The owner of an opposition Internet news site in Russia’s volatile Ingushetia region was shot and killed Sunday after being detained by police.

Magomed Yevloyev, owner of the www.Ingushetiya.ru Web site, was arrested at Nazran airport in southern Russia after disembarking a flight, according to a statement by media watchdog Reporters Without Borders. Yevloyev was later found dumped on the side of the road, suffering from a gunshot wound to the head, the news site’s deputy editor, Ruslan Khautiyev, told the Associated Press. Yevloyev later died at a hospital, Khautiyev said.

Yevloyev had angered the region’s Kremlin-backed administration with bold criticism of police treatment of civilians in the region, the AP reported. A court in June accused him of spreading “extremist” statements and ordered him to close his site, but it reappeared under a different name.

The Russian prosecutor general’s office said it would open an investigation into the “incident.”

“While police officers were attempting to transfer M. Yevloyev to an Interior Ministry office, an incident occurred,” said Vladimir Markin, a spokesman for the investigative committee of the prosecutor general’s office, according to the Interfax news agency. “M. Yevloyev received a gunshot wound to the temple area.”

A lawyer for Yevloyev ridiculed the explanation and said police dumped Yevloyev on a road after shooting him.

Comcast Corp, the largest U.S. cable operator, said on Thursday it will cap customers’ Internet usage starting October 1, in a bid to ensure the best service for the vast majority of its subscribers.

Comcast said it was setting a monthly data usage threshold of 250 gigabytes per account for all residential high-speed Internet customers, or the equivalent of 50 million e-mails or 124 standard-definition movies.

“If a customer exceeds more than 250 GB and is one of the heaviest data users who consume the most data on our high-speed Internet service, he or she may receive a call from Comcast’s Customer Security Assurance (CSA) group to notify them of excessive use,” according to the company’s updated Frequently Asked Questions on Excessive Use.

Customers who top 250 GB in a month twice in a six-month timeframe could have service terminated for a year.

Scientists in Israel are taking digital photographs of the Dead Sea Scrolls with the aim of making the 2,000-year-old documents available to the public and researchers on the Internet.

Israel Antiquities Authority, the custodian of the scrolls that shed light on the life of Jews and early Christians at the time of Jesus, said on Wednesday it would take more than two years to complete the project.

For many years after Bedouin shepherds first came upon the scrolls in caves near the Dead Sea in 1947, only a small number of scholars were allowed to view the fragments.

But access has since been widened and they were published in their entirety seven years ago.

Using powerful cameras and lights that emit no damaging heat or ultraviolet beams, scientists in Israel have been able to decipher sections and letters in the scrolls invisible to the naked eye.

The scrolls, most of them on parchment, are the oldest copies of the Hebrew Bible and include secular text dating from the third century BC to the first century AD.

A team of specialists has taken 4,000 pictures of some 9,000 fragments that make up the scrolls, which number 900 in total. A few large pieces of scroll are on permanent display at the Israel Museum

Mozilla released an experimental browser plug-in Tuesday that aims to connect the Web with language to help users perform common Web tasks more quickly and easily.

Ubiquity, created by Aza Raskin–son of Apple Mac pioneer Jef Raskin–is a command-line interface that allows users to use plain language to manipulate Web tasks, such as mapping, translation, shopping, or retrieving entries from Wikipedia, Yelp, and Twitter. The free Firefox plug-in allows for the creation of “user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs,” according to a post on Mozilla’s site Tuesday. “In other words, allowing everyone–not just Web developers–to remix the Web so it fits their needs, no matter what page they are on, or what they are doing.”

Two security researchers have demonstrated a new technique to stealthily intercept internet traffic on a scale previously presumed to be unavailable to anyone outside of intelligence agencies like the National Security Agency.

The tactic exploits the internet routing protocol BGP Border Gateway Protocol to let an attacker surreptitiously monitor unencrypted internet traffic anywhere in the world, and even modify it before it reaches its destination.

The demonstration is only the latest attack to highlight fundamental security weaknesses in some of the internet s core protocols. Those protocols were largely developed in the 1970s with the assumption that every node on the then-nascent network would be trustworthy. The world was reminded of the quaintness of that assumption in July, when researcher Dan Kaminsky disclosed a serious vulnerability in the DNS system. Experts say the new demonstration targets a potentially larger weakness.

It s a huge issue. It s at least as big an issue as the DNS issue, if not bigger, said Peiter Mudge Zatko, noted computer security expert and former member of the L0pht hacking group, who testified to Congress in 1998 that he could bring down the internet in 30 minutes using a similar BGP attack, and disclosed privately to government agents how BGP could also be exploited to eavesdrop. I went around screaming my head about this about ten or twelve years ago…. We described this to intelligence agencies and to the National Security Council, in detail.

The man-in-the-middle attack exploits BGP to fool routers into re-directing data to an eavesdropper s network.

Anyone with a BGP router ISPs, large corporations or anyone with space at a carrier hotel could intercept data headed to a target IP address or group of addresses. The attack intercepts only traffic headed to target addresses, not from them, and it can t always vacuum in traffic within a network — say, from one AT&T customer to another.

