Just before the parliamentary elections, to be held in March, Iran has decided to strictly control web users in the country by bringing some draconian rules to be implemented in cybercafes besides preparing to introduce a national intranet.
Residents of Iran are complaining that they are unable to connect to the Internet anonymously at Cyber Cafes in the country as government is creating a “censored” national intranet.
The government of Iran, on Wednesday, introduced a new rule under which the residents of Iran must give their name along with their father’s name, telephone number, address and national ID to log in to access internet, reported UPI.
Besides these rules, the government is also conducting various tests for a new countrywide network which is aimed at “substituting services” which operates through the internet. This move has lead to fears that the country is planning to withdraw itself from global internet.
In fact, just a week before the judiciary of Iran commented that the messages that are distributed through the social networks or e-mail asking for boycotting elections should be treated as “national security crimes”.
The domestic Intranet of Iran will be called “halal” which means pure and once it is activated the country will be shutting global web access to the 23 million internet users in the country.
Several websites suffered downtime on Monday owing to a software glitch affecting Juniper routers.
The problem stemmed from a Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) update made to Juniper routers running the JunOS versions 10.2 and 10.3.
The glitch, which caused downtime for hundreds of websites, affected a large number of internet service providers and networking service providers, V3 reports.
Juniper failed to give a detailed statement at that time, but Level3, one of the hosting company’s affected by the glitch confirmed what had happened.
“Shortly after 9am Eastern Time, Level 3′s network experienced several outages across North America and Europe relating to some of the routers on our network,” it said in a statement on its website.
“Our technicians worked quickly to bring systems back online. At this time, all connection issues have been resolved, and we are working hard with our equipment vendors to determine the exact cause of the outage and ensure all systems are stable,” the company later informed.
Level3 said that the issue had been resolved at 4:00 PM Monday afternoon and informed that it had started notifying affected customers.
But no one really knows how many websites or individual Web pages make up this seemingly infinite digital universe that is the internet.
Kevin Kelly, a founder of Wired magazine, has written that there are at least a trillion Web pages in existence, which means the internet’s collective brain has more neurons than our actual gray matter that’s stuffed between our ears.
“The Web holds about a trillion pages. The human brain holds about 100 billion neurons,” Kelly writes in his 2010 book “What Technology Wants.”
“Each biological neuron sprouts synaptic links to thousands of other neurons, while each Web page on average links to 60 other pages. That adds up to a trillion ‘synapses’ between the static pages on the Web. The human brain has about 100 times that number of links — but brains are not doubling in size every few years. The global machine is.”
With a $1 million grant from Google, the foundation plans to release the results of its online forensic search, called the World Wide Web Index, early next year, the foundation’s CEO, Steve Bratt, said in a recent interview.
Here’s how the foundation described the project in an e-mail to CNN:
“The Web Index will be the world’s first multi-dimensional measure of the Web and its impact on people and nations. It will cover a large number of developed and developing countries, allowing for comparisons of trends over time and benchmarking performance across countries.”
Bratt stressed that it won’t answer every question people have about the internet, but he hopes the index, which will be presented as a series of annual reports, will go a long way toward filling in some of the gaps.
“We want to be really careful about what will happen (as a result of the Web Index) because we just don’t know,” he said. “But this will be probably the best opportunity to quantify” the Web.
So, what kind of tools does one use to try to measure the internet? Certainly not yard sticks and rulers, right?
Bratt said the Web Foundation will conduct surveys of internet users, interview relevant people and try to gather data from internet service providers, national governments and search engines such as Google to come up with its findings.
In addition to looking at how big the Web is, the group wants to use data to tease out the role social media sites had in sparking revolution in the Middle East this year. And it wants to find out what kinds of websites people all over the world are looking at; what websites exist; and how internet trends differ from country to country and region to region.
The International Telecommunications Union digs into some similar questions, publishing reports on the number of internet users in various countries and how fast connections are around the world (South Korea is by far the fastest, in case you were wondering. The United States is super-slow in comparison).
Bratt said the Web Foundation’s work will supplement, not replace, what the ITU does.
The foundation is starting work on the Web Index soon and is still seeking funding for the project, he said. The first of five annual reports will be available early next year, the group says.
The European Commission wants countries to force Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block access to websites that contain material related to the sexual abuse of children. The move has been opposed by digital rights groups.
Some countries already operate systems of blocking, such as the UK’s voluntary system run by the Internet Watch Foundation, a charity that is not a part of Government or the police, which maintains a list of sites which ISPs can choose to block.
