On the Net

JuntaJoe · Site Admin

Did you just say gooberment?

If you knew anything about southern US slang then you'd be laughing your ass off.

s_stabeler · Knight of the Realm

it was a mis-spelling, not intentional. in hadn't even noticed that.

JuntaJoe · Site Admin

Study says many dial-up users don't want broadband

A new study suggests that attitude rather than availability may be the key reason why more Americans don't have high-speed Internet access.

The findings from the Pew Internet and American Life Project challenge the argument that broadband providers need to more aggressively roll out supply to meet demand.

Only 14 percent of dial-up users say they're stuck with the older, slower connection technology because they can't get broadband in their neighborhoods, Pew reported Wednesday.

Thirty-five percent say they're still on dial-up because broadband prices are too high, while another 19 percent say nothing would persuade them to upgrade. The remainder have other reasons or do not know.

"That suggests that solving the supply problem where there are availability gaps is only going to go so far," said John Horrigan, the study's author. "It's going to have to be a process of getting people more engaged with information technology and demonstrating to people it's worth it for them to make the investment of time and money."

Nonetheless, the Pew study does support concerns that rural Americans have more trouble getting faster Internet connections, which bring greater opportunities to work from home or log into classes at distant universities. Twenty-four percent of rural dial-up users say they would get broadband if it becomes available, compared with 11 percent for suburbanites and 3 percent for city dwellers.

Vint Cerf, one of the Internet's key inventors and an advocate for the idea that the government should be more active in expanding broadband, suspects that many more dial-up users would be interested in going high-speed if they had a better idea of what they're missing. He pointed out that broadband access is available from only one provider in many areas, keeping prices high and speeds low.

"Some residential users may not see a need for higher speeds because they don't know about or don't have ability to use high speeds," Cerf said. "My enthusiasm for video conferencing improved dramatically when all family members had MacBook Pros with built-in video cameras, for example."

Overall, Pew found that 55 percent of American adults now have broadband access at home, up from 47 percent a year earlier and 42 percent in March 2007. By contrast, only 10 percent of Americans now have dial-up access.

Despite the increase in overall broadband adoption, though, growth has been flat among blacks and poorer Americans.

Of the Americans with no Internet access at all, about a third say they have no interest in logging on, even at dial-up speeds. Nearly 20 percent of nonusers had access in the past but dropped it. Older and lower-income Americans are most likely to be offline.

Pew's telephone study of 2,251 U.S. adults, including 1,553 Internet users, was conducted April 8 to May 11 and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2 percentage points. The error margins for subgroups are higher — plus or minus 7 percentage points for the dial-up sample.

Copyright © 2008 The Associated Press.

JuntaJoe · Site Admin

In Your Facebook: Virus Anything But Friendly

It's all fun and friendship until someone gets an infection.

In this case, the someone may be your Facebook friend. There's a nasty virus spreading faster than you can update your Facebook status.

Dubbed Koobface, the virus preys on the social network's messaging system to entice the unsuspecting to download a video from their "friend " with the tempting message, "You look just awesome in this new movie." All you have to do is update your Flash player and you're good to go with your cool, new vid. Sounds great, right? Wrong! The social call is actually a social disease, and before you know it, when you think you've got mail you've actually got a virus. The insidious worm will go grab all the private data on your computer, like credit card info. Is nothing sacred?

The uninvited friend already made its destructive appearance on rival networking site MySpace. But Facebook is serious fresh meat. With 120 million users, it's a nightmare that's been waiting to happen.

According to Facebook, the virus has hit only a very small percentage of users. But, like the growing popularity of social networking, it's on the rise.

With friends like this, who needs enemies?

Copyright © 2008 Yahoo! Inc.

JuntaJoe · Site Admin

Death leaves online lives in limbo

NEW YORK: When Jerald Spangenberg collapsed and died in the middle of a quest in an online game, his daughter embarked on a quest of her own: to let her father's gaming friends know that he hadn't just decided to desert them.

It wasn't easy, because she didn't have her father's "World of Warcraft" password and the game's publisher couldn't help her. Eventually, Melissa Allen Spangenberg reached her father's friends by asking around online for the "guild" he belonged to.

One of them, Chuck Pagoria in Morgantown, Kentucky, heard about Spangenberg's death three weeks later. Pagoria had put his absence down to an argument among the gamers that night.

