The US has refused to hand over control of the main computers that control the Internet to the UN.

Ambassador David Gross, the US coordinator for international communications and information policy at the State Department said that the US will not allow the UN to take over the management of the net.

He said that although some countries want that the US thinks that's unacceptable. Gross said that the US had been clear that it was not even going to negotiate on this issue. He had a pop at the EU which is starting to move towards agreeing some sort of compromise saying he was "deeply disappointed" with them.

Some countries were hoping that the US would reach some sort of compromise deal on the Internet, as some countries were getting increasingly concerned about the amount of control the US has. They are also concerned that at a stroke the US government could force ICANN to make any web site it liked unreachable.

Mailinator, the free, temporary email service gets a lot of spam (over a million emails a day). And with another cool application of Google maps, the site now shows a Spam Map indicating what sites are spamming mailinator in (nearly) real time. It's oddly addictive to poke around and see where the spam is actually coming from.

The experimental high speed internet project Internet2 has two new members today: a pair of acronyms guaranteed to have researchers rifling anxiously through their "Stuff" directories. Both the Recording Industry Ass. of America, the RIAA, and Hollywood lobby group the Motion Picture Ass. of America, the MPAA, have signed up to the project to explore high-bandwidth DRM.

Earlier this year, the RIAA sued 400 researchers on the network for copyright infringement. "We cannot let this high-speed network become a zone of lawlessness where the normal rules don't apply," RIAA president Cary Sherman said at the time.

"The MPAA views this partnership with Internet2 as an important opportunity for collaboration as we seek to link new delivery models with content protection," added MPAA prez Dan Glickman.

As relief workers scramble to provide comfort and succor to the thousands and thousands of people dispossessed by hurricane Katrina, tech relief efforts are hitting snags. Equipment shortages, problems accessing the Internet, and the time it takes to set up computers for refugees to use are all getting in the way of getting people help, but that's not too surprising. This is, after all, a disaster.

What is surprising, however, is the fact that the Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA) online registration site for disaster help is Internet Explorer-only.

Workers on the ground have told Ars Technica that they would prefer to avoid setting up Windows XP workstations because they take longer to setup, and even longer to properly patch and configure for use. You may recall that in an experiment performed last year, a Windows XP SP1 box put on the Internet was compromised in 4 minutes flat.

Encrypted P2P networks will soon make bandwidth management based on deep packet inspection obsolete, says Staselog, a Finnish appliance outfit.

Around 80 per cent of all traffic in the Internet is already P2P. This traffic will increase 1,000-fold in the next five years and most of it will be encrypted P2P, according to a study by Staselog and researchers at Finnish Universities.

Along with next generation file trading networks featuring the use of encryption - so-called darknets - scrambled VoIP traffic will also to the load service provider networks have to support. Staselog's sales pitch is that current approaches to bandwidth management, based on deep packet inspection to detect and throttle P2P, will be unable to cope when most traffic is encrypted - hence the need to introduce different traffic prioritisation techniques.

Google is planning on introducing it's own instant messaging service which will allow users to make calls over computers a la Skype, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The service will be called Google Talk and is expected to be out and about by Wednesday. As well as being able to make calls users can trade text messages over the web, similar to programs like AOL Instant Messenger and MSN Messenger.

With newspapers increasingly seeing how the web helps them make money, you'd think they'd want more visitors, not fewer. That's why I've never quite understood registration only websites that consistently go through and weed out any BugMeNot logins. However, it looks like the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the site that just realized charging for content doesn't make sense, has come up with another way to stop BugMeNot logins. Instead of just requiring your email and password, they require your name as a third field. I've definitely seen other sites swap these two, so that all the BugMeNot entries that are set with usernames, and not email addresses, no longer work. Either way, all this does is piss off potential readers who won't bother going back and certainly won't send any more readers to the site. And, of course, for those few who actually do go through the registration process, you can bet they're going to give dirty data which is worse than useless in that it compromises the whole set of aggregate data the newspaper was trying to put together in the first place. Users don't feel they're getting anything of value in exchange for giving up their data and will often just go elsewhere.

Would it bother you if the only browser you could use to preregister a copyright claim with the United States Copyright Office is Internet Explorer, version 5.1 and higher? Well, you might be getting bothered real soon, because that is what the Library of Congress has in mind.

In a followup to its July 22, 2005, Notice of Proprosed Rulemaking, the Copyright Office is now seeking "information as to whether persons filing the electronic-only preregistration form prescribed by the Copyright Office will experience difficulties if it is necessary to use Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser in order to preregister a work."

NewsForge tried to speak with David O. Carson, General Counsel for the Library of Congress Copyright Office, this morning. His name is given as the primary contact on the request for comments. Unfortunately, Carson is on vacation and is not available.

Next we tried Charlotte Douglass, Principal Legal Advisor, whose name is also provided as a contact point. Alas, she is out of the office until August 15th.

Our last effort was to speak with the author of the notice, Associate General Counsel Tanya Sandros. You guessed it. She is unavailable. It's not that the Library of Congress Copyright Office is closed for the summer, but the receptionist did tell us that everyone connected with situation is unavailable.

When most people think of Web search, they think of Google. But Yahoo said Monday that it has completed a vast expansion of its search engine index and now encompasses almost double that of its main competitor.

Yahoo's Tim Mayer said Monday on the company's Search Blog that it now indexes more than 20 billion documents and images. That's almost twice the 11.3 billion Google publicly says it currently spans.

Of the 20 billion elements in Yahoo's database, 19 billion are documents, 1.5 billion images and more than 50 million audio and video files, the company said.

To be sure, Yahoo's supplanting Google as king of the search indexes--in size at least--is a surprise, and gives it a lot of grist for touting its search feature as a solid alternative to Google's. That has been a public relations challenge for Yahoo since it unveiled its own search feature last year after years of licensing Google's.

Researchers from a little-known security software company named Sunbelt Software have seemingly uncovered a criminal identity theft ring of massive proportions. According to one of their employees, Alex Eckelberry, during the course of one of their recent investigations into a particular Spyware application—rumored to be called CoolWebSearch—they've discovered that the personal information of those "infected" was being captured and uploaded to a server.

One can only speculate about why someone would do such a thing; the amount of data that could be gathered would almost certainly be daunting for even a few people to sift through and exploit. On the other hand, the researchers at Sunbelt have personally uncovered the personal information of two individuals who, combined, could be taken for well over US$350,000.

The researchers initially had tried in vain to get ahold of someone who could take action on this issue but didn't get a response right away:

We have notified the FBI, but of course no response (too busy doing other more important things). We have notified a few of the parties involved...If anyone has any other ideas, send 'em to us. Right now, we're sitting upon literally thousands of pages of stolen identities that are being used right now.