Internet News & Analysis

The first applications were accepted on Monday for internationalised domain names (IDNs), in one of the most significant steps to making the Internet more accessible around the globe.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has opened the application process, ending the exclusive use of Latin characters for website addresses.

On the first day, “we have already received six applications from around the world for three different scripts,” ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom told an Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Egypt’s Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.

He said that while ICANN could not reveal the names of those applying, Egypt – with .misr, meaning Egypt in Arabic – and Russia had already made public their applications for country code top level domains in their scripts.

With the introduction of “internationalised” domain names (IDNs), scripts such as Chinese, Korean or Arabic will eventually be usable in the last part of an address name – the part after the dot, as in .com and .org.

“It’s an historic moment,” Beckstrom said.

Read more: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/internet-inches-closer-to-internationalisation-1821930.html

After months of often bitter debate, European Union lawmakers reached agreement on how to preserve citizen’s rights to Internet access in a meeting that ended in the early hours of Thursday morning.

The issue, which pits citizens’ civil liberties against the rights of content owners such as record and movie companies to protect creative works on the Internet, has blocked the passage of a wide range of laws collectively dubbed the telecoms package.

Although the compromise reached by representatives of the European Parliament, the 27 national governments and the European Commission has still to be confirmed, it is seen as a watershed moment for the proposed laws, which aim to enhance competition among telecoms providers and to adapt users’ rights to better suit the Internet age.

The text of the telecoms package now contains a new Internet freedom provision that states that access to the Internet is a human right of every E.U. citizen, and that if authorities take away that right people must have the opportunity to defend themselves; citizens also have an automatic right to mount a legal challenge.

Read More: http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/181472/eu_breaks_deadlock_in_debate_over_right_to_internet_access.html

Hackers are exploiting an unpatched vulnerability in Microsoft Video Active X Control to target Internet Explorer users.

The affected component is part of Microsoft DirectShow, and is installed by default with Windows XP. The company said it was already aware of attacks that were exploiting the vulnerability.

Security vendor Symantec said that thousands of websites had been compromised and were now hosting the exploit.

Attackers could exploit the flaw by leading a user to visit a malicious website. Hackers could then silently install code on the victim’s computer.

If the hacker is successful, they could install a backdoor to the system, stealing credentials and confidential information.

Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP users with Internet Explorer 6 and 7 were at risk. Symantec said the exploit in the wild did not yet work on Internet Explorer 8, but claimed that it was possible to “trigger” the vulnerability through it.

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China’s ambitions to strengthen control of the Internet with filtering software became a show of the limits of its power on Wednesday, as activists and industry groups welcomed AN abrupt delay of the contentious plan.

The surprise climbdown was reported late on Tuesday by Xinhua news agency, which said the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology would “delay the mandatory installation of the controversial ‘Green Dam-Youth Escort’ filtering software on new computers”.

Officials said the software was intended to stamp out Internet pornography, and computer companies had originally been told that from Wednesday they had to bundle “Green Dam” with any personal computers heading to stores for sale in the country.

But the order was assailed by opponents of censorship, industry groups and Washington officials as rash, politically intrusive, technically ineffective and commercially unfair.  PC companies have mostly avoided making firm public statements on the issue.

Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSPEK13838120090701