Google CEO: Internet will be dominated by China

The introduction of IDNs will certainly increase the number of Chinese Internet users, but Google CEO Eric Schmidt has a much more optimistic view of web adoption in the Asian country. According to him, cyberspace will be dominated by Chinese content within 5 years.

Though Western nations have had more than a decade to populate the Internet with content, China’s population of 1.3 billion gives it an unparalleled advantage in this area. Increasingly inexpensive computers along with Chinese-character URLs will cause exponential growth in China web usage.

What does this mean for us? Besides a crowded Internet, expect more sites to become available in Chinese soon.

Source | IDN Blog

Kate Hudson initiates battle for KateHudson.com

Award-winning actress Kate Hudson submitted a complaint with the National Arbitration Forum this week over the domain KateHudson.com. She is asking that the name be transferred to her.

The registrant is Fei Zhu, a Shanghai resident. He has owned the name since 2006, but it will be hard for him to prove he isn’t using the name in bad faith.

Kate Hudson is best known for her roles in How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Bride Wars, and Almost Famous.

Source | Domain News
Photo | Flickr

Chinese Language TLDs Coming

China is moving full speed ahead in its plans to introduce a top-level-domain in the Chinese language. Like the current .cn TLD, the new country domain will use two characters. There have been technical hurdles to implementing Chinese characters in TLDs, but the China Internet Network Information Center now seems confident that it will happen.

As part of ICANN‘s push into the future, they recently announced plans to promote country domains in character sets other than the current standard Latin characters. China expects to make the new TLD its standard within two years, fully replacing the current .cn. They also expect them to become the most widely used by Chinese Web users.

China has recently come under a lot of fire for the wide usage of .cn domains to send SPAM and malware. The Chinese government says that it is handling the problem. One reason that cyber criminals prefer .cn, whether they are Chinese or not, is that the domains are extremely cheap, sometimes going for as low as USD$0.15.

Source: ComputerWorld
Photo: Flickr

China feels the IP squeeze

As IPv4 addresses run out, those countries with the fastest-growing number of Internet users will run low on IPs first. A perfect example of this is China, which currently adds more people to the web per year than any other country in the world.

According to Wu Hequan from the Chinese Academy of Engineering, the land of the Great Wall is set to run out of IP addresses in two or three years. Compared to the rest of the world, it is in decent shape.

The problem is, this calculation assumes that computer deployment will continue to increase at the same rate. As tech devices like computers, cell phones, and PDAs become less expensive, adoption rises at a disproportionate rate.

IPv6 adoption so far only extends to Chinese universities. It is my guess that the number of addresses needed by this economic powerhouse will increase much more quickly than Hequan predicts. China has the disadvantage of being a relatively late Internet adopter, so when IPs were first allocated, it didn’t receive nearly as many as Western nations.

Source | People’s Daily Online

Germany's .de gains position of top ccTLD

Germany is not only the most populous country in Europe, but is now the operator of the Internet’s most popular ccTLD with more than 13 million registrations on its .de domain.

For years Germany held the number one spot, but recently lost its position to China’s .cn extension, which experienced a huge spike in registrations after the government discounted its price to only 1 yuan per year.

Now the discount program has been discontinued, and .cn registrations are dipping– from 14,082,553 in February to 12,545,589 at the end of July. This decrease mainly consists of domainers who took advantage of the low cost a year ago, but chose not to renew their names at the higher rate this year.

Source | Domain News

The Internet is big, really big

According to new Internet data, there are now more websites than people in the world — over 1 trillion. With such large numbers, there are 150 domains per person, and it would take 31,000 to read all of them, even if you spent only one minute on each and never slept. Still, just 1.46 billion out of 6 billion people in the world use the Internet, meaning it would take a long time even for all of them combined to see all websites.

China leads the list with 338 million users, with the US trailing at 227 million. Japan, India, and Brazil round out the top five. The UK is a bit lower with 48 million users, reflective of its smaller population. The interestingly neglected part of this data and most raw data like it, is that there is no analysis of the website content.

Of the 1 trillion websites out there, how many are made up of malware, spam harvestors, phishing, fraud, schemes, ad portals, parked domains, and cybersquatting? Furthermore, of the sites that are none of the above mentioned, how many are actually useful and worth visiting? While it may be the job of Google and Bing to index legitimate sites, it will be up to someone else to catalog and evaluate them. As the Internet continues to grow, so does the need for some time of organization.

