Asian Cities Dominate Fast Broadband - PCWorld

Asian Cities Dominate Fast Broadband - PCWorld

State of the Internet report identifies cities, countries with fastest and most available broadband service.

John E. Dunn

Sunday, October 24, 2010 08:05 AM PDT

High-speed broadband has become a phenomenon of densely-populated Asian cities, which now account for 74 of the top 100 global cities offering fast connections according to Akamai's latest State of the Internet report.

According to the company's statistics for best average connection speeds, Japan leads the way with an astonishing 62 cities in the top 100, ahead of South Korea and Hong Kong on 12, Europe on 15 and the U.S. and Canada on 10.

The top 10 for speed are all in South Korea, however, which benefits from intense coverage around capital city Seoul, where average speeds range from 15Mbit/s to 21Mbit/s, with Japanese users hitting between 8.5Mbit/s and 12.2Mbit/s.

The best European city was Constanta in Romania with an average of 8.5Mbit/s while the best U.S. city was Monterey Park, California, which managed 6.9Mbit/s.

These are average connection speeds, but looking at the extremes also gives further insight. Again, South Korea leads the way with some users reaching 38Mbit/s connections, ahead of Hong Kong (32Mbit/s), Japan (28Mbit/s), and Romania (27 Mbit/s). The US languishes, in relative terms at least, with peak rates of only 16Mbit/s.

In terms of U.S. cities, California is the place to be -- seven of the best connections speeds were recorded there. At the other end of the scale, the state with the highest number of connections above 2Mbit/s was Delaware, where 98 percent of connections reached this level.

Akamai also measured global 'attack traffic', which showed Russia falling to third place as an originator on 10 percent, behind the US and China which head the list on 11 percent each. These three counties swap top placing in all such reports.

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Editorial - Microsoft and Russia - NYTimes.com

Editorial - Microsoft and Russia - NYTimes.com

Microsoft made the right decision to stop helping Russian authorities use claims of software piracy to harass and silence dissenters. On Monday, it announced that it is barring its lawyers from taking part in such cases and will provide a blanket software license to advocacy groups and news media outlets in Russia, undercutting the Kremlin’s tactic.

Still, Microsoft’s willingness to lend itself to politically motivated investigations — it changed course only after an article by Clifford Levy in The Times on Sunday — suggests a shocking failure of corporate responsibility. The Times said lawyers for Microsoft bolstered state police in politically tinged cases across Russia. They made statements suggesting the company was a victim and called for criminal charges. After police seized a dozen computers from a Siberian environmental group, the group said all its software was legally licensed and asked Microsoft to confirm this. Microsoft would not. The police used information from the computers to track down and interrogate some of the group’s supporters.

Before changing policy on Monday, Microsoft executives said the company was required under Russian law to take part in such inquiries.

Unfortunately, Microsoft is not the only American company that has failed to stand up for the rights of its customers in undemocratic countries.

In China, all search engines have helped the state control access to the Internet. In 2004, Yahoo helped Beijing’s state police uncover the Internet identities of two Chinese journalists, who were then sentenced to 10 years in prison for disseminating pro-democracy writings online. Skype’s Chinese partner, Tom Online, scanned text messages for politically sensitive words and stored them alongside user information on servers that could be accessed easily by the Chinese government.

The one company that has stood up to China is Google. In March, after five years of complicity with Beijing’s censors, it began redirecting searches to its unfiltered engine in Hong Kong. By contrast, Microsoft’s founder and chairman, Bill Gates, defended the company’s continued collaboration with China’s censors. “You’ve got to decide: Do you want to obey the laws of the countries you’re in, or not?” he said during Beijing’s fight with Google. “If not, you may not end up doing business there.”

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Google's China answer page inaccessible - The China Post

Google's China answer page inaccessible - The China Post

BEIJING -- A Google question-and-answer page for Chinese users was inaccessible from mainland China on Tuesday less than a month after the search giant's Internet license was renewed amid a dispute over online censorship.

The company found no technical problems with the Hong Kong-based service, said a Google Inc. spokewoman, Courtney Hohne, in an e-mail. Phone calls to China's Internet regulator, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, were not answered and the agency did not respond to questions sent by fax.

Beijing encourages Web use for education and business but tries to block material deemed subversive and closely watches sites where China's public can leave comments. Regulators block access to social networking sites abroad such as Facebook that pro-democracy and Tibet activists have used to criticize the communist government.

Google's future in China has been uncertain since the company announced in January it no longer wanted to cooperate with Beijing's Web censorship and shut down its China-based search engine in March. Mainland Web surfers can reach Google's Chinese-language site in Hong Kong, which has no online censorship, but industry analysts say users might defect to local rivals, eroding its advertising revenues.

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China Called a Hacker's Marketplace - PCWorld

China Called a Hacker's Marketplace - PCWorld

Malware is openly available in China, researchers at the Black Hat conference report.

Jaikumar Vijayan

Sunday, August 01, 2010 06:30 AM PDT

LAS VEGAS -- China's rapid emergence as a hotspot for criminal hacking activities is enabled by the open and unfettered availability of sophisticated hacking tools, according to security researchers attending the Black Hat conference here this week.

Many of the hacking tools are inexpensive, highly customizable, and easy to use.

Most of the early users of the malware products have sought to steal has been from from online gaming accounts inside China. But now experts are seeing much broader use of such tools.

Hackers in China are developing malicious software "almost like a commercial product", said Val Smith founder of Attack Research, a Los Alamos, N.M.-based security firm. The products come complete with version numbers, product advertising, end-user license agreements and 24-hour support services, he said.

They are "rapidly deploying very easy to use tools for cutting edge exploits," Smith said at a Black Hat presentation last week. "Their community is huge because [the malware] is easy to use," while at the same time many of the exploits are very advanced, he added.

Unlike in the U.S, the buying and selling of hacker tools in China takes place mostly in the open, said Anthony Lai, a security researcher with Valkyrie-X Security Research Group (VXRL) a Hong Kong based non-profit firm. Often, all that's required to find and purchase a malware program often is the ability to use a browser and search engine, he said during a talk at Black Hat.

Most of those selling malware products make little effort to conceal their activities. In fact, many openly advertise their wares and their capabilities through search engines like Baidu.com, he said. Customers can buy the malware they need for less than $20 or sign up as subscribed members and get regular updated supplies of the tools, Lai said.

The hacking tools run the gamut and are often designed for off-the-shelf use. Many offer exploit generators that allow more sophstocated hackers to carefully customize malware for specific needs by using graphical user interfaces, Lai said. The GUIs let wannabe hackers specify what they want the program to do, for instance, whether they want it to steal data, capture screens, log keystrokes, remotely control a system or undertake any other task.

Some check boxes lets malware purchasers decide what kind of obfuscation and hiding methods they want to use to evade detection by security tools, while others walk them through the deployment and updating process, Lai said.

It's not unusual for those selling malware programs to let buyer's first test out the products before buying it and to offer regular product updates and phone numbers to call for support services. Statistical tools are also available to help buyers keep track of the systems they have infected.

China's hacking abilities has received increasing scrutiny following Google's disclosure earlier this year that it's servers had been hacked apparently by hackers based out of China.

Jaikumar Vijayan covers data security and privacy issues, financial services security and e-voting for Computerworld. Follow Jaikumar on Twitter at @jaivijayan , or subscribe to Jaikumar's RSS feed . His e-mail address is jvijayan@computerworld.com .

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