WASHINGTON (Reuters) –
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission on Thursday launched a broadband test service to help consumers clock the speed of their Internet.

Located at the site www.broadband.gov, the test is aimed at allowing consumers to compare their actual speeds with the speeds advertised by their providers.

The FCC release follows an FCC meeting in September where officials said that actual speeds were estimated to lag by as much as 50 percent during busy hours.

“The FCC’s new digital tools will arm users with real-time information about their broadband connection and the agency with useful data about service across the country,” FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said in a statement.

The FCC is also collecting information about where broadband is not available. Consumers can email the FCC at fccinfo@fcc.gov or call the FCC.

(Reporting by John Poirier; Editing by Bernard Orr)

NEW YORK (AFP) –
Charging online readers will give The New York Times a critical second revenue stream but the print newspaper will be important for “many years to come,” publisher Arthur Sulzberger said Thursday.

Sulzberger, speaking at the Bloomberg Businessweek 2010 Media Summit here, also said he has no intention of selling the newspaper which has been in his family for generations.

The Times Co. announced in January that it would begin charging readers of NYTimes.com in early 2011, using a “metered model” that will offer users free access to a set number of articles before they will be asked to pay.

“The model we are going to be putting into place in early 2011 will allow us to continue to be part of the social media ecosystem, as well as bring us that critical second revenue stream that… is going to be critical to supporting the journalism that we do,” Sulzberger said.

“We believe that going to a metered model is absolutely the right thing today,” Sulzberger said. “But will it be the best thing 10 years from now? I don’t know.”

Times Co. president and chief executive Janet Robinson said “there is an opportunity, I think, for us to gain a great deal of revenue from this paid model going forward.”

Sulzberger said that “for those New York Times customers who want print, it is not as though print is going away.

“It’s a critical part of today, it will be a critical part I think for many years to come,” he said. “The iPad is also going to be a critical part just the way the Kindle’s a critical part.”

“At the end of the day we can’t define ourselves by our method of distribution,” Sulzberger said. “What we care about at the end of day is our journalism, our quality journalism.”

Sulzberger also said that he was “delighted” to have Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, who was named the world’s richest man by Forbes magazine on Wednesday, as a major investor in the Times.

Slim extended a 250-million-dollar loan to the Times last year.

“He’s invested because he believes in our mission, and he believes in the quality of what we do, and that his shares will, in fact, rise,” Sulzberger said.

“Shareholders who don’t share the vision of where the New York Times Company is going or how we’re operating are going to bail,” he said. “They’re going to sell.

“Because, if they don’t buy into what we’re doing, then that’s not a good investment for them,” the Times publisher said. “This is not a company that’s going to be sold. It’s not a company that’s going to be split apart.”

ATLANTA – A Georgia man who posted a video of himself on the Internet holding a sign that said “Elton John must die” has been arrested for making terroristic threats.

Neal Horsley, 65, was arrested early Wednesday in Carrollton, about 50 miles west of Atlanta, said Atlanta Police Sgt. Curtis Davenport. He would not say who Horsley is accused of threatening, but Horsley’s son, Nathan, said he thought the arrest was connected to the video about the musician.

In the video posted Feb. 28 on YouTube, Horsley held the sign in front of a building where he said John has a condo. John’s publicist, Fran Curtis, confirmed that John has an Atlanta apartment but declined further comment.

Horsley was upset that John, who is gay, told Parade magazine in an interview last month that he thought Jesus was a “compassionate, super-intelligent gay man who understood human problems.”

“What Elton John has done is desecrated the image of the Lord Jesus Christ, blasphemed the Lord Jesus Christ,” Horsley said in the video.

Horsley founded the Creator’s Rights Party and has declared himself a candidate in the 2010 governor’s race. He kicked off his campaign July 4, 2008 in downtown Carrollton, wearing a placard showing the head of an aborted fetus while singing an anti-abortion song.

The state ethics commission, which oversees election filings, has no record of Horsley’s campaign.

He previously gained notoriety in the late 1990s for his role in establishing a Web site that published the names and addresses of doctors who performed abortions. Planned Parenthood officials called the site a “hit list for terrorists.”

Fulton County jail records showed Horsley also faces charges of criminal defamation and disseminating terroristic threats over the Internet.

He was being held Thursday in the Fulton County jail on $40,000 bond. As conditions for his release, a judge said he must live with his son in a house with a phone landline and must pay 10 percent of his bond in cash.

Horsley’s son said his father doesn’t have an attorney.

SAN FRANCISCO – VeriSign Inc., whose technology is key to allowing Internet users to access Web sites with names ending in “.com” and “.net,” plans to spend more than $300 million over the next decade to upgrade its systems.

The upgrades will allow VeriSign’s machines to handle up to 4 quadrillion requests per day from computers trying to reach those sites. That’s a thousand times more lookups than the 4 trillion per day that the company can currently handle.

Ken Silva, the company’s chief technology officer, said Thursday that the latest changes are needed to keep up with ballooning Internet traffic and with spikes in usage caused by major news events and computer attacks.

Traffic volume is expected to soar along with the expansion of technologies such as Internet-connected televisions, navigation systems and video streaming.

