One of the group’s members, e-commerce site Etsy Inc (ETSY.O), said that it would separately also join the legal effort. Several states including New York, and public interest advocacy groups have said they intend to sue to stop the mid-December ruling by the Federal Communications Commission.

The approval of FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s proposal in a 3-2 vote marked a victory for internet service providers such as AT&T Inc (T.N), Comcast Corp (CMCSA.O) and Verizon Communications Inc (VZ.N), handing them power over what content consumers can access.

Democrats, Hollywood and companies such as Google and Facebook had urged Pai, a Republican appointed by U.S. President Donald Trump, to keep the Obama-era rules barring service providers from blocking, slowing access to or charging more for certain content.

“The final version of Chairman Pai’s rule, as expected, dismantles popular net neutrality protections for consumers. This rule defies the will of a bipartisan majority of Americans and fails to preserve a free and open internet,” the Internet Association said in a statement.

Etsy called the decision to overturn net neutrality rules “deeply disappointing.”

“Etsy is continuing to fight for a free and open Internet; that’s why we intend to challenge Chairman Pai’s order in the courts,” Althea Erickson, Etsy’s head of advocacy and impact, said in a statement.

The new rules give internet service providers sweeping powers to change how consumers access the internet but must have new transparency requirements that will require them to disclose any changes to consumers.

Internet Association members also include Airbnb, Amazon.com (AMZN.O) and several dozen online and social media companies.

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Source: Reuters

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While working at the Pentagon in the 1960s, he instigated the creation of Arpanet – a computer network that initially linked together four US research centres, and later evolved into the internet.

At Xerox, he later oversaw the first computer with desktop-inspired icons and a word processor that formed the basis of Microsoft Word.

Mr Taylor died at home aged 85.

His family told the Los Angeles Times that he had suffered from Parkinson’s disease among other ailments.

Mr Taylor studied psychology at university, but worked as an engineer at several aircraft companies and Nasa before joining the US Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Project Agency (Arpa) in 1965.

At the time, Arpa funded most of the country’s computer systems research.

In his role as the director of the organisation’s Information Processing Techniques Office, Mr Taylor wanted to address the fact different institutions were duplicating research on the limited number of computer mainframes available.

In particular, he wanted to make “timesharing” more efficient – the simultaneous use of each computer by multiple scientists using different terminals, who could share files and send messages to each other.

Mr Taylor was frustrated that the Pentagon could only communicate with three research institutions, whose timeshared computers it helped fund, by using three incompatible systems.
So, he proposed a scheme to connect all of Arpa’s sponsored bases together via a single network.

“I just decided that we were going to build a network that would connect these interactive communities into a larger community in such a way that a user of one community could connect to a distant community as though that user were on his local system,” he later recalled in an interview with the Charles Babbage Institute.

“Most of the people I talked to were not initially enamoured with the idea. I think some of the people saw it initially as an opportunity for someone else to come in and use their [computing cycles].”

Nevertheless, he was given $1m (£796,000) to pursue the project.

And in 1968, a year before Arpanet was established, he co-authored a prescient paper with a colleague.

“In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face,” it predicted.

“The programmed digital computer… can change the nature and value of communication even more profoundly than did the printing press and the picture tube, for, as we shall show, a well-programmed computer can provide direct access both to informational resources and to the processes for making use of the resources.”

Sugar supplies
Mr Taylor’s time at Arpa was also spent trying to see whether his country could make use of computer technology to solve logistics problems during the Vietnam war.

The White House had complained that it was getting conflicting reports about the number of enemies killed, bullets available and other details.

“The Army had one reporting system; the Navy had another; the Marine Corp had another,” Mr Taylor later recalled.

“It was clear that not all of these reports could be true.

“I think one specific example was that if the amount of sugar reported captured were true we would have cornered two-thirds of the world’s sugar supply, or something like that. It was ridiculous.”

His efforts led to a uniform method of data collection and the use of a computer centre at an air force base to collate it.

“After that the White House got a single report rather than several,” Mr Taylor said.

“That pleased them; whether the data was any more correct or not, I don’t know, but at least it was more consistent.”

Apple and Microsoft
Once Arpanet was up and running in 1969, Mr Taylor left the Pentagon and the following year he founded the Computer Science Laboratory of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (Xerox Parc).

There his team built Alto – a personal computer that claims several firsts. It was networked, controlled by a ball-driven mouse and used a graphical user interface (Gui).

Steve Jobs and others from Apple were given an early look, and it went on to inspire them to create the Apple Lisa and later the Apple Mac.

Its software included Bravo – a what-you-see-is-what-you-get word processor. Its primary developer, Charles Simonyi, later joined Microsoft where he created Word.

Despite their achievements, Mr Taylor became frustrated with Xerox’s failure to capitalise on his team’s work and quit in 1983.

“Xerox continued to ignore our work,” he told an interviewer in 2000.

“I got fed up and left, and about 15 people came and joined me at DEC [Digital Equipment Corporation].”

There he helped create AltaVista, an early internet search engine, and a computer language that later evolved into Java.

Mr Taylor continued to dream of new technologies – predicting that the public would one day wear a device that would record everything they saw or heard.

But he also reflected that his greatest legacy – the internet – had taken longer to catch on than anticipated.

“My timing was awful,” he conceded, adding “I didn’t anticipate [its use for] pornography and crime.”

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Source: BBC

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Recurrent attacks up to 3 November flooded the cable link with data, making net access intermittent.

