The EU is one step from ending roaming charges and delivering net neutrality for all Europeans.
The first move was to slash pricing of mobile phone roaming costs across Europe. Then calls were made to abolish mobile roaming costs completely, with a view towards “safeguarding citizens’ right to access an open Internet.” Today that vision has become a reality.
Continue reading… “Europe to abolish roaming charges by December 2015”
The NSA’s surveillance network covers more Americans’ Internet communications than officials have publicly disclosed.
The existence of several NSA programs that allow for far greater surveillance than the government has admitted to, and, importantly, detail how the government forces Internet service providers (ISPs) to hand over raw data, Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.
Continue reading… “NSA scans 75% of all U.S. internet traffic”
ISP speeds throughout a day
The FCC has collected data for the first time showing real-world speeds that Americans receive from their Internet providers. And the news is pretty good! Or, perhaps the news is pretty bad!
Continue reading… “FCC measures actual internet speed and finds FiOS comes out on top”
Screwing the public to help corporations is pretty standard procedure
these days for people like New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo.
Last month, the major American ISPs and entertainment industry lobbyists struck a deal to limit Internet access for alleged copyright infringers. This deal, negotiated in secret with the help of New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo did not include any public interest groups or comment from the public. As a result, it’s as one-sided and stilted as you’d imagine. Corynne McSherry from the Electronic Frontier Foundation analyzes the material that these cozy corporate negotiators left out, the stuff that public interest groups would have demanded. Here’s an abbreviated list…
Online games will be blocked between the hours of 10pm to 8am.
Gamers in Vietnam will soon have to rearrange their schedules if they’re used to playing videogames online at night. The country’s Ministry of Information and Communication is requesting that local internet service providers block online games access between the hours of 10pm and 8am.
Continue reading… “Access to Nighttime Online Games Will Be Blocked in Vietnam”
FBI Director Robert Mueller knows there are online places where criminal activity is centralized: the backbone hubs located in hosting facilities across the country. All of the Internet’s activity, legal and illegal, flows through these ‘choke points,’ and the feds, of course, are already tapping those points and siphoning off data. What Mueller wants is the legal authority to comb through the backbone data, which is already being siphoned off by the NSA, in order to look for illegal activity.
Continue reading… “FBI Wants Authority To Hunt Criminals Thru Internet Backbone”
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgqEIp2YmtE[/youtube]
Perhaps you have been curious how all of those connection sounds came about when connecting to the Internet. We’ll, here’s how it is done. Second video after the jump.
Continue reading… “Animation – Behind the Curtains of Your ISP”
Joe Stewart, director of malware research at SecureWorks, presented his survey at the RSA Conference, which opened Monday in San Francisco. The survey ranked the top 11 botnets that send spam; by extrapolating their size, Stewart estimated the bots on his list control just over a million machines and are capable of flooding the Internet with more than 100 billion spam messages every day.
The botnet at the top of the chart is Srizbi. According to Stewart, this botnet — which also goes by the names “Cbeplay” and “Exchanger” — has an estimated 315,000 bots and can blast out 60 billion messages a day.
Continue reading… “Botnets Control Over 1 Million Hijacked Computers”