A recently-discovered flaw in Gmail is capable of turning Google's e-mail service into a highly effective spam machine.

An e-mail from johdoe@awinnerisyou.com (or the corresponding IP address block) may be automatically blocked by any given e-mail service, while an e-mail from a trusted, authenticated source such as Gmail is automatically allowed through the gateway.

E-mail sent to Yahoo and Hotmail from a blacklisted IP didn't even necessarily reach the account's spam box, while forged e-mail sent via Gmail always arrived in the intended account's inbox.

The Times of India has accused Chinese hackers, allegedly backed by the Chinese government, of systematically attacking Indian online assets over the past 18 months.

India's relatively friendly relationship with China may have grown a bit more tense of late thanks to the recent Chinese crackdown in Tibet. India is home to the largest group of Tibetan refugees in the world, including the Dalai Lama's government-in-exile.

Radiohead made it official: the band won't be giving away music like it did with the album In Rainbows.

Many music fans had hoped that the band's now famous pay-what-you-want promotion was an attempt by the group to discover a new way to sell music. Now it appears Radiohead at best was after publicity.

Nine Inch Nails, led by Trent Reznor, followed Radiohead by offering the digital version of the album Ghosts I-IV for free as well as charging for premium versions. Reznor said last month that to that point the album had generated 781,917 transactions and $1.6 million.

"I think the way (Radiohead) parlayed it into a marketing gimmick has certainly been shrewd," Reznor said.

Wikipedia has temporarily blocked edits from the US Department of Justice after someone inside the government agency tried to erase references to a particularly-controversial Wiki-scandal.

The DoJ did not respond to our requests for comment. But odds are, the edits were made by a single individual acting independently. Wikipedia's ban on the department's IP is due to be lifted today.

It warmed my heart to see Khoi Vinh, Design Director for the NY Times state that they still write HTML code by hand.

It's our preference to use a text editor, like HomeSite, TextPad or TextMate, to "hand code" everything, rather than to use a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) HTML and CSS authoring program, like Dreamweaver. We just find it yields better and faster results.

China has surpassed the United States to become the world's largest Internet-using population, reaching 221 million by the end of February, state media said on Thursday.

Internet censorship is common in China, where the government employs an elaborate system of filters and tens of thousands of human monitors to survey surfing habits, surgically clipping sensitive content.

But while Fusion Centers centralize law enforcement efforts, they do not centralize the criminal activity. There are places, however, where such activity is centralized: the backbone hubs located in hosting facilities across the country. All of the Internet's activity, legal and illegal, flows through these "choke points," and the feds, of course, are already tapping those points and siphoning off data.

What Mueller wants is the legal authority to comb through the backbone data that is already being siphoned off by the NSA in order to look for illegal activity.

I want to point out that this centralization of legal and illegal activity at network hubs will be a persistent part of all of our lives as we live more and more of them online. Thus the government's desire to tap those hubs and filter them for criminal and hostile activity will never go away.

BT's covert trial of Phorm's ISP adware technology in summer 2007 involved tracking many thousands more customers without their knowledge than previously reported, it's emerged.

Today Phorm said the 2007 trial was actually performed on "tens of thousands" of lines. It refused to provide a specific figure, but at the absolute least there are 38,000 BT Retail customers unaware their communications have been allegedly criminally intercepted in the last two years. The number could be as high as 108,000.

Don Foster MP, a Liberal Democrat who has taken a lead in parliament over the Phorm controversy, has called on BT to reveal the details of its allegedly illegal action.

Phorm and BT say their lawyers told them the trials were legal, but won't say why.

Shameless domain registrar and web hoster Network Solutions is hijacking its customers' sub-domains, filling these pilfered pages with a sea of money-making ad links.

Betteridge hosts GotGame with "NetSol," and somewhere along the way, he realized that his unused GotGame sub-domains resolved to ad-infested "parking" pages.

Yes, you can opt out this questionable program. But first you have to know about it. The EULA housing the above paragraph is 59,000 words long.

Of course, this isn't nearly as bad the company's domain front running scam. Which it continues to call a "security measure."

Some Internet Service Providers (ISP) have been using deep-packet inspection to spy on the communications of more than 100,000 US customers. Deep packet inspection allows the ISP to read the content of communications including every Web page visited, every e-mail sent and every search entered, in short every click and keystroke that comes down the line. The companies involved assert that customers' privacy is protected because no personally identifying details are released, but they make money from advertisers who use the information to target their online pitches.