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Low Cost Web Hosting, Free Web Hosting, Cheap Domain Hosting	29 October 2007
Web hosting is a type of Internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to provide their own websites accessible via the World Wide Web.
Dell offers free laptops with broadband subscription	20 July 2007
(InfoWorld) - Dell has signed a deal with a U.K. mobile phone retailer to distribute free laptops with the purchase of a broadband Internet access subscription, continuing the company's push into the retail market. Starting in September, consumers who buy a two-year contract for America Online's broadband service through the Carphone Warehouse Group will get a coupon for a free base-model Inspiron notebook from Dell. AOL broadband costs £19.99 ($41) per month. A similar free laptop offering was unveiled this week by mobile provider Orange UK, a move designed to get consumers who may have never owned a computer or bought broadband service using the Internet in order to grow subscriber numbers, said Jonathan Coham, an analyst at Ovum. Those customers tend to be older and are more loyal. But it won't come cheap for those operators. "These are very low-margin customers for the time being," Coham said. "Both Orange and Carphone Warehouse are going to make a slim amount of money on top of what they are getting from the broadband subscriber." The Dell laptop comes with Microsoft's Vista Home Basic OS, 1 GB of RAM, an 80GB hard drive, an Intel Celeron processor and Wi-Fi. The laptop can be upgraded for a fee. Customers also get a wireless router, but have to pay a £14.99 laptop delivery fee. By contrast, Orange's free laptop offers fewer features than Dell's. It's made by Ei Systems, and comes with Windows XP Home, 256 MB of RAM and a 40GB hard drive but doesn't have Wi-Fi. Users can upgrade to a better laptop for a fee. Orange's broadband service, however, is cheaper, at £14.99 per month for a 24-month contract, excluding an initial discount for the first three months. A Dell spokeswoman said the deal with Carphone Warehouse is an extension of the company's retail strategy, and there will be more retail deals around the world coming soon. Dell, which traditionally sold computers online, by phone or through catalogs, sees the retail market as a way to stop its declining market share, Coham said. Dell could potentially try to entice the novice computer users who take the free laptop into buying technical support packages. "I think if Dell is smart they will see this as an opportunity to upsell these basic PC customers with additional accessories, software and support," Coham said. Dell began selling computers at Wal-Mart, the American retailer, in June. The company is also now selling three PCs with the Ubuntu 7.04 Linux OS installed, a move driven by customer demand, Dell has said.
FBI: Expect more spam prosecutions	12 July 2007
(InfoWorld) - U.S. Internet users should expect a growing number of prosecutions for sending spam and related activities, such as creating botnets, officials with two U.S. law enforcement organizations said Thursday. The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has 70 active investigations into spam-related crimes, said FBI special agent J. Keith Mularski, speaking at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's spam summit. The FBI has worked with the National Cyber-Forensics and Training Alliance (NCFTA), a partnership between law enforcement agencies, universities, and private businesses, to identity spammers, he said. The NCFTA, launched in 2002, has identified more than 100 "significant spammers," including five tied to traditional organized crime, Mularski said. Partnerships with industry are important to fight cybercrime, Mularski said. The Internet Crime Complaint Center, a joint operation of the FBI and the National White Collar Crime Center, gets more than 22,000 complaints about cybercrime each month, up from 18,000 complaints a month last year, he said. "If we don't address it together, it's only going to get worse," he said. "Industry has all the information, because these guys are hitting their networks." The U.S. Department of