Marvin Ammori

The FCC holds its monthly meeting tomorrow, with many spectrum-related topics on the agenda.

The online website WikiLeaks on Sunday blamed the temporary outage of its site on a denial-of-service attack by unknown hackers trying to prevent its release of hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. State Department documents.

The Australian Senate passed a bill splitting up Telstra’s wholesale and retail operations in an effort to smooth implementation of the government’s broadband plan.

In what appears to be the latest phase of a far-reaching federal crackdown on online piracy of music and movies, the Web addresses of a number of sites that facilitate illegal file-sharing were seized this week by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a division of the Department of Homeland Security.

Bruce Schneier has a thoughtful piece in NYT’s Room for Debate on the TSA’s full body scanners. His conclusion: it’s a waste of time and money. He discusses other security measures have worked.

Schneier is a well-known security guru, and, earlier this year, was one of Nebraska Law’s keynotes at our DC Conference.

Earl Zmijewski at the Renesys Blog has a post on a DNS censorship incident which took place in March of this year, and provides insight into how such tampering might be prevented in the future.

UltimaRatioReg at the US Naval Institute’s Blog discusses the indictment of Lin Mun Poo, a Malaysian hacker sought for breaches into financial systems (including the Federal Reserve Bank) as well as a major breach into a DoD contractor’s network.  You can read the request for permanent order of detention here.

Paul Budde at CircleID discusses remarks made by Britain’s Minister for Communications – remarks suggesting a tiered regime for Internet traffic may be necessary to cope with strains on network capacity.  Budde argues such a concept mistakenly relies on “competition” in the market, which is largely dominated by a triopoly of telcos, and that net neutrality principles are necessary to protect consumers.

Marcelo Prince writing for the WSJ’s Digits Blog discusses Verizon’s new broadband package, with download speeds of up to 150mb p/s and 35mb p/s upload speeds.  The price tag?  $195 a month, plus subscribers must sign a one year contract and pay for voice service (without those items the cost is $215).

Tim Berners-Lee has a piece in Scientific American in which he argues that open and royalty-free standards are crucial to defending the Internet from various threats posed by surveillance and other invasive measures.