AT&T 'violates net neutrality' by NOT charging twice for same data

American telco giant AT&T doesn’t want to charge femtocell users twice for the same data, but exempting its customers from the second bill could fall foul of US Network Neutrality, says the Public Knowledge blog, which has demanded an FCC investigation into "data cap abuse".

Femtocells are tiny base stations which route cellular connections over domestic broadband to extend coverage, but that generally results in customers paying twice for the data: once to their cellular network and once to their broadband provider, so AT&T decided that customers buying both services from AT&T should only be charged once, which is where Net Neutrality kicks in.

Nokia Siemens Networks plans to flog bonds, raise €700m

Nokia Siemens Networks is planning to go to the public markets to try to get some financing through high-yield bonds for up to €700m (£580m, $930m).

The telecoms equipment firm will be hoping that there’s enough investor appetite to make its bonds a good buy, meaning that some folks reckon the company is worth betting on.

Polish CERT hits Virut botnet

The Polish Research and Academic Computer Network (NASK), the national registry of the .pl domain and founder of CERT Polska, has announced on Friday that they took over 23 domains that served as C&C servers for the Virut botnet.

 

The botnet, recently used as a way for Waledac botmasters to recreate their own botnet which has been crippled in previous years by Microsoft, has been dealt a considerable blow.

"The scale of the phenomenon was massive: in 2012 for Poland alone, over 890 thousand unique IP addresses were reported to be infected by Virut," claims CERT Polska. "Since 2006, Virut has been one of the most disturbing threats active on the Internet. In late 2012 Symantec estimated the size of its botnet at 300,000 machines, while Kaspersky reported that Virut was responsible for 5.5% of infections in Q3 2012, making it the fifth most widespread threat of the time."

Among the domains the incident response team took over and sinkholed were also a few .pl domains previously used to host the Virut malware, its C&C IRC servers, and even Zeus and Palevo malware.

The Virut malware has, in the past, been mostly distributed via infected removable media and file sharing. But more recent version are capable of infecting HTML files, injecting an invisible iframe that would download Virut from a remote site, say the researchers.

Computers enslaved in the Virut botnet were used for spamming, DDoS attack, malware propagation, and similar malicious activities.

Newest Java update doesn't fix fresh critical vulnerabilities

Another week, another zero-day threatening millions of Java users.

As you might remember, last week Oracle released Java 7 Update 11, which patched the zero-day vulnerability that was being misused in attacks in the wild.

WTF is... Weightless?

Weightless, the would-be world standard that allows devices to talk to devices without human intervention, is set to reach its first major release milestone this spring. Version 1.0 of the technology specification is set to be published in the March-April timeframe and then it will be able to begin making the much-hyped but yet to be delivered ‘internet of things’ start to happen, or so its backers believe.

IoT is about making it possible for devices to communicate autonomously, rather than solely as carriers of human conversation, be it vocal, video or textual. It’s a fluffy, Web 2.0 term for the old notion of machine-to-machine (M2M) communication, a business which has been steadily growing over the past two decades, primarily on the back of expanding cellular networks run by operators keen to be seen enabling more serious stuff than Facebook updates and text messages for teenagers.