Public participation site

Vint Cerf has blasted telephone and cable companies for harming national interests by holding investments in their networks to ransom. A long-time advocate of keeping the internet free from control by service providers, Cerf, a current senior vice-president for search giant Google Inc., told the Silicon Valley Watcher blog that the companies are being childish by threatening to withhold upgrading networks unless they get breaks from regulators. More...

Vint Cerf has blasted telephone and cable companies for harming national interests by holding investments in their networks to ransom. A long-time advocate of keeping the internet free from control by service providers, Cerf, a current senior vice-president for search giant Google Inc., told the Silicon Valley Watcher blog that the companies are being childish by threatening to withhold upgrading networks unless they get breaks from regulators. More...

Derek Slater, Google's policy analyst, is asking "What if you could own your own Internet connection?" In other words, proposing a very different model where residentials, businesses, or other institutions would pay for the installation and maintenance of their own "last mile" link to the Internet, thus improving broadband reliability and choice. Although the idea may seem far fetched, Slater points out that in Ottawa, Canada, a trial experiment is already underway trying out the consumer-owned model for a downtown neighborhood of about 400 homes... More...

Derek Slater, Google's policy analyst, is asking "What if you could own your own Internet connection?" In other words, proposing a very different model where residentials, businesses, or other institutions would pay for the installation and maintenance of their own "last mile" link to the Internet, thus improving broadband reliability and choice. Although the idea may seem far fetched, Slater points out that in Ottawa, Canada, a trial experiment is already underway trying out the consumer-owned model for a downtown neighborhood of about 400 homes... More...

As warned by Dan Kaminsky, Paul Vixie, and numerous other experts experts, it was just a matter of time before an exploit code for the now public DNS flaw would surface. An exploit code for the flaw allowing insertion of malicious DNS records into the cache of target nameservers has been posted to Metasploit, a free provider of information and tools on exploit techniques. According to reports Metasploit creator, H D Moore in collaboration with a researcher named "|)ruid" from Computer Academic Underground, created the exploit, dubbed "DNS BaliWicked Attack", along with a DNS service created to assist with the exploit. More...

As warned by Dan Kaminsky, Paul Vixie, and numerous other experts experts, it was just a matter of time before an exploit code for the now public DNS flaw would surface. An exploit code for the flaw allowing insertion of malicious DNS records into the cache of target nameservers has been posted to Metasploit, a free provider of information and tools on exploit techniques. According to reports Metasploit creator, H D Moore in collaboration with a researcher named "|)ruid" from Computer Academic Underground, created the exploit, dubbed "DNS BaliWicked Attack", along with a DNS service created to assist with the exploit. More...

The buzz from vendors and carriers about the broadband wireless technology called mobile WiMAX is heating up, fueled by new chipsets and radio products and fanned by some huge carrier investments, reports Network World. "Clearwire in the summer rounded up $900 million, including $600 million from WiMAX zealot Intel, to upgrade its growing wireless broadband net to support the IEEE's 802.16e mobile WiMAX standard. And Sprint Nextel in August became the first U.S. cellular provider to announce plans to deploy a nationwide mobile WiMAX net in the licensed 2.5GHz frequency band." More...

The buzz from vendors and carriers about the broadband wireless technology called mobile WiMAX is heating up, fueled by new chipsets and radio products and fanned by some huge carrier investments, reports Network World. "Clearwire in the summer rounded up $900 million, including $600 million from WiMAX zealot Intel, to upgrade its growing wireless broadband net to support the IEEE's 802.16e mobile WiMAX standard. And Sprint Nextel in August became the first U.S. cellular provider to announce plans to deploy a nationwide mobile WiMAX net in the licensed 2.5GHz frequency band." More...

The July edition of the ICANN magazine is out, emailed to subscribers and available for review online.

Each issue covers the latest news and events, plus outlines how you can interact with the organization. This month, alongside the usual policy rundown, compliance summary, Board meeting precis, public comment digest, and blog complendium, is a briefing note for the recent Paris meeting and some early details about the Cairo meeting.

The hope is that, no matter which part of ICANN you are interested in, this magazine will act as an entry point and make people more aware of the other work that the organization carries out every month.

Feedback, as ever, is welcome. If you wish to receive the magazine automatically to your inbox, there is a very simple sign-up box above the magazine on the main magazine webpage at http://www.icann.org/magazine/.

Introducing Content Licenses on Google Code

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

By DeWitt Clinton, Google Developer Programs

The Google Code team is pleased to announce the availability of content licenses for projects hosted on code.google.com. Projects owners may now select from either the Creative Commons Attribution license or the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license to indicate the terms under which their non-source code materials may be distributed.

While this may seem like a minor change, it reflects the continued evolution of our mission to support best practices in open source software development. As the open web increasingly relies on protocols and formats that reach beyond source code, we encourage authors to apply an explicit copyright license to the data, documentation, and related media that complements their work.

