The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which was created after the attacks on September 11, 2001 as a kind of overriding department, wants to have the key to sign the DNS root zone solidly in the hands of the US government. This ultimate master key would then allow authorities to track DNS Security Extensions (DNSSec) all the way back to the servers that represent the name system's root zone on the Internet.

At the ICANN meeting, Turcotte said that the managers of country registries were concerned about this proposal. When contacted by heise online, Turcotte said that the national registries had informed their governmental representatives about the DHS's plans.

If the IANA retains the key, however, US authorities still have a political problem, for the US government still reserves the right to oversee ICANN/IANA. If the keys are then handed over to ICANN/IANA, there would be even less of an incentive to give up this role as a monitor.

The key Internet oversight agency decided not to give adult websites their own ".xxx" domain for the third time.

The rejection comes on the back of complaints from both the porn industry and religious groups. The adult entertainment groups were worried that their businesses would be censored into a coma and the religious groups thought it would encourage the adult industry.

The idea was first pushed by ICM Registry which handles Web-site registrations with the aim of overseeing sites that want to have the ".xxx" Internet suffix. According to Associated Press, ICM is considering suing ICANN.

Once you join Flixster, Flixster commandeers your address book - your list of all of your personal contacts in your AOL (or Hotmail, Yahoo or Gmail) address book - and sends out an invitation to join Flixster "from" you. Oh sure, you enable them to do it - but clearly enough people are unaware of what they are doing that it's causing a problem.

Using AOL as an example, when you first sign up for Flixster using an AOL email address, after you select a username and password, the very next screen prompts you for your AOL password!

If you use a Gmail address, you can get the same screen, only with the Gmail logo. Same for Hotmail and Yahoo.

Once you give them your password, they grab everyone's email addresses from your AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo or Gmail address book, and spam them with the invitation. In your name using your email address.

Flixster's Terms of Service start out by saying: "I can’t believe you really clicked on this. What are you trying to find out? Here is our privacy policy (link to privacy policy)."

According to the Hartford Courant, Connecticut became the latest state to want to restrict the use of MySpace and other social networking sites. The proposed bill would require that all such sites verify the identity and age of users, as well as get parent's permission for those under 18. Sites that failed to comply would be subject to a $5,000 per day fine. Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said of the proposition, 'If we can put a man on the moon, we can verify age on the Internet,' but quickly followed with the acknowledgment that there is no foolproof method.

The Library of Congress' copyright board, which sets the royalty rates for statutory licenses, proposes doubling the amount webcasters pay for their statutory license in the next the few years.

Partial details, first reported on Kurt Hanson's RAIN newsletter, see the current rate of .0762 cents of per song per listener rising retroactively to 0.08 cents for 2006, 0.11 cents in 2007, and 0.14 cents, 0.18 cents and 0.19 cents by 2010.

The details leaked so far give little idea of the final picture - many commercial broadcasters opt for the aggregate tuning hour schedule - except that royalties are set to rise steeply. Hanson described this as "undeniably a huge victory for the legal departments of record labels", represented by the Recording Industry Ass. of America, the RIAA.

Tor, the system for anonymizing Internet traffic by routing it through a succession of "onion" routers, has been compromised. In the lab. Using a previously-known exploit. One that has yet to be seen in the wild. And one that was researched in consultation with Tor developers.

The paper that started the whole uproar explained that anonymity could be compromised on a Tor network if a malicious party deliberately configured its own Tor routers and advertised them as high-bandwidth devices. The Tor protocol tends to route traffic to devices which claim they have plenty of bandwidth available, but it does no checking to see if this claim is true. Setting up several of these servers allows the malicious party to be chosen as part of the routing path quite often. If two of the malicious servers are included as the start and end points in any particular path, a "correlation attack" becomes possible that can reveal both the sender and receiver of the communication.

The attack in question has never been seen in action outside the laboratory, and the researchers suggest several ways of reworking Tor to address the problem. Those suggestions include checking up on the claims made by routers (by comparing them to observed performance, for instance) and by implementing "location diversity" among the routers used by the system.

The change, which began Tuesday, affects e-mails sent from AOL accounts using the internet provider's AOL 9.0 software, which is available to AOL's 13 million paid subscribers and others who have downloaded the program.

E-mails sent through AOL's Webmail service, which is available for free on the company's Web site, have had the ads attached for about eight months, said AOL spokeswoman Anne Bentley.

Bentley said the ad is a reminder to people, especially those paying for AOL service, that many products like e-mail are now available for free.

A US intellectual property pressure group has called on the US government to declare Canada a member of the IP Axis of Evil, alongside China, Russia and Belize.

The group has complained to the US government, accusing the Canadians of failing to deliver on a promised overhaul of copyright laws and a policing crackdown.

The group which includes members such as Microsoft, Apple and Paramount Pictures feels that the Government needed to "ratchet this up" as the Canadian government doesn't seem to take this very seriously.

The IIPA thinks that putting Canada on the "priority watch list" next to Belize, Venezuela, China, Turkey, Indonesia, Ukraine and Russia will do the trick.

The group of disgruntled newspapers in Belgium that sued Google for copyright infringement has emerged victorious after a decision was granted in their favor today in court. The judgment echoes a previous ruling from the Court of First Instance in Brussels that found Google in violation of copyright law when the company published extracts of articles from Belgian newspaper publishers.

Copiepresse, the Belgium copyright group representing the nearly 20 papers scandalized by Google News, now gets its wish: Google News may no longer link to the news resources in question nor cache any of their materials for use in Google News.

They actually resented the fact that Google News might direct readers to their content, because they feared that a search engine might do what it is designed to do: get people what they want the first time. Copiepresse's member companies would prefer that you hit their home pages and wander around aimlessly instead. No, I'm not joking.

Video download services such as YouTube are pushing Interweb capacity to breaking point, a Google executive warned.

Vincent Dureau, head of TV technology at Google, said that the web will soon struggle to meet rising demand for online video.

Speaking at the Cable Europe Conference in Amsterdam this week, Dureau said: "The web infrastructure, even Google's, does not scale. It is not going to offer the quality of service that consumers expect."

In its Predictions 2007 report, Deloitte says increased demand for online video and social networking sites like MySpace and Bebo are "pushing bandwidth to breaking point".