internet

The battle lines have now been drawn clearly. Wide-open Internet usage could easily, and soon, become a thing of the past. On October 1, one of the nation's largest Internet providers will implement a new bandwidth limit policy for its residential ... customers. According to reports, by this time next month Comcast will introduce a 250 gigabyte-per-month limit. (Source: nytimes.com ) The Comcast move follows a recent dispute about its 'throttling' policy where the company limited bandwidth for customers using the BitTorrent file-sharing program. On August 1, the Federal Communications Commission ... (view more)

Those wanting to see a glimpse of the future need only look to the upcoming Internationale Funkausstellung in Berlin, the largest consumer electronics convention in Europe. Here, some of the biggest electronic companies in the world are set to ... showcase their latest products, with the main focus of the convention centered on wireless interconnectivity in the home. Manufacturers are closer than ever to releasing technology that allows televisions, stereos, computers and even kitchen appliances to communicate with one another wirelessly and automatically over the Internet. Among the new gadgets ... (view more)

In the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, a new breed of hacker-investigators monitoring how traffic is routed through countries where web sites are blocked and why it is happening are reportedly conducting digital espionage --- turning their ... attention to a new weapon of international warfare: cyber attacks. "Hacktivists," led by Ronald J. Deibert, director of Citizen Lab, referred to as the "NSA of operations," set out to help residents in countries that censor online content, but have ended up tracking wars. Citizen Lab researchers created a software tool called Psiphon that helps ... (view more)

It's one of the first rules of Internet 101: visiting questionable websites leads to viruses, which entices hackers to access your hard drive and monitor your every click. But can someone still be monitoring your web activity even if you're extra ... careful when selecting online destinations? The answer may just depend on which Internet provider you use. A few months ago, The U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce sent out an open letter to 33 companies inquiring about their online targeting practices, or in other words, the extent to which the web activity of their customers is being ... (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)

As part of a "Test Your ISP" Project, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is reportedly releasing "Switzerland," a software tool for customers to test the integrity of their Internet communications. The idea is the result of a Federal ... Communications Commission (FCC) action against Comcast for violating the FCC's net neutrality principles. Comcast was recently caught interfering with its subscribers' use of BitTorrent, Gnutella, and other common file-sharing protocols employed by millions of Internet users. In an effort to disrupt certain protocols commonly used for file-sharing, Comcast ... (view more)

Apple has finally caught up with its rivals by issued a Mac-based fix for a major flaw in the Internet's workings. However, experts say it may not have fixed the problem. The patch is for a recently discovered issue with the Domain Name System ... (DNS). In short, DNS translates website addresses into the numbers which identify the computer where a website is physically stored. When you visit a popular website, Internet providers usually keep a copy of the relevant DNS data to make the site quicker to load for the next visitor. The problem is that hackers found a way to exploit the way the DNS ... (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)

It appears increasingly likely that Comcast will face a formal rebuke from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) over its 'throttling' policy in which Internet access was deliberately slowed for those using peer-to-peer download services. The ... FCC won't announce any decision until its monthly meeting on Friday, but Reuters reports five of the nine commissioners have already agreed to uphold a complaint of throttling. (Source: guardian.co.uk ) That won't come as a major surprise, since FCC chairman Kevin Martin had already announced he considered Comcast's actions wrong and that he'd be ... (view more)