News Briefs

German IPv6 Council Starts Contest, Looking for Fresh IPv6 Ideas

Last week the German IPv6 Council initiated a contest for new ideas related to IPv6 where the council invited submissions of applications which are based on the new internet protocol. The council hopes the contest will be a helpful step towards an efficient and large deployment of IPv6. The IPv6 Council, founded in late 2007 in Potsdam, will award prices of up to 10,000 Euros to the best developers' ideas for concepts, applications, and implementations. The winners will be announced and receive their awards at the 2nd German IPv6 Summit on May 14th, 2009 in Potsdam. more

ICM Registry Publicly Posts Filings for Independent Review Panel Against ICANN on .XXX Domain

ICM Registry (proponents of the .xxx initiative) and Stuart Lawley, Chairman and President of the organization, have filed a 522-page brief in the ongoing Independent Review Process that began last June. "In what may prove to be the biggest sleeper Internet governance issue of the year, ICM Registry has publicly posted its filings for the Independent Review Panel that will decide whether ICANN acted improperly in rejecting its application for a .xxx domain," writes Brenden Kuerbis in a post on the IGP blog.  more

UPDATEDNetwork Solutions Under Large Scale DDoS Attack, Millions of Websites Potentially Unreachable

Network Solutions is having problems with "all" its name servers, according to their tech support and a recent post on North American Network Operators' Group (NANOG) mailing list indicates that it has been under very large-scale UDP/53 DDoS attack for the last 48 hour period. As a result, domain names hosted with Network Solutions' Worldnic have been affected. Network Solutions is one of the leading domain registrars and DNS hosting providers in the world, managing more than 7.6 million domain names. more

Internet 2008 in Numbers

In a blog post today, Royal Pingdom has posted a variety of statistical answers to questions for 2008 such as: How many websites were added? (A: 31.5 million) How many emails were sent? (A: 210 billion per day) How many blog posts were published? (A: 329 million) Other numbers include total number of Internet users in the world which, according to June 2008 data, is recorded at 1,463,632,361 with Asia having the highest percentage of users (39.5%) followed by Europe as the second largest (26.3%) and North America as the third (17%). Numbers have been gathered using a wide variety of sources from around the Web. more

Akamai Reports Record Streaming, Web Content on Obama’s Presidential Inauguration

Web traffic delivery surged to record levels during President Barack Obama's inauguration yesterday, according to content delivery network provider, Akamai. As the largest day ever for the delivery of concurrent live streaming over Akamai's global servers, the company reported it delivered a peak of over 7 million active simultaneous streams (the majority being live streams) at approximately 12:15 p.m. ET on Tuesday, January 20, 2009. Typical simultaneous streams on an average day are less than 1 million. more

Expect More Malware Threats Exploiting the Financial Crisis, Warn Experts for 2009

Continued exploitation of the financial crisis to scam users with fake financial transactions services, fake investment firms, and fake legal services is the top trend to emerge for 2009 according threat predictions by McAfee. "Computer users face a dangerous one-two punch today," said Jeff Green, senior vice president of McAfee Avert Labs, McAfee's research group. "The current economic crisis is delivering a blow to our financial well-being, while malware authors are taking advantage of our distraction to deliver a roundhouse strike." more

Report on Possibly the Largest Data Breach Ever

Amidst all the recent reports of data breaches, Gunter Ollmann of IBM Internet Security Systems, has reported today about one particular case which may be the largest data breach to date. Ollmann wirtes: "The media has been full of analysis concerning data breaches over the last couple of weeks, mostly related to the uptick in 2008 reports. While much of this increase can be accounted for by the wider adoption of state legislation that mandates companies to publicly disclose their data breaches, I think it is worth pointing out today's latest disclosure -- which is quite probably the largest breach ever." more

