internet news - 20/2

[David Goldstein <goldstein_david@yahoo.com.au>]

Domain Name News
Customers claim refunds over dot-biz domains 
Almost 9,000 UK web users who signed up for a dot-biz domain name are
to receive a refund after the original allocation process was deemed
to be improper. 
 http://www.silicon.com/a51442

http://www.netimperative.com/media/newsarticle.asp?ArticleID=14447&ChannelID=2&ArticleType=1

Right To A Domain Name At Issue In Sex.com Case (Newsbytes)
The question of whether or not a domain name is "property" that can
or cannot be "converted" will be decided later this year by a federal
appeals court in California. The issue stems from the continuing
fall-out from the theft of a lucrative domain name seven years ago.
 http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/174608.html

Appeals Court Quashes Domain-Name Ban For PR Firm (Newsbytes)
An appeals court has reversed the ruling of a federal court judge who
said more than a year ago that a California public relations firm
could not use the domain EntrepreneurPR.com because it infringed on
trademarks belonging to the publisher of Entrepreneur magazine.
 http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/174595.html

VeriSign teams with Web services providers (iwon Money)
VeriSign Inc. has reached deals with a group of technology
heavyweights to integrate its technology for authentication, payments
and domain name lookups with their Internet-based services.

http://money.iwon.com/jsp/nw/nwdt_rt.jsp?cat=USMARKET&src=201&feed=reu&section=news&news_id=reu-n18243968-u1&date=20020219&alias=/alias/money/cm/nw
 http://zdnet.com.com/2110-1106-840673.html

From BNA Internet Law News
Proposal To Do Away With ICANN At-Large?
 Internet message boards were humming yesterday with news from ICANN
director Andy Mueller-Maguhn that Joe Sims, lawyer to ICANN, recently
met with officials from the European Union and proposed a complete
restructuring of the ICANN board that would see the at-large
community eliminated and government representative invited onto the
board. Mueller-Maguhn, the European elected ICANN director, was
apparently not invited to the meeting.
 http://www.icannwatch.org/article.php?sid=554
 http://www.dnso.org/clubpublic/ga/Arc09/msg01055.html 

Internet News

Copyright law comes under the spotlight (Financial Times)
The US supreme court on Tuesday agreed to make a rare foray into
intellectual property law. It will hear a case which attacks recent
trends in US law that have expanded the scope and duration of
copyright at the expense of public access to copyrighted works. 

http://news.ft.com/ft/gx.cgi/ftc?pagename=View&c=Article&cid=FT31VBV3WXC

Justices to Review Copyright Extension (New York Times)
The Supreme Court agreed today to decide whether the 1998 law that
extended the duration of existing copyrights by 20 years was
constitutional. The court's action took the world of copyright
holders and users by surprise and held the potential of producing the
most important copyright case in decades.
 http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/20/national/20RIGH.html

Net porn judge fights to save job (Australian IT)
A New Zealand High Court judge is under pressure to resign after
revelations he accessed internet pornography at work, while five of
his colleagues who also logged on to sex sites have been cleared of
any wrongdoing. 

http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,3810000%5e16123%5e%5enbv%5e,00.html
 http://www.it.mycareer.com.au/breaking/2002/02/19/FFXSLHOKUXC.html

Man held on Internet sex counts (Sydney Morning Herald)
A New Zealand man faces extradition to Australia on sex charges
involving a 14-year-old girl he met in an Internet chatroom. 
 http://www.smh.com.au/news/0202/20/national/national15.html

Not All Asian E-Mail Is Spam (Wired)
Anti-spam activists confirm that a growing number of beleaguered
systems administrators are now blocking all e-mail originating from
Asia from their systems, in an attempt to choke off a flood of spam
from China, Taiwan and Korea, an action that has upset non-spamming
Asian e-mailers.
 http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,50455,00.html

Afghanistan joins mobile age (BBC)
Afghanistan is joining the mobile phone revolution, even though the
war-ravaged country has almost no telephones and barely a notion of
computers, let alone the internet. 
 http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1827000/1827993.stm

