A 13-year-old boy in Taiwan got himself into hot water over a hot Website: a sexual services Website for which he is alleged to have recruited fellow minors to sign up as members. Authorities told reporters over 100 boys and girls signed up to join the site, known as "elementary and junior high school students enjokosai ring" – "Enjokosai" being a Japanese word for "compensated dating," which means, ahem, prostitution – in this case, youth trading sex for money or gifts. The boy is said to have told police he had one reason for starting the site: boredom. That boredom relief could cost him up to five years in a juvenile correctional facility and a heavy fine. Authorities aren't saying, though, if any of his site members met any clients through the site. Yet.
ThomasB2B.com hopes a lot of people hook up to a lot of clients through their new site: they launched a new online advertising network, modeled after Overture and Google but different in that they're focusing purely on the business-to-business market, and they're matching ads with search queries and content by way of pre-determined categories, and not keywords. But a ThomasB2B advertiser would decide how much it will pay each time someone clicks on its ad to go to its Website, and that amount of money in turn will decide which position the ad occupies when it runs in relation to other ads. The more you pay, if you're an advertiser, the higher the ad runs, with minimum bids a quarter a click.
Billed as the first event just for digital consumers, DigitalLife will hit New York's Jacob K. Javits Convention Center October 14-17. Among other expected highlights will be chipmaking giant Intel modeling what they call a "Home of the Future"; audiovisual and digital retail giant Best Buy presenting a Fun Zone Technology Truck, where you can see the latest hot tech and an integrated home office, high-definition home theater, and high-tech kitchen; GameOn NY's Gaming Pavilion; and, BlackBerry's "Fastest Thumbs" contest. Keynote speakers at the event are expected to include Best Buy chief executive Brad Anderson, Research in Motion chief executive James Basille, AT&T senior vice president for Internet telephony Cathy Martine, Intel vice president Rob Crooke, and Youth Intelligence president Jane Buckingham. Celebrity appearances during the show are expected to include Def Jam's N.O.R.E. and Joe Budden, a so-far unannounced cast member of The Sopranos, Michael Strahan of football's New York Giants, and six Swedish Girls of Gaming competing in a gaming contest.
International soccer's governing body won an American legal dispute over World Cup rights with a Miami-based Internet company, Star Media and its successor Cyclelogic, getting a court order banning references to the World Cup by the company FIFA accused of using its World Cup marks without authorization on the Web. FIFA pursued Star Media/Cyclelogic under the U.S. Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, after the company – whose main audience is Spanish and Portugese-speaking Netizens in Latin America – used domain names that were also FIFA trademarks.
Britain has a problem with holes in hundreds of e-mail gateway products, apparently. The National Infrastructure Security Coordination Centre (NISCC) has issued an alert warning flaws in the MIME e-mail protocol extension could let hackers bypass content checks and antivirus tools and launch denial of service attacks, if they choose to exploit the holes. And all they'd need, the NISCC said, would be to use "malformed" subjects using multiple field occurrences, nonstandard whitespace presence, and nonstandard quoting to duck the content checkers and let malicious code through filters and antivirus tools.
Apparently, too, enough found holes in the idea that Microsoft's bid to make some of its intellectual property a mandatory part of an e-mail source identification solution was voted down by members of a technical working group looking to develop a source ID standard. The group apparently objected to Microsoft's insistence on keeping secret a possible patent application on its proposed technology. "The working group has at least (reached a) rough consensus that the patent claims should not be ignored," said Andrew Newton, one of two co-chairs of the MTA Authorization Records in DNS (MARID) working group, in an e-mail to their discussion forum. "It is the opinion of the co-chairs that MARID should not undertake work on alternate algorithms reasonably thought to be covered by the patent application."
If we must suffer Internet worms, at least they ought to be a little bit playful while wreaking their mischief. Consider the Amus worm, which might be of Turkish origin and uses the Microsoft Windows Speech Engine embedded on Windows XP. This is the message it plays: "How are you. I am back. My name is Mr. Hamsi. I am seeing you. Haaaaaaaa. You must come to Turkey. I am cleaning your computer. 5. 4. 3. 2. 1. 0. Gule gule." This worm runs after the Windows XP boot-up music plays, according to security/antivirus firm F-Secure – but it also deletes certain files and causes Windows to fail, spreading automatically by way of an e-mail called "Listen and Smile" and altering home page settings in Internet Explorer. "It might be confusing to users because it says 'I am seeing you,'" F-Secure antivirus research director Mikko Hypponen. "It's the only (worm) I have found speech on, but it is not too advanced because it is written in Visual Basic." It has been rated low-risk by security companies. So far.
