First non-Latin Web addresses go live

Arab nations are leading a "historic" charge to make the World Wide Web live up to its name, reveals the BBC.

Internet regulator Icann has switched on a system that allows full Web addresses that contain no Latin characters.

Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE are the first countries to have so-called "country codes" written in Arabic scripts.

According to research from the non-profit Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA), UK businesses have less confidence in the IT industry than many of their global counterparts, reports Computing.co.uk.

CompTIA's global business confidence survey shows companies in India and China have greater confidence in their domestic IT industries than companies in the UK or US.

IT organisations are looking to invest after a period of cutting costs, the research shows, although UK IT companies plan to invest less than those in other countries.

A small Internet service provider (ISP) has been awarded nearly $2.6 million in a lawsuit it filed against a company that sent just under 25 000 spam messages over an 18-month period, writes The Register.

Although it's questionable whether Asis Internet Services will ever see a penny of that windfall, the judgment is testament to the power of the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act, which was passed by Congress in 2003.

It allows judgments of as much as $100 for every unsolicited e-mail, and damages can be tripled for a variety of reasons.

A worm, spreading via Yahoo Instant Messenger, tricks people into downloading what they think is a photo from a friend but is instead malware that installs a backdoor on Windows systems and spreads to a victim's IM contacts, says News.com.

The worm arrives via a message from a contact with the word "photo" or "photos" and a smiley face icon, along with a link to a Web site resembling a Facebook page, MySpace page, or some other page where photos might reside.

If the user clicks on the link on a Macintosh system, an executable file will be downloaded, but no further action will occur. On a Windows system, the executable will download and if the user runs the file, the computer will become infected and the malicious message will be distributed to all of the IM contacts.