[Update 6/10/2008 1 p.m.: We've found out details about what's going to happen. Time Warner Cable will pull the plug on tens of thousands of Usenet discussion groups after the N.Y. attorney general's office found child porn on 88 of them. Verizon and Sprint plan to limit Usenet, too. Earlier reports that the three broadband providers would block access to, say, overseas Web sites may not have been accurate. --Declan McCullagh]
Internet service providers Verizon Communications, Sprint Nextel, and Time Warner Cable have agreed to block Internet newsgroups and Web sites nationwide that disseminate child pornography, The New York Times reported Monday.
The move--part of an agreement with New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo expected to be announced Tuesday--will affect customers across the country, the newspaper reported. Negotiations are reportedly continuing with other ISPs.
Part of the plan is to shut down access to Usenet newsgroups known to traffic such images, as well as Web sites that host child pornography.
"The ISPs' point had been, 'We're not responsible, these are individuals communicating with individuals, we're not responsible,'" the newspaper reported Cuomo as saying. "Our point was that at some point, you do bear responsibility."
The agreement was reportedly reached after the attorney general's office threatened charges of fraud and deceptive business practices when the companies ignored investigators' complaints.
Cuomo has made safety of children on the Internet a priority of his office. He subpoenaed Facebook in September 2007 after his office conducted an undercover investigation that he said yielded a slow response from the social network to complaints of harassment and inappropriate conduct. The subpoena eventually led to an agreement between Facebook and the attorneys general of 49 states.
Earlier in 2007, Cuomo joined a group of New York lawmakers in introducing a bill to crack down on the presence of sex offenders on the Internet, specifically on sites where they could get in touch with minors.
Updated at 12:15 p.m. PDT to clarify that Comcast wasn't technically hacked, but that its domain and Web site were hijacked.
Two teenagers who say they hijacked Comcast's Web portal on Thursday also say they expect to be arrested for their actions.
"I wish I was a minor right now because this is going to be really bad," 19-year-old "Defiant" told Wired's Kevin Poulsen, who managed to get a one-hour phone interview with Defiant and his 18-year-old cohort "EBK."
"I slept in my clothes, because the last time they came, I was in my underwear with my dong hanging out and shit," Defiant said of a past raid.
On Thursday, Comcast's portal was defaced, leaving some e-mail subscribers without service. On the site, the hackers referenced their group: "KRYOGENICS Defiant and EBK RoXed Comcast."
The teens say that after they initially managed to take control of Comcast's registrar account at Network Solutions, they called the company's technical contact to tell him, but he dismissed their claim and hung up on them.
That response angered EBK, who says he then decided to redirect traffic from Comcast's site to other servers. "I wasn't even really thinking," he said. "Plus, I'm just so mad at Comcast. I'm tired of their shitty service."
Meanwhile, the teens say they did not grab user names and passwords during the hack, even though they could have.
This post was updated at 9 a.m. PDT with clarifying details on GasBuddy.com's data source and the correct spelling on Milt Krantz' name.
Perhaps you heard Wednesday's news about the price of crude oil once again reaching all-time highs, and, like me, you're wondering how that's going to affect gas prices at the pump as you fill up for your Memorial Day weekend trip.
Rest assured, you've got the likes of Milt Krantz on your side.
Krantz, 71, a retired social worker from San Jose, Calif., is also a designated gas price spotter for GasBuddy.com, one of a handful of increasingly busy sites for finding cheap gas in your vicinity.
"It's a little something I can do about the price of gas," said Krantz, adding that the payoff for his efforts is the feeling that consumers are working together to make a difference. "We're in it together."
And what a difference such information can make: In San Francisco on Tuesday, for example, the price of a gallon of regular gasoline ranged from $3.86 to $4.53, depending upon location, according to Gas.Buddy.com's regional site SanFranGasPrices.com. That's a 67-cent difference, or $10.05, when filling a 15-gallon tank.
That potential savings, combined with the scary sound of $4-a-gallon gas, has been driving up traffic to such sites.
"For about the last 60 days, we've seen a nice steady ramp up," said Brad Proctor, founder of GasPriceWatch.com, which offers price data from about 130,000 gas stations.