The European Commission has proposed a new Directive on the sexual abuse and exploitation of children which proposes, amongst other measures, that countries force ISPs to block sites containing material depicting abuse.
“Member States shall take the necessary measures to obtain the removal of internet pages containing or disseminating child pornography,” said a Commission statement summarising the proposed Directive.
“Member States will be obliged to ensure that access to websites containing child pornography can be blocked, as they are very difficult to take down at the source, especially if the site is outside the EU,” it said. “The proposal will leave it to Member States to decide exactly how the blocking should be implemented but legal safeguards will always apply.”
The move has been opposed by lobbying group European Digital Rights (EDRi), though. “As a measure which superficially sounds like a positive move, [forcing the blocking of sites] is also an attractive option politically, which creates the temptation to legislate based on impulse rather than on evidence, legality and effectiveness,” said the group in a letter to European Commissioners.
“The proposal is flawed on the basis of law, flawed on the basis of possible effectiveness, flawed on the basis of unintended consequences for the fight against online child abuse and flawed on the basis of inevitable damage for freedom of communication and privacy in the online world,” it said.
The letter was to Home Affairs Commissioner Cecilia Malmström; Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding; and Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes.
EDRi said that the Commission’s policies were based on misunderstandings of the problem.
“As repeatedly and consistently shown by figures produced by EU hotlines, the websites that are targeted by blocking measures are not in some distant ‘rogue states’ that the EU has no influence over – they are hosted on the territories of our major trading partners,” it said. “What is needed is comprehensive international law enforcement cooperation – the last thing that is needed is a policy which does nothing to address the actual problem but reduces the political pressure for effective action.”
The group warned that blocking is technically ineffective and possibly forbidden by the European Convention on Human Rights. It says that governments could use the blocking in the future for political or economic reasons if it is allowed to be used in the battle against distributors of material depicting child exploitation.
The Commission said that its existing Framework Decision on the issue was inadequate, and that new rules were needed.
“[The Framework Decision] approximates legislation only on a limited number of offences, does not address new forms of sexual abuse and exploitation using information technology, does not remove obstacles to prosecuting offences outside national territory, does not meet all the specific needs of child victims, and does not contain adequate measures to prevent offences. This calls for a substantive improvement of EU rules,” said the Commission in a statement.
In what is seen by many as a good turnaround for the company, Yahoo has posted impressive profits in its third quarter results with earnings standing at $186m.
Yahoo has managed to treble its profits as compared to the same period in 2008 and the internet giant has managed to pull this through even when its total revenues have dipped to $1.58bn.
Analysts believe a major reason for the higher profits at Yahoo were the layoffs it made in the organisation which has prove to be instrumental in improving its operating profits.
In addition, it has been trying hard to woo online advertisers to its network and has launched a major global advertising campaign which is supposed to cost the company around $100m.
Apart from its promoting its portals, Yahoo has also opened up its sites to third party services like Hotmail and Facebook which is going down well with many of its users.
While increasing its revenue figures remains a major challenge for Yahoo and its CEO, Carol Bartz expressed confidence in the company by mentioning “With new products like Yahoo homepage, our brand revitalisation campaign and expansion in the Middle East through Maktoob.com, our execution is improving and we are focused on what we do best -being the centre of people’s online lives.”
Comments
Shares of Yahoo went up significantly in pre-market transactions, gaining 4.54 percent to push the company’s share to around $18. That’s still half the price of what it was worth by the end of 2005. Much of the savings though was down to the steep reduction in the number of Yahoo employees, not necessarily down to new business.
Yahoo and Microsoft have announced a long-rumoured internet search deal that will help the two companies take on chief rival Google.
Microsoft’s search engine will power the Yahoo website and Yahoo will in turn become the advertising sales team for Microsoft’s online offering.
Yahoo has been struggling to make profits in recent years.
But last year it rebuffed several takeover bids from Microsoft in an attempt to go it alone.
Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer said the 10-year deal would provide Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, with the necessary scale to compete.
“Through this agreement with Yahoo, we will create more innovation in search, better value for advertisers, and real consumer choice in a market currently dominated by a single company,” said Mr Ballmer.
In return for ceding control of its search engine, Yahoo will get to keep 88% of the revenue from all search ad sales on its site for the first five years of the deal, and have the right to sell adverts on some Microsoft sites.
