WSJ : GoDaddy Internet Registrar For Sale

From CBS News:

World's Largest Internet Domain Name Registrar Could Fetch More Than $1 Billion.

(CBS) Citing "people familiar with the matter," The Wall Street Journal is reporting that GoDaddy.com, the private company that registers Internet domain names, has put itself on the block and could fetch upward of $1 billion.

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People Hanging Out More On Facebook Than Google

From CNET:

Internet users are spending a bit more time these days socializing on Facebook than searching on Google, according to new data from market researcher ComScore.

In August, people spent 41.1 million minutes on Facebook, accounting for 9.9 percent of the total number of minutes they spent online for the month. That inched past the 39.8 million minutes, or 9.6 percent of total time, that Net users spent on all of Google's sites combined, including its search engine, YouTube, Gmail, and Google News, ComScore said Thursday.

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One In Four Gives Fake Net Names

From The BBC:

More than a quarter of people online have lied about their name and more than one in five has done something online they regret, says a new report.

The behavioural and psychological impacts of online life are outlined in a report from the security firm Norton.

The report suggests that two-thirds of web users have been hit by cybercrime, with the costs and time to resolve the crime varying widely around the world.

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Craigslist Puts "Censored" Tag On Adult Services Section

Craigslist has deactivated its adult services section
(Credit: CBS News)

From CBS News:

Craigslist has deactivated its adult services section in the United States, leaving in its place the word "censored" in bold black and white.

It's still not clear whether this means that the classified ads site has taken down the section, something that 17 attorneys general recently demanded in an open letter. They said that Craigslist could not adequately block potentially illegal ads promoting prostitution and child trafficking.

Craigslist did not immediately return a request for comment.

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Report: Global Net Speeds Keep Bumping Up

(Credit: Akamai)

From CNET:

The fastest are getting faster.

Eight of the top 10 countries or regions in terms of Internet speed saw a boost in the final quarter of 2009, according to Akamai's "State of the Internet Report" released Tuesday.

Among those top areas, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Japan grabbed the best Internet performance globally, averaging connection speeds higher than 7.5 megabits per second (Mbps) in the fourth quarter. Although South Korea actually was hit by a 29 percent decline in performance year over year, it still snagged the No. 1 spot at 11.7 Mbps.

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Threat Level Privacy, Crime and Security Online Isohunt Ordered to Remove Infringing Content

From Threat Level:

A U.S. judge is ordering Isohunt, one of the world’s leading BitTorrent search engines, to remove all infringing content. Isohunt’s operator said Tuesday that the decision would likely shutter the site, which has 30 million unique monthly visitors.

The injunction targeting Isohunt follows similar rulings against competing pirate sites like Mininova and The Pirate Bay, although the Bay has thus far eluded compliance.

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US Marines Embrace Web 2.0

[Photo: USMC; Linker: MY]

In About-Face, Marines Embrace Web 2.0 -- The Danger Room

Last summer, the U.S. Marine Corps took a draconian approach to Web 2.0, issuing a sweeping ban on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and other social media sites from its networks.

In an order issued yesterday, the service changed course, issuing guidelines to encourage “responsible and effective use” of social networking technology. “The Marine Corps embraces and strives to leverage the advances of internet-based capabilities,” the directive states. “Effective immediately, internet-based capabilities will be made available to all MCEN [Marine Corps Enterprise Network] users.”

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My Comment: I call this a positive direction. Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc. they all add to the morale and well being of our soldiers.

'Infections Found': Inside The Great Scareware Scam

Fake virus scans often look just like the real thing.

From New Scientist:

ONE day in March 2008, Kent Woerner got a disturbing phone call from a teacher at an elementary school in Beloit, Kansas. An 11-year-old student had triggered a security scan on a computer she was using, revealing that the machine contained pornographic images. Worse still, the images had appeared on-screen as the scan took place.

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GoDaddy To Stop Registering Domains In China

From CNET:

At least one company is ready to follow Google's stance on doing business in China: GoDaddy.

During a congressional hearing later today to discuss Internet freedom and China, GoDaddy executives plan to announce that they will stop registering domain names in China in response to a new government policy that requires extensive information about registrants, according to The Washington Post. Starting last December, individuals and businesses that wished to register a .cn domain name were being asked to submit a photograph of themselves as well as a serial number identifying their business license in China.

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The Future Of News

WNU Editor: Kristen Purcell explains how the Internet has changed how we get news. (From ABC News)

How Privacy Vanishes Online

Alessandro Acquisti mined Web data to successfully predict Social Security numbers. Ross Mantle for The New York Times

From The New York Times:

If a stranger came up to you on the street, would you give him your name, Social Security number and e-mail address?

Probably not.

Yet people often dole out all kinds of personal information on the Internet that allows such identifying data to be deduced. Services like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr are oceans of personal minutiae — birthday greetings sent and received, school and work gossip, photos of family vacations, and movies watched.

