Some offhand comments by Google's Vint Cerf at a recent event seem to have a triggered a panicky "Vint Cerf proposes nationalizing the Internet" buzz that's been ramping up fairly rapidly. Holy BitTorrent, Batman! Army paratroopers seen dropping into parking lots at AT&T and Comcast, while the Transportation Security Agency orders us all to remove our shoes before surfing the Web! Settle down, everyone. As usual with these kinds of stories, the truth is significantly different from the breathless buzzing. Here's how Vint described his thinking on this issue to me... More...

Last month, privacy organizations wrote to Google CEO Eric Schmidt asking the company to link to its privacy policy from its home page. Organizations say including the privacy link on the Google's home page is good practice and mandated by California law. On late Thursday, Google quietly changed its stance by adding a privacy link to its home page and with explanations posted on its main corporate blog and its public policy blog. More...

Last month, privacy organizations wrote to Google CEO Eric Schmidt asking the company to link to its privacy policy from its home page. Organizations say including the privacy link on the Google's home page is good practice and mandated by California law. On late Thursday, Google quietly changed its stance by adding a privacy link to its home page and with explanations posted on its main corporate blog and its public policy blog. More...

In all the recent uproar (New York Times, "Google Told to Turn Over User Data of YouTube," Michael Helft, 4 July 2008) about the fact that Google has been forced to turn over a large pile of personally-identifiable information to Viacom as part of a copyright dispute (Opinion), there is a really interesting angle pointed out by Dan Brickley (co-creator of FOAF and general Semantic Web troublemaker)... More...

VeriSign's CEO, William Roper, has resigned from the company and its board. Roper has been president and CEO of VeriSign for a bit more than a year -- he was named in May 2007 after VeriSign's previous CEO, Stratton Sclavos, stepped down for undisclosed reasons. VeriSign announced today that its board elected the company's founder and first chief executive, Jim Bidzos, as interim chief executive and president and named him executive chairman. More...

VeriSign's CEO, William Roper, has resigned from the company and its board. Roper has been president and CEO of VeriSign for a bit more than a year -- he was named in May 2007 after VeriSign's previous CEO, Stratton Sclavos, stepped down for undisclosed reasons. VeriSign announced today that its board elected the company's founder and first chief executive, Jim Bidzos, as interim chief executive and president and named him executive chairman. More...

On Wednesday night, a federal judge ruled that Google must turn over YouTube user activity which includes videos watched, IP addresses, and usernames, to the media giant, Viacom as part of a long-running copyright infringement case. Kurt Opsahl of the Electronic Frontier Foundation says: "The Court's erroneous ruling is a set-back to privacy rights, and will allow Viacom to see what you are watching on YouTube. We urge Viacom to back off this overbroad request and Google to take all steps necessary to challenge this order and protect the rights of its users." However, according to CNET News, there is a heavy protective order in place that will keep individuals' personal information protected in this ruling. Update: PDF download of court order here. More...

On Wednesday night, a federal judge ruled that Google must turn over YouTube user activity which includes videos watched, IP addresses, and usernames, to the media giant, Viacom as part of a long-running copyright infringement case. Kurt Opsahl of the Electronic Frontier Foundation says: "The Court's erroneous ruling is a set-back to privacy rights, and will allow Viacom to see what you are watching on YouTube. We urge Viacom to back off this overbroad request and Google to take all steps necessary to challenge this order and protect the rights of its users." However, according to CNET News, there is a heavy protective order in place that will keep individuals' personal information protected in this ruling. Update: PDF download of court order here. More...

Hundreds of Lithuanian government and corporate Web sites were hacked and plastered with Soviet-era symbols and other digital graffiti this week in what appears to be a coordinated cyber attack launched by Russian hacker groups, reports Brian Krebs of the Washington Post. According to reports, Lithuanian officials did not directly accuse Russian hackers of initiating the attacks which are said to have come from foreign computers. However, iDefense, a security intelligence firm, based in Reston, VA, as linked the attacks to nationalistic Russian hacker groups protesting a new Lithuanian law banning the display of Soviet emblems, including honors won during World War II. More...

Hundreds of Lithuanian government and corporate Web sites were hacked and plastered with Soviet-era symbols and other digital graffiti this week in what appears to be a coordinated cyber attack launched by Russian hacker groups, reports Brian Krebs of the Washington Post. According to reports, Lithuanian officials did not directly accuse Russian hackers of initiating the attacks which are said to have come from foreign computers. However, iDefense, a security intelligence firm, based in Reston, VA, as linked the attacks to nationalistic Russian hacker groups protesting a new Lithuanian law banning the display of Soviet emblems, including honors won during World War II. More...