"I figured he probably just needed some time to cool off," Pagoria said. "I was kind of extremely shocked and blown away when I heard the reason that he hadn't been back. Nobody had any way of finding this out."

With online social networks becoming ever more important in our lives, they're also becoming an important element in our deaths. Spangenberg, who died suddenly from an abdominal aneurysm at 57, was unprepared, but others are leaving detailed instructions. There's even a tiny industry that has sprung up to help people wrap up their online contacts after their deaths.

When Robert Bryant's father died last year, he left his son a little black USB flash drive in a drawer in his home office in Lawton, Oklahoma. It was underneath a cup his son had once given him for his birthday. The drive contained a list of contacts for his son to notify, including the administrator of an online group he had been in.

"It was kind of creepy because I was telling all these people that my dad was dead," Bryant said. "It did help me out quite a bit, though, because it allowed me to clear up a lot of that stuff and I had time to help my mom with whatever she needed."

David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, has had plenty of time to think about the issue.

"I work in the world's largest medical center, and what you see here every day is people showing up in ambulances who didn't expect that just five minutes earlier," he said. "If you suddenly die or go into a coma, there can be a lot of things that are only in your head in terms of where things are stored, where your passwords are."

He set up a site called Deathswitch, where people can set up e-mails that will be sent out automatically if they don't check in at intervals they specify, like once a week. For $20 per year, members can create up to 30 e-mails with attachments like video files.

It's not really a profit-making venture, and Eagleman isn't sure about how many members it has — "probably close to a thousand." Nor does he know what's in the e-mails that have been created. Until they're sent out, they're encrypted so that only their creators can read them.

If Deathswitch sounds morbid, there's an alternative site: Slightly Morbid. It also sends e-mail when a member dies, but doesn't rely on them logging in periodically while they're alive. Instead, members have to give trusted friends or family the information needed to log in to the site and start the notification process if something should happen.

The site was created by Mike and Pamela Potter in Colorado Springs, Colorado. They also run a business that makes software for online games. Pamela said they realized the need for a service like this when one of their online friends, who had volunteered a lot of time helping their customers on a Web message board, suddenly disappeared.

He wasn't dead: Three months later, he came back from his summer vacation, which he'd spent without Internet access. By then, the Potters had already had Slightlymorbid.com up and running for two weeks.

A third site with a similar concept plans to launch in April. Legacy Locker will charge $30 per year. It will require a copy of a death certificate before releasing information.

Peter Vogel, in Tampa, Florida, was never able to reach all of his stepson Nathan's online friends after the boy died last year at age 13 during an epileptic seizure.

A few years earlier, someone had hacked into one of the boy's accounts, so Vogel, a computer administrator, taught Nathan to choose passwords that couldn't be easily guessed. He also taught the boy not to write passwords down, so Nathan left no trail to follow.

Vogel himself has a trusted friend who knows all his important login information. As he points out, having access to a person's e-mail account is the most important thing, because many Web site passwords can be retrieved through e-mail.

Vogel joked that he hoped the only reason his friend would be called on to use his access within "the next hundred years or so" would be if Vogel forgets his own passwords.

But, he said, "as Nathan has proven, anything can happen any time, even if you're only 13."

___

On the Net:

http://www.deathswitch.com

http://www.slightlymorbid.com

Copyright 2009 Associated Press

NibbyCat · Knight Lord

I have a "just in case" email in my drafts, addressed to the email address of a key person in each community. My mom knows about the email, and she can fill in the details before hitting send. For WoW, one of my co-workers got me started, there's a separate email for him listing my guild owners and some of my good buddies so he can use the realm mail to contact them.

JuntaJoe · Site Admin

New French law on Internet piracy meets skepticism

PARIS – A thousand French Internet users a day could be taken off-line following approval of President Nicolas Sarkozy's pet project — an unprecedented law to cut the Internet connections of people who repeatedly pirate music and movies.

As the husband of supermodel-turned-pop star Carla Bruni and friend to some of France's most powerful media figures, Sarkozy has long basked in his cozy ties with the entertainment industry, which has embraced the measure.

But many in Europe have denounced it, saying government controls needed to enforce the law could open the way for invasive state monitoring that violate privacy. And legal challenges at home could derail it: The opposition is trying to get the law declared unconstitutional.