The method conceivably could be used for corporate espionage, nation-state spying or even by intelligence agencies looking to mine internet data without needing the cooperation of ISPs.

BGP eavesdropping has long been a theoretical weakness, but no one is known to have publicly demonstrated it until Anton Tony Kapela, data center and network director at 5Nines Data, and Alex Pilosov, CEO of Pilosoft, showed their technique at the recent DefCon hacker conference. The pair successfully intercepted traffic bound for the conference network and redirected it to a system they controlled in New York before routing it back to DefCon in Las Vegas.

The technique, devised by Pilosov, doesn t exploit a bug or flaw in BGP. It simply exploits the natural way BGP works.

Facebook has hit 100 million active users. No formal press release has been issued, so you’re going to have to believe the guy who built the site.

The news came straight from the source: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and several of his fellow executives put it in their status messages on the social network, and platform manager Dave Morin broadcast it in his Twitter feed. At least one of them referred to the number being “active users,” the statistic that Facebook prefers to use, rather than registered accounts overall.

Customers in China of Apple Inc.’s iTunes online music store were unable to download songs this week, and an activist group said Beijing was trying to block access to a new Tibet-themed album.

In Internet forums, iTunes users complained they had been unable to download music since Monday. That was a day after the Art of Peace Foundation announced the release of “Songs for Tibet,” with music by Sting, Alanis Morissette, Garbage and others, and a 15-minute talk by the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan leader.

Michael Wohl, executive director of the New York City-based group, said he believed the album was the reason for the iTunes interruption, though he had no proof.

“We issued a release saying that over 40 (Olympic) athletes downloaded the album in an act of solidarity, and that’s what triggered it. Then everything got blocked,” Wohl said by phone.

Beijing encourages Internet use for education and business use but tries to block access to foreign sites run by dissidents and human rights and Tibet activists.

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, which regulates Internet use, did not respond to a request for comment. A spokeswoman for the Ministry of Public Security said she had no information.

Apple, based in Cupertino, Calif., acknowledged that customers were having trouble.

Source: AP

Trying to view a video on CNN web site was impossible. Using Ubuntu and Firefox with Flash installed I got a message from the web server telling me that I need Flash player version 8 or above. The problem is that I have version 10 of Flash player installed (and working perfectly). I thought that a site like CNN has better QA team to check its scripts

this message from the CNN server.

This CNN.com feature is optimized for Adobe Flash Player version 8 or higher.

You are currently using Flash Player 10

Check out the screen shot on the right, WTF ?

Georgian authorities have blocked most access to Russian news broadcasters and websites since the outbreak of the conflict with Moscow.

Georgia’s Interior Ministry said the action was not anti-democratic, but Russian broadcasts could not be allowed to “scare our population”.

A war over the Russian-backed breakaway region of South Ossetia has unleashed high emotion in Russia and Georgia, reflected in coverage on both state and private channels.

“People from the (Georgian) security agencies asked me to block Russian sites,” Mamia Sanadiradze, founder and CEO of the biggest Georgian internet service provider, Caucasus Online, told Reuters.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has backed away from a DMCA take-down request to remove a YouTube video of a Tibetan protest at the Chinese consulate in New York.

The video in question (see below) was clearly not an example of copyright infringement. YouTube and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) both pushed back against the IOC, which then withdrew their complaint. As the EFF notes, however, the inaccurate title of the video was “Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony,” so in all likelihood, the IOC was filing DMCA notices for Olympics content, which has been springing up on YouTube faster than they can take it down.

Anthony Falzone, Executive Director of the Fair Use Project, was impressed that YouTube went beyond the call of duty in pushing back at the IOC. With the sheer volume of DMCA requests that YouTube must be fielding with the Olympics, taking the time to double-check the content is certainly impressive. At the same time, however, it highlights how much work YouTube has to do in terms of policing copyrighted content. The number of legal notices they have to respond to consume time and resources that might be put to better use.

Wordpress 2.6.1 released today, however If you’re happy with 2.6, keep on using it. You need not upgrade to 2.6.1 if 2.6 is getting the job done.

2.6.1 offers several improvements for international users. Styling of the admin for right-to-left languages is much improved thanks to the efforts of the Farsi and Hebrew translation teams, and a mysterious gettext bug caused by certain PHP configurations is now fixed. For IIS users, 2.6.1 fixes several permalink problems. Image insertion problems in the Press This feature experienced by IE users are also fixed. Of note to everyone is a fix for a performance bug in the admin where those with a lot of plugins would experience slowness on some pages.

Industry figures available Wednesday show Facebook has dethroned MySpace to become the world’s most popular social networking website.

Slightly more than 132 million people visited Facebook in June as compared to the approximately 117.5 million that went to MySpace that month, according to industry tracker comScore.

Facebook seized the social networking crown from News Corp-owned MySpace in April, comScore reported.

Facebook’s moves to tailor versions of its website to languages other than English is credited with giving it a boost in international users that pushed it to the top of the social networking heap.