Today, an internet milestone is reached with the 25th anniversary of the day the first dotcom website was registered. Back in March 1985, Symbolics computers in Cambridge, Massachusetts made history with an internet address ending in dotcom. Later that year, another five companies followed suit, effectively setting the very slow trend moving. It wasn't until…
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TSA Security Leaks- TSA Blames Bloggers
While the government investigates how an alleged terrorist was able to bring a bomb onto a U.S.-bound plane and try to blow it up on Christmas Day, the Transportation Security Administration is going after bloggers. Steve Frischling and Chris Elliott both wrote about a directive to increase security after the incident, and both were served…
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Russia and U.S. Talk Internet Security
The United States has begun planning talks with Russia and a United Nations arms control committee to strengthen Internet security and limit military use of cyberspace. American and Russian officials have very different interpretations of the talks so far, but the simple fact that the United States is even participating represents a significant policy shift…
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New Zealand Man Fined $16 Million for Spamming
In New Zealand, a man living in Queensland has been ordered to pay more that $16 million for running the world's largest illegal spam operation. Lance Atkinson, 26 years old from Christchurch, was living in Pelican Waters on the Sunshine Coast when the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) had the entirety of his assets frozen just last…
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Is Wikipedia Out?
According to Monday's Wall Street Journal, volunteers have increasingly been quitting Wikipedia en masse for a variety of potential reasons. An excess of 49,000 editors left Wikipedia's English-language edition during the first three months of 2009, compared with only 4,900 for the same quarter a year earlier. This information is quoting Spanish researcher Felipe Ortega,…
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Are Pacemakers in Danger of Attack?
Recently, medical manufacturers have started adding wireless capabilities to many implantable medical devices like pacemakers and cardioverter defibrillators. This technology allows doctors to access vital information and send commands to these devices quickly, but security researchers have called attention to concerns about their vulnerability to attack. Researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in…
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IBM and Canonical Get Competitive
A few weeks back, IBM and Canonical, the head sponsor of Ubuntu Linux, announced a plan to deliver Linux desktops and software to Africa. The effort was originally announced over a year ago, in August of 2008 as the Microsoft-free PC Effort. The basic idea was to have a Linux operating system with IBM smart client applications…
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Google’s Big Plans
Google has always withheld the number of servers running in its data centers, but at a recent ACM workshop presentation, Google engineer Jeff Dean showed that the company is in preparations to manage as many as 10 million servers in the future. One of the keynote speakers on large-scale computing systems, Dean discussed some of…
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Google’s Neglected Library
In light of Google's recent push for a book settlement, their past is being considered and it's true to say that it's surprisingly unmarred. In this specific market however, Google has made mistakes. The worst of these is known as Usenet A massive internet and dial-up-based message board system brought to life in 1980. For…
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Recovery.gov Still Not Accessible
Recovery.gov, a heavily advertised government-run transparency site that relaunched on Monday after criticisms about it's actual content, still fails to meet the federal government's accessibility standards or and practices. The non-compliance issues relate mostly to display of data tables -- an essential point given the site's motto of "Data, Data & More Data." This is…
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