Source: News.com.au
Photo: Flickr

Two Chinese domain registrars to blame

The names of the two Chinese domain registrars allegedly responsible for a large chunk of the world’s spam, have come under fire from University of Alabama’s director of research, Gary Warner. Last week I posted a short entry about Warner’s research, concluding that 70 percent of spam originated in China. Warner has now identified two companies: eName and Xin Net Technology as the two registrars that provide the spammers with safe havens.

According to Warner, 34,283 malicious domains are linked to Xin Net. Registrants of their domains deal in all sorts of crimes, from unregulated drugs to software piracy. eName is linked to several security attackers, including botnets. Warner argues that these registrars could actively prevent these illicit activities and shut down these domains.

With eName, “we are seeing an absolute refusal to cooperate with any legitimate form of an abuse complaint,” Warner said. Xin Net will take minor action when pressed with a complaint, he said.

Rod Beckstrom, newly appointed ICANN president and CEO, has already hinted that new regulations could be on the horizon. Companies like eName and Xin Net could be restricted from registering domains names altogether if they refuse to deal with this type of abuse. Meanwhile, the Chinese government has a team that deals with complaints, but it is undermanned and receives as many as 9,000 complaints per day.

Source: PC World
Photo: Flickr

Chinese domains linked to 70 percent of SPAM

A new report by the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) has concluded that as much as 70 percent of all spam sent in 2009 originated from domains ending in .cn, China’s top-level country domain. Furthemore, the report claims to have confirmed that nearly all of those spam messages originated on Chinese servers.

The study mined millions of spam emails and concluded that they came from 69,117 unique domains. Of that number, 48,552 or 70 percent, were sent from .cn domains. 48,331 were sent from Chinese computers. Chinese domains and servers are ripe for the picking in the minds of spammers for two reasons: 1) Web hosts in China deny the problem and insist that they do not have security issues, and 2) domain names in China are phenomenally inexpensive, costing only about one yuan or 15 U.S. cents.

Gary Warner, UAB’s director of research in computer forensics, insists that China has entered a “spam crisis.”

“Not only is it cheap to operate spam-promoted Web sites through the Chinese technology infrastructure, there is not enough revenue being generated to pay for the creation of programs or entities that could prevent such abuses from taking place,” Warner said.

Source: Newswise
Photo: Flickr

China to Install "Green Dam" Content Filter on New Computers

The Chinese government has issued an order requiring all computers sold in China to have a government-sanctioned content filter installed.

Known as “Green Dam,” the software filters obscene images and words. Computer makes must preinstall it on all computers sold in the country starting July 1.

China is notorious for its strict Internet censorship, but security experts are afraid Green Dam could be used to monitor personal computer use, collect personal information, and block a greater range of content.

American computer makers in the region have already expressed dissent. “Many of us are going to take it in the neck with this mandate,” said one tech executive. “It has put people into five-alarm mode.”

The software has already been downloaded 3.2 million times. Its installation has been required on all school computers since May. Users have reported that the content filter is buggy, at times ineffective, and some have reported system crashes associated with the software, which is only available on Windows for now.

Source: New York Times

Chinese Police Detain Four Internet Hackers

On May 19, China experienced widespread Internet outages after hackers took down major DNS servers in a DoS (Denial of Service) attack. Chinese authorities now have the four hackers in custody following police investigations in the Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Guandong provinces. The server in question was DNSPod, a Chinese DNS service provider and domain name registrar.

The motive for the attacks was apparently over a bitter rivalry between two illegal online gaming companies. DNSPod provides access to some of the competition’s gaming servers, and the suspects figured it was an easy way to redirect traffic to their own gaming sites. But the effects of the attacks were widespread, causing other servers to go down, including those of Baofeng, a popular Chinese video streaming service. Millions of users were denied service.

Nearly 300 million Internet users in China temporarily lost service, the worst outage since 2006, according to the the Chinese Ministry of Public Security. A DoS attack relies on unsecured computers to do its dirty work, infiltrating them and then using their Internet connections to send useless packets of data to a server until the server’s resources are completely used, denying real customers service.
Source: Top Tech News
Photo: Flickr