Category: Internet
September storm of spam coming, targeting students
There’ll be a 40 per cent increase in email spam in September, thanks to spammers perfecting their new techniques, and things are only going to get worse according to the email security firm SoftScan.
They believe that many spammers will target students returning to colleges and universities, because they have the potential to connect unprotected laptops to large, fast, educational networks which may themselves be poorly secured.
SoftScan say that a typical student’s surfing habits — careless use of the Net, including spending a long time in chat rooms and playing online games — makes them the perfect target. Their shiny new laptop may already be part of a “botnet” before being connected to a college’s network.
Porn stars need social networks too…
Web start-up Zivity is the discreet, plain-brown-wrapped new idea for a social networking site for those who ‘perform’ within the adult entertainment world.
Zivity has secured one million dollars of lovely venture cash…
Aussie arrested for pirating 'The Simpsons Movie'
A poor Australian man was made the scapegoat of the entire internet piracy scene on Friday, when police raided his home.
The film’s maker 20th Century Fox teamed up with Aussie piracy experts…
House of Lords Committee wanted to redesign the Internet, until told they couldn't
Whether they’d been talking to Elton John, or just wanted to live up to their popular reputation, isn’t clear, but the House of Lords’ Science and Technology Committee (bet you didn’t know they had one, did you?) recently decided that the Internet had bad things in it, and needed to be redesigned in order to make it more secure.
Believing the Internet to be like “‘a Wild West’ operating outside of the law”, their report claimed that, “While the internet supports astonishing innovation and commerical growth, it is almost impossible to control or monitor that traffic that uses it. So we have to ask the question, whether it is possible to redesign the internet more securely?”
Opinion: Kids use age-old excuse — "everyone's doing it" — to justify media piracy. So what's new?
Andy Merrett writes…
I’m sure it’s the classic excuse for why kids and teenagers do pretty much anything their parents (or indeed, The Law) don’t want them to.
“But everyone else is doing it.”
Passing over the classic teacher retort “Well, if everyone else was jumping off a cliff [auditioning for a part in “Lemmings the Movie, perhaps?], would you” (oops), that seems to be the reasoning for kids who copy and distribute music, videos, or software over the Internet.
It has to be a lot less dangerous – at least physically – than jumping off that metaphorical cliff.
A study from the European Commission — which is seriously official and, therefore, must be true — found that a large number of kids knew that what they were doing was illegal, but still did it because they saw both their peers and their parents doing it.
The EC calls this an “implicit form of authorisation”.
I just call it kids wanting the latest music and being too poor to buy it. It could be laziness. Or the possibility that most albums contain mainly crap music and they want to make a mix tape of decent tracks.
Opinion: Facebook numpties deserve to be defrauded!
Jonathan Weinberg writes…
Two days into the week and TWO Facebook security threats appear. The first in The Guardian on Monday warned secret code from FB’s inner-workings had been published on the internet prompting warnings of a security risk for users. Boring! Code, schmode, it’s far too technical.
But then this piece of wonder appeared today in The Times and it’s far more worrying, not least because everyone I know does it – and also because it involves a frog!
Freddi Staur is a cute green frog who has stolen email addresses and mobile phone numbers from users on the social network website – in an experiment to show how easily people give out their personal information to strangers…
Are these the 30 most popular blogs in the world today?
According to one research firm, other blog popularity-ranking services are flawed because they only use one or two measurements to calculate the most popular blogs.
They, on the other hand, use a schmorgasboard of statistics including inbound links from the likes of Yahoo and Google, Alexa (does anyone normal actually use their toolbar?), plus US unique monthly visitor data.
Spotting a fundamental flaw in this already?
Or, in other words, how many of those blogs are not US-based?
Fancovers – for mum's version of the Hucknall classics
Fancovers is a very special place. It is a place where ambition and blatant self-promotion combine, to let us ordinary people show off how good we think we are at strumming along with our favourite classic songs.
A simple YouTube-alike interface…
Google begins selling additional online storage
Google has started offering additional space to its Gmail and Picasa users, increasing storage quota from 2.8GB and 1GB respectively, and will roll out the offer to some of its other services, including Google Docs and Google Spreadsheet, in due course.
A range of plans have been introduced, from 6GB of storage for $20 per year to 250GB for $500 per year.
UK ISPs send BBC warning about possible bandwidth hogging iPlayer
Internet Service Providers in the UK are warning the BBC that the widespread use of its iPlayer service may put too much strain on their networks, and consequently they could place restrictions on their users’ access to it.
Demand for the service certainly seems high, with over 120,000 people signing up to be beta testers in the first week alone.
Yet while it provides great additional exposure for a variety of the BBC’s TV programmes, leading ISPs including BT, Tiscali, and the Carphone Warehouse believe that its soaring popularity will eat heavily into their bandwidth.