Researchers said the attacks showed hackers trying different ways to use massive networks of hijacked machines to overwhelm high-value targets.

Experts said Liberia was attacked by the same group that caused web-wide disruption on 21 October.

Those attacks were among the biggest ever seen and made it hard to reach big web firms such as Twitter, Spotify and Reddit.

Short bursts
The attacks were the first to send overwhelming amounts of data from weakly protected devices, such as webcams and digital video recorders, that had been enrolled into what is known as a botnet.

A botnet variant called Mirai was identified by security firms as being the tool used to find and compromise the insecure devices.

The source code for Mirai has been widely shared and many malicious hacker groups have used it to seek out vulnerable devices they can take over and use to mount what are known as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.

“There’re multiple different botnets, each with a different owner,” security researcher Kevin Beaumont told the BBC. “Many are very low-skilled. Some are much better.”

For more than two weeks, my internet has not been working properly. At first I thought it was a problem with my internet provider, which often suffers from slow speeds. But this feels more serious.

Even when you do get online, the connection repeatedly cuts out. I’ve spent the past week trying to upload some photos and audio to send to London, without success.

A woman who runs a computer club for young people in the capital, Monrovia, tells me that they have been having trouble getting on to Facebook and that their connection has slowed in recent weeks.

The hotel I am staying at in the north-eastern town of Ganta is right next to the network tower of a company that provides my internet service, but the connection is still coming in and out.

The hackers behind the “huge” network that attacked Liberia, dubbed botnet#14, were “much more skilled”, Mr Beaumont said.

“The attacks are extremely worrying because they suggest a Mirai operator who has enough capacity to seriously impact systems in a nation state,” he wrote in a blogpost.

Network firm Level 3 confirmed to tech news site ZDNet that it had seen attacks on telecoms firms in Liberia making access to the web spotty. Other reports suggested mobile net access was affected too.

The attacks varied in length with some lasting only 30 seconds and the longest being sustained for a few minutes. At times the amount of data being funnelled towards Liberia exceeded 600 gigabits per second.

Net access in Liberia comes via an undersea cable whose capacity is shared with many other nations in West Africa.

“They’re trying a number of different techniques for short bursts, against the companies who own the submarine cable to Liberia,” said Mr Beaumont, adding that commands to botnet#14 seemed to originate in the Ukraine.

Mr Beaumont said the controllers of botnet#14 were refining their control of the attack system but it was not yet clear who it would be turned against next.

A Twitter account, called #Miraiattacks has been set up by a security company to monitor the many different attack targets hit by Mirai botnets. Earlier targets included computer security firms, schools, food-ordering services and gaming sites.

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Source: BBC

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Saying free speech in the virtual realm was at stake, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz and others had tried to block the transfer. But a federal judge denied on Friday their request for an injunction and the scheduled handoff took place at midnight.

The transfer involved the internet’s domain name system, or DNS, which translates the Web addresses you type into your browser, like “cnet.com,” into the numerical language that net-connected computers use to communicate.

Under a plan that’s been in the works for years, the US Department of Commerce shuttled control of the DNS to a nonprofit called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), whose multiple stakeholders include technical experts, as well as representatives of governments and businesses.

Cruz and other critics had argued the transfer could lead to authoritarian countries taking control of the internet and eventually censoring content throughout the world.

“Imagine an internet run like many Middle Eastern countries that punish what they deem to be blasphemy,” Cruz said at a congressional hearing on September 14. “Or imagine an internet run like China or Russia that punish and incarcerate those who engage in political dissent.”

“When ICANN escapes from [US] government authority,” Cruz said, “ICANN escapes from having to worry about the First Amendment, from having to worry about protecting your rights or my rights.”

But ICANN said such fears were uninformed.

“ICANN is a technical organization and does not have the remit or ability to regulate content on the internet,” the group said prior to the transfer. “That is true under the current contract with the US government and will remain true without the contract with the US government.”

Supporters of the handoff also argued that preventing the transfer could actually lessen US impact on the net.

Russia and China, among others, had backed the idea of empowering an obscure United Nations body called the ITU (International Telecommunications Union) with internet governance duties. That would have given governments control, but it also would have diminished the relative importance of tech powers like the States.

On Wednesday, the attorneys general of Arizona, Nevada, Oklahoma, and Texas filed a lawsuit (PDF) to block the turnover. But a federal judge in the Southern District of Texas denied that request for a temporary restraining order.

ICANN said Saturday that the handoff would ensure an open internet.

“This transition was envisioned 18 years ago, yet it was the tireless work of the global internet community, which drafted the final proposal, that made this a reality,” ICANN Board Chair Stephen D. Crocker said in a statement. “This community validated the multistakeholder model of internet governance. It has shown that a governance model defined by the inclusion of all voices, including business, academics, technical experts, civil society, governments and many others is the best way to assure that the internet of tomorrow remains as free, open and accessible as the internet of today.”

The Internet Governance Coalition, a group of companies that includes Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Verizon, also expressed approval of the move but offered a more measured assessment.
“A plan has been implemented that includes strong accountability measures and upholds the bottom-up approach that embodies the very nature of the open internet we experience today,” the group said in a statement prepared Friday. “Although this is an important step in the transition process, there is still much work that needs to be done to ensure the accountability and transparency of ICANN. We look forward to working with the multistakeholder community on these ongoing efforts.”

A representative for Nevada Attorney General Adam Paul Laxalt said Laxalt and the other AGs were reviewing their legal options. The other attorneys general, as well as Cruz, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Source: CNET

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