Predictably, music, film and other industry groups have welcomed the measure. John Kennedy, chairman and CEO of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, said Wednesday that it represents a "sea change."

Critics, however, worry about civil liberties.

"We should be careful about interfering with the freedom of exchange of information," said Wolfgang Zankl, professor at the University of Vienna and president of the European Center for E-Commerce. "This is a constitutional right which no one should be barred from."

Some Internet experts say the law will be technically impossible to apply. It requires Internet subscribers to install special software that would enable authorities to track down and identify those suspected of illegal downloads, but some experts say such programs do not yet exist.

And because it denies accused pirates the chance to defend themselves before their Web connections are severed, legal experts say it will not stand up in court.

The measure's first short-term test came Tuesday, when the opposition Socialists took their objections before the Constitutional Council, which has a month to issue a ruling. If the council decides the law does not violate the constitution, it could take effect by summer.

It calls for graduated reprisals against alleged offenders. If a suspected pirate fails to heed e-mail warnings and a certified letter, Internet access would be cut for two months to a year — with the subscriber required to keep paying for the service under the contract's terms.

Christine Albanel, the French culture minister, foresees cutting 1,000 Internet connections a day and sending 13,000 warnings to first- or second-time offenders.

In the United States, the music industry has waged war on content swappers with limited success. A campaign to sue individuals who repeatedly download free songs was dropped last year in favor of an effort to work more closely with Internet service providers to try to block connections of alleged offenders. AT&T, the largest Internet service provider in the U.S., is beginning to send the warnings to its subscribers.

Even before the French legislation was approved this month, it encountered resistance in the European Parliament. Elections for a new parliament take place in June, and the fight for Internet freedom has become a campaign issue in some countries, notably Sweden, which has gained a reputation as a hub for illegal file-sharing.

Support for Sweden's Pirate Party, which calls for legalization of file-sharing, is growing, and a recent poll shows the party could gain a seat in the European Parliament.

Christian Engstrom, the party's nominee, said the French law is damaging to the free exchange of information on the Internet. French cooperation with the "greedy copyright industry is not fitting for a Western democracy," he said.

With the exception of Sweden, where a court sentenced four men last month to one-year jail terms for helping people download copyrighted material, court cases in Europe have failed to dent the practice. A Spanish court this week will hear the latest industry case against suspected file-sharers.

Russia and Ukraine are some of Europe's biggest offenders in illegal file-sharing. However, they have no intention of passing legislation similar to that in France and are out of the reach of eventual European Union rules.

Last year, the Russian government did shut down one music download site, but it soon resurfaced under a different name.

The French law faces opposition not only from politicians and the public. Internet service providers in Britain consider cutting offenders' connections a disproportionate, and ultimately impractical, punishment.

"Significant technological advances would be required if these measures are to reach a standard where they would be admissible as evidence in court," the U.K. Internet Service Providers' Association said Tuesday.

ISPs in Germany have so far refused to volunteer information about Internet pirates, forcing copyright owners to take them to court to compel them to reveal identities.

In the United States, Internet service companies complain that big users of music and video-swapping sites are clogging their networks, and some have begun to impose caps on Internet usage and charge extra for customers who exceed it.

In France, opponents say the new law misses the point by targeting downloads rather than online "streaming" — an increasingly popular approach where music and videos are played over the Internet, rather than downloaded and saved onto a user's computer.

The French law creates a government agency to sanction offenders, with the actual monitoring left to industry watchdogs.

"It has been extraordinary to see the change of attitude to this problem, not only among governments but also within our own creative industries," Kennedy told The Associated Press in an e-mail statement Wednesday. "Barely two years ago Internet piracy was something that seemed to many beyond regulation. Today, the mind-set couldn't be more different."

Copyright © 2009 Yahoo! Inc.

JuntaJoe · Site Admin

Hurdles remain as FCC ponders Internet data rules

WASHINGTON -

With Democrats in charge in Washington, supporters of so-called "net neutrality" rules seem poised to finally push through requirements that high-speed Internet providers give equal treatment to all data flowing over their networks.

These rules — at the heart of a five-year policy debate — are intended to guarantee that Internet users can go to any Web site and access any online service they want. Phone and cable companies, for instance, wouldn't be able to block subscribers from using cheaper Internet calling services or accessing online video sites that compete with their core businesses.

