Posts Tagged ‘Internet’
ICANN Says Hebrew, Hindi and Other Scripts Get Web Address Nod
Fri-Oct 30, 2009
Seoul / Agence France-Presse
The nonprofit body that oversees Internet addresses approved Friday the use of Hebrew, Hindi, Korean and other scripts not based on the Latin alphabet in a decision that could make the Web dramatically more inclusive.
The board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers — or ICANN — voted to allow such scripts in so-called domain names at the conclusion of a weeklong meeting in Seoul, South Korea’s capital. The decision follows years of debate and testing.
The decision clears the way for governments or their designees to submit requests for specific names, likely beginning Nov. 16. Internet users could start seeing them in use early next year, particularly in Arabic, Chinese and other scripts in which demand has been among the highest, ICANN officials say.
“This is absolutely delightful news,” said Edward Yu, CEO of Analysys International, an Internet research and consulting firm in Beijing, emphasizing that the Internet would become more accessible to users with lower incomes and education. Yu spoke ahead of the approval, which had been widely expected.
Domain names — the Internet addresses that end in “.com” and other suffixes — are the key monikers behind every Web site, e-mail address and Twitter post.
Since their creation in the 1980s, domain names have been limited to the 26 characters in the Latin alphabet used in English — A-Z — as well as 10 numerals and the hyphen. Technical tricks have been used to allow portions of the Internet address to use other scripts, but until now, the suffix had to use those 37 characters.
That has meant Internet users with little or no knowledge of English might still have to type in Latin characters to access Web pages in Chinese or Arabic. Although search engines can sometimes help users reach those sites, companies still need to include Latin characters on billboards and other advertisements.
Now, ICANN is allowing those same technical tricks to apply to the suffix as well, allowing the Internet to be truly multilingual.
Many of the estimated 1.5 billion people online use languages such as Chinese, Thai, Arabic and Japanese, which have writing systems entirely different from English, French, German, Indonesian, Swahili and others that use Latin characters.
Internet turns 40 with birthday bash
Fri-Oct 30, 2009
Los Angeles / Agence France-Presse
Technology and media stars, pundits and entrepreneurs joined the Internet’s father to celebrate the 40th anniversary of his culture-changing child.
“It’s the 40th year since the infant Internet first spoke,” said University of California, Los Angeles, professor Leonard Kleinrock, who headed the team that first linked computers online in 1969.
Kleinrock led an anniversary event at the UCLA campus that blended reminiscence of the Internet’s past with debate about its future.
“There is going to be an ongoing controversy about where we have been and where we are going,” said Arianna Huffington, co-founder of the popular news and blog website that bears her name.
“It is not just about the Internet; it is about our times. We are going to need desperately to tap into the better angels of our nature and make our lives not just about ourselves but about our communities and our world.”
Huffington was on hand to discuss the power the Internet gives to grass roots organizers on a panel with Kleinrock and Social Brain Foundation director Isaac Mao.
“The Internet is a democratizing element; everyone has an equivalent voice,” Kleinrock said. “There is no way back at this point. We can’t turn it off. The Internet Age is here.”
Kleinrock never imagined Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube that day four decades ago when his team gave birth to what is now taken for granted as the Internet.
“The net is penetrating every aspect of our lives,” Kleinrock said to a room of about 200 people and an equal number watching online.
On October 29, 1969, Kleinrock led a team that got a computer at UCLA to “talk” to one at a research institute.
Kleinrock was driven by a certainty that computers were destined to speak to each other and that the resulting network should be as simple to use as telephones.
US telecom colossus AT&T ran lines connecting the computers for ARPANET, a project backed with money from a research arm of the US military’s Advanced Research Projects Agency.
ARPANET grew into what is known today as the Internet.
“It feels to me like the alumni meeting of the framers of the US Constitution,” Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Perry Barlow said as he addressed the gathering.
“There are a lot of people in this room who are honest to god uncles and aunts of the Internet. What you did is conceivably the most important technological event since the capture of fire.”
Barlow, whose nonprofit legal organization fights for online freedom, maintained that Internet access is on the verge of becoming an inalienable human right.
“The reality today is that the Internet is like a new life; it is organic,” said Regina Dugan, director of what became DARPA when “Defense” was added to the agency’s name.
“It is inherently beautiful. It challenges us all to think about ourselves, about others, about ethics, and about the future.”
To test the power of the Internet, DARPA will release 10 “very large balloons” in the continental US and then pay $40,000 to the first person or team to pinpoint their locations using online tools or networking.
The balloons will be afloat for two days and visible only during daylight hours. “Individuals can make information go viral,” Dugan said. “Then it was an Internet challenge, today it is a network challenge.”
The competition will be tracked on wildly popular microblogging service Twitter, according to DARPA.
Kleinrock, who is now 75, sees the Internet spreading into everything.
“The next step is to move it into the real world,” Kleinrock said. “The Internet will be present everywhere. I will walk into a room and it will know I am there. It will talk back to me.”