Please join us in the project hosting discussion group if you have any questions.

Using free and open source software licenses for the code and Creative Commons licenses for the content makes total sense and I'm really happy that Google Code has decided to include CC licenses as a default. Thanks to DeWitt and crew for this.

Update:

Google Knol opened today, intended to be a platform for authoritative articles about a specific topics, also known as knols, by a created single author or collaboratively. The default license for a new knol is CC Attribution. A creator can also choose CC Attribution-NonCommercial or All Rights Reserved.

More on the CC Blog.

A recent report by iDefense Labs estimates that there have been 66 distinct spear phishing attacks between February 2007 and June 2008, with the rate of attacks continuing to accelerate. Spear phishing groups have claimed more than 15,000 corporate victims in 15 months, with victim losses exceeding $100,000 in some cases. Victims include Fortune 500 companies, financial institutions, government agencies, and legal firms. More...

A recent report by iDefense Labs estimates that there have been 66 distinct spear phishing attacks between February 2007 and June 2008, with the rate of attacks continuing to accelerate. Spear phishing groups have claimed more than 15,000 corporate victims in 15 months, with victim losses exceeding $100,000 in some cases. Victims include Fortune 500 companies, financial institutions, government agencies, and legal firms. More...

Max Levchin the Guitar Hero Sorry I haven't been blogging much. I've been spending too much time talking. There are too many people who I need to catch up on.

My session did go better than I expected and I was happy to finally get to meet Quincy Smith of CBS Interactive who was the moderator for our panel.

I did manage to shoot some photos, but not too many. I've posted them as a Flickr set. If I get any tomorrow, I'll post them as well.

I'm leaving tomorrow morning for SF for a brief visit.

One day after a security company accidentally posted details of a serious flaw in the Internet's Domain Name System (DNS), hackers are saying that software that exploits this flaw is sure to pop up soon. Several hackers are almost certainly already developing attack code for the bug, and it will most likely crop up within the next few days, says one security expert. The author of one widely used hacking tool said he expected to have an exploit by the end of the day Tuesday. More...

One day after a security company accidentally posted details of a serious flaw in the Internet's Domain Name System (DNS), hackers are saying that software that exploits this flaw is sure to pop up soon. Several hackers are almost certainly already developing attack code for the bug, and it will most likely crop up within the next few days, says one security expert. The author of one widely used hacking tool said he expected to have an exploit by the end of the day Tuesday. More...

Robert Soloway, dubbed the "Spam King", who was charged with defrauding people through tens of millions of spam has been given four years in prison for mail fraud, electronic mail fraud, and failing to file a tax return. According to recent reports, federal prosecutors allege that from November 2003 to May 2007, Soloway sent tens of millions of email messages to advertise his company, which offered software to send out broadcast emails. For $495 customers could have an ad sent to 20,000,000 emails, or receive software allowing them to send up to 80,000,000 e-mails. Judge Marsha Pechman said laws governing Spam are very new territory for the courts, and the CAN-SPAM Act allows for only a maximum sentence of only five years. More...

Robert Soloway, dubbed the "Spam King", who was charged with defrauding people through tens of millions of spam has been given four years in prison for mail fraud, electronic mail fraud, and failing to file a tax return. According to recent reports, federal prosecutors allege that from November 2003 to May 2007, Soloway sent tens of millions of email messages to advertise his company, which offered software to send out broadcast emails. For $495 customers could have an ad sent to 20,000,000 emails, or receive software allowing them to send up to 80,000,000 e-mails. Judge Marsha Pechman said laws governing Spam are very new territory for the courts, and the CAN-SPAM Act allows for only a maximum sentence of only five years. More...

The 4th iCommons Summit is being held in Sapporo, Japan from 29 July to 1 August, 2008. The summit originally started as a gathering of Creative Commons country leads, but had evolved over the years into a global conference of people interested in social, educational, business, technical, creative, legal and other aspects of sharing, collaborative and open models for doing just about everything. I think it is the most interdisciplinary and global meeting of its kind.

The usual suspects will be there. This year, we have substantial participation from Sapporo City and should have interesting cultural programs as well as local Japanese participation.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to seeing everyone next week. Although there's only one week left, it's not too late to sign up and join. If you think Japan's too far away, you're not thinking globally.

In the last few weeks we've seen two very different approaches to the full disclosure of security flaws in large-scale computer systems. Problems in the domain name system have been kept quiet long enough for vendors to find and fix their software, while details of how to hack Transport for London's Oyster card will soon be available to anyone with a laptop computer and a desire to break the law. These two cases highlight a major problem facing the computing industry, one that goes back many years and is still far from being unresolved. Given that there are inevitably bugs, flaws and unexpected interactions in complex systems, how much information about them should be made public by researchers when the details could be helpful to criminals or malicious hackers? More...