The results of a search on MapQuest Gas Prices using CNET's San Francisco ZIP code.
(Credit: MapQuest)GasBuddy.com, which serves as an umbrella site for 180 regionalized sites covering some 170,000 gas stations in the U.S. and Canada, has seen more of a steady climb in traffic, said co-founder Jason Toews. When we last talked to Toews in 2005--as gas prices were hitting a then-shocking $3 per gallon--GasBuddy was averaging about 700,000 to 800,000 unique visitors a day. Now it gets about 2 million visitors a day, he said.
Of course, gas price sites vary greatly in terms of format, functionality, and info-gathering methodology. GasBuddy.com and GasPriceWatch.com, both 8-year-old sites, rely on their networks of registered members/spotters, but also factor in information from retailers and other sources. GasBuddy has some 1.4 million member/spotters and GasPriceWatch has about 166,000. And both have arrangements to share their data with other media outlets
Spotters are community members who are usually offered incentive points or a chance to win a "thank you" prize such as a discount on gas. But for Krantz, who uploads prices at least once a week, the motivation is more the idea of exposing the stations that are gouging consumers and rewarding the ones that are not.
"People still want to think they have a little power with their dollar," added Proctor.
AAA's Gas Price Finder, unlike the other two sites, uses data derived primarily from credit card transactions. And MapQuest Gas Prices and MSN Gas Prices rely on data supplied by the Oil Price Information Service, a pricing database that collects information from 125,000 North American retail outlets.
It should be noted that new technologies have changed the way consumers are accessing information from the gas price sites. Some, like me, are still looking at the sites on their PCs. But other gadgeteers are getting such information through in-car GPS systems, text messaging, and smartphone applications.
As far as tools go, GasBuddy.com has one of the coolest in what it calls its Gas Temperature Map, an interactive display of gas prices around the country, with areas color-coded according to their average price for regular unleaded gasoline. Through the map, and with a little guidance from Toews, I learned Tuesday the lowest gas price in the country was found in Rapid City, S.D., at $3.38 per gallon, and the highest was in Beaver Island, Mich., at $5.19 per gallon.
"In 2000, I never would have thought gas prices would be this high. It doesn't surprise me anymore," Toews said. "We've gotten desensitized to the high prices." Nonetheless, he does expect activity on his site to be brisk before the three-day weekend.
Toews offered a closing hint for bargain shoppers. Look for Arco service stations, which don't accept credit cards and therefore can offer cheaper prices.
GasBuddy.com's Gas Temperature Map is an interactive display of gas prices around the country, with areas color-coded according to their average price for regular unleaded gasoline.
(Credit: GasBuddy.com)You may recall that during the heat of the 2006 primary race that prompted then-Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman to go Independent, the Connecticut politician's Web site, as a colleague of mine so eloquently noted, dropped dead.
Sen. Joe Lieberman
(Credit: U.S. Senate)At the time, conspiracy theories abounded. There was twittering that liberal bloggers who backed Lieberman's antiwar Democratic rival, Ned Lamont (who went on to win the primary, by the way) were responsible for the site's inaccessibility, and Lieberman's own campaign maintained that a denial-of-service attack had occurred.
Now, nearly two years later, we finally know whom to blame: the Lieberman campaign's own system configuration.
A recent Freedom of Information Act request by the Stamford Advocate, a local newspaper, turned up an FBI memo that concluded there was no evidence of an attack.
Rather, "the server that hosted the joe2006.com Web site failed because it was overutilized and misconfigured," according to an e-mail message dated October 25, 2006 from the FBI's New Haven, Conn., office.
The site crashed because Lieberman officials were exceeding a 100-e-mails-per-hour limit, as configured by their system administrator, on the night before the primary, the memo went on. The system administrator "misinterpreted the root cause" of the additional Web traffic overwhelming the Web server and declared it was being attacked, the FBI memo said.
Lieberman, of course, ultimately won re-election to the Senate as an Independent Party candidate during the November election. The 2000 running mate to Democratic presidential contender Al Gore has also been on the road campaigning for this year's presumptive Republican presidential nominee, John McCain.
Network Solutions has suspended a Web site that a Dutch lawmaker was using to promote a yet-to-be-released film critical of Islam.