From BNA Internet Law News 
Be Sues Microsoft For 'Destruction' Of Business
Be Inc. is suing Microsoft for allegedly destroying its business
through anti- competitive practices. Be, which sold most of its
assets last year to handheld computer maker Palm, claims that
Microsoft struck deals with PC makers barring them from installing
more than one operating system on computers they sold. Be complaint
at http://www.beincorporated.com/msft_complaint.pdf
 http://news.com.com/2100-1040-840478.html 

Microsoft and the Great Game (The Economist)
The world’s biggest software firm is pushing into the mobile
telephone and computer-games businesses with a series of
announcements this week. These are no interesting diversions, but a
desperate attempt to stop new consumer products from stealing large
parts of Microsoft’s market over the coming years
 http://www.economist.com/agenda/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=997908

Making cents on the Internet (The Economist)
The first successful flotation in more than a year of a Silicon
Valley dotcom on Wall Street shows that, despite the dotcom bust,
there is still some interest among investors in a good Internet idea.
PayPal is one of a group of firms trying to pioneer systems for
making small payments on the web. If they succeed, they will
transform e-commerce 
 http://www.economist.com/agenda/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=997654

Patching the Net's Fatal Flaws (Business Week) 
Before the Web, computer viruses depended on the lowly floppy disk as
their sole means of transmission. Now, thanks to widespread broadband
connectivity, computer viruses can blossom into huge epidemics in no
time, crashing networks and overwhelming IT staffs. So-called "worms"
clog the Web with random scans, searching for vulnerable systems to
corrupt or co-opt, tearing across the digital landscape in a matter
of days or even hours. New hybrid worm-viruses, such as "Code Red,"
are even more insidious, using both e-mail and direct scans to spread
their bandwidth-hogging packages to deface Web pages or erase
critical files.

http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/feb2002/nf20020220_5030.htm

Fifty million Indians online by 2004 (Nua)
eMarketer reports that the number of Internet users in India is
forecast to reach 50 million by 2004. 
 http://www.nua.ie/surveys/?f=VS&art_id=905357675&rel=true

IIA: the Net is not dead, long live the Net (ZDNet)
The Australian Internet Industry Association has come to the
Internet's defence, responding to a survey suggesting that Australian
businesses are losing interest in it. 

http://www.zdnet.com.au/newstech/ebusiness/story/0,2000024981,20263551,00.htm

Invasion of the browser snatchers (CNN)
Ron Zorko was only trying to get to PC World's web site. But when he
accidentally mistyped the URL, a porn site popped up.
"I suppose I should learn to type better," he says. But a typo that
took him to mycpworld.com was only the beginning of his troubles. He
soon discovered that this porn site was now both his home and default
search page. He changed the settings back in Internet Explorer. But
with his next system boot, www.mycpworld.com was back.

http://europe.cnn.com/2002/TECH/internet/02/18/browser.snatchers.idg/index.html

Macromedia integrará el player de Flash en el Mediaterminal de Nokia
(ZDNet) 
Nokia y Macromedia han anunciado que el player de Flash estará
integrado en el Mediaterminal de Nokia, un innovador dispositivo de
entretenimiento que combina emisión de vídeo digital (DVB), acceso a
Internet, tecnología de grabación de vídeo personal (PVR) y juegos. 
 http://www.zdnet-es.com/canales/zdnn/mostrarnoticias_t.html?id=3769

Internet2: Building a Better Net (techLEARNING.com)
The high-tech research and development community behind the Net's
invention is hoping to make history again with Internet2. Although
sometimes used generically to refer to next-generation, high-speed
connectivity, Internet2 is actually a proprietary name of a
not-for-profit consortium, led by nearly 200 American universities
who have come together to "recreate the partnership of academia,
industry, and government that helped foster today's Internet in its
infancy." Member universities pay a hefty annual fee to connect to
the high-speed Internet2 network and collaborate with nonprofit
partners and corporate sponsors on developing new applications and
network services for research and education.

http://www.techlearning.com/db_area/archives/TL/2002/02/newsextra.html

See http://www.alfa-redi.com/noticia/ for the web version of the
news, along with an archive.


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