Kim Dotcom is certainly a colorful character but you have to admit that he does things for real. Two years after the raid that shut down his file hosting and streaming sites MegaUpload and MegaVideo, he has opened Baboom, a service dedicated to music streaming and download. At the moment the site is almost empty, just a demonstration of its potential with the music album “Good Times” by Kim Dotcom himself.
A few days ago, Proofpoint, an American company that offers a variety of Internet related services including some related to security, revealed that it discovered what may be the first cyberattack carried out by exploiting the so-called Internet of Things. According to Proofpoint, over 750,000 phishing and spam e-mails were sent not by normal computers but by smart appliances such as TV-sets and refrigerators.
The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) didn’t have the authority to prohibit Internet service providers to block or even slow down web traffic and applications in a selective manner. This represents a rejection of Net Neutrality, which required in particular to broadband connections operators not to discriminate Internet traffic.
The news was initially given unofficially by the Wall Street Journal, which reported it as a matter of fact, and was later officially confirmed: Apple has acquistto Topsy, to be precise Topsy Labs, Inc., a company that deals with research and analysis in social networks, particularly Twitter, of which is a certified partner. It seems that Apple has paid over $200 million for this acquisition.
Yesterday, when it was early morning in the USA, Facebook started having problems. Suddenly it became impossible to update your status or write anything in groups and pages and even use the “Like” function. Soon, on other social networks, mainly Twitter, messages were posted showing panic but also irony and #facebookdown was very trendy among the hashtags. After a few hours the fault was fixed and the situation slowly went back to normal.