The Web hosting service said it is investigating whether content on the site--Fitnathemovie.com--is in violation of the hosting service's acceptable use policy.
The 15-minute movie, called Fitna--an Arabic word that means "test of faith in times of trial"--describes Islam as "the enemy of freedom," according to comments made by Geert Wilders, a Dutch lawmaker and the film's maker. Dutch officials fear the movie could spark violence, as happened after Danish newspapers published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. The movie is set for release at month's end.
Wilders had been using the site to promote the movie, but the site was pulled after the Web-hosting company said it received a "number of complaints" regarding the site.
"In this situation with the dialogue that's happening throughout the world ,we've made the choice to suspend the site as of last night," Susan Wade, spokeswoman for Network Solutions, told the Associated Press on Sunday. "This site is suspended so people can't see the content right now. But the customer still has access to their site. They can make whatever changes are necessary as we complete our investigation."
Wilders plans to show his film despite the setback, Dutch news agency ANP reported.
"If need be, I will personally distribute DVDs in the Dam," ANP quoted him as saying. The Dam is the central square in Amsterdam.
News sites carrying coverage of New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer's resignation faced an onslaught of traffic Wednesday, but demand on the servers paled in comparison to earlier in the week when news of the sex scandal first broke.
Spitzer, who developed a reputation as a bulldog while attorney general for the state of New York, was a hot news topic on Monday, when allegations surfaced that he had hired high-priced prostitutes.
And on Wednesday, the former attorney general turned governor announced his resignation, a move that comes early in his term.
The New York Times, for example, faced a two-second delay in loading pages between 11 a.m. to 12 p.m. (EDT), which came right in the middle of Spitzer's 11:30 a.m. press conference to announce his resignation, according to Web site monitoring company Pingdom.com. In the hours prior to 11 a.m., the average load time on the site was half a second.
But that 2-second delay Wednesday paled in comparison to the 11-second delay The New York Times site faced on Monday, according to Pingdom.com. That slowdown occurred from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m.
That had the IT staff at the New York Times juggling servers, said Diane McNulty, a spokeswoman for the media company.
"NYTimes.com Web site traffic spiked after the Spitzer article was posted on Monday around 2 p.m.," McNulty said in an e-mail. "The hourly Web site traffic from 2 to 4 p.m. was 60 percent higher than the same time last Monday."
She added that The New York Times' mobile traffic nearly doubled during that time period. Traffic figures for Spitzer's resignation announcement have yet to come in.
Other sites carrying news of Spitzer's resignation include CNN.com, which offered live video coverage, as well as MSNBC News Service and Fox News.
Other New York news sites that carried the governor's resignation included the New York Post to Newsday to the NY Daily News.
And while traffic to news sites was heavy on Wednesday, it didn't compare to 9/11.
The New York Times Web site was overwhelmed by traffic on September 11, 2001, the day terrorists struck the city's Twin Towers. Readers had trouble accessing stories on the site, McNulty noted.
And two months later, when an American Airlines plane crashed in Queens after departing from JFK airport, the Times site had trouble dishing up pages, but not as bad as on September 11, said McNulty, noting the company has since increased its bandwidth by 10 times its previous levels.
A new ranking methodology at Nielsen/NetRatings gives AOL a boost while disadvantaging Google.
Nielsen/NetRatings this week made a change to its metrics for ranking the most popular Web sites. It will now focus on the amount of time people spend on a site instead of just the unique audience. This move benefits sites with services like instant messaging and e-mail over sites that offer quicker activities such as search.
Using the new total-minutes calculation, AOL is ranked as the most popular Web site in May in the U.S., followed by Yahoo; MSN/Windows Live; Fox Interactive, which owns MySpace.com; Google; eBay; Microsoft; Electronic Arts; Apple and YouTube, which is owned by Google.
Under the unique-audience calculation, the top 10 list looks like this: Google Yahoo, MSN/Windows Live, Microsoft, AOL, Fox, eBay, YouTube, Wikipedia and Apple.
Fox's MySpace, Google's YouTube and eBay have loyal and engaged users, while Microsoft's Windows Media Player and Apple's iTunes helped those rankings, Nielsen/NetRatings said. Electronic Arts broke into the top 10 based on total minutes because of the popularity of its Pogo.com gaming site.
