The U.S. Air Force Cyber Command is developing capabilities to inflict denial of service, confidential data loss, data manipulation, and system integrity loss on its adversaries, and to combine these with physical attacks, according to a senior U.S. general.

"Terrorists and criminals are doing the same thing. We depend so heavily as a military on the use of cyber, we have to be cautious about it," Elder said. "Cyber gives us a huge advantage, but adversaries look at our capabilities and see areas they can undermine. We need to protect our asymmetric advantage--on the one hand by having people further exploit cyber, and on the other by having mission assurance."

"We're trying to move away from clandestine operations. We're looking for real physics--a bigger bang resulting in collateral damage."

A patent scheduled for sale next month in San Francisco could threaten some of the biggest players on the internet leading Web 2.0.

In supporting documentation it is claimed that pretty much the whole of the web uses this method to operate AJAX-based applications. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple and eBay are identified as among those whose products "potentially" infringe on the patent.

Clearly if the claim is valid, the value of the patent - filed in 1999 and issued in 2002 - is substantial. It will be interesting to see who bids and what the new owner does with it. One possible option on the table is to prosecute claimed infringers, cashing in through the US courts.

If a law proposed last week in Maryland gets passed, intentionally using a neighbour's wireless Internet connection without permission will be a crime.

He cited the story of some man in Michigan who was prosecuted for parking outside a coffee shop and freeriding on its wireless network to check his email.

The man was charged with a felony and faced a fine of up to $10,000 and up to five years in prison.

As an alternative, the man chose a diversion program, a $400 fine, spending 40 hours in community service and six months probation.

When businesses want to communicate with their customers via e-mail, many send messages with a bogus return address, e.g. "somethinghere@donotreply.com."

As owner of www.donotreply.com, the Seattle-based programmer receives millions of wayward e-mails each week, including a great many missives destined for executives at Fortune 500 companies or bank customers, even sensitive messages sent by government personnel and contractors.

He says Capital One appears to have used donotreply.com as the return address for automated payment transfers and debits set up by customers.

"It's really kind of weird, because I'll get these faxes from Iraq, where they talk about various camps, when and where they're moving the support equipment, what they're buying, accident reports, and information on people applying for jobs," Faliszek said.

Faliszek said he is constantly threatened with lawsuits from companies who for one reason or another have a difficult time grasping why he is in possession of their internal documents and e-mails.

P4P, which stands for Proactive network Provider Participation for P2P, ultimately aims to decrease backbone traffic and bring down network operation costs by enabling service providers to communicate information about network conditions to client applications for the purpose of facilitating improved P2P file transfer performance.

Ars spoke with Verizon senior technologist and P4P workgroup co-chair Doug Pasko, who tells us that Verizon observed download performance improvements of approximately 200 percent during tests conducted with Pando. The performance boost can climb as high as 600 percent in some cases.

Verizon condemns illegal filesharing and says that the new protocol is intended for adoption by legal commercial services, but also reiterates that - unlike AT&T - the company has no intention of policing its own network.

The Internet is the realm of beer swigging youths with a predilection for pornography, according to Poland’s former prime minister.

In an interview for his conservative party's website, the former PM who ruled Poland with his twin brother Lech, the president, put forward the view that Poles shouldn't be given the opportunity to vote online because the Internet attracts people who watch "pornography while sipping a bottle of beer".

Tim wrote about the pointless controversy around the site RateMyCop.com, which would allow people to rate police officers they had dealings with.

But, of course, many police officers didn't see it that way. However, what no one expected is that the site's registrar and host would step into the fight and take the site completely offline with no warning to its owner.

People at GoDaddy gave conflicting reports as to why the site was taken offline, first claiming it was taken offline for "suspicious activity" and later that he had surpassed a 3 terabyte bandwidth limit, which the owner of the site disputes, saying there weren't nearly enough page views for that to happen. Either way, he's now ditched GoDaddy and found a host that won't pull the site offline with no warning and no recourse.

People seem to have this weird fascination with blaming YouTube for the stuff people do on YouTube. The latest is in an article that discusses the fact that adolescent males tend to be fans of blowing stuff up -- with a fair number of them filming the activity and putting it on YouTube.

Yet, there's always someone who still thinks it's at least partially YouTube's fault. In this case, it's someone who runs a non-profit focused on kids' online safety, claiming that "YouTube and other sites have not taken responsibility for allowing such videos to be posted." That might be because it's not YouTube's responsibility. It's just a hosting platform.

Canadian soldiers fighting in Afghanistan have been warned that terrorists might be attacking them through their Facebook notworking sites.

According to CBC, the Defence Department is telling soldiers not to post personal photos and information on Facebook because they have proof that Al Qaeda operatives are monitoring the site.

Comcast Corp. told the Federal Communications Commission in formal comments Tuesday that hampering some file-sharing by its subscribers was a justifiable way to keep Web traffic flowing for everyone.

Comcast says it must curb some file-sharing traffic because some subscribers would otherwise hog the cables with their uploads and slow traffic in their neighborhood.

The company - the country's second-largest Internet service provider - also said it was justified in using "reset" packets to break off communications between two computers.

Comcast sometimes inserts these packets in the data stream to kill a file-sharing session. The move "fools" each computer into believing the other computer wants to end the connection.