Critics Blast Claims of Net Outages by 2010

Social network eats up 8.9% of US visits

(NEWSER) - Facebook knocked Google from its cushy No. 1 slot this year, becoming the most-visited website in the US, Reuters reports. Between January and November, Facebook saw 8.9% of all US visits; Google.com saw 7.2%. If you count all of Google’s properties, like YouTube and Gmail, however, Google takes 9.9%, surpassing Facebook. Yahoo’s properties came in third, with 8.1%. Google was king in 2009 and 2008; MySpace was on top in 2007. More»

'Fake' neutrality plan doesn't go far enough, critics say

(AP) - New rules aimed at prohibiting broadband providers from becoming gatekeepers of Internet traffic now have just enough votes to pass the Federal Communications Commission today. The new "net neutrality" rules would prohibit phone and cable companies from abusing their control over broadband connections to discriminate against rival content or services, such as Internet phone calls or online video, or play favorites with Web traffic. More»

Proposal might amount to net neutrality order

(NEWSER) - FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski is making yet another valiant stab at introducing net neutrality or something like it today. In a speech today, Genachowski will propose a new regulatory framework that would forbid Internet broadband providers from blocking lawful content, the New York Times reports. The rules would also allow providers to charge different rates for different levels of service, and to manage traffic to limit congestion or harmful traffic. More»

Analysts: It's still a problem, but let's get the numbers straight

(NEWSER) - The tech blogosphere was buzzing this week with reports that China hijacked 15% of the world's Internet traffic for about 20 minutes and did possibly nefarious things with it before letting it go. Only thing is, the real figure was probably closer to .015%, writes Andy Greenberg at Forbes . He cites this analysis at Arbor Networks. More»

It's not clear if anything bad happened, but it highlights Internet weakness

(NEWSER) - A report to Congress alleges that China briefly hijacked a chunk of the world's web traffic, including some from US military facilities, before sending it on its way. (The actual amount rerouted is in dispute .) China denies it , but tech writers are pretty sure it happened. Cause for alarm? A definite maybe.

• Bob Sullivan, MSNBC : "If there is a grey area between honest mistakes and outright cyber attack, these incidents probably fall right in the middle—if not a pre-planned testing of the waters, then certainly a happy accident with valuable results to be studied by would-be cyber-attackers."
• Nate Anderson, Ars Technica : "The culprit here was 'IP hijacking,' a well-known routing problem in a worldwide system based largely on trust." But as is usually the case with these things, "it's hard to know if anything bad happened here. The entire thing could have been a simple mistake. Besides, Internet traffic isn't secure and already passes through many servers outside of one's control."