Networking

Citing the recent wave of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on U.S. and South Korean government sites, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York has proposed legislation to bolster U.S. efforts to work with foreign governments on cybersecurity.

Called the Fostering a Global Response to Cyber Attacks Act, the bill would require the secretary of state to report to Congress on efforts to encourage international cooperation in improving cybersecurity.

BT will guarantee connection speeds of at least 15Mbits/sec on its forthcoming fibre network.
The company is accelerating its nationwide fibre rollout, and now plans to connect a million premises by next March, and 1.5 million by next summer.

How many people does it take to break the Internet? On June 25, we found out it's just one -- if that one is Michael Jackson. The biggest showbiz story of the year saw the troubled star take a good slice of the Internet with him, as the ripples caused by the news of his death swept around the globe.

Playing games over the Internet is a lot easier than it used to be. Nobody wants to go back to the days of modem initialization strings, manually entering IP addresses, and getting disconnected whenever someone else picked up the phone. With the advent of broadband internet and home networks, users discovered a whole host of new problems related to that wonderful invention: the home router. Opening ports, other people saturating your network connection and messing up your game, IP address conflicts, you name it.

Millions of homes are expected to be denied superfast internet access for at least a decade because of a failure to reach agreement across the communications industry over who should pay for the upgrade.

Telecommunications service provider PacNet is further expanding its presence in the ASEAN region, with the launch its first point-of-presence (PoP) in Vietnam. Located in Vietnam’s capital Ho Chi Minh City, the PoP was established in partnership with Vietnamese telecommunications provider FPT Telecom.

The PoP is also expected to help PacNet further expand its network into Cambodia and Laos.

Internet users are being asked what they think about a year-old policy that boosts privacy protection for individuals who have registered dot-ca domain names.

The non-profit company that manages the domain has launched public consultations on the disclosure policy introduced in June 2008 for its Whois online directory. Whois is a tool that allows internet users to search for particular internet domain names to:

- See if they are available.
- View contact and technical information for the owner.

The Public Interest Registry, which manages the .org top-level domain, yesterday digitally signed the .org zone using the Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC).

DNSSEC lets DNS queries and responses be digitally signed so they can be authenticated and are harder to spoof or manipulate. But both sides of the exchange must be using DNSSEC in order for it to work, and it will be some months before the new security service is rolled out to domains registered within the top-level domain.

Britain's biggest broadband supplier has been accused of limiting download speeds on its cheapest package without giving users a clear warning.

BT Broadband cuts the speed users can watch video services like the BBC iPlayer and YouTube at peak times. A customer who has signed up for an up to 8 megabit per second package can have their speed cut to below 1Mbps.

Earlier this year Lord Stephen Carter, better known as the governments first Minister for Communications, Technology and Broadcasting, published his first interim Digital Britain report outlining the need for a new digital Universal Service Commitment/Obligation (related news). The new USO had several aims, not least to make broadband capable of 2Mbps available to everybody in the country by 2012. This would be no easy task, especially with BT’s own figures showing that roughly 7% of the country could not achieve such speeds via existing land lines.