Yet making that happen is proving thorny — and it's likely that the courts and perhaps even Congress will ultimately get involved.

The Federal Communications Commission is set to vote Thursday on a proposal by the agency's chairman, Julius Genachowski, to begin crafting regulations to prohibit broadband providers from favoring or discriminating against Internet traffic.

Although Genachowski has the support of the other two Democrats on the five-member commission, his proposal has run into strong opposition from the large phone, cable and wireless companies that provide the bulk of U.S. high-speed Internet connections.

Broadband providers such as AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and Comcast Corp. argue that after pouring billions of dollars into their networks, they should be able to operate those networks as they see fit. That includes offering premium services over their lines to differentiate themselves from competitors and earn a healthy return on their investments.

Genachowski's proposal has also encountered misgivings among Republicans on the FCC and in Congress, who fear network neutrality rules could discourage broadband providers from continuing to expand and upgrade their systems.

"The risk of regulation really inhibits investment," said Republican Commissioner Robert McDowell. Noting the agency's estimated price tag of up to $350 billion to bring broadband connections to all Americans, he added: "How do we pay for all that?"

One thing everyone agrees on is that the FCC will have to sort through some tricky issues as Genachowski's plan moves forward.

One question is how much flexibility broadband providers should have to keep their networks running smoothly by ensuring that high-bandwidth applications such as YouTube videos don't hog too much capacity and impede other traffic like e-mail and online searches. In other words, when does legitimate network management cross the line to become discrimination?

Lawrence Spiwak, president of the Phoenix Center for Advanced Legal & Economic Policy Studies, a think tank that promotes free-market approaches, fears the FCC could hurt small, rural carriers that face higher costs to build out their systems. Without the ability to manage traffic, he said, these companies could be forced to make expensive network upgrades they cannot afford.

The FCC also needs to sort out how the rules would apply to wireless systems, which have less bandwidth capacity than wire-based networks and might have greater need for traffic management. AT&T, the exclusive U.S. carrier for Apple Inc.'s iPhone, already is running into capacity challenges given the popularity of the gadget and its scores of bandwidth-consuming applications.

"There could be unintended consequences of applying net neutrality to wireless," said Christopher Guttman-McCabe, vice president of regulatory affairs for CTIA-The Wireless Association, an industry trade group.

Genachowski's plan calls for the agency to formally adopt four broadband principles that have guided the FCC's enforcement of communications laws on a case-by-case basis. Those principles state that network operators must allow subscribers to access all online content, applications, services and devices as long as they are legal.

The FCC relied on those guidelines last year when it ordered Comcast to stop blocking subscribers from using an online file-sharing service called BitTorrent, which is used to transfer large files such as online video. Comcast is challenging the FCC ruling in court.

Genachowski also wants the FCC to adopt two more principles. One would make it clear that broadband providers couldn't discriminate against particular content or applications, either by blocking them completely or by letting other traffic jump ahead in the queue. The other would require providers to disclose network management practices.

He is also seeking to extend all six principles to wireless systems, which have been largely unregulated.

Thursday's vote will launch a proceeding to draft rules based on those principles and open them to public comment. The agency would likely adopt formal regulations by next summer.

Supporters of net neutrality regulations want to prevent broadband companies from becoming online gatekeepers by abusing their control over Internet networks. They warn that a startup like YouTube or Facebook might never have a shot if broadband providers can prioritize their own online services or those of business partners.

"If bandwidth is disproportionately consumed by those who can pay, it would destroy the Internet as a level playing field," said Ben Scott, policy director for the public interest group Free Press.

Colin Crowell, a senior counselor to Genachowski, described regulations as "sensible rules of the road to preserve a free and open Internet, which has been an economic and innovation engine for the nation."

But the service providers, along with many Republicans and even some Democrats in Congress, say the FCC chairman has not shown a need for more regulation given the few known examples of discrimination.

Besides Comcast's actions last year, the other major incident occurred in 2005, when a small telecom company in North Carolina blocked subscribers from accessing Vonage Holding Corp.'s Internet phone service. The company reversed course after the FCC stepped in.

"The FCC has a responsibility to prove a market failure before intervening in the market," said Rep. Cliff Stearns of Florida, the top Republican on the House subcommittee that oversees communications and technology. "I don't think they have proven that."

