Their fans call the Boston Red Sox hot stuff, but this isn't exactly what Red Sox Nation has in mind: A Salem, Massachussetts fan went channel-surfing for a Red Sox game August 14 but got himself some red-hot porn instead, and red-faced Comcast Cable officials are scrambling to unravel the racy snafu – which apparently piped "several minutes" of hardcore adult entertainment to "countless homes" on that day, on Comcast's 24-hour news and entertainment CN8 network. "It wasn't grainy," said the flummoxed Red Sox fan, Donald McFadden. "It was super quality film and production values." Comcast issued a statement promising that kind of salacious screw-up "never happens again."
Australia's federal government has a warning to the country's telecommunications industry: Dump the Internet dumping yourselves, or we'll do it for you. The government has now suggested credit limits for telephone accounts to stop the practice, which involves disconnecting dialup users from their ISPs and reconnecting them to expensive overseas telephone numbers – a shady enough practice that has raised hackles in the past when maverick or fly-by-night Net porn operators have used the technique.
The U.S. isn't exactly the only country worrying about selling illegal prescriptions in cyberspace. Authorities in Tokyo have arrested Tomonobu Narita for selling stimulants and other illegal drugs to about one hundred Japanese Netizens. Narita allegedly told an unemployed Kanazawa man to deposite about 35,000 yen into a bank account and he, Narita, would send him a gram of stimulants June 1 through a delivery service. Narita is also said to have boasted on an online bulletin board of the amounts of stimulants he sold – even posting his contact details. Authorities estimate he earned about 13 million yen in 2004 alone from the sales.
British banking customers are believed to be the targets of an online attack by way of e-mail, with the British National Hi-Tech Crime Unit telling reporters an e-mail giving details of order costs for computer products – mostly phony – and offering a link brings users, when they click the link, to an "under construction" Web site whose coding can attack the user's computer. That coding can also record keystrokes – including sensitive personal identification numbers and passwords – the next time the computer is used, the unit told reporters.
How's this for pushing the pedal to the mettle: A bicycle rickshaw carrying a computer with high-speed, wireless Internet connectivity, to a poor farming village, Bithoor, in India. It's part of the Infothela project, aiming to bring technology to India's villages for improving education, health care, and access to agricultural information. "By using computers, I can improve my knowledge," said a twelve-year-old girl to a wire service reporter before joining a Web camera class. "And that will help me get a job when I grow up." The project is government funded and was created last year by the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, giving free computer classes in six villages in the Uttar Pradesh state.
Finally, Google isn't the only Internet hotshot having less than a perfect passage through the initial public offering route. Online personals service MatchNet planned an IPO of its own – until it took a closer look at the current reputed faltering in Internet-related IPOs and blew up their own plans like a bad date. They also found themselves having to replace the boss: president and chief executive Todd Tappin resigned "to pursue a new business opportunity," but will stay on MatchNet's board of directors. David Siminoff will succeed him as the company's new kingpin.