‘New era’
Yahoo said the deal would benefit Yahoo’s users and advertisers.
“This agreement comes with boatloads of value for Yahoo, our users, and the industry. And I believe it establishes the foundation for a new era of internet innovation and development,” said Yahoo chief executive Carol Bartz.
The deal became possible after Yahoo’s co-founder Jerry Yang stepped down as chief executive of the company late last year.
“Only a Yahoo outsider like Ms Bartz could do such a deal,” said Tim Weber, business editor of the BBC News website.
“She has no sentimental attachment to what was once the core of Yahoo, its search business. Microsoft was helped by the fact that at long last it managed to develop a search engine -Bing – that is a credible alternative to search giant Google.”
Yahoo said the deal would boost annual operating income by $500m and secure $200m in savings.
Crack teams of volunteers keep the net online and functioning, according to leading internet lawyer Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard University.
The way data is divided up and sent around the internet in many jumps makes it “delicate and vulnerable” to attacks or mistakes, he said.
However, he added, the “random acts of kindness” of these unsung heroes quietly keep the net in working order.
Professor Zittrain’s comments came at the TED Global conference in Oxford.
Incidents such as when the Pakistan government took YouTube offline in 2008 exposed the web’s underlying fragility, he explained.
But a team of volunteers – unpaid, unauthorised and largely unknown to most people – rolled into action and restored the service within hours.
“It’s like when the Bat signal goes up and Batman answers the call,” Professor Zittrain told BBC News.
Blind faith
The fragility of the internet’s architecture was largely due to its origins, said Professor Zittrain.
He said it had been conceived with “one great limitation and with one great freedom”.
“Their limitation was that they didn’t have any money,” he told the TED audience in Oxford.
It’s like dark matter in the universe. There’s a lot of it, you don’t see it but it has a huge impact on the physics of the place
Professor Jonathan Zittrain
Harvard University
“But they had an amazing freedom, which was that they didn’t have to make any money from it.
“The internet has no business plan – never did – no CEO, no single firm responsible for building it. Instead it’s folks getting together to do something for fun, rather than because they were told to or because they were expecting to make money from it,” he said.
That ethos, he suggested, had let to a network architecture that was completely unique.
“As late as 1992, IBM was known to say that you couldn’t build a corporate network using internet protocol.”
Internet protocol (IP), the method used to send data around the internet, was first described by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn in 1974. Data is broken into chunks – or packets – and sent around different parts of the network, often owned by different corporations and entities.
Professor Zittrain likened it to how a drink may be passed along a row of people at a sporting event.
“Your neighbourly duty is to pass the beer along – at risk to your own trousers – to get it to its destination.”
“That’s precisely how packets move around the internet, sometimes in a many as 25 or 30 hops with the intervening entities passing the data around having no contractual or legal obligation to the original sender or to the receiver.”
The prime minister spoke at the conference on Tuesday
The route the data takes depends on the net’s addressing system, he said.
“It turns out there is no overall map of the internet. It is as if we are all sat together in a theatre but we can only see in the fog the people around us.
“So what do we do to figure out what is around us. We turn to the person on our right and tell them what we can see to the left and vice versa.
This method, he said, gives network operators a general sense of “what is where”.
“This is a system that relies on kindness and trust, which also makes it very delicate and vulnerable,” he said.
“In rare but striking instances, a lie told by a single entity within this honeycomb can lead to real trouble.”
Bucket brigade
One example, he said, was an incident in 2008 when Pakistan Telecom accidentally took YouTube offline.
At the time, the Pakistan government asked Pakistan’s ISPs to block the site, reportedly because of a “blasphemous” video clip.
However, a network error caused a worldwide blackout of the site.
“This one ISP in Pakistan decided to [institute] the block for its subscribers in a highly unusual way,” said Professor Zittrain.
“It advertised that … it had suddenly awakened to find it was YouTube.”
Because of the way that the network spreads messages between neighbours, the announcement quickly reverberated around the world.
Passing a drink, firefighting, and saving the net – driven by similar motivations
Within two minutes, YouTube was completely blocked.
“One of the most popular websites in the world, run by the most powerful company in the world, and there was nothing that YouTube or Google were particularly privileged to do about it,” said Professor Zittrain.
However, he said, the problem was fixed within about two hours.
This was down to a largely unknown group known as the North American Network Operators Group (NANOG), he said.
NANOG is a forum for distributing technical information among computer and network engineers.
