UK Cities Will Get Better Broadband

They have announced a list of cities eligible to bid for super-fast broadband funding. However, the experts think that the cash might make no difference to a lot of British cities.

After the authorities have announced that the 4 capital cities in the United Kingdom will be awarded part of a £100 million fund created for developing high speed broadband, they revealed a list of cities who’ll scrap it out for broadband cash.

The permit to grab the remaining money and find themselves a part of the super-fast broadband project was given to Birmingham, Glasgow, Bristol, Leeds, Newcastle, Nottingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, and Bradford. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport is currently taking bids from the towns able to plead the best case for receiving the money, which will involve explanation of how they are going to use the 80-100 Mbps speeds to push growth. Meanwhile, the broadband will be supplied by ISPs BT and Virgin.

As you understand, the competition will mean that some cities will lose out on the cash. However, it still seems to make it easier to allocate the resources more fairly. Industry observers think that there are still doubts about the ability to make a difference to 10 cities taking into account the amount on the table. By limiting the funding to 4 pre-selected capital cities, and adding 6 out of the 10 cities only going to get into the project, the UK will least have an idea of how far the money will have to spread. The authorities pointed out that a lot of cities are already approaching existing targets for 2015, like Cardiff, despite the fact that such steps might have been made prior to any knowledge of further funding.

Mainly, the cities have been working towards improving Internet connection, though it is not clear whether some of their projects were going ahead with the prior knowledge that government funding might be available. However, experts agree that the offered amount is little in comparison to the scale of the task in improving broadband systems, but if the authorities will carefully target the worst served locations, it might make a difference. Nevertheless, the best people can expect is that the project will ensure broadband at speeds well above the 2 Mbps available everywhere.

Italy Angry with Switzerland For Protecting File-Sharers

Recently the Swiss government made a decision to endorse a law according to which non-profit file-sharing is considered legitimate. The Swiss government believes that the so-called “illicit” downloads don’t actually hurt the entertainment industry like various anti-piracy groups claims they do. However, this decision has led to a hostile reaction from the Italian government.

Italy is known in file-sharing circles for the legislation pleasing entertainment industry, which it has adopted in a popular form of “three-strikes” regime. Under this law, Internet users accused of copyright violation could have their broadband connection terminated.

Italy has issued a kind of response via Enzo Mazza, the president of the Italian music industry group FIMI (known in the country as Federazione Industria Musicale Italiana), the next day after Switzerland had made an announcement. This response was a bit childish, claiming that Switzerland was the country that had hid the loot of history’s biggest criminals, and whose banks had shielded tax evaders. Now this country is also accused of protecting Internet thieves.

However, Switzerland had reasons to decide so. The country’s government made their decision after consulting a federal study and different researches, all of which conclude, along with some other things, that piracy doesn’t actually cause the country any significant economic damage. Instead, the experts pointed out that file-sharing only affected big foreign companies.

Meanwhile, the same federal study revealed that despite the fact that about 30% of Swiss citizens aged over 15 do have a habit of downloading copyrighted content like films and music, this doesn’t really influence their buying habits in regards to entertainment. In other words, industry experts are sure that the Internet users do not spend less because they download stuff for free. Nevertheless, Italy wasn’t the only country that applied such strict anti-piracy penalties – they have been also introduced by a number of other countries like France, all of them currently receiving much disapproval by the study in question which really doubts the legitimacy of the “three-strikes” regime.

Google Facing $30 Million Lawsuit

Google has just opened its new French headquarters, but it seems that they won't be receiving a warm welcome in the nearest future. The reason is that the company has recently landed itself in hot water over the abuse of its dominant position one more time, facing a lawsuit that demands over $30 million for damages to some navigation software firm.

French company named NAVX is currently suing Google in the Paris Commercial Court over what it believes to be wrongdoing about blocking advertisements from the company. NAVX has appealed to the local antitrust authorities over its treatment by the search giant where it was discovered that competition legislation has been violated. The search giant was ordered to reinstate the NAVX’s advertising, as well as clarify the conditions of its Adwords service for further use. NAVX, which offers content for GPS and smartphones, confirmed that Google did agree to do so.

Nevertheless, the French firm acknowledged that it has lost out on a load of money because of Google’s meddling, so it has demanded damages of around $31 million. NAVX Chief Executive Officer Jean Cherbonnier has announced that the dominant position of Google on the advertising market connected with search engines can’t be disputed, particularly after the investigation carried out by the French Antitrust Authority that concluded a year ago that the search giant undoubtedly holds a dominant position.

NAVX is currently asking the Paris Commercial Court to hand down ruling saying that Google abused its dominant position. The company also hopes the court will order Google to pay damages. Meanwhile, such court case couldn’t come at a worse time for the international corporation. Its CEO has just met with European Commission antitrust boss in a kind of last ditch attempt to stop a formal investigation into the company landing the search giant with a statement of objection over its practices.

Truly, it looks like NAVX isn’t the only company out for Google’s blood after the latter allegedly mistreated them. Such firms as Ciao and Foundem are also enraged at Google’s activities and are currently pushing for intervention of European Commission into what they see as bullying and bullish behavior. In other words, it is very unlikely that some other companies making detrimental claims against the search giant while talks are ongoing do Google any favors.

Big Hole Found In Apache

Security experts claim they’ve discovered a yet-to-be-patched vulnerability in the Apache HTTP server. The hole, according to their claims, allows hackers to access protected resources within the internal network. Due to the importance of the issue, Apache developers gathered a conference where they tried to decide how to fix the problem.

All you need for “goodnight Vienna” to happen on the internal network is for some rewrite rules not to be configured correctly. Right after this you can see hackers inside the server doing whatever they want. The big hole hits Apache installations operating in reverse proxy mode – that’s what is used for load balancing, caching and many other operations using multiple servers.

The matter is that while trying to set up Apache HTTPD to work as a reverse proxy, server administrators have to use some specialized modules, such as mod_proxy or mod_rewrite. That’s where it happens: if some rules aren’t determined properly, hackers are able to trick servers into performing unauthorized requests in order to access internal resources. In fact, the trouble has been around for a while, because the patch was released to fix something similar last month.

Nevertheless, after security experts reviewed the patch in question, they realized that it can be easily bypassed thanks to a bug in the procedure for Uniform Resource Identifier scheme stripping. In other words, you have to clearly understand what you are doing, since the fault was something to do with the part of Uniform Resource Identifier coming before the colon. So, if you haven’t mastered your colon, it can become a problem with your Apache server configuration.

As for Apache, they’ve had a discussion about the outlined issue and the problem was allocated to have a look at it. Today the developers aren’t sure what will be better to do with the discovered vulnerability – either to strengthen the earlier released patch in the server code so that it could reject requests of this type or make up something a bit heavier. The reason why they can’t agree on details is the suggestion made by some experts who believe that tinkering with one branch of the code may also have negative consequences. For example, this move can lead to opening another hole somewhere else.