News of the internet

Silicon Valley is well known as the home of technology companies like Google, but it’s also one of many regions around the world with frequent earthquake activity. When we in the Bay Area feel an earthquake, we want to know how strong it was and where it occurred, as soon as possible. After all, even a small vibration could be the result of a severe earthquake far away. Traditionally, we’ve had to wait for answers as reporters scrambled to investigate and spread the news. But thanks to the US Geological Survey (USGS), we can get earthquake data straight from the source. [...]

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The Pope has called on ICANN to keep religion out of the domain name system.

The Vatican warned the internet address-making body of the “perils” of allowing new internet domains such as “.catholic, .anglican, .orthodox, .hindu, .islam, .muslim, [and] .buddhist”.

ICANN, frequently accused of mission creep, could find itself having to decide who gets to represent an entire religion on the internet, His Holiness pointed out, in a letter from Monsignor Carlo Maria Polvani. [...]

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The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) has launched a code of practice for targeted online advertising services that track users browsing habits in a bid to display personalised adverts.

Tech companies AOL, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are among the firms that agreed to the Good Practice Principles, along with controversial targeted advertising system Phorm. The service has already created a great deal of controversy in the UK, in particular when BT trialled the service on 30,000 web users without their knowledge. [...]

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The first person to be charged under federal wiretap statutes for using a botnet to steal data and commit fraud was sentenced to four years in prison this week.

John Schiefer, a 27-year-old Los Angeles resident, was also ordered to pay $2,500 in fines. The sentence was handed down Wednesday by U.S. District Judge Howard Matz in federal court in Los Angeles.

Schiefer, a former security researcher, agreed to plead guilty in November 2007 to stealing usernames, passwords and financial data from more than 250,000 compromised systems, then installing adware on the massive botnet that he and several accomplices set up. [...]

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The European Commission is scaling back its scrutiny of Microsoft.

Regulators have ended full-time monitoring of Microsoft that was started to ensure the firm was complying with an anti-trust ruling.

The 2004 ruling forced Microsoft to share information about the internal workings of its software with rivals.

Brussels said the shift was driven by Microsoft’s improved behaviour and legal changes that meant market abuse could be tackled at national level. [...]

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We’re excited to introduce to you expandable ads, a new type of ad that can appear on your pages. Expandable ads are rich media ads that can expand beyond the original size of the ad unit, following a user-initiated action.

This creates more real estate for the ad, allowing for more interaction from interested users. For instance, expandable ads may stream a movie trailer, show video game clips, or display various views of an item for sale. [...]

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A photograph uncovered on Flickr is creating speculation that Digg may be coming out with a new Web-based toolbar, in addition to its existing Firefox toolbar. The new feature is designed not only to submit your favorite content to Digg, but also to make it easier to share “Diggs” across your other social media identities. The new Digg bar will let you share content through Twitter, Facebook, e-mail, and Digg Shout, and features a “Random” service that suggests other Digg stories you might like. A Digg-style Tiny URL has also been added so you don’t crowd your Tweets with lengthy web addresses, and of course Digg stats will be displayed for the current web page you’re visiting. [...]

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Web sites written in Russian, Korean and other non-ASCII characters soon will be able to have their addresses displayed in the same language.

Testing on 11 pilot sites with internationalized domain names (IDN) could be completed by the end of the year, according to Kim Davies, spokesman for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The URLs being tested in Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Japanese, Russian and a handful of other major world languages don’t cover all possible character sets, but broadly represent most countries, Davies told The Standard. Only http://, which is automatically added by browsers, is displayed in English. [...]

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Let’s face it: You can kill a lot of time with Google Earth 5,0. With this highly-visual, recently-released tool, you can fly anywhere on Earth for free, from your neighborhood to your upcoming fishing spots. You can check out terrain and 3D buildings, plot your ideal vacation tour, explore the ocean floor and even see Mars up close. It’s a rich application that can take plenty of time to fully explore-both in terms of places and functionality. To make it easier for you, we’ve outlined five ways to get a small taste for what Google Earth 5.0 can do. [...]

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An unpatched bug in popular PDF viewing and editing applications is much more dangerous than first thought, according to security researchers who have created exploits that sidestep Adobe’s defensive recommendations.

Adobe Systems Inc. has known about the vulnerability in its Reader and Acrobat software since mid-January, but will not patch the problem until next Wednesday, March 11.

The bug first made news two weeks ago, when Adobe confirmed the problem and pegged it as critical. Within days, other reports surfaced that in-the-wild attacks have exploited the flaw since early January. [...]

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