It's one thing to start efficiently registering thousands of email accounts at reputable email providers by automatically breaking their CAPTCHA authentication, and entirely another to build a business model on the top of it next to the opportunity to abuse if for your own malicious purposes. Which is exactly what we have here, an underground service that's selling registered accounts at Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and the most popular Russian email providers in the thousands. More...

A three-year-old mandate for IPv6 usage, put into place by the White House's Office of Management and Budget, went into effect June 30 -- an order requiring all U.S. government agencies to have the ability to transmit IPv6. But passing of the deadline doesn't mean that U.S. government agencies have actually begun using IPv6 for transit, reports Sean Michael Kerner of InternetNews. In fact, even with experts predicting that the current IPv4 Internet addressing scheme will be exhausted by 2010, the vast majority of all traffic in the U.S. remains IPv4. More...

A three-year-old mandate for IPv6 usage, put into place by the White House's Office of Management and Budget, went into effect June 30 -- an order requiring all U.S. government agencies to have the ability to transmit IPv6. But passing of the deadline doesn't mean that U.S. government agencies have actually begun using IPv6 for transit, reports Sean Michael Kerner of InternetNews. In fact, even with experts predicting that the current IPv4 Internet addressing scheme will be exhausted by 2010, the vast majority of all traffic in the U.S. remains IPv4. More...

Broadband growth in the United States has effectively stalled over the past five months, a possible victim of the economic slowdown, according to a report released Wednesday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Some 55 percent of all adult Americans now have a high-speed internet connection, or a broadband connection, in their home, according to the report, "Home Broadband Adoption 2008." That number compares with 47 percent of adult Americans with broadband in early 2007, and 54 percent in December 2007. Hence broadband growth over the previous 12 or 13 months has dramatically tapered off. More...

Broadband growth in the United States has effectively stalled over the past five months, a possible victim of the economic slowdown, according to a report released Wednesday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Some 55 percent of all adult Americans now have a high-speed internet connection, or a broadband connection, in their home, according to the report, "Home Broadband Adoption 2008." That number compares with 47 percent of adult Americans with broadband in early 2007, and 54 percent in December 2007. Hence broadband growth over the previous 12 or 13 months has dramatically tapered off. More...

At its 32d International Junket Meeting last week, ICANN's Board approved the GNSO Council's recommendations for the eventual addition to the root of new generic top-level domains (gTLDs). This means that eventually, when the staff drafts, community comments upon, and Board approves implementation processes, those with deep pockets will have the opportunity to bid for new TLD strings... More...

Computer security researchers from ETH Zurich, Google, and IBM have suggested that computer software would be more secure if it were labeled with an expiration date -- similar to perishable food product. Firefox 2 is considered to be the most secure browser since 83.3% of its users worldwide are running the current version. The issue of browser security matters more these days because more and more malware is targeting Web browser vulnerabilities. Remotely exploitable vulnerabilities have been on the rise since 2000 and accounted for 89.4% of vulnerabilities reported in 2007, according to the study, which claims that a "growing percentage of these remotely exploitable vulnerabilities are associated with Web browsers." More...

Computer security researchers from ETH Zurich, Google, and IBM have suggested that computer software would be more secure if it were labeled with an expiration date -- similar to perishable food product. Firefox 2 is considered to be the most secure browser since 83.3% of its users worldwide are running the current version. The issue of browser security matters more these days because more and more malware is targeting Web browser vulnerabilities. Remotely exploitable vulnerabilities have been on the rise since 2000 and accounted for 89.4% of vulnerabilities reported in 2007, according to the study, which claims that a "growing percentage of these remotely exploitable vulnerabilities are associated with Web browsers." More...

The spam attacks which occurred this weekend and claimed to have come from Microsoft, are reported to have used Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) servers. Brian Krebs of Washington Post's Security Fix has investigated this issue -- from the report: "...to spammers and scammers accustomed to paying for all kinds of Web services with stolen credit cards, Amazon's service is another place to host their junk, said Suresh Ramasubramanian, head of anti-spam operations at Outblaze, a Hong Kong-based outfit that has listed all of Amazon's EC2 Internet space on its spam blacklists..." Also reported: "Anti-spam group Spamhaus also has flagged a large swath of Amazon's EC2 Internet address space on its "policy blocklist," which subscribers use to block e-mail from dynamic Internet addresses..." More...