Google has acknowledged omitting some news sources within the viewing range of China, but has also said it's meant only to improve the quality of the service. "In order to create the best possible news search experience for our users," a company statement said, "we sometimes decide not to include some sites, for a variety of reasons. These sources were not included because their sites are inaccessible." This is in response to accusations that the Internet's search kings have been supporting Chinese Internet controls by blocking what the Chinese government might consider "contentious" news stories from China-based search results. The Communist government routinely blocks access to Websites it deems "inappropriate," including both Chinese and international sites featuring stories critical of the regime. One magazine said Dynamic Internet Technology, an American company, which built technology to circumvent Chinese Net restrictions, found Google's recently launched Chinese version blocking news sources.
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks may be hitting more mainstream Websites these days. Credit card transaction processor Authorize.Net, whose clients include small to mid-size e-commerce sites – has been hit with one, described by the company as intermittent but large scale. Marketing director David Schwartz said the attacks followed an extortion note – just as happened to adult Webmaster affiliate program PECash earlier this month – and are continuing, even though the company installed technology to thwart them from doing inside and lasting continuing damage. Authorities including the FBI are investigating the attacks.
Nokia wants to help parents attack the problem of their children spotting porn and other "questionable" Websites on mobile phones. The cell phone maker has announced plans for new software to give operators control features based on subscriber recognition and user information, including parents indicating service categories to be blocked. "With the increasing amount of new mobile-content services, there are inevitably services and sites (to) which not everyone would want access," said Nokia vice president Olli Oittinen in a statement. "Hence, the ability to safely and securely control access to these sites is important for both operators and their subscribers, and our solution allows just that." The product is expected to be available in the final three months of the year.
Internet telephony may well begin feeling an epidemic of voice spam soon enough, and one Voice-over Internet Protocol management company, Qovia in Maryland, says they have developed a way to shut up voice spam – also known as Spam Over Internet Telephony (SPIT) before it opens its mouth. Qovia says that monitoring things like the length of calls and the rate they're made from particular Net addresses, their program can spot and block up to 95 percent of SPIT before it hits the intended recipients. Qovia plans to bring the technology into their VoIP security software later in the year.
Cutting off spam or SPIT is one thing. But cut off enough people's Internet connections and you have " withdrawal, feelings of loss, frustration, and disconnectedness." That's what Yahoo says, in a report the Internet portal released September 22, and it's called "The Internet Deprivation Study." Trying to get a group of participants to stay offline and then report back, Yahoo discovered almost half of them couldn't stand it for more than two weeks if that long, and the median time they could stand being offline was five days at best. In fact, Yahoo was probably lucky they got anyone to go along with the research at all, according to chief sales officer Wenda Harris Millard. "It was incredibly difficult to recruit participants for this study, as people weren't willing to be without the Internet for two weeks," she said, and those they did recruit had to resist temptation to check the Web often.
