Twitter went offline for a while Friday after hackers calling themselves the Iranian Cyber Army apparently managed to change DNS records, redirecting traffic to another web page. Instead of the usual Twitter Web site design, visitors to the site instead saw a black screen with an image of a green flag and Arabic writing. The defaced site also included a message that said, This site has been hacked by Iranian Cyber Army
, and an e-mail address. Whether or not Iranian hackers are responsible for the attack wasn’t immediately clear. However, Twitter and other Internet sites have been used by Iranian opposition groups and protestors to share details of anti-government protests in that country
A Paris court has found Google guilty of copyright infringement in a ruling which could have ramifications for its plans to digitise the world’s books. The search giant must pay 300,000 euros in damages and interest to French publisher La Martiniere. It was one of many to take Google to court for digitising its books without explicit permission. Google was also ordered to pay 10,000 euros a day until it removes extracts of the books from its database
Hungarian Parliament has made the use of open standards mandatory by law in the intercommunication between public administration offices, public utility companies, citizens and voluntarily joining private companies, conducted via the central governmental system
A Sunshine Coast man has admitted to being the mastermind behind the world’s biggest email scam and faces fines of up to $200,000 next week. In a separate action, a Queensland man and a company were fined $6.5 million for a mobile phone texting scam that targeted users of dating web sites. For that scam, fines have yielded the Federal Government’s anti-spam body, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, more than than $22 million in the past year.
Spam accounted for 87 percent of all email messages in 2009, says Symantec. According to the security vendor’s December State of Spam and Phishing report, spam peaked in May, when it accounted for 95 percent of all email messages sent and was at its lowest level (74 percent) at the beginning of the year, just months after US ISP McColo was shut down
The Federal Trade Commission announced Wednesday that it is suing Intel, claiming that the chip giant has illegally used its dominance to stymie competition and to strengthen its own monopoly. In so doing, says the FTC, the company has robbed consumers of both choice and innovation in microprocessors, including those that outshone Intel’s own: “Intel’s anticompetitive tactics were designed to put the brakes on superior competitive products that threatened its monopoly in the CPU microchip market
Google Australia posted a statement today on its official blog calling the government’s ISP filter heavy handed
and outlining the search giant’s concerns about the scope of filtered content. Google’s major concern is that the scope of filtered refused classification content is too wide, citing a recent report by Australian media academics, professors Catharine Lumby, Lelia Green and John Hartley
The New Zealand government has reintroduced a newly rewritten addition to the Copyright Act which will allow rights’ holders to send copyright notices to ISPs, and force them to pass them on to account holders. Section 92A of the Copyright Act will allow rights holders to take people who have been identified as infringers more than three times in front of a Copyright Tribunal. This law will allow the Copyright Tribunal to hand down either a $15,000 fine or six months internet disconnection. The law specifies that the account holder himself is responsible for what is downloaded via the account, and doesn’t make allowances for identifying the actual copyright infringer if there are multiple computers tied to an account — via Slashdot
Given the recent coverage and controversy over Australia’s forthcoming web censorship system, it is somewhat surprising (and worrying) that Clause 11 of the UK’s proposed Digital Economy Bill seems to have gone by largely unnoticed. It amends the Communications Act 2003 to insert a new section 124H that could give the Secretary of State powers to order ISPs to block pretty much any website for pretty much any reason. Such orders would not require the scrutiny of parliament, or anyone else for that matter, because the Secretary of State would not be required to publish them — via Slashdot
One of Australia’s top communications experts says the Government’s internet censorship trials were designed to succeed from the outset, presented no new information and are now being used by the Government to further its political agenda. His comments came after Communications Minister Stephen Conroy yesterday announced he would introduce legislation before next year’s elections forcing ISPs to block a secret blacklist of refused classification
(RC) websites for all Australian internet users. Separately, a report into the scope of content that will be caught up in the net filters concluded that the Government’s policy might lead to a wide range of innocuous material disappearing from Australians’ computer screens. Commentators in Australia and overseas have interpreted Senator Conroy’s policy as pushing the country towards being like repressive regimes such as China and Iran. University of Sydney associate professor Bjorn Landfeldt said the Government had still failed to address serious issues such as whether the internet filtering scheme would result in any meaningful reduction in harmful content and whether it was worth the effort, given the risk that the scope of blocked content could widen significantly
Australia’s lack of constitutionally guaranteed rights made a much higher level of censorship possible in Australia than in other democracies, constitutional law expert Professor George Williams said today. Australia does not have a Bill of Rights which protects free speech at a federal level,
said Williams, the Anthony Mason Professor of law at the University of New South Wales. We don’t have the protections that they have in every other democratic country. That means Australia might be subject to far more stringent regulations on the internet than would be possible in other democratic countries
Civil rights and online free speech lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) today criticised the government’s internet filtering report, claiming civil rights implications should be the focus rather than the technology’s impacts on internet speed and performance
Australia intends to introduce filters which will ban access to web sites containing criminal content. The banned sites will be selected by an independent classification body guided by complaints from the public, said Communications Minister Stephen Conroy. A seven month trial in conjunction with ISPs found the technology behind the filter to be 100% effective. However, that claim has been questioned and there has been opposition from some internet users. Twitter users have been voicing their disapproval by adding the search tag nocleanfeed
to their comments about the plans
Microsoft has suspended a new internet messaging service in China, after it emerged that the site was partially based on code stolen from a rival startup. The site, Juku, launched in November is similar in concept to other online messaging systems like Twitter. But earlier this week the team behind Plurk, a young internet company based in Canada and popular with users across Asia, accused Microsoft of directly copying as much as 80% of the code to run the program
The short gloves are off. Earlier today, both Google and Facebook got into the URL shortening game with goo.gl and fb.me. Google’s move in particular is a direct challenge to bit.ly, the rising independent standard among link shortening services. Bit.ly’s response is in effect to ask publishers and consumers who they trust with all their data: Google or the rest of the Web? To that effect, it is rolling out a new service called bit.ly Pro, which allows Web publishers to bit.ly to send out short links with their own branded (short) domain names such as nyti.ms, 4sq.com, mee.bo, or tcrn.ch. Publishers in the beta include AOL, Bing, foursquare, Hot Potato, the Huffington Post, Meebo, MSN, the New York Times, the Onion, TechCrunch and the Wall Street Journal. Pro accounts is where all the money is, although bit.ly is not yet charging
It’s still not called the Google Phone
, but the Nexus One — to be made by HTC — is as close as I think we’re going to get. The WSJ cites sources familiar with Google’s plans and says that Google has designed this handset and plans to sell it directly to consumers, unlocked
The Delhi High Court has fined Microsoft for harassing alleged software pirates by taking them to court in the national capitol, instead of the cities where the crimes had supposedly occurred. According to the ruling, using money as a power tool is not condoned without repercussions
Seagate Technology today announced what it’s calling the world’s thinnest laptop and netbook hard drive, the Momentus Thin drive, which at 7mm, is just over a quarter of an inch thick and is 25% slimmer than a traditional 9.5mm, 2.5-in. hard drive. The 5,400 rpm Momentus Thin comes in 250GB and 160GB capacities, features 8MB cache, and uses the SATA 2.0 3Gbit/sec interface. The drive is scheduled to ship to Seagate’s resellers next month
First of its kind research conducted by Ynet in collaboration with surfers, bloggers suggests two of Israel’s largest internet service providers perform manipulation on file sharing traffic
Following an official press release recently that the Pirate Party of Australia is now accepting members, a scathing editorial was written in the Sydney Morning Herald. Such a response was expected, but this tone usually changes when they receive support from thousands of followers
RSS – Posts