McDowell, the Republican commissioner, argues that antitrust laws — which aim to prevent companies from abusing their market power — already provide a clear framework to handle such incidents.

Meanwhile, looming over the entire FCC proceeding are questions of jurisdiction. In challenging the BitTorrent ruling, Comcast argued that based on the FCC's deregulation of Internet service in 2002 — a move the Supreme Court upheld three years later — the agency doesn't have authority to mandate nondiscrimination rules.

A decision in the Comcast case is expected next year and if the court rules in the company's favor, it could undermine the net neutrality proceeding at the FCC — forcing the agency to reverse course on deregulation or drawing Congress into the debate.

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press.

JuntaJoe · Site Admin

A good example of why taxing on the internet is stupid.

Coffee tax collection costs dwarf revenue

BERLIN (Reuters) – Germany spent more than 30 times as much collecting taxes on coffee beans ordered online from abroad than it received in the tax revenues, the accounting office said on Tuesday.

Some 4,000 Germans who bought coffee over the Internet from other EU countries but failed to pay the coffee tax have been charged between a few cents to 10 euros ($14.81) in taxes and fees, said Dieter Engels, head of Germany's Federal Accounting Office.

Tax collectors ended up with just 25,000 euros, way below the 800,000 euros in the costs of staff charged with collecting the payments, Engels said.

Germany is one of the few European countries to levy a special coffee tax which is currently set at 2.19 euros per kg.

Engels said that other administrative costs often exceeded the amount collected. It usually takes up to a year for customs to handle the cases.

"While the financial and customs authorities are too lax on some occasions, they go overboard in others," Engels said.

"This has led to somewhat grotesque results in coffee taxation."

Copyright © 2009 Yahoo! Inc

JuntaJoe · Site Admin

3 Google execs convicted of privacy violations

MILAN – Three Google executives were convicted of privacy violations Wednesday in allowing a video of an autistic boy being abused to be posted online — a case that has been closely watched for its implications on Internet freedom.

Judge Oscar Magi sentenced the three to a six-month suspended sentence and absolved them of defamation charges. A fourth defendant was acquitted altogether.

The trial had been closely watched since it could help define whether the Internet in Italy is an open, self-regulating platform or if content must be better monitored for abusive material.

Google, based in Mountain View, California, had said it considered the trial a threat to Internet freedom because it could force providers to attempt an impossible task — prescreening the thousands of hours of footage uploaded every day onto sites like YouTube.

Prosecutors insisted the case wasn't about censorship but about balancing freedom of expression with the rights of an individual.

The charges were sought by Vivi Down, an advocacy group for people with Down syndrome. The group alerted prosecutors to the 2006 video showing an autistic student in Turin being beaten and insulted by bullies at school. In the footage, the youth is being mistreated while one of the teenagers puts in a mock telephone call to Vivi Down.

Google Italy, which is based in Milan, eventually took down the video, though the two sides disagree on how fast the company reacted to complaints. Thanks to the footage and Google's cooperation, the four bullies were identified and sentenced by a juvenile court to community service.

The events shortly preceded Google's 2006 acquisition of YouTube.

All four executives denied wrongdoing. None was in any way involved with the production of the video or uploading it onto the viewing platform, but prosecutors argued that it shot to the top of a most-viewed list and should have been noticed.

Convicted of privacy violations were Google's senior vice president and chief legal officer David Drummond, former chief financial officer George Reyes and global privacy counsel Peter Fleischer. Senior product marketing manager Arvind Desikan was acquitted.

Copyright © 2010 Associated Press

JuntaJoe · Site Admin

How an unfixed Net glitch could strand you offline

NEW YORK – In 1998, a hacker told Congress that he could bring down the Internet in 30 minutes by exploiting a certain flaw that sometimes caused online outages by misdirecting data. In 2003, the Bush administration concluded that fixing this flaw was in the nation's "vital interest."

Fast forward to 2010, and very little has happened to improve the situation. The flaw still causes outages every year. Although most of the outages are innocent and fixed quickly, the problem still could be exploited by a hacker to spy on data traffic or take down websites. Meanwhile, our reliance on the Internet has only increased. The next outage, accidental or malicious, could disrupt businesses, the government or anyone who needs the Internet to run normally.

