Phone Moratorium

China has ordered a new phone moratorium, "suggesting" to companys that they should be focusing their efforts on the Olympics. At the current rate, phone companies are adding 9 million new accounts per month.

ICANN Approves New Domain Names System

ICANN approved the first sweeping changes in the 25 year old URL addressing system. But the new domains won't come cheap, with about $100,000 in costs per domain. The new process is simple. An applicant proposes the new domain, and if nobody raises an objection on grounds as racisms, trademark conflicts and similarity to another suffix, the name should be approved quickly. Also, countries will be able to have non-English characters in domain names as well.

Nigerian Scam Busted!

Edna Fiedler pleaded guilty to attempting to defraud US citizens with the Nigerian scheck scam. She made $609,000 from people who fell for it. Is there anybody who still believes these scams out there?

South Carlonia now has their own copyright

In a South Carolina Supreme Court opinion, the court ruled that a municipality has a copyright in their own forms and such copyright does not impact the state's freedom of information act. Maybe somebody forgot 28 USC 1338 which states: "The district courts shall have original jurisdiction of any civil action arising under any Act of Congress relating to patents, plant variety protection, copyrights and trademarks. Such jurisdiction shall be exclusive of the courts of the states in patent, plant variety protection and copyright cases."

Dangerous Web Domains

McAfee, Inc., found that certain domains were a little more dangerous than others. For example, 19.2% of the .hk domains were dangerous, 11.8% of .cn domains and 11.75% of .info. Compare this with the most popular domain family, .com, with a little more than 5% of the sites being considered dangerous. The safest were the .gov, .jp and .au domains, each with less than .3% of sites being dangerous.

The report can be found here.