Justice is targeting several spam-related activities, added Mona Sedky Spivack, a trial attorney in the DOJ Criminal Division's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section. In June, the DOJ and FBI launched Operation Bot Roast, targeting criminals who use networks of compromised computers, often called botnets, to send spam and launch distributed denial-of-service attacks. In addition to targeting "bot herders," criminals who control botnets, the DOJ will begin targeting "bot brokers," the people who negotiate the sale of botnet resources, she said. "We're going to start pegging them with some criminal liability," she said. "There is a lot of money getting exchanged here." Botnets and anonymous proxies are popular with spammers right now because they don't have to use their own computer resources to send the e-mail messages, Spivack said. This makes it more difficult for law enforcement agencies to track down spammers. The DOJ and other federal agencies are also targeting stock-scheme spam campaigns, she said. In a typical "pump and dump" stock scheme, spammers buy cheap stocks, then send out huge volumes of spam telling recipients that the stock price is poised to rise. The stock price goes up because of the spam campaign, and the spammers sell their stock at a large profit. On Tuesday, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed securities fraud charges against two Texas men for an alleged pump-and-dump scheme. The scheme allegedly cost investors $4.6 million. Despite news reports of such schemes, they tend to work, Spivack said. "It appeals to unsophisticated investors who are day traders at home," she said. The U.S. Congress passed the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act in 2003, and there's still debate over whether the law has reduced the amount of spam U.S. Internet users receive. CAN-SPAM allows senders to deliver unsolicited commercial e-mail, but requires that they stop when a recipient asks them to. CAN-SPAM also requires that commercial e-mail have accurate header information, have a legitimate postal address for the sender, and have a working opt-out mechanism. The law has given some spammers a set of rules they must follow to become legitimate marketers, said Aaron Kornblum, a senior attorney with Microsoft. But law breakers have become inventive as law enforcement and private companies find new ways to combat spam, he added. Some spammers rotate the URLs in their spam, making it difficult to track, while others don't include URLs at all, he said. Some used pixelated text to defeat spam filters. "We need our investigative techniques to evolve," he said.
BlackBerry gets free international calls	29 June 2007
EQO service uses local minutes and data instead Internet phone service specialist EQO has added BlackBerry to the list of around 400 handsets that it says can now make local-rate or free international calls - without using Wi-Fi or VOIP to the handset. Users also get cheap text messaging and free access to all the popular IM services, the company said.…
American Wi-Fi gets off to a bad start	24 June 2007
Public Wi-Fi networks designed to provide cheap internet access across cities and towns have got off to a bumpy start in the US. Local governments are setting up municipal wireless networks, partly as a way of bridging the digital divide by offering cheap or even free internet access to low-income families (New Scientist, 28 March 2006, p 28). Nearly 200 local governments in the US now run wireless networks, with another 195 planned, according to MuniWireless, a firm that tracks industry trends. Yet only 88 of those built so far serve their entire community, with 63 operating in limited hotspots and 39 used only by government agencies. Delays in setting up the networks are common. In San Francisco, for example, a network due to be installed by Google and internet service provider Earthlink remains on hold pending a July hearing before the city's board of supervisors, two years after the city first asked for bids. The network has become the subject of a battle of wills between the city's mayor and board, delaying its installation, which was due to begin this year.
