A massive project to redesign and rebuild the Internet from scratch is inching along with $12 million in government funding and donations of network capacity by two major research organizations.

Many researchers want to rethink the Internet’s underlying architecture, saying a “clean-slate” approach is the only way to truly address security and other challenges that have cropped up since the Internet’s birth in 1969.

On behalf of the government, BBN Technologies Inc. is overseeing the planning and design of the Global Environment for Network Innovations, or GENI, a network on which researchers will be able to test new ideas without damaging the current Internet.

The $12 million in initial grants from the National Science Foundation will go to developing prototypes for the GENI network.
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Unlike its baseball counterparts, the NFL has not embraced the Internet – until now.

Starting this fall, games appearing on NBC’s Sunday Night Football will also stream live on NFL.com and NBCSports.com. A complete NFL game has never been made available on the Internet in the U.S.

Not only will “Sunday Night Football Extra” offer the network’s audio and video stream, but additional camera angles, in-game on-demand highlights and picture-in-picture capability will also be included in the web package. And best of all, this won’t cost fans anything.

According to Broadcasting & Cable, the deal with NBC was called a “one-year experiment.” The network shells out $600 million per year to the NFL for television rights and there is some fear among NBC execs the web stream will cut into that viewership.

The service will debut with NBC’s season-opening broadcast of the Washington Redskins-New York Giants game on September 4th.

Foreign-owned hotels in China face the prospect of “severe retaliation” if they refuse to install government software that can spy on Internet use by hotel guests coming to watch the summer Olympic games, a U.S. lawmaker said Tuesday.

Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., produced a translated version of a document from China’s Public Security Bureau that requires hotels to use the monitoring equipment.

“These hotels are justifiably outraged by this order, which puts them in the awkward position of having to craft pop-up messages explaining to their customers that their Web history, communications, searches and key strokes are being spied on by the Chinese government,” Brownback said at a news conference.
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The U.S. Federal Communications Commission needs to take steps to keep the Internet free of interference from broadband providers, such as the slowing of peer-to-peer traffic and the tracking of subscribers’ Web habits, several witnesses told the FCC at a hearing yesterday.

The FCC should take fast action against broadband providers that block access to legal online applications, especially those who don’t notify their subscribers, said Marge Krueger, administrator of the Communications Workers of America for the district covering Pennsylvania and Delaware.

Krueger didn’t name providers that have slowed access to applications, but Comcast Corp. has been in the news in recent months for slowing access to the BitTorrent peer-to-peer application. A Comcast representative didn’t testify at the hearing at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, but the company has repeatedly said it slows BitTorrent traffic at limited times of peak traffic.

Another witness complained that some broadband providers are using deep-packet inspection techniques to track subscribers’ Internet use, in an effort to deliver targeted advertising. NebuAd Inc. in Redwood City, Calif., has worked with several broadband providers to provide this targeted ad service, but several privacy groups and U.S. lawmakers have objected to the tracking.
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China’s booming Internet population has surpassed the United States to become the world’s biggest, with 253 million people online despite government controls on Web use, according to government data reported Friday.

The latest figure on Web use at the end of June is a 56 percent increase from a year ago, the China Internet Network Information Center said. It said the share of the Chinese public using the Internet is still just 19.1 percent, leaving more room for rapid growth.

The United States had an estimated 223.1 million Internet users in June, according to Nielsen Online, a research firm. The Pew Internet and American Life Project puts U.S. online penetration at 71 percent.

“This is the first time the number has drastically surpassed the United States, becoming the world’s No. 1,” a CNNIC statement said.
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The search engine wars are heating up again with the public launch tonight of Cuil (pronounced “cool”).

The Menlo Park start-up behind the website, at www.cuil.com, isn’t trying to be a Google killer — it’s trying to reinvent search, said Anna Patterson, president and co-founder of Cuil.

She’s an ex-Googler, the architect of the Web giant’s TeraGoogle search index that launched in 2006. She joined Google in 2004 after her work on Recall, then the largest search engine with 12 billion pages, which she began programming during a difficult pregnancy. That feat spurred a bidding war among search engines for her services. (Note to moms: Microsoft does not allow breast-feeding in its lobby.)

As exciting as her three years at Google were, Patterson said she soon discovered she was an entrepreneur at heart.
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Toymaker Hasbro Inc. filed suit in federal court yesterday against the two brothers who created Scrabulous — a wildly popular online version of Scrabble — saying the electronic game infringes on the Pawtucket company’s intellectual-property rights.

Hasbro also notified the social-networking site Facebook of the lawsuit. The toymaker requested that Facebook block the Scrabulous game application from the network’s users in the United States and Canada as soon as possible.

“Hasbro has an obligation to act appropriately against infringement of our intellectual properties,” said Barry Nagler, the company’s general counsel. “We view the Scrabulous application as clear and blatant infringement of our Scrabble intellectual property, and we are pursuing this legal action in accordance with the interests of our shareholders and the integrity of the Scrabble brand.”

Hasbro owns the rights to distribute Scrabble in the United States and Canada, while Mattel Inc. owns the rights to distribute it elsewhere.
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Internet security researchers on Thursday warned that hackers have caught on to a “critical” flaw that lets them control traffic on the Internet.

An elite squad of computer industry engineers that labored in secret to solve the problem released a software “patch” two weeks ago and sought to keep details of the vulnerability hidden at least a month to give people time to protect computers from attacks.

“We are in a lot of trouble,” said IOActive security specialist Dan Kaminsky, who stumbled upon the Domain Name System (DNS) vulnerability about six months ago and reached out to industry giants to collaborate on a solution.

“This attack is very good. This attack is being weaponized out in the field. Everyone needs to patch, please,” Kaminsky said. “This is a big deal.”
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Embarq Corp. has revealed more details about its exploration of a program that tracked Internet subscribers’ Web-surfing habits for advertising purposes, telling Congress that it performed the test on 26,000 customers in a Kansas town.

Building on an earlier response to Rep. John Dingell, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Embarq CEO Thomas Gerke wrote in a letter late Wednesday that his Overland Park, Kan.-based company chose Gardner, Kan., for its test because it was Embarq’s smallest market and near qualified technicians.

Gerke’s letter also revealed that the company included a notice about potential uses of customer Internet history for advertising on an obscure part of its Web site, and that 15 people asked not to participate.

Internet service providers like Embarq have attracted the scrutiny of Congress and privacy advocates for technology that develops targeted ads based on what Web sites a particular subscriber visits. Those providers and the companies that make the programs, notably Silicon Valley-based NebuAd Inc., have defended the technology, saying it protects customer privacy and enhances the online experience by weeding out ads that don’t matter to people.
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