VeriSign is in two big businesses that are critical to the functioning of the Internet but both remain largely out of the public’s view.

The most recognizable business involves selling “certificates” that Web sites can use to tell Web browsers that they are using encryption to protect data passing between a user’s computer and the Web site’s servers. That’s important for banking and e-commerce sites in protecting customers’ data. VeriSign is one of several large vendors of such Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates.

VeriSign also operates the registry of all “.com” and “.net” domain names. That means it’s responsible for ensuring that Internet users can reach sites registered with those names.

When someone enters a Web address into a browser, the traffic doesn’t go directly to servers operated by that Web site. It often has to go through servers operated by VeriSign and other companies to translate the written name, such as verisign.com, into a numeric Internet Protocol, or IP, address that computers can understand.

The last major infrastructure upgrade VeriSign announced was in 2007, when the company said it would spend more than $100 million to boost capacity tenfold by 2010.

The amount represented about a quarter of the total $373 million VeriSign spent in those three years on all its capital expenditures.

Last year the VeriSign, which is based in Mountain View, earned $245.6 million on revenue of $1.03 billion.

WASHINGTON (AFP) –
The United States said Thursday that the battle for human rights is increasingly being fought on the Internet as China, Iran and other states try to block access by political activists and others.

In its 2009 report on human rights abuses worldwide, the State Department highlighted how the Internet has become a battleground for supporters and opponents of fundamental rights like freedom of expression and assembly.

It was “a year in which more people gained greater access than ever before to more information about human rights through the Internet, cell phones, and other forms of connective technologies,” it said.

“Yet at the same time it was a year in which governments spent more time, money, and attention finding regulatory and technical means to curtail freedom of expression on the Internet and the flow of critical information,” it added.

Such governments also sought “to infringe on the personal privacy rights of those who used these rapidly evolving technologies,” it added.

In Iran, after the contested presidential elections, authorities cracked down on new media such as Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites.

“After the June election, there was a major drop in bandwidth, which experts posited the government caused to prevent activists involved in the protests from accessing the Internet and uploading large video files,” it said.

In China, the government “increased its efforts to monitor Internet use, control content, restrict information, block access to foreign and domestic Web sites, encourage self-censorship, and punish those who violated regulations.

“The government employed thousands of persons at the national, provincial, and local levels to monitor electronic communications,” the report said.

“The government at times blocked access to selected sites operated by major foreign news outlets, health organizations, foreign governments, educational institutions, and social networking sites,” it said.

“The government also automatically censored e-mail and Web chats based on an ever-changing list of sensitive key words,” the State Department added.

In Stalinist North Korea, “the government sought to control virtually all information,” it added.

“There were no independent media, Internet access was limited to high-ranking officials and other elites, and academic freedom was repressed,” it said.

“The government prohibited all but the political elite from listening to foreign media broadcasts, and violators were subject to severe punishment,” the report said.

In Cuba, “the government controlled nearly all Internet access,” it said.

The authorities “reviewed and censored e-mail” as well as used Internet search filters and blocked access to Web sites they opposed.

“Citizens could access the Internet only through government-approved institutions, except at Internet facilities provided by a few diplomatic missions,” it added.

In Egypt, a US ally, the government has promoted use of the Internet but monitored it closely. “During the year, police harassed, detained, and allegedly abused certain bloggers and Internet activists,” it added.

published exploit code for the latest Internet Explorer zero-day flaw on the Web and Microsoft is warning that more attacks against the unpatched vulnerability can be expected in-the-wild. One thing seems to be more apparent with each passing Internet Explorer (IE) vulnerability: its time to upgrade the Web browser.

This zero-day exploit of Internet Explorer is just the most recent demonstrating that IE8 is more secure than its predecessors–especially IE6. Security aside, Web hosts and developers generally despise IE6 as well. For evidence of this fact you need look no further than the extensive list of supporters displayed on the IE6nomore.com site.

IE6 is Note Secure

Wolfgang Kandek, CTO of Qualys, noted via email “IE6 is a 10-year old browser, with its architecture designed when the Internet was a much more innocent place. IE8 has many additional security features and had the Microsoft SDL [Security Development Lifecycle] applied throughout. Its CSS and JavaScript support are much better than IE6, or even IE7, and it is a much more robust interface for the new Web 2.0 type applications.”

Joshua Talbot, Security Intelligence Manager, Symantec Security Response agreed “IE 6 does not have the security features implemented in later versions of IE; for example, Data Execution Prevention (DEP) and Protected Mode. DEP makes it more difficult for attackers to successful exploit memory corruption vulnerabilities, while Protected Mode limits what an attacker can do if they are able to gain control of the IE process.”

This is the part where many readers stop reading and jump over to the comments to express their opinion–sometimes quite passionately–that everyone should just stop using Internet Explorer completely and that anyone who chooses to continue using IE as their Web browser deserves the issues and security concerns that come with it.

Judging from the Web browser market share trends, there are many who subscribe to the “drop Internet Explorer” mantra. Microsoft has seen steady–although minute–declines in market share month after month, while rival Web browsers such as Firefox and Chrome continue to make gains. Still, Microsoft holds a dominant stake at almost 62 percent–more than double the share held by second-place Firefox.

