IT Bytes - briefing 9
Non-English Domain Names
Officially, the Internet’s Domain Name System can support a mere 37 characters. These characters are made up of the Latin alphabet, 10 numerals and the hyphen.
IT engineers have been trying to trick the system into understanding other languages – such as Arabic, Chinese and Japanese, in an effort to make the internet more user-friendly.
The UN have criticised the stunted progress made toward achieving “multilingualisation”. However, the Chairman of the Internet’s Key Oversight Agency has voiced some major concerns about “phishing” email scams which are likely to delay the process even further. According to the UN, the lack of international co-ordination as well as the technical hurdles have been some of the problems.
The system that engineers have been using is called “Unicode”. However, security experts fear that spammers will take advantage of the fact that characters that look alike have two separate codes in Unicode and thus appear to the computer as different. For example, substituting one character for another can allow a spammer to register a domain name that looks to the user to be, for example, www.paypal.com – but is in fact a spoofed PayPal site. Once the user is on the bogus site they are tricked into giving over sensitive information, passwords and so on. Spammers have used this trick before by substituting the numeral “1” instead of the letter “I” and tricking users into divulging sensitive information.
ICANN have also picked up on the security concerns of multilingualisation. ICANN are yet to approve domain names which are entirely made up in another language, as currently, all addresses over which it has jurisdiction must end with the English “.com”. However, last year, operators of the German “.de” domain offered 92 accented and other special characters to domain name seekers.
Privacy aboard
Business travellers account for a huge percentage of profits for airlines, so it is no surprise that planes are now equipped with wireless routers. These wireless routers are then linked to an Internet Service Provider (ISP) or Virtual Private Network (VPN) via a satellite connection, allowing the passenger to access his emails, use the internet and so on.
However, the US federal government is proposing to “tap and track” all in-flight communications. This new security measure is in an effort to prevent a re-occurrence of the 9/11 atrocities (and we must now include 7/7 in the same category).
The first airline to offer Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) technology was Lufthansa. Engineers in Hamburg had to seek prior approval from the European Joint Aviation Authority (JAA) for the project, while American airlines had to also seek regulatory approval in the US.
Federal Law Enforcement would like to be able to block, intercept and read any email to and from any plane. As it stands, authorities can only read in-flight emails and instant messages after receiving a court order. The ISP on board would have to provide the authorities access to a passenger’s email within 10 minutes of receiving a court order.
However, steps are now to be taken to allow authorities to identify passengers – not only by their ISP address, but also by their seat number. The authorities are concerned (rightly or wrongly) that terrorists would be able to use the internet to plot an aircraft take-over.
Another concern – which seems to have a Hollywood spin - is that terrorists would have the ability to detonate explosives placed upon an aircraft using the in-flight Internet systems. It may sound fanciful, but….
Makers of in-flight technologies, interestingly, have been advertising the fact that their products can be used to “monitor passenger behaviour”. There have even been proposals put forward to equip each individual monitor (increasingly located on the back of each seat) with web-cams. Suddenly the prospect of flying doesn’t seem so appealing…although the possibilities for the next celebrity indiscretion seem endless….
eBay
There was a time when the internet auction site eBay – could do no wrong. A world-wide auction site, where anything from socks to cars were up for grabs at low, low prices. In fact, eBay has earned itself an almost iconic status, proving itself to be a real success story against the general background of the bursting of the dot.com bubble.
However, industry experts are now warning eBay that there may be trouble ahead… Buyer dissatisfaction is on the rise over increased fees and changing rules. Bad publicity during the Live 8 Concerts - with sellers putting their free tickets up for sale at enormous prices - has added to eBay’s troubles, resulting in many on-line buyers opting to use competing auction sites.
However, eBay has rebutted any criticism with reports that its net revenue gain increased to 36% this year.
Another criticism levied at eBay – this time from potential on-line bidders – relates to what often seems to be unfair bidding practices. Often – especially it would seem with high value items such as cars – the bidding is closed and the winning bidder is informed that the car is going to a private buyer. There have been a few cases in the US in which disappointed would-be buyers have tried to take on eBay, arguing that when the goods are offered to a private buyer, this is breaching the contract between bidder and seller that is formed at the outset.
However, experts now argue that eBay are facing their biggest threat ever in the form of Cmarket. Cmarket caters to fund-raising audiences – an “eBay” for charities and fundraisers. Online auction markets, like Cmarket, are moving into niches and specialised markets, and so industry experts are warning that eBay must change its focus to meet ever-changing times.
Australian record industry
A precedent has been set in Australia, warning internet site operators and ISPs that providing links to pirated material will not be tolerated.
The ruling means that not only the downloading of pirated material – but also the actual linking to sites with offending material – will be an infringement of Australian copyright.
The site in question, while it did not host pirated music, had offered users direct hyperlinks to websites with the offending material. The ISP was also found guilty as it had failed to take action against this infringement.
The case was brought by several of the music industry’s major players – including EMI, Sony and Universal. The record industry will be welcoming this ruling as a step toward combating the increasing problem of music piracy.
If you are concerned about your on-line business or any other issue raised in this edition or a previous edition of IT Bytes, please get in touch. Whether you have a comment or question, we would be pleased to hear from you – please contact Bill Fowler.
This briefing is for information purposes only. It is not intended to give detailed advice on particular situations and should not be acted upon.