ISPs unhappy with data proposals

Internet service providers (ISP) have strongly objected to a government plan to force them to collect and organise communications data, reports Computing.co.uk.

In a response to a government consultation on the issue seen by the Financial Times, the ISP Association expressed "serious concerns about the operational burden the proposals would place on companies".

A paper written by academics earlier this year says that forcing ISPs to collect and organise the information at a time when they are already under pressure to continue roll-out of super-fast broadband to parts of the population is unrealistic.

A group of hi-tech hackers were sentenced to over 13 years in prison last week for using a Trojan computer virus to steal hundreds of thousands of pounds from UK bank accounts, writes Computing.co.uk.

The gang is believed to have been based in Eastern Europe and used servers in countries across the continent to spread the virus. The virus would wait until the customer logged onto their online bank account and then create a new payee on the account without their knowledge.

Funds were then transferred to a separate account from which it was withdrawn by a number of money "mules".

Herders behind the Mega-D botnet may have corralled nearly a quarter million infected machines into their spam-churning enterprise before it was recently crippled by white hat hackers, reports The Register.

The botnet, which was once responsible for an estimated third of the world's spam output, was knocked out of commission last week by employees of security firm FireEye. After unplugging the Mega-D master control channels, the researchers set up a benign "sinkhole" channel for the bots to report to and waited to see what would happen.

Over five days, 487 340 unique IP addresses reported to the ad hoc server. Using findings derived from last year's take-down of the separate Srizbi botnet, FireEye estimates the figure translates to 248 590 unique machines.

China has become one of a handful of nations to own one of the top five supercomputers in the world, says the BBC.

Its Tianhe-1 computer, housed at the National Super Computer Centre in Tianjin, was ranked fifth on the biannual Top 500 supercomputer list.

The machine packs more than 70 000 chips and can compute 563 trillion calculations per second (teraflops).

Users of scripts other than that in which English is written will soon have Web addresses in their own language, writes the BBC.

Internet regulator Icann has invited countries to ask for "internationalised domain names" in non-Latin characters. Egypt and Saudi Arabia have announced their intentions to apply for the first Arabic domains.

Countries can also apply for domains in other scripts, such as Chinese. The first official international Web addresses are expected in 2010.