CommunityDNS News Bits, March 18, 2009.
IBM in Talks to Buy Sun in Bid to Add to Web Heft
IBM is in talks to purchase Sun Microsystems for possibly $6.5 billion. Such an acquisition would increase IBM’s “weight” in the Internet as well as in the markets of software, finance and telecommunications.
Battered by, and never fully recovered from the affects of the dot.com bust, Sun has reaching out to large tech companies in hope of being acquired.
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Criminals Sneak Card-sniffing Software on Diebold ATMs
Cyber criminals, always hungry for payment card information, are looking for more sophisticated ways of obtaining this information, even if it means going low-tech.
While landing malware on ATMs is through manual access only, Diebold reported in January that ATMs were affected by malware in a “number” of machines in Russia. Installed in November of 2008, the malware was designed to scan transactions that were in Ukrainian, Russian and US currencies.
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Consumers want unrestricted Internet access
Internet service providers are expected to provide open and unrestricted access to the Internet, according to a survey conducted in the UK, France and Germany.
The survey was commissioned by Google, Yahoo and Skype as the European Parliament and EU states hold talks to reform telecom rules to boost competition.
Some respondents in the UK and Germany indicated willingness to pay more to an ISP if their current Internet provider was found to block or limit access to the sites on the web.
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Irish ISPs rally against record label anti-piracy threat
The Internet Service Providers in Ireland (ISPAI), a group of Ireland’s largest ISPs, reject the Irish Recorded Music Association’s demand for universally blocking websites the music industry claims as providing illegal access to copyrighted music.
The group of ISPs responds with, “ISPAI is disappointed that the great potential of the internet, to provide opportunities to connect with users in new ways and develop new business models, is being missed by the music recording industry….”
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Group asks U.S. FTC to probe Google privacy safety
On March 7 Google reported a bug in their online document platform caused a small percentage of their user’s documents to be shared with other users.
The group calling for the investigation, Electronic Privacy Information Center, says Google’s cloud computing services are becoming increasingly vulnerable to data breaches for user-generated documents that area stored on Google’s servers.
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IT spending forecasts spiral further downward
Goldman Sachs and HIS Global Insight released two separate reports indicating further decline in U.S. IT spending. Findings, however, suggest the rate of decline is at the slowest pace since last summer.
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