting services improve their operations and better protect end-users. more

A Look at How Google, Verizon and the FCC Talks are Playing Out

Sam Gustin reporting in DailyFanance: "As Apple (AAPL), Amazon (AMZN), Netflix (NFLX) and Google forge ahead with highly publicized new plans to stream high-speed content like movies and TV shows to your living room, smartphone, telecom and cable giants like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast (CMSCA) have been intensely lobbying to maintain control over the broadband pipes they spent billions to build. Comcast is going so far as to buy a rich content factory, NBC Universal, a deal that would create a $35 billion media and delivery juggernaut." more

A Look Inside the Emerging Private IPv4 Market

A significant quantity of unused, previously allocated IPv4 addresses are becoming readily available for re-distribution to IP network operators in need of the depleted addresses. Network World has published a report that takes a look at this emerging private market that's allowing companies with excess numbers to sell them to those in need. 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

Sources Confirm Google Streaming Over 1.2 Billion Videos Per Day

Source from Google have recently confirmed total number of YouTube video streams are above 1.2 billion per day worldwide according to Michael Arrington at TechCrunch. Previously reported numbers by comScore and other third party services appear to have been fairly under-estimated.  more

US Should Take More Aggressive Counter-Measures On IP Theft, Including Use of Malware

A bipartisan Commission recently produced a report titled, "The Report of the Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property". Karl Bode from dslreports.com writes... more

91.3% of Malware Use DNS as a Key Capability

Nearly 92 percent of malware use DNS to gain command and control, exfiltrate data or redirect traffic, according to Cisco's 2016 Annual Security Report. It warns that DNS is often a security "blind spot" as security teams and DNS experts typically work in different IT groups within a company and don't interact frequently. more

Newly Released “Domain Name Arbitration” Book Offers Guide for Navigating UDRP

Legal Corner Press, LLC recently announced the publication of Domain Name Arbitration: Asserting and Defending Claims of Cybersquatting Under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy, authored by Gerald M. Levine, intellectual property attorney, with Foreword by Hon. Neil A. Brown QC, former member of the Australian Parliament and a UDRP panelist. more

WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center Registers Its 50,000th “Cybersquatting” Case

The WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center on Monday announced it had registered its 50,000th "cybersquatting" case. The 50,000th case just received by WIPO coincides with the organization's 20th anniversary on November 20, 2020. more

IETF Reaches Broad Consensus to Upgrade Internet Security Protocols Amid Pervasive Surveillance

Internet security has been a primary focus this week for more than 1100 engineers and technologists from around the world gathered at the 88th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Participants are rethinking approaches to security across a wide range of technical areas. more

VoIP Services Reshaping the Fixed Line Market in Europe, Uptake Varies Widely

According to a new study, VoIP services are having a significant impact on the fixed line market in Europe. By mid-2008, just under 30 million consumer VoIP lines were in service in Western Europe, up from 20 million only a year earlier. TeleGeography, a research division of PriMetrica, estimates that the number of VoIP lines in Europe topped 35 million at end-2008... more