FCC to toughen Internet rules

The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has taken the first formal steps towards tougher rules for broadband, states BBC News.

It asked for public comment on three different plans, igniting an expensive lobbying campaign by all sides. The looming battle follows a court ruling questioning the FCC's right to regulate Internet service providers after one throttled traffic to users.

That court ruling dealt a major blow to a central plank of the FCC's broadband plan called Net neutrality which demands that all data traffic be treated equally.

Threats to the Internet have increased significantly in recent months as cyber criminals step up the frequency and sophistication of their attacks, leading to a need for drastic action on the structure of the Internet, according to experts speaking at a recent Neustar security forum in London, reports Computing.co.uk.

Security professionals are constantly playing catch-up to cyber criminals, and the speakers put forward arguments about how the Internet DNS should be secured through the use of DNS Security Extensions.

However, they argued that in the longer term, the whole design of the Internet needs to be rebuilt from scratch in order to mitigate the increasing risks.

Google has started reaching out to publishers in Italy, asking them to test a content payment solution called Newspass, says The Business Insider.

The platform will be launched by the end of the year and users will be able to access content behind paywalls with a single click, directly from the search engine results page.

Newspass will be integrated with Google Checkout and will use a single login that would compete with Facebook's virtual currency, Facebook Credits.

MobileMe didn't go free, despite the rumours, but it has got a new look and some improved features.

Apple has renovated its cloud-based service with better e-mail and faster performance, as well as a new iPhone application to help find a lost iPad.

The layout improvements are mainly tweaks, but there is some meat in the addition of SSL when using a Web browser, mail consolidation (so MobileMe will collect e-mail from other addresses), as well as better junk handling and task switching.