More evidence of U.S. as malware capital	26 March 2007
(InfoWorld) - Contrary to beliefs that overseas crime networks and unemployed computer programmers in Eastern Europe remain the leading sources of virus code on the Internet, new research supports the growing perception that the United States is producing greater volumes of malware code than any other region of the planet. According to security hardware maker Finjan's latest Web Security Trends Report -- which analyzes data collected by the San Jose-based firm over the first three months of 2007 -- more than 80 percent of the Web sites it found to be distributing malicious code were hosted on servers located in the U.S. Although Finjan officials concede that much of the malware distributed by those sites may indeed be written and controlled by hackers operating outside of the U.S., the results indicate that efforts by legislators and law enforcement officials to crack down on illegal computing activity in the nation may not yet be succeeding. According to the Q1 Finjan report, published on March 26, the United Kingdom ranked second in the list of countries hosting infected sites, accounting for roughly 10 percent, followed by Canada, Germany, and Italy. Noticeably absent from the top of the rankings are Russia and China, which have been widely perceived in recent years as leading sources of malware worldwide. Finjan'sresults jibe with rival Symantec's latest Internet Security Threat Report -- released earlier this month -- which also maintains that attacks are increasingly emanating from sources in the United States. Symantec's research, which focused on all types of threats, not just Web-based attacks, reported that the U.S. is the source of about 31 percent of all malware and phishing schemes. The reason why so many threats are coming from sites hosted in the U.S. and other relatively wealthy nations -- most of which have stricter laws in place to combat such efforts than their developing neighbors -- is simple, said Yuval Ben-Itzhak, chief technology officer at Finjan. No matter what region the code writers live in, he said, attackers are flocking to markets where the most money is changing hands to carry out their crimeware schemes, and increasingly doing so by hijacking legitimate URLs to pass out their work. "If you look back at many reports over the last few years, the perception has been that the malware is coming from Russia and other areas where laws are fewer and harder to enforce, but when we analyzed the live end-user content, we realized that a vast majority of malware was coming from servers in the U.S. where there are advanced laws and practices," Ben-Itzhak said. The upside of the issue is that security researchers can take action when they find malware URLs that are based in the U.S. by reporting them to authorities and applying pressure to the companies hosting the sites to take them offline. For the most part, the malware delivery pages are supported by cheap hosting companies that don't appear to closely monitor their behavior, Ben-Itzhak said. But an even more alarming trend is the high number of attacks being passed along to end-users via seemingly legitimate sites. In many of those cases, the attacks are being served up as advertisements that site operators may not even recognize as malware sources, making the situation even harder to fight. "It's very clear that a lot of malware is coming from advertisements, and it's difficult to track where the code is originating because of the layers of ad systems, aggregators and agents that work together to create and distribute this content," Ben-Itzhak said. "There are so many third parties pushing ads to these sites, and there is no official process among these parties for seeking out the bad code." A high-profile example of this type of attack was being distributed on a banner ad posted to social networking site MySpace.com in July 2006, which specifically attempted to use a security flaw in Microsoft Windows to infect Web surfers with spyware. Finjan’sreport indicates a trend of new efforts to spread malware using Web pages that have been filtered by automatic translation services, which are typically used by people to read content written in foreign languages.   Because the translation services don't scan for threats, and are often distributed in cooperation with known sources such as news sites or search engines, attackers can use the systems to sneak infected links through to end-users without tipping off security applications that look for unknown content. "The translation service sends a link that looks fine but the malware is still in there," Ben-Itzhak said. "This is another reason why people need real-time dynamic scanning for protection, because it's so hard to tell what you might actually be looking at these days."
Fring aims to cut cellphone costs with VOIP	16 February 2007
(InfoWorld) - Avi Shechter, co-founder and CEO of Fringland (Fring), could be on to something big with the launch of a cheap Internet-based phone service that runs over mobile networks. But the Israeli entrepreneur could also be in for the fight of his life with mobile phone network operators determined to protect their cash-cow voice business from virtual service providers. "I believe Fring brings value for users," Shechter said in an interview on the sidelines of the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona, adding that the low-cost service will have an impact on the voice business of mobile phone network operators. Fring didn't have a booth at the show but if you ran into Shechter, he was more than happy to demonstrate the service. The former co-general manager of instant messaging company ICQ and his team of 30 have launched a peer-to-peer VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol) service that carries calls over cellphone networks in much the