Spending on Mobile Phone Surpasses Residential Phone Services

Recent statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Consumer Expenditure Survey has shown that American have been increasingly spending on mobile phones from 2001 through 2007. BLS data indicates cellular phone expenditures surpassed spending on residential landline phone services beginning in 2007. From the report: "In 2001, the ratio of spending on residential phone services to spending on cellular phone services was greater than 3 to 1. In 2007, cellular phone expenditures accounted for 55 percent of total telephone expenditures compared to 43 percent for residential phone expenditures. The distribution of telephone service expenditures between residential telephone/pay phone services and cellular phone services changed significantly in all age groups since 2001." more

Phishers Using New Web-Based Technique ‘In-Session Phishing’ to Steal User Data, Researchers Warn

Security researchers have identified a new phishing attack method designed to trick users into surrendering confidential information after they have logged on to an online banking, brokerage, or other sensitive website. The technique, called In Session Phishing, can be used to inject into all major browsers legitimate looking Pop Up messages using malicious JavaScript that request passwords, account numbers, etc., on behalf of the trusted website. more

UPDATEDFCC Chair Kevin Martin Makes His Departure Official, Announces Resignation

In his last meeting today, Federal Communication Commission (FCC) chairman Kevin J. Martin, announced that he will be leaving the commission and will not be staying in the Obama administration. While the chairman had previously declined commenting on his future plans, the departure did not come unexpected. In the statement after announcing his departure at the FCC meeting, Martin also mentioned that he would depart Jan. 20 to become a Senior Fellow at the Aspen Institute in Washington, D.C. This announcement follows reports that President-elect Barack Obama will nominate Julius Genachowski to be the next FCC chairman. more

TV Warehousing: Comcast’s 500-Terabyte Storage Development for Advanced Advertising

Comcast has sketched out plans for a gigantic database called "TV Warehouse," able to store a full year of statistics gathered from digital set-tops in more than 16 million households nationwide, according to an industry executive familiar with the project. TV Warehouse, envisioned as having a massive 500 Terabytes of storage, would then feed up to a database even broader in scope operated by Canoe Ventures, the advanced-advertising venture formed by Comcast and five other large MSOs. more

An Early Look at the State of Spam in 2009, Social Networking Spam on the Rise

As recently reported, spam volumes indicate spam has nearly jumped back up to its pre-McColo shutdown levels. However, Symantec's The State of Spam report has also observed that in recent days spammers are increasingly piggybacking on legitimate newsletters and using the reputation of major social networking sites to try and deliver spam messages into recipients' inboxes... In its special URL investigation the report also indicates that on average approximately 90 percent of all spam messages today contain some kind of a URL. Additionally, analysis of data from past recent days, according to Symantec, have shown that 68% of all URLs in spam messages had a '.com' Top-Level Domain (TLD), 18% had a China's '.cn' ccTLD and 5% had a '.net'. more

UPDATEDGoogle Rolling Out Its Services Over IPv6

While Google admits that offering its services over IPv6 is still in its infancy, the company today announced the option for accessing Google services over IPv6. Last year, Google started offering Google search over IPv6 on IPv6-only websites like 'ipv6.google.com' requiring IPv6 connection, but other Google products have not been generally available over IPv6, says Google. "That's why we created Google over IPv6." more

Broadband Now: Yes We Can… Stimulate the Economy, Says Industry Association

With the upcoming inauguration of United States' 44th President, USTelecom Association has released a Broadband Now video highlighting challenges facing the country, and how broadband can make a significant difference. From revitalizing the economy to tackling health care, education and global climate change, broadband can play a vital role, says the association which represents broadband service providers, manufacturers and suppliers providing advanced applications and entertainment. more

Study Projects Broadband Sign-Ups to Fall by 12 Percent in 2009, Economic Downturn Blamed

The result of the economic downturn will force cable industry and telephone companies to face some unsettling prospects in terms of customer growth and revenue increases, according to a forecast by research firm, Pike & Fischer. According to the report released today, Pike & Fischer anticipates approximately 5.7 million U.S. households to become new high-speed Internet customers this year, marking a 12% decline in subscriber growth compared to 2008. The report also suggests that the cable industry will capture about 75% of new broadband subscribers. more