The outages are caused by the somewhat haphazard way that traffic is passed between companies that carry Internet data. The outages are called "hijackings," even though most of them are not caused by criminals bent on destruction. Instead the outages are a problem borne out of the open nature of the Internet, a quality that also has stimulated the Net's dazzling growth.

"It's ugly when you look under the cover," says Earl Zmijewski, a general manager at Renesys Corp., which tracks the performance of Internet data routes. "It amazes me every day when I get into work and find it's working."

When you send an e-mail, view a Web page or do anything else online, the information you read and transmit is handed from one carrier of Internet data to another, sometimes in a long chain. When you log into Facebook, your data might be handed from your Internet service provider to a company such as Level 3 Communications Inc., which operates a global network of fiber-optic lines that carry Internet data across long distances. It, in turn, might pass the data to a carrier that's connected directly to Facebook's server computers.

The crux of the problem is that each carrier along the way figures out how to route the data based only on what the surrounding carriers in the chain say, rather than by looking at the whole path. It's as if a driver had to get from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh without a map, navigating solely by traffic signs he encountered along the way — but the signs weren't put up by a central authority. If a sign pointed in the wrong direction, that driver would get lost.

That's essentially what happens when an Internet route gets hijacked. Because carriers pass information between themselves about where data should go — and this system has no secure, automatic means of verifying that the routing information is correct — data can be routed to some carrier that isn't expecting the information. The carrier doesn't know what to do with it, and usually just drops it. It falls into a "black hole."

On April 25, 1997, millions of people in North America lost access to all of the Internet for about an hour. The hijacking was caused by an employee misprogramming a router, a computer that directs data traffic, at a small Internet service provider.

A similar incident happened elsewhere the next year, and the one after that. Routing errors also blocked Internet access in different parts of the world, often for millions of people, in 2001, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2008 and 2009. Last month a Chinese Internet service provider halted access from around the world to a vast number of sites, including Dell.com and CNN.com, for about 20 minutes.

In 2008, Pakistan Telecom tried to comply with a government order to prevent access to YouTube from the country and intentionally "black-holed" requests for YouTube videos from Pakistani Internet users. But it also accidentally told the international carrier upstream from it that "I'm the best route to YouTube, so send all YouTube traffic to me." The upstream carrier accepted the routing message, and passed it along to other carriers across the world, which started sending all requests for YouTube videos to Pakistan Telecom. Soon, even Internet users in the U.S. were deprived of videos of singing cats and skateboarding dogs for a few hours.

In 2004, the flaw was put to malicious use when someone got a computer in Malaysia to tell Internet service providers that it was part of Yahoo Inc. A flood of spam was sent out, appearing to come from Yahoo.

"Hijacking is very much like identity theft. Someone in the world claims to be you," said Todd Underwood, who worked for Renesys during the Pakistan Telecom hijacking. He now works for Google Inc., trying to prevent hijacking of its websites, which include YouTube.

In 2003, the Bush administration's Critical Infrastructure Protection Board assembled a "National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace" that concluded that it was vital to fix the routing system and make sure the "traffic signs" always point in the right direction.

But unlike Internet bugs that get discovered and fixed relatively quickly, the routing system has been unreformed for more than a decade. And while there's some progress being made, there's little industry-wide momentum behind efforts to introduce a permanent remedy. Data carriers regard the fallibility of the routing system as the price to be paid for the Internet's open, flexible structure. The simplicity of the routing system makes it easy for service providers to connect, a quality that has probably helped the explosive growth of the Internet.

That growth has also increased the risks exponentially. Fifteen years ago, maybe 8,000 people in the world had access to computers that use the Border Gateway Protocol, or BGP, which defines how carriers pass routing information to each other. Now, Danny McPherson, chief security officer at Arbor Networks, believes that with the growth of Internet access across the world and the attendant increase in the number of carriers, that figure is probably closer to 1 million people.

Peiter Zatko, a member of the "hacker think tank" called the L0pht, told Congress in 1998 that he could use the BGP vulnerability to bring down the Internet in half an hour. In recent years, Zatko — who now works for the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — has said the exploit would still work. However, it would likely take a few hours rather than 30 minutes, partly because a greater number of Internet carriers would need to be hit.

