Burkina Faso Telecom workers were on strike again this month, leading to phone and internet interruptions. The country has only one internet service provider, Onatel, but the days of the telecom monopoly in Africa may ending. The Burkina Faso telecommunications authority fined Onatel 5 billion CFA francs ($8.5 million U.S.) in response to the strike, …
Firefox developer Mozilla has reclaimed an infringing domain name that was filed in bad faith reports IPPro The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Arbitration and Mediation Center last month that the registrant, which had concealed its identity by means of a privacy protection service, had registered mozilla-europe.com in bad faith and that it was identical …
The FCC’s rules prohibit Comcast and other companies from charging customers for services they didn’t explicitly sign-up for. In other words, just because you didn’t say “no” to a service or a piece of equipment doesn’t mean your telco can charge you for it. But according the settlement, customers were in some cases charged for …
Algeria has joined a growing list of countries to open rehab centres helping those who suffer from a web obsession. In South Korea, home of the world’s most connected population, digital detox camps have already treated thousands of children. According to South Korea’s Ministry of Family, 14 percent of South Korean teenagers are addicted to the internet. …
Following Yahoo’s September announcement of a data breach affecting 500 million user accounts, the company has made it more difficult for Yahoo Mail users to transition to another email service. At the beginning of October, Yahoo disabled an email forwarding feature, which would allow users to automatically redirect incoming emails sent to their Yahoo address to …
On 1 September 2016, an explosion caused a fire on a cargo ship docked in Hamburg, Germany. ICANN’s Public Meeting technical equipment was on board. The ship had departed Helsinki, Finland after ICANN56, and the equipment was bound for Hyderabad, India via Mumbai. ICANN had two containers – a 40-foot and a 20-foot container. It …
Swiss citizens have backed by a large margin a new law that will expand government surveillance powers, following a national referendum held in Switzerland on Sunday. In total, 65.5 percent were in favour, and 34.5 percent against. Under the new law, Switzerland’s intelligence agency, the Service de renseignement de la Confédération (SRC), will be allowed …
More than 600 new generic top-level domains—the characters that appear after the dot in website addresses—have been released to the public since 2014, but few have been of broad interest to online retailers. The addition of .shop and .shopping may spark retailers’ interest. Both go on sale to the general public later this month—.shop on …
Michael O’Rielly, one of the FCC’sFederal Communications Commissioners has blasted proponents of the IANA oversight transition to a new international community in a speech Tuesday, saying the threat of influence and censorship by oppressive regimes is real. Commissioner O’Rielly, said the Obama administration’s plans presents a real threat to the free flow of information online. …
A Ted Cruz led committee will today Wednesday, September 14th hold a hearing on “Protecting Internet Freedom: Implications of Ending U.S. Oversight of the Internet”. This follows the plans to complete IANA Stewardship Transition steps on October 1, 2016. This is unless House and Senate Republicans are successful in their calls to delay the transition …