same way PC-based Internet telephony services transport conversations over Wi-Fi or fixed-line broadband connections. You can download the 200KB Fring application to your handset for free. You'll need a Nokia Series 60 3rd Edition phone but Fring hopes to widen the choice of handsets by enabling the application to run on other operating systems as well, including Microsoft's Window Mobile. Fring not only looks and feels a lot like other PC-based applications such as Skype, Google Talk, and MSN Messenger that offer integrated VOIP, instant messaging and real-time presence services; the application also connects with them. It uses Skype's API (application programming interface) but is not endorsed or certified by Skype, according to Fring's Web site. You can fill your contacts list with other Fring users, or friends on the other services, see when they're online and communicate directly with them. When in idle mode, the Fring application drains the battery a little faster than a cell phone normally would in standby mode -- but with the advantage that you are able to see when your friends are available, and signal your availability. The cost of using Fring depends on your data plan -- the application sends around 4.5MB per hour spent talking. While the costs of local or in-country calls are comparable with standard calls, the real savings appear to be made on international calls. You can make calls to users on public telephone networks, using Skype Out, but these carry an additional fee on top of the data charges. Also, if you make a "roaming" call from outside your home network, you will be charged a data roaming fee as you would for any other data service. For all its features, Fring still has some kinks. If you try to make calls over GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) or GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) networks, you'll notice a crackly voice quality similar to early PC-based VOIP service, according to Shechter. "Our service is designed for 3G networks but we're working on improving the quality in the other networks," he said. Because you have to connect to the Internet to use the service, you'll need a data package of sufficient size, and although most mobile Internet data packages are volume-based, make sure there's no time limit. That would severely restrict your ability to use Fring or any other mobile VOIP application for that matter. Some operators, such as T-Mobile International, have banned the use of VOIP applications on their networks. Other operators may also introduce measures to block access to virtual mobile VOIP service providers like Fring that use their mobile data networks without commercial agreements. To offset any lost voice revenue from the switch to IP, such operators could charge a specific VOIP subscription fee, or offer a more expensive data package service fee for using VOIP or even bundle additional services for a higher fee. Particularly in Europe, operators have invested far too much money in licenses, equipment and customer acquisition to give anything away. Like fixed-line operators that first fought and then adopted VOIP services, mobile operators must now deal with a disruptive technology that could radically change their business models.
Nissan's car navigation to offer fuel-saving tips	22 January 2007
(InfoWorld) - Drivers of some Nissan cars in Japan from Monday will begin tracking the fuel efficiency of their vehicles on the Web thanks to a new system that ties in with the car's existing navigation system. The new service is being offered through Nissan Motor Co.'s Carwings, which is a service-oriented component of factory-installed navigation systems in Nissan cars. Carwings supplements the basic navigation system by offering real-time traffic data and information useful to drivers, such as upcoming attractions and cheap gas nearby. The additional data is supplied via a cell phone data connection. Carwings, which is free for the first three years and then ¥5,250 ($43) per year thereafter, also offers a live operator who can remotely program the navigation system or offer recommendations on things such as nearby restaurants. The fuel-efficiency system has two parts. Inside the car the current fuel efficiency can be displayed on the navigation screen and is constantly updated as each journey progresses. Then each time the navigation system accesses the Carwings server the data is relayed back and can then be checked via a password-protected page on the Internet. The Web page can also provide historical data allowing drivers to check the efficiency of their vehicles over a period of time. Nissan said the service is part of its goal to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles through better cars and better driving. Car owners are encouraged to improve their own driving efficiency through tips and a ranking system that awards them a bronze, silver, gold or platinum rating based on the data. Drivers will also be able to compare their fuel efficiency score against the average of other drivers with the same car. The service is being introduced Monday through factory-installed DVD Carwings navigation systems in nine Nissan models available in Japan (Fuga, Tiida, Latio, Serena, Lafesta, Wingroad, Note, Sylphy and late-model Presage from May 2006). It will be available in hard-disk based factory-installed systems from the middle of this year. Carwings has yet to be introduced in vehicles outside of Japan. Nissan said a wider launch is under consideration.
Transfer firm revs up premier service	28 November 2007
Firm to offer upgraded service in Portugal and Tunisia
COUNCIL OF EUROPE DECORATES 3 TURKISH DEPUTIES WITH HIGH SERVICE MEDAL & HONORARY MEMBERSHIP	01 January 0001
ESKISEHIR (A.A) - The Council of Europe has decorated three Turkish deputies with high service medal and honorary membership.