Dawn Patrol--A Black Hole Inside the Net; China Swarms the Web

Major Flaw in Domain Security Requires Patch

Web security expert Dan Kaminsky made headlines this past week revealing a major flaw in domain name integrity.  From Kaminsky: Recently, a significant threat to DNS, the system that translates names you can remember (such as www.edgelings.com) to numbers the Internet can route (66.240.226.139) was discovered, that would allow malicious people to impersonate almost any website on the Internet. Software companies across the industry have quietly collaborated to simultaneously release fixes for all affected name servers. To find out if the DNS server you use is vulnerable, click here.   Now if they could only do something about viagara spam.
 

China Now Dominates the Web

China now has the world’s largest number of Internet users, passing the United States by the end of June, a government-backed center said in a report yesterday.

Another 43 million netizens joined in the first half of this year, lifting the number of Chinese Internet users to 253 million, China Internet Network Information Center said in its 22nd Internet Development Report today.

 Highlights of the report:

• The Internet population in the United States stood at 220 million at the end of last year, according to the Beijing-based center.
• But the percentage of Chinese people online stands at 19.1 percent, below the world’s average 21.1 percent, the report said
• The Internet penetration rate is 60 to 70 percent in Japan, South Korea and the US, Morgan Stanley said but it expects China’s Internet population to hit 300 million by the end of this year.
• The number of registered domain names that ended with .cn surged to nearly 12.19 million by July 22 — again the world’s biggest, followed by Germany, the report said.
• The number of Websites in China rose 46.3 percent to 1.919 million by July 22.
• Online music is the most popular field for Internet users in China with 214 million, or 84.5 percent of the netizens, listening to music online while news takes second place with 206 million, followed by instant message’s 195 million, the report said.
• Online video ranked fourth in terms of user popularity followed by search engines, e-mail, online games, blogs, BBS and online shopping, the report said.
• Twenty-five percent of Chinese Internet users are online shoppers, well below the 66 percent in the US and 57.3 percent in South Korea, the report said.
• Shanghai tops other Chinese cities in terms of online shoppers with 45.2 percent of the city’s online users buying on the Internet. Beijing is second with 38.9 percent.
• By the end of June, 28.9 percent of Chinese online users had surfed the Internet using cell phones, the report said.