Plenty of solutions have been proposed in the Internet engineering community, going back as far as 1995. The U.S. government has supported these efforts, spurred in part by the Bush administration's 2003 strategy statement. That has resulted in some trials of new technology, but adoption by data carriers still appears distant. And the federal government doesn't have any direct authority to force changes.

One reason is that the weaknesses in the system are in the routing between carriers. It doesn't help if one carrier introduces a new system — every one it connects with has to make the change as well.

"It's kind of everybody's problem, because it impacts the stability of the Internet, but at the same time it's nobody's problem because nobody owns it," says Doug Maughan, who deals with the issue at the Department of Homeland Security.

The big Internet carriers seem willing to accept the status quo. Spokesmen at AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc., two of the largest, world-spanning carriers of Internet traffic, said they were unable to find anyone at their companies who could discuss the issue of routing reform.

Pieter Poll, the chief technology officer at Qwest Communications International Inc., says that he would support some simple mechanisms to validate data routes, but he argues that fundamental reform isn't necessary. Hijackings are typically corrected quickly enough that they don't pose a major threat, he argues.

One fix being tested would stop short of making the routing system fully secure but would at least verify part of it. Yet this system also worries carriers because they would have to work through a central database.

"My fear is that innovation on the Internet would slow down if there's a need to go through a central authority," Poll says. "I see little appetite for that in the industry."

Jeffrey Hunker, a former senior director for critical infrastructure in the Clinton administration, says he's not surprised that little has happened on the issue since 2003. He doesn't expect much to happen in the next seven years, either.

"The only thing that's going to drive adoption is a major incident, which we haven't had yet," he says. "But there's plenty of evidence out there that a major incident would be possible."

In the meantime, network administrators deal with hijacking an old-fashioned way: calling their counterparts close to where the hijacking is happening to get them to manually change data routes. Because e-mails may not arrive if a route has been hijacked, the phone is a more reliable option, says Tom Daly, chief technical officer of Dynamic Network Services Inc., which provides Web hosting and other Internet services.

"You make some phone calls and hope and pray," Daly says. "That's about it."

Copyright © 2010 Associated Press

JuntaJoe · Site Admin

10 most dangerous web search terms

Web searches including terms like lyrics, free music downloads are most likely to put your computer at risk of virus or even malicious software, for security firm McAfee, Inc. has listed these words as some of the most dangerous search terms on the internet.

In a recent report, McAfee has revealed Web search terms that put users most at risk for accidentally downloading unwanted or malicious software.

The report, titled ''The Web''s Most Dangerous Search Terms'', reveals that the researchers analysed over 2,600 of the most popular search terms of 2009 from a range of sources, including the Google Zeitgeist and the Yahoo! 2009 Year in Review.

"Search engines are our on-ramp, our highway and our off-ramp -- they''re everything for Web travel. The hacking community is very smart -- they can spot a trend as well as any trendspotter," the Telegraph quoted Shane Keats, the research analyst with McAfee who led the study, as saying.

After analysing the search terms, the researchers found that hackers looking for crowds.

They are also attacking Internet surfers who are ready to take an online action, like downloading a ringtone or logging in to a site with a name, address and social security number.

For example, people searching for free music downloads are easy targets for hackers because they are expecting to download an mp3.

In order to evaluate the risk associated with each keyword, the researchers looked at the search results generated by each keyword, and then calculated the percentage of links that would take users to Web sites with unwanted adware, spyware or other malicious software.

For example, the term "lyric," had an average risk of 14.8 percent, meaning that nearly 15 out of 100 search results would take users to risky sites.

The most dangerous categories of search terms include online games, free downloads, song lyrics, and screensavers.

Search terms involving online games were among the riskiest because online games often prompt users to install plug-ins or register with a name or e-mail address.

Keywords that include lyrics were risky because Web sites featuring the words to songs sometimes host links that take users to sites with unwanted pop-up ads or spyware.

The 10 Most Dangerous Web Searches in the United States are:

1. Word Unscrambler

2. Lyrics

3. MySpace

4. Free Music Downloads

5. Phelps, Weber-Gale, Jones and Lezak Wins 4x 100m Relay

6. Free Music

7. Game Cheats

8. Printable Fill in Puzzles

9. Free Ringtones

10. Solitaire

ExarKun · Knight of the Realm

Really? Solitaire?