Web sites are increasingly offering services that keep a user on a site for longer, and measurement firms are looking at user "engagement" metrics more and more. The widespread adoption of streaming audio and video, which provides dynamically changing content within a single page or media player, and applications like Ajax, have diminished the importance of measuring page views.
On Thursday, I'll take a broader look at what industry insiders think about this change and what impact it may have on advertising.
If you're reading this, then the chances are pretty good that you know what a Web site is. So go tell it to the judge.
The man you'd want to speak to is Judge Peter Openshaw, who's presiding at Woolwich Crown Court in London over a trial in which three men stand charged with inciting terrorism over the Internet. According to a Reuters account of Wednesday's proceedings, Openshaw interrupted questioning to get a basic vocabulary check.
"The trouble is I don't understand the language. I don't really understand what a Web site is," Openshaw said. After the prosecutor did some explaining, the judge still was at a bit of a loss: "I haven't quite grasped the concepts."
It's hard to know from the brief Reuters piece whether the magistrate was playing devil's advocate in trying to nail down certain concepts or, at age 59, was fessing up that he's stuck in a pre-Web era of legal pads and snail mail. A number of bloggers gave Openshaw credit for being forthright, but many yelped about cluelessness in the courts.
Blog community response:
"I admit, it's difficult to grasp how anyone -- especially someone presiding over a case on internet terrorism -- could be so insulated from the everyday realities of modern life. But I must say I'm really quite impressed that Judge Openshaw is brave enough to admit this."
--Christopher MacKay's blog
"It's like me, a web developer, being asked to make a website about law. I don't understand law, I don't understand the terms, but I am an expert in making websites. I am there to apply my understanding of how to make a website; if I don't understand a legal term that is important to the website, I should be expected to admit it and find out about it, but not to resign every time I hear something that I don't understand."
--Slashdot user SausageOfDoom
"Isn't it ludicrous that any judge can get away with this? And in a serious case it's even more serious."
--Little Bulldogs
"God forbid if his next case involves online fraud in Second Life or something like that."
--Lalaia
In his lifetime, the late Rev. Jerry Falwell had no shortage of critics, both in the offline and online worlds--and over the years, some in the latter category found themselves caught in his legal crosshairs over domain names resembling his own.
One of the higher-profile Web spats involved Christopher Lamparello, a thirtysomething gay man in New York. Since 1999, Lamparello has owned the Fallwell.com Web site, which housed articles aimed at contradicting the televangelist's antigay views. A few years ago, Falwell sued him, claiming the domain name's spelling was too close to that of his official Web presence and created a "likelihood of confusion," thus violating trademark laws.
A federal district court sided with the preacher, but an appeals court overturned that ruling. Not content to stop there, Falwell asked the U.S. Supreme Court to weigh in, but the justices declined last year to take the case, leaving Fallwell.com to remain up and running.
But after news Tuesday of Falwell's sudden death at age 73--reportedly of heart failure--Lamparello's Web site adopted a somewhat different tone.
The articles attacking Falwell's views were no longer accessible from the home page. Instead, in stark white text on a navy blue background, Lamparello posted a brief note offering his "deepest sympathies" to Falwell's family--although he didn't back down on his disdain for the preacher's views.
"Although we have clearly been on opposite sides of the issues, there is no satisfaction in hearing of his passing," he wrote. "It was his homophobic bigotry and intolerance that we wanted to die, not him personally."
Internet auction site eBay is in "advanced talks" to acquire Web-ratings site StumbleUpon, according to a report Tuesday night in The Wall Street Journal (subscription required). The deal could be worth $75 million according to the newspaper, which cited unnamed sources.
The sources told the newspaper that the deal for StumbleUpon was not final and could fall apart.
The report comes a couple of weeks after technology blog Techcrunch reported that the sites were in buyout talks, as well as naming Google and AOL as other suitors. GigaOm, another blog, reported an asking price in the neighborhood of $45 million.
The San Francisco-based company combines a search algorithm and user recommendations to help users discover new sites. According to ComScore, StumbleUpon has recently seen a sharp rise in traffic, tripling the number of page views in the span between January and March.
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