Feds Shut Down File-Sharing Site One Day After Web Protest

The Justice Department seized Megaupload.com, one of the world's most popular file-sharing sites, and several of its related sites on Thursday. Prosecutors charged seven employees of Megaupload with criminal copyright infringement, conspiracy to commit racketeering and other charges. Each faces up to 55 years in prison.

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Web addicts have brain changes, research suggests

Web addicts have brain changes similar to those hooked on drugs or alcohol, preliminary research suggests. Experts in China scanned the brains of 17 young web addicts and found disruption in the way their brains were wired up. [...]

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Web gambling gets boost from Obama administration

(Reuters) - The Obama administration cleared the way for states to legalize Internet poker and certain other online betting in a switch that may help them reap billions in tax revenue and spur web-based gambling. A Justice Department opinion dated September and made public on Friday reversed decades of previous policy that included civil and criminal charges against operators of some of the most popular online poker sites. Until now, the department held that online gambling in all forms was illegal under the Wire Act of 1961, which bars wagers via telecommunications that cross state lines or international borders.

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Man sentenced to six years for antagonizing women through digital 'sextortion'

32-year-old Luis Mijangos was sentenced to six year in prison this week by a U.S. District Court judge in California after pleading guilty to one count of computer hacking and one count of wiretapping in March 2011. Mijangos, a resident of Santa Ana, California, worked as a freelance web designer and developer earning about $52,000 a year, but also spent his days using malware to gain access to people’s computers and extorting up to $3,000 a day from his victims. FBI experts in computer forensics estimated that Mijangos infected more than 100 computers used by over 230 people, 20 percent...

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Why companies are flocking to HTML5

A new crop of apps from Amazon, LinkedIn and Box.net are the latest to take advantage of HTML5. They also signal this young language already has business' blessing. Something in the last 18 months kicked the HTML5 adoption machine into overdrive. Maybe it was tech giants Apple and Microsoft joining hands and dubbing it the future of the web. Maybe it was Google's launch of the Chrome Web Store, with its focus on HTML5, last December. Maybe it was the HTML5-friendly iPad's meteoric sales. Whatever it was, a recent wave of consumer-facing web apps from Amazon, Box.net and LinkedIn confirm...

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The Web, Apple, NeXT and the evolution of search [Happy 20th Birthday, WWW!]

...August 6 marks the date the first-ever Web page went online, powered by the world's first-ever Web server, situated at http://info.cern.ch. Assembled by Sir Tim Berners-Lee using a NeXT computer, the browser was also an editor, enabling an interactive Web experience. Unfortunately, with the exception of NeXT machines, most computers just weren't capable of handling all these features, which is why a browse-only Web was born. Who ran NeXT? Steve Jobs. It was his next step project after losing a battle for control of Apple, all those years ago... It is interesting that Berners-Lee used a NeXT computer both as...

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Drumming Up More Addresses on the Internet

Who could have guessed that 4.3 billion Internet connections wouldn’t be enough? Certainly not Vint Cerf. In 1976, Mr. Cerf and his colleagues in the R.& D. office of the Defense Department had to make a judgment call: how much network address space should they allocate to an experiment connecting computers in an advanced data network? They debated the question for more than a year. Finally, with a deadline looming, Mr. Cerf decided on a number — 4.3 billion separate network addresses, each one representing a connected device — that seemed to provide more room to grow than his experiment...

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Authoritarian Governments Have Immensely Benefited From The Web

Evgeny Morozov, a noted specialist on the use of new communications technologies to promote democratic values, has a new book titled "The Net Delusion: The Dark Side Of Internet Freedom." In it, he argues that hype about "Twitter revolutions" and the enormous potential of the Internet to promote open societies and roll back authoritarianism is naive and overblown. What's more, Morozov warns, authoritarian regimes such as Russia, China, and Iran have adapted quickly to devise new ways -- often modeled on commercial Internet-monitoring tools used by Western corporations -- to track and neutralize Internet activism.

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BlackRock, Inc. website homepage displays Upside-Down

Take a look - I was checking the BlackRock, Inc. homepage to gather some investment information, and what do I see? Their main "introduction" pane is displaying the words UPSIDE DOWN. Hmmmm.... struck me as so funny, I just HAD to share it! So the only question is, should I really invest? I mean, I don't think this was done on purpose, or am I wrong? I think they were hacked? hmmmm... BlackRock is suppose to be a providers of investment, advisory and risk management solutions. But can they even manage their own homepage? Ok, maybe this is on purpose,...

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Arabs Target the Internet

Wow, those Arabs are clever. So clever--or devious, or dangerous--that they've managed to rearrange continents, to rearrange computer domain names to suit their political/religious/financial objectives. In The Lawfare Project, Aaron Eitan Meyer explains this latest Arab attack. "The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is the entity responsible for assigning domain names on the Internet. (snip) ICANN works 'in particular to ensure the stable and secure operation of the Internet's unique identifier systems.'"[1] Formerly overseen by the U.S. Department of Commerce, ICANN has been under "international and multilateral control" for over a year. And this has brought about...

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Internet Traffic from U.S. Government Websites Was Redirected Via Chinese Networks

According to the draft report, a state-owned Chinese telecommunications firm, China Telecom, "hijacked" massive volumes of Internet traffic during the 18-minute incident. It affected traffic to and from .gov and .mil websites in the United States, as well as websites for the Senate, all four military services, the office of the Secretary of Defense, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and "many others," including websites for firms like Dell, Yahoo, IBM and Microsoft. "Although the Commission has no way to determine what, if anything, Chinese telecommunications firms did to the hijacked data, incidents of this nature could have a number...

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