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China Stands Firm On Internet Security Amid Google Drama

From Xinhuanet:

BEIJING, Jan. 14 (Xinhua) -- China Thursday insisted its stand for an open Internet under proper regulating following Google's widely-concerned statement of a possible retreat from the country.

"The Internet is open in China, where the government always encourages its development and has created a favorable environment for its healthy development," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said at a regular press conference.

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China's Internet Users Top 384 Million

From Xinhuanet:

BEIJING, Jan. 15 (Xinhua) -- China reported 384 million Internet users by the end of 2009, up 28.9 percent, or 86 million, from a year ago, said a report from the China Internet Network Information Center on Friday.

Internet users surfing through mobile phones increased by 120 million to top 233 million, about 60.8 percent of the total Internet population, thanks to expanding third-generation (3G) business, said the report.

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FCC Broadband Plan Promises High-Speed Internet For 100 Million More Americans By 2015

A Series of Tubes At Terremark's Miami headquarters, undersea Internet cables emerge from the Atlantic and connect to the rest of the country John B. Carnett

From Popular Science:

Today the Federal Communications Commission unveiled its plan to expand broadband Internet access to 100 million more Americans within the next five years. The plan calls both for the expansion of wired networks in under-serviced areas, and for the dedication of more wireless spectrum for Internet use as opposed to television. Largely deficit-neutral, the plan has bipartisan support in the current Congress, in part because contentious issues of net neutrality and privacy were not tackled by the FCC's plan. As you remember, PopSci called for an improvement to the nation's broadband infrastructure last year

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Cyberguards To Protect Children

Image: Demand for digital monitors from concerned parents is expected to grow. (Alamy)

From The Independent:

Technology that allows parents to monitor and even block a child’s online and mobile activity is coming to Britain soon.

Do you know what your teenager is doing on the computer in their bedroom? What websites they are visiting and who they are poking on Facebook? American parents do. A raft of new technology designed to enable mums and dads to keep tabs on their children in cyberspace is hitting the market across the Atlantic.

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U.S. Army Worried About Wikileaks In Secret Report

From CNET News:

A leaked U.S. Army intelligence report, classified as secret, says the Wikileaks Web site poses a significant "operational security and information security" threat to military operations.

Classified U.S. military information appearing on Wikileaks could "influence operations against the U.S. Army by a variety of domestic and foreign actors," says the report, prepared in 2008 by the Army Counterintelligence Center and apparently disclosed in its entirety on Monday.

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RealNetworks: A Tale Of Opportunities Missed

Rob Glaser with Bill Gates. Glaser left Microsoft in 1994.
(Credit: Microsoft)

From CNET News:

Rob Glaser's 16 years at the helm of RealNetworks started with the pioneering of the early dot-com days and ended with a courtroom drubbing at the hands of the entertainment industry. In between, Glaser, who by most accounts saw the promise of Web video and music long before his peers, proved himself to be a better visionary than executive.

Earlier this month, Real announced it was giving up on attempts to defend its RealDVD technology against a lawsuit filed by the major movie studios. RealDVD is software that enabled users to create copies of their film discs and store the digital versions on hard drives. It was also the backbone of a planned DVD player, code-named Facet. The device would copy and hold 70 digital movies and enable users to instantly jump from film to film and scene to scene.

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How The Web Has Changed Us

Watch CBS News Videos Online

From The CBS:

Yahoo! Survey Finds Reading, Writing, Commerce, Cooking and Dieting Changed By Internet Access

(CBS) When was the last time you thumbed through a cookbook? Or used a phonebook? Most of us now rely on a computer to get the most basic information in an instant.

Popular search engine Yahoo! is celebrating its 15th birthday this week, and they launched a survey looking at just how much our lives have changed since the Web took hold. Heather Cabot, Yahoo!'s Web life editor, shared the survey's surprising results on "The Early Show."

The survey highlights the responses of more than 1,800 Internet users ages 25 to 64.

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How To Save And Share Ridiculously Large Files

From CNET:

A few years ago it was a big deal to find a place that would let you share 1 gigabyte of files.

Things change, though. Bandwidth keeps growing, and the cost of Web storage keeps shrinking. That's good news for people looking to share increasingly large files, be it an HD video recording or an archive of several files that tops out at over a gig.

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More States Propose Internet Sales Taxes

From CNET:

Jeremy Bray received an e-mail message this morning with an unwelcome surprise: Amazon.com told him it had canceled its affiliate program, which provides small payments for referring customers, for everyone in the state of Colorado.

The reason? A state law, which Democratic Gov. Bill Ritter signed last week, slaps onerous new restrictions on large out-of-state sellers like Amazon, which said it has no choice but to end its marketing program in response.

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