Do We Need A New, Safer Internet?

Spam worm halts work at NASA, Comcast

(NEWSER) - An email spam virus swept through corporate America's inboxes yesterday, causing servers to be shut down at major operations including Comcast, AIG, Disney, and NASA. The virus spread through emails with the subject line "Here you have," which contained a link that downloads a virus that sends the same email to everybody in a user's address book. The Department of Homeland Security is investigating, reports ABC News . More»

Forget the open WWW—it's all about apps now

(NEWSER) - As the World Wide Web turns 18, Wired declares it dead—even as the Internet continues to rule. Chris Anderson takes us through a typical user's day: email checked and Facebook browsed on an iPad; podcasts and Pandora listened to; Skype and IM conversations held. "You’ve spent the day on the Internet—but not on the Web," he writes, and it's because we now want closed platforms, like apps, that "work better or fit better" in our lives. "For the sake of the optimized experience on mobile devices, users forgo the general-purpose browser. Fast beats flexible." More»

Dorothy Miller says the Celery system is 'so much fun'

(NEWSER) - To anyone who wrote off fax machines as so 1994: Turns out they're a pretty decent stand-in for a computer, at least for an 80-year-old grandmother who uses a new system developed specifically for seniors to post on Twitter—by fax. Dorothy Miller tells The Frisky the Celery system is “so much fun” and allows her to communicate much more often with her family. More»

(NEWSER) - The outage affecting Google’s email service today sent millions to its search function, Jennifer Van Grove writes on Mashable—with so many looking for an explanation that, for a time, Gmail-related topics were 18 of the top 20 US queries. “The frenzy of Google searches on its status certainly proves how widespread the outage was,” Van Grove notes, “and how many millions of people were affected. We’ve never seen anything quite like it.” More»

Software scatters encryption keys among temporary BitTorrent nodes

(NEWSER) - Email is inherently insecure, because it has a long shelf-life—even deleted messages can be stored infinitely on the email service of the sender or recipient. Now a team of scientists is poised to unveil software later this month to make them disappear for keeps, reports the Economist. “Vanish” uses the ephemeral nature of P2P networks to render messages unreadable after a set amount of time. Essentially, they self-destruct. More»