Breitbart, “Internet flaw could let hackers take over the Web”
Computer industry heavyweights are hustling to fix a flaw in the foundation of the Internet that would let hackers control traffic on the World Wide Web.
Major software and hardware makers worked in secret for months to create a software “patch” released on Tuesday to repair the problem, which is in the way computers are routed to web page addresses.
“It’s a very fundamental issue with how the entire addressing scheme of the Internet works,” Securosis analyst Rich Mogul said in a media conference call.
“You’d have the Internet, but it wouldn’t be the Internet you expect. (Hackers) would control everything.”
The flaw would be a boon for “phishing” cons that involve leading people to imitation web pages of businesses such as bank or credit card companies to trick them into disclosing account numbers, passwords and other information.
Continue reading ‘Somebody needin to patch teh INTERWEBz, DNS vulnerability found’
Gizmodo, “Welcome to the Future of Broadband: Third Major ISP AT&T Testing Bandwidth Caps in the Fall”
AT&T chief tech officer John Donovan has told Wired that they’re going to test bandwidth caps in the fall, making them the third of the four major ISPs to do so. (Verizon stands alone, but for how long?) He lays out the familiar rationale, a small group of users (5 percent) pillage the network (40 percent) and they’ve got to stop them. But then he slips what’s probably the real reason they’ve moving to caps: “Traffic on our backbone is growing 60 percent per year, but our revenue is not.”
Continue reading ‘AT&T to limit the internet this Fall’
Yahoo! News, “AP Google Assails Microsoft Over Yahoo Deal”
But Google is painting a starkly different picture, asserting that Microsoft will be able to stifle innovation and leverage its dominating Windows operating system to set up personal computers so consumers are automatically steered to online services, such as e-mail and instant messaging, controlled by the world’s largest software maker.
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| Jerry Yang (Yahoo! CEO) |
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| Eric Schmidt (Google CEO) |
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Google Inc. raised the specter of Microsoft Corp. using its proposed $42 billion acquisition of Yahoo Inc. to gain illegal control over the Internet, underscoring the online search leader’s queasiness about its two biggest rivals teaming up.
The critical remarks, posted online Sunday by Google’s top lawyer, represented the Mountain View-based company’s first public reaction to Microsoft’s unsolicited bid for Yahoo since the offer was announced Friday.
“Microsoft’s hostile bid for Yahoo raises troubling questions,” David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, wrote. “This is about more than simply a financial transaction, one company taking over another. It’s about preserving the underlying principles of the Internet: openness and innovation.”
Google’s opposition isn’t a surprise, given that Microsoft views Yahoo as a crucial weapon in its battle to gain ground on Google in the Internet’s booming search and advertising markets.
Continue reading ‘Google assails Microsoft over Yahoo! bid’
CNN, “Web cable to be fixed ‘within week’”
Stephan Beckert, an analyst with TeleGeography, a research company that consults on global Internet issues, said the damaged cables collectively account for the majority of international communications between Europe and the Middle East.
He added the options while those cables are repaired were re-routing traffic around the globe or using an older undamaged cable that has less capacity — both of which would cause usage delays.
An official at Egypt’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, speaking on condition of anonymity told AP it was believed that a boat’s anchor may have caused the problems, although this was unconfirmed. Beckert agreed that was a likely cause.
Yahoo! News, “Microsoft Offers $44.6B for Yahoo”
By joining forces, Microsoft and Yahoo also would widen their narrowing advantage over Google in providing free e-mail accounts — a service that helps foster more loyalty with users and create more advertising opportunities.
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Microsoft Corp. has pounced on slumping Internet icon Yahoo Inc. with an unsolicited takeover offer of $44.6 billion in its boldest bid yet to challenge Google Inc.’s dominance of the lucrative online search and advertising markets.
The surprise offer of $31 per share, made late Thursday and announced Friday, seizes on Yahoo’s weakness while Microsoft tries to muscle up in a high-stakes battle with Google likely to define the technology landscape for years to come.
In a statement Friday, Yahoo said it will “carefully and promptly” study Microsoft’s bid.
With its profits steadily sliding, Yahoo’s stock slipped to a four-year low earlier this week and a new management team has been trying to steer a turnaround but sees more turbulence through 2008.
The announcement lifted Yahoo’s share price by almost 50 percent in morning trading, while Google fell almost 8 percent, dragged down by a fourth-quarter earnings report that missed Wall Street expectations.
In conference call Friday morning, Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer indicated he won’t take no for an answer after Yahoo rebuffed takeover overtures a year ago.
Continue reading ‘Microsoft Offers $44.6B for Yahoo’
CNN, “Internet failure hits two continents”
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (CNN) — Large swathes of Asia, the Middle East and north Africa had their high-technology services crippled Thursday following a widespread Internet failure which brought many businesses to a standstill and left others struggling to cope.
One major telecommunications provider blamed the outage, which started Wednesday, on a major undersea cable failure in the Mediterranean.
India’s Internet bandwidth has been sliced in half, The Associated Press reported, leaving its lucrative outsourcing industry trying to reroute traffic to satellites and other cables through Asia.
Reports say that Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Bahrain are also experiencing severe problems.
Nations that have been spared the chaos include Israel — whose traffic uses a different route — and Lebanon and Iraq. Many Middle East governments have backup satellite systems in case of cable failure.
Continue reading ‘Internet failure hits two continents’
While this is probably nothing new, nor anything that hasn’t already been transitioning, it is still a scary concept. The NYTimes provides some media coverage below on the subject.
The New York Times, “AT&T and Other ISPs May Be Getting Ready to Filter”
For the past fifteen years, Internet service providers have acted - to use an old cliche - as wide-open information super-highways, letting data flow uninterrupted and unimpeded between users and the Internet.
But ISPs may be about to embrace a new metaphor: traffic cop.
At a small panel discussion about digital piracy here at NBC’s booth on the Consumer Electronics Show floor, representatives from NBC, Microsoft, several digital filtering companies and telecom giant AT&T said the time was right to start filtering for copyrighted content at the network level.
Such filtering for pirated material already occurs on sites like YouTube and Microsoft’s Soapbox, and on some university networks.
Network-level filtering means your Internet service provider – Comcast, AT&T, EarthLink, or whoever you send that monthly check to – could soon start sniffing your digital packets, looking for material that infringes on someone’s copyright.
“What we are already doing to address piracy hasn’t been working. There’s no secret there,” said James Cicconi, senior vice president, external & legal affairs for AT&T.
Continue reading ‘ISPs and companies interested in policing the internet’
