300 UK domains pilfered, massive security lapse blamed

Exclusive What appears to be a glaringly obvious security hole has been blamed for the snatching of 300 domains hosted by one web-hosting firm last year, The Reg has discovered. A source told El Reg that anyone with a hosting package from 123-Reg, and hence an account control panel, simply had to change the final section of the URL manually (to, for example, /someoneelseswebsite.co.uk) to be able to gain access to another site’s emails, name servers and billing.  With access to the admin panel, would-be domain thieves just had to…

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25 years on, Tim Berners-Lee wins ‘UK’s Nobel prize’ for siring the internet

Just the other day we were contemplating the tragic irony of the internet’s inventor Tim Berners-Lee having just 125,000 Twitter followers, while Jersey Shore’s trainwreck-in-chief ‘Snooki’ had over 6 million. Wasn’t it about time Sir Tim, who NBC’s presenters admitted they “hadn’t heard of” during the Olympic opening ceremony, got a little more recognition for his planet-altering creation of the world wide web? Well it turns out the judges for the inaugural Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, our new answer to the Nobel prize, felt the same way and have…

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Time to Take Stock: Twelve Internet and Jurisdiction Trends in Retrospect

With the growing tension between the cross-border Internet and the patchwork of national jurisdictions, it becomes crucial to keep track of key global trends that drive the debate on appropriate frameworks. One year ago, the Internet & Jurisdiction Project initiated a global multi-stakeholder dialogue process on these issues. To provide a factual basis for such discussions, it established an Observatory, supported by a network of selected international experts, to detect and categorize relevant cases via an innovative crowd-based filtering process in order to identify high-level patterns. The following twelve trends…

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