Ryan Naraine

Howard Carmack, the notorious ‘Buffalo Spammer’ accused of sending more than 825 million unsolicited e-mails from illegal EarthLink accounts, has been arrested and arraigned in New York on four felony and two misdemeanor counts. New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer heralded the case as the first criminal prosecution of a spammer under New York’s six-month-old […]

Struggling media giant Bertelsmann’s legal woes over its association with Napster escalated this week with Universal Music joining a group of songwriters and music publishers to sue the German company for supporting a rogue P2P service. Universal Music Group, a division of French media company Vivendi, filed suit in a Manhattan court accusing Bertelsmann of […]

Just weeks after slashing its monthly DSL fee, Verizon plans to build Wi-Fi “hotspot” extensions of its broadband service in New York, using existing pay phones as the distribution vehicle. A spokesperson for Verizon said the company would upgrade more than 200,000 pay phones in Manhattan to create 802.11b-compliant network nodes for its high-speed subscribers. […]

Online security firms on Monday warned of a new mass-mailing worm spreading itself via e-mail address books and the KaZaa peer-to-peer network. Symantec’s Security Response on Monday increased the threat level on the Fizzer (W32.HLLW.Fizzer@mm) virus, warning it contains a backdoor that uses mIRC to communicate with a remote attacker and keystroke-logger that records all […]

Mozilla has released the newest version of its open-source Web browser project, adding support for NTLM authentication in the 1.4b beta release. The latest beta, which comes on the heels of a major shift to make Phoenix its standalone default browser, would support communication with Microsoft Web and proxy servers configured to use Windows integrated […]

Microsoft on Thursday plugged a security hole in its all-encompassing .NET Passport service after an attack scenario was made public, showing how user’s passwords could be stolen. The security vulnerability, which was posted to the Full-Disclosure e-mail list, also put personal information of millions of Hotmail user at the mercy of attackers. The flaw, which […]

EarthLink’s plans to implement “Challenge/Response” technology in its ongoing crusade against e-mail spam have hit a snag with a patent infringement complaint from e-mail service provider Mailblocks. The Los Altos, Calif.-based Mailblocks claims it owns patents on the “Challenge/Response” technology, which adds a layer of e-mail authentication to eliminate spam from non-human senders. In the […]

Microsoft has tagged its maximum security rating on a flaw in the way ‘skin’ files are downloaded in some versions of its Windows Media Player (WMP). The software giant said the security hole was detected in WMP version 7.1 and WMP for Windows XP version 8.0 and could allow an attacker to “force a file […]

Atlanta-based ISP EarthLink has won a $16 million judgment against Howard Carmack, the notorious ‘Buffalo Spammer’ accused of sending more than 825 million unsolicited e-mails from illegal EarthLink accounts since early 2002. In a ruling from the bench of Wednesday, U.S. District Court judge Thomas Thrash ruled in favour of EarthLink’s motion for a permanent […]

Four college students have agreed to pay damages ranging from $12,000 and $17,500 each in order to settle lawsuits brought by the recording industry against operators of what it called “Napster-like internal campus networks” that aid in the theft of copyrighted songs. The settlement, announced Thursday, was in connection with lawsuits filed in early April […]

Still bristling over a surprise court ruling that the Grokster and Morpheus P2P networks could not be held liable for copyright infringement, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has taken up instant messaging as an anti-piracy tool. Starting Tuesday, millions of file-swappers on the popular peer-to-peer networks are getting IM warnings that there are […]

New York City’s Downtown Alliance has turned to modern technology — Wi-Fi ‘hotspots’ — to lure business to one of the oldest business districts. On Friday (May 1), the Alliance is expected to launch three public 802.11-compliant public network nodes to give away high-speed wireless Internet access and four more will go live later in […]