Get Live News on Your Mobile as You Get on TV
English news channel NewsX has now made its videos available on mobile phones with just a 30-second delay from what is seen on the TV. The service is primarily aimed at “tech-savvy” and “corporate people”, says spokesperson Ajatshatru Singh.
“This service is primarily for the urban and corporate people who are very tech savvy and who are happy using gadgets. It is for those who want news on the go – which is what we call the mobile generation… So as long as they have a device in their hands, the news can be delivered to them,” Singh, head of Online, NewsX, told IANS.
As part of this service which was launched last week, viewers can access the same news content on their mobile device as they see it on NewsX TV channel and also its website. A special mobile URL – m.newsx.com/live – can be used to access the same.
Asked why the channel felt the need to introduce this concept, Singh explained: “The opportunity to do this has always been there given that India has the fastest growing mobile market in the world. It was about a year ago that we realised that with so many handsets floating around, people will want to get any kind of content delivered on their mobiles – so why not news?”
According to Singh, the video service will best work on phones such as the Apple iPhone and high-end models of all other companies like Motorola, Nokia, Samsung or HTC.
Also, there are no extra costs for availing the service, except for the basic expense of using mobile Internet.
“We have no subscription charges, no fees attached with this. As long as you have a phone with Internet, you can log on to the URL and access news. There is also no specific operator we have tied up with. The service is cost independent and operator independent,” he said.
Indian Government Website Hacked
A second Indian government Web site – operated by the Institute of Remote Sensing – has been compromised for malware purposes, says Finjan Inc., one of the big names in secure web gateway products and a provider of unified web security solutions for the enterprise market. News that the site has been hacked by cybercriminals came after Finjan reported that the Government of India portal was hacked back in May of this year.
“This latest hack is interesting on two fronts. First the attack has happened despite the Indian government stepping up security on its hosting servers. And secondly, the cybercriminals have added a script into the site that adds an iFrame attack to the page,” said Yuval Ben- Itzhak, Finjan’s chief technology officer.
“The page then re-routes to a LuckySploit-infected server in Texas that fires off multiple attacks across the Internet. Early reports suggest that the site hack and re-route has infected several thousand Internet users,” he added.
According to Ben-Itzhak, the LuckySploit toolkit uses a variety of methods to infect users and is notable for using a complex encryption system to hide what it is doing. The bad news about this exploit is that the infected pages are only detected by 4 out of 41 anti-virus engines on the Virustotal.com code checking portal.
Finjan’s malicious code research team has notified the Indian CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) operation about the problem.
“More than anything, this infection teaches us that any site can be compromised and serve malicious code without the site owner knowledge. This is why Web protection utilizing real-time content inspection is needed for businesses to prevent such attacks and keep their valuable data away from hackers,” added Ben-Itzhak
“Individual users should also consider installing a URL-checking browser plugin such as Finjan’s free-to-use SecureBrowsing tool,” he said.
Tips to Search Better in Google
This is an old one, but very important: Put quotes around phrases that must be searched together. If you put quotes around “electric curtains,” Google won’t waste your time finding one set of Web pages containing the word “electric” and another set containing the word “curtains.”
Similarly, put a hyphen right before any word you want screened out. If you’re looking up dolphins, for example, you’ll have to wade through a million Miami Dolphins pages unless you search for “dolphins – Miami.”
Google is a global White Pages and Yellow Pages. Search for “phonebook:home depot Norwalk , CT,” Google instantly produces the address and phone number of the Norwalk Home Depot. This works with names (“phonebook: Robert Jones Las Vegas, NV”) as well as businesses.
Don’t put any space after “phonebook.” And in all of the following examples, don’t type the quotes I’m showing you here.
Google is a package tracker. Type a FedEx or UPS package number (just the digits); when you click Search, Google offers a link to its tracking information.
Google is a calculator. Type in an equation (“32+2345*3- 234=”).
Google is a units-of-measuremen t converter. Type “teaspoons in a gallon,” for example, or “centimeters in a foot.”
Google is a stock ticker. Type in AAPL or MSFT, for example, to see a link to the current Apple or Microsoft stock price, graphs, financial news and so on.
Google is an atlas. Type in an area code, like 212, to see a Mapquest map of the area.
Google is Wal-Mart’s computer. Type in a UPC bar code number, such as “036000250015, ” to see the description of the product you’ve just “scanned in.” (Thanks to the Google Blog, http://google. Blogspace. Com , for this tip and the next couple.)
G oogle is an aviation buff. Type in a flight number like “United 22″ for a link to a map of that flight’s progress in the air. Or type in the tail number you see on an airplane for the full registration form for that plane.
Google is the Department of Motor Vehicles. Type in a VIN (vehicle identification number, which is etched onto a plate, usually on the door frame, of every car), like “JH4NA1157MT001832, ” to find out the car’s year, make and model.
For hours of rainy-day entertainment, visit http://labs. Google.com . Here, you’ll find links to new, half-finished Google experiments- like Google Voice, in which you call (650) 623-6706, speak the words you want to search for and then open your browser to view the results. Disclaimer: It wasn’t working when I tried it. (Ditto a lot of these experiments.