“They came together to help find a problem and fix it,” he said.
Despite being unpaid volunteers they were able to put YouTube back on line, he said.
“It’s kind of like when your house catches on fire,” he said.
“The bad news is there is no fire brigade. The good news is that random people appear from nowhere, put out the fire and leave without expecting payment or praise.”
The same social structures – and in particular kindness and trust – are also responsible for websites such as Wikipedia, he said.
“It’s like dark matter in the universe. There’s a lot of it, you don’t see it but it has a huge impact on the physics of the place,” he earlier told the BBC.
This year’s TED Global conference runs from 21 to 24 July.
Vodafone is celebrating Mayday and the release of a new 50p package by allowing all its Vodafone mobile phone customers to test drive the operator’s network by giving then free access for a day.
From tomorrow, they will also be able to browse the internet and check their email for only 50p a day on PAYG and on pay monthly contracts. Obviously, this is valid only if you use your phone as a browser, not as a modem.
The offer ends at midnight today and those interested can find out more on Vodafone’s free browsing page where you can also get your hands on the company’s own MB usage calculator as well as a series of mobile internet demos.
Furthermore the promotion is for private non-commercial use only but you are allowed to use it to stream content from Youtube for example. Vodafone reserves the right to limit the service if it believes a particular user’s usage is excessive. That said the daily usage limit is only 25MB, pretty low.
Vodafone users won’t have to enable or activate any particular feature to use the free service for a day. Youtube is a popular destination according to Vodafone and Google is the 8th most searched word on Google by Vodafone users.
Comments
Vodafone’s offer is expensive. Virgin offers the same package for 30p per day while Three and T-Mobile go even further at only 17p a day when you go on a £5 monthly package which is better value for money. Three will even allow you to use your phone as a modem.. O2 offers free internet access on many packages as a free bolt on and charges £5 per month for it.
Mozilla’s security team is rushing out a fix for its flagship Mozilla browser following the public release of attack code that targets a previously unknown vulnerability.
The exploit was released Wednesday online. It attacks a vulnerability present on Windows, Mac and Linux versions of the browser and could be used to surreptitiously execute malware on the machines of users who browse booby-trapped websites. The flaw is classified as a boundary condition error that targets Firefox’s XML parsing features according to SecurityFocus.
This is the second critical vulnerability in Firefox to come to light in as many weeks. Last week, a master’s candidate from the University of Oldenburg in Germany unveiled a separate vulnerability that allowed him to compromise the browser’s security. At time of writing, there were no reports that attackers were exploiting either vulnerability, but there’s nothing stopping a determined miscreant from modifying Wednesday’s release into working attack.
Mozilla intends to fix both vulnerabilities in the version 3.0.8, which is due for release on April 1, Mozilla says here. Mozilla developers are characterizing it as a “high-priority firedrill security update.”
As is usually the case, the Firefox add-on NoScript can mitigate attacks against both vulnerabilities.
A German computer science student has hacked the three main browsers, winning $15,000, showing that none of them is completely safe.
At the annual Pwn2Own at the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver, Charlie Miller hacked Apple’s Safari browser in seconds (below), but the others didn’t last significantly longer. As Ryan Naraine says at ZD Net:
A security researcher named “Nils” (he declined to provide his full name) performed a clean drive-by download attack against the world’s most widely used browser to take full control of a Sony Vaio machine running Windows 7.
He won a cash prize and got to keep the hardware. Details of the vulnerability, which was described by contest sponsor TippingPoint ZDI as a “brilliant IE8 bug!” are being kept under wraps.
Nils also pwned Safari and, later, Firefox, winning a total of $15,000 plus two computers. Not a bad day’s work.
Heise Online says Nils is “a 25 year old computer science student at the University of Oldenburg in Germany”.
Apple’s Safari was first to fall because Charlie Miller’s name was first out of the hat. If Nils had gone first, he might well have hit Safari first, but that would have been down to the MacBook being more attractive than the Sony Viao: he could have pwned whichever he liked, but the MacBook had already gone.
So, this year, nobody really gets any bragging rights — you can be pwned whichever browser and operating system you use — except maybe Google Chrome.
And as the DVLabs report says: “Will Nils produce a Chrome exploit tomorrow, turning his trifecta into a clean sweap of all browsers? Stay tuned!”
It seems like an answerable question, right?
It’s like dark matter in the universe. There’s a lot of it, you don’t see it but it has a huge impact on the physics of the place 