If you drill a little deeper in the browser market share data, though, you will find that not only is Internet Explorer the number one browser, but IE8 specifically is at the top of the list with more than 22 percent of the browser market. Not too shabby for a browser that will celebrate its one-year anniversary next week.

What is concerning is that the number two browser is the nine year old IE6 at almost 20 percent of the market. Although IE7 has been available for almost four years, it is the number four browser, coming in behind Firefox 3.5 with a meager 13.57 percent.

Wean Off of IE6

IE6 is simply not secure and businesses and IT administrators should make it a priority to upgrade the Web browser as soon as possible. The Web is a major vector for cyber attacks and the Web browser is the Achilles heel that makes organizations vulnerable and creates the weakest link in the security chain.

Of course, it’s not quite that easy. Many organizations that still rely on IE6 would like to make the switch to IE8 but can’t. Kandek explained “In the corporate environment, software is managed, and IE6 or IE7 are part of the initial, approved build that works on all internal applications. Requalifying that build against all internal applications is a large effort that many companies do not have resources for.”

“If they do, they might find applications that specifically use IE6 features that are incompatible with other browsers. Recently one of our larger customers told me that they had dozens of applications that do not run under IE8,” continued Kandek.

Symantec’s Talbot shared the same concerns “For enterprises, not only is there a cost to purchase software, there is also the cost to deploy and maintain. An enterprise must quality-assure software to ensure the new version meets the current needs and that there are no compatibility issues. They must also allocate IT resources to deploy the update. Then there is also an education component that must be provided for users to address differences between versions and how to handle known compatibility issues.”

A Microsoft spokesperson commented via e-mail to say “Microsoft has consistently recommended that consumers upgrade to the latest version of our browser. Internet Explorer 8 offers improvements in speed, security and reliability as well as new features designed for the way people use the web. While we recommend Internet Explorer 8 to all customers, we understand we have a number of corporate customers for whom broad deployment of new technologies across their desktops requires more planning.”

I understand that it can be a daunting undertaking to ensure that all commercial software and custom internal applications used by the organization will work properly under a newer Web browser–or find and implement alternate applications that will. Continuing to run IE6, though, is like leaving your car unlocked with the keys in the ignition.

A recent report from NSS Labs illustrates why moving from IE6 (or even IE7) to IE8 should be a priority for IT administrators. It also contradicts the IE-bashing wisdom and shows that IE8 is actually the most secure Web browser when it comes to protecting systems against social networking and Web 2.0 attacks.

Socially-engineered malware attacks–or phishing attacks–pose an increasing risk to organizations. These attacks use social engineering and exploit the trust of the end-user to compromise, steal, or damage sensitive information.

The NSS Labs report claims “53 percent of malware is now delivered via Internet download versus just 12 percent via e-mail according to statistics from Trend Micro. And, according to Microsoft, as many as 0.5 percent of the download requests made through Internet Explorer 8 are malicious.”

NSS Labs tested five Web browsers (IE, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera) over the course of 18 days. Testing was conducted 24×7 during the evaluation period, attacking the browsers with more than 550 socially-engineered malware links.

This was the third time NSS Labs has conducted these Web browser security tests. According to the report, “Over the three tests, Windows Internet Explorer 8 provided the best protection against socially-engineered malware and was the only browser that improved its block rate test-over-test, successfully stopping 69 percent, 81 percent, and 85 percent of threats in each respective test.”

Talbot explained that there is nothing magical that makes any Web browser inherently superior to the rest. “Applications and operating systems from any vendor typically don’t have anything special in terms of their code that makes them impervious to vulnerabilities and therefore attacks.”

“It really comes back to the fact that the more popular software is the more it will be targeted. Thus, if everyone in the world switched to some obscure browser with very little market share, attackers would start targeting it. Attackers go where the money is, and the money is wherever the people are,” summed up Talbot.

Tyler Reguly, lead research engineer for nCircle, also responded by e-mail and expressed similar sentiment that the browser itself is not the issue. “The insecurity these days comes from a lack of ‘smart browsing’ or ‘safe browsing’. People are too willing to browse the seedy underbelly of the internet. Many people wouldn’t walk down a dark alley and purchase items from a guy sitting in the dark, but they’re willing to visit (and purchase from) websites that are the cyber-equivalent.”

To sum it up–stop using Internet Explorer 6. You will be doing yourself, your company, and the rest of the world that shares the Web with you a tremendous favor. And, as long as you’re upgrading away from IE6, IE8 offers a solid Web browser to switch to.

Other Web browsers such as Firefox or Chrome would also be exceptionally more secure than IE6, however organizations that are used to managing IE through Group Policy and updating it using the tools provided by Microsoft need to consider how supporting and patching alternate browsers will fit into the network infrastructure.

R.I.P. IE6. We knew thee (too) well.

Tony Bradley is co-author of Unified Communications for Dummies. He tweets as @Tony_BradleyPCW. You can follow him on his Facebook page, or contact him by email at tony_bradley@pcworld.com.