Internet

Security researchers have revealed that the current military hostilities between Russia and Georgia may have actually begun online a couple of weeks ago. There's no official word as to who was behind cyber attacks which brought down Georgian ... government websites, including that of the country's president Mikheil Saakashvili. The Russian government has denied any involvement in the attacks, which were routed through servers based in the US. Whoever was responsible used denial of service (DOS) attacks, a brutally simple technique which involves sending repeated requests to a website's server. It ... (view more)

Delta Airlines is the latest airline to announce plans to offer WiFi Internet service on its domestic flights. The new service will allow laptops, smartphones and other handheld devices to access the Internet while en route. Delta will charge a flat ... $9.95 for short flights of 3 hours or less and $12.95 for longer flights. Internet WiFi service will begin initially with Delta's fleet of MD80-type aircraft and expand throughout its entire fleet by the end of summer 2009. (Source: nytimes.com ) With the pressure of rising fuel costs, new airline revenue opportunities have gained momentum. Delta ... (view more)

A recently-discovered security flaw in fundamental operation of the Internet could be much more serious than first believed. Every form of network, including email services, could be vulnerable. Dan Kaminsky, the security expert heading efforts to ... solve the problem, told a Las Vegas convention that the central problem can be exploited in at least 15 different ways. As we recently reported , the heart of the problem is the Domain Name System (DNS), which translates website addresses into the identifying number of the particular computer where the content of site is physically stored. A key ... (view more)

Your turn on Scrabulous? Too bad. As of July 29, 2008 the popular application will no longer be available to Facebook subscribers in Canada and the US. Before it was disabled, the app closely resembling Hasbro and Mattel's board game Scrabble had ... over half a million players daily. The battle began in January as legal dispute between the Agarwalla brothers (Scrabulous' Indian developers) and the two distributors of Scrabble (Hasbro in Canada, Mattel in the United States). Both toy companies accused the Agarwalla's RJ Software company of intellectual property infringement. Currently, it is ... (view more)

The Global Environment for Network Innovations believes that almost 20 years is enough to classify the Internet as "outdated". GENI is now attempting to do what no one would have ever imagined: rebuild the entire Internet infrastructure. With the ... Internet being such an integral part of our lives, it's difficult to remember how people functioned in the pre-online era. Instead of marvelling at the fact that we have an endless supply of information at our disposal, we complain that our software and products are outdated, slow, and difficult to manage. Without even realizing it, we create a never ... (view more)

According to a recent Chinese government tally, 253 million people in the country regularly use the Internet, giving China the largest Internet using population in the world. This number is more than double the 137 million users counted just two ... years ago. China has for some time been considered the world's next economic powerhouse. As western nations like the United States slow in production and development, rising countries like China and India are expected to be next in line for huge industry booms. But industry is not the only indicator that these countries are steaming into the twenty- ... (view more)

Now that Wikipedia is being rivalled by Knol , it seems fitting that Google is being challenged by a new search engine called Cuil. Created by Anna Patterson, a former employee of Google, the new engine, pronounced "cool", is attempting to edge ... Google out of the market by including more Web pages in its search index. The move is obviously the result of Patterson's knowledge of Google's search index, having been previously working on that particular aspect of Google. (Source: pcworld.com ) Cuil claims that it has indexed over 120 billion pages on the net and, unlike Google, can sort results ... (view more)

Reading, at least in the conventional way of leafing page by page through a book, is at risk and the blame is being placed squarely on the shoulders of the Internet and (of course) television. The decline of reading has fueled a massive national ... debate not only about 'if' we read but 'how' we read. The debate began in 2002 when the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) found that the number of non-reading adults had increased by 17 million to 89 million adults, roughly one out of three adults. According to the NEA, only 47% of American adults read 'literature', including poems, plays, ... (view more)

Have you ever anticipated an important email, but found yourself in a location where no WiFi service was available? How about having to be away from your inbox for a few days? Just the thought of having all of those messages build up, only to ... extract one or two relevant ones...what a time-waster! Yahoo has revealed plans to help users manage their email accounts by making their popular email service available on the desktop. The program is called Yahoo Zimbra Desktop and will work with Yahoo Mail, AOL and Google Gmail (in addition to other small business email services) in an effort to ... (view more)

Tivo has made a deal with Amazon that could genuinely revolutionize how TV advertising works. Viewers will now be able to order products mentioned in shows with a click of their remote. The system will initially involve chat shows such as Oprah, ... Ellen DeGeneres and the Colbert Report. Whenever a guest talks about a product, such as an author publicising a book, viewers will see a link in the corner of their screens. Clicking on it will either allow them to order it instantly by typing in a PIN code, or to put the item in their Amazon shopping basket to examine on a computer later on. At first ... (view more)