MS shuts down global botnet

Microsoft has won court approval to shut down a global network of computers, which it says is responsible for more than 1.5 billion spam messages every day, reports the BBC.

A US judge granted the firm's request to shut down 277 Internet domains, which it said were used to "command and control" the so-called Waledac botnet.

A botnet is a network of infected computers under the control of hackers. The firm said closing the domains would mean that up to 90 000 PCs would stop receiving orders to send out spam.

Virgin Media is to introduce a commercial 100Mbps broadband service later this year, and has plans to trial a 200Mbps service, reveals Computing.co.uk.

The company made the announcement as part of its 2009 fourth-quarter results, which showed a 3.3% rise in revenue to £980 million.

Virgin Media said it had increased the number of homes on its 20Mbps or higher services by 45%, and had grown its cable broadband customer base by 6 500 since the fourth quarter of 2008.

Supposed footage of Wednesday's fatal Sea World killer whale attack in Florida actually points at sites distributing scareware, says The Register.

Dawn Brancheau, 40, a trainer at Sea World in Orlando, lost her life after a killer whale attack.

Black hat search engine trickery is once again being used to drive traffic to these sites, by planting links to malware portals in Google results for search terms related to the tragedy, such as "killer whale video pictures".

Italy could shoot itself in the foot and seriously harm freedom of speech and the Internet, according to Google, which recently saw three top execs convicted in absentee for content hosted briefly on YouTube which had nothing to do with them, writes TG Daily.

David Drummond, Arvind Desikan, Peter Fleischer and George Reyes (who left Google in 2008) were all indicted, and all but Desikan were found guilty of violating Italy's privacy laws yesterday, over a YouTube video of kids bullying another autistic child.

The execs were told they were criminally responsible for content posted to YouTube, even though Google removed the video just two hours after receiving an Italian police complaint, after it took two months for the police to notice the video.