Anonymous Wikipedia editors caught red handed
An online tool that claims to reveal the identity of organisations that edit Wikipedia pages has revealed that the CIA was involved in editing entries. Wikipedia Scanner allegedly shows that workers on the agency's computers made edits to the page of Iran's president. It also purportedly shows that the Vatican has edited entries about Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams. The tool, developed by US researchers, trawls a list of 5.3m edits and matches them to the net address of the editor. Wikipedia is a free online encyclopaedia that can be created and edited by anyone. Most of the edits detected by the scanner correct spelling mistakes or factual inaccuracies in profiles. However, others have been used to remove potentially damaging material or to deface sites. On the profile of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the tool indicates that a worker on the CIA network reportedly added the exclamation "Wahhhhhh!" before a section on the leader's plans for his presidency. A warning on the profile of the anonymous editor reads: "You have recently vandalised a Wikipedia article, and you are now being asked to stop this type of behaviour." Other changes that have been made are more innocuous, and include tweaks to the profile of former CIA chief Porter Goss and celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey. When asked whether it could confirm whether the changes had been made by a person using a CIA computer, an agency spokesperson responded: "I cannot confirm that the traffic you cite came from agency computers. "I'd like in any case to underscore a far larger and more significant point that no one should doubt or forget: The CIA has a vital mission in protecting the United States, and the focus of this agency is there, on that decisive work." The site also indicates that a computer owned by the US Democratic Party was used to make changes to the site of right-wing talk show host Rush Limbaugh. The changes brand Mr Limbaugh as "idiotic," a "racist", and a "bigot". An entry about his audience now reads: "Most of them are legally retarded." The IP address is registered in the name of the Democratic National Headquarters. A spokesperson for the Democratic Party said that the changes had not been made on its computers. Instead, they said that the "IP address is the same as the DCCC". The DCCC, or Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, is the "official campaign arm of the Democrats" in the House of Representatives and shares a building with the party. A spokesperson for Wikipedia said the tool helped prevent conflicts of interest. "We really value transparency and the scanner really takes this to another level," they said. "Wikipedia Scanner may prevent an organisation or individuals from editing articles that they're really not supposed to." BBC News website users contacted the corporation to point out that the tool also revealed that people inside the BBC had made edits to Wikipedia pages.

Sprint May Spend $5 Billion To Build WiMax Network
Sprint Nextel laid out its financial targets for its WiMax network, saying it could spend as much as $5 billion over three years to construct the nationwide broadband network. The No. 3 wireless carrier, which is attempting to turn its subscriber growth around, is spending $2.5 billion through next year to build a high-speed network it hopes will differentiate itself and draw new customers. Sprint said it could spend an additional $2.5 billion through 2010 to expand the network, depending on the success of the service. Sprint, which unveiled the "Xohm" brand as the name for its WiMax business, said it expects revenue of $2 billion to $2.5 billion from the network in 2010.

iPhones not good for texting
Users of Apple's iPhone can only compose text messages at half the speed achieved by users of conventional Qwerty and numeric phone keyboards, new research has revealed. Chicago-based usability consultancy User Centric said that the iPhone's touchscreen is "potentially problematic" for sending text messages. User Centric tested the iPhone's SMS features with frequent texters to see how rapidly they could adapt to the iPhone's touch keyboard. All 20 participants sent at least 15 messages per week. Ten participants owned phones with a full Qwerty keypad and 10 owned phones with a numeric keyboard. None of the participants owned an iPhone. Each participant typed six fixed-length text messages on their own phone and six on an iPhone. It took Qwerty users almost twice as long to create the same message on the iPhone as it did on their Qwerty phone. While there was improvement over time, the difference persisted even after using the iPhone for 30 minutes. For Qwerty users, texting was fast and accurate. But when they switched to the iPhone, they were frustrated with the touch sensitive keyboard. In contrast to Qwerty users, numeric users used the 'multi-tap' method of entering text messages on their phones, pressing individual number keys multiple times to get a desired letter or character to appear.

Skype hangs up on users
Skype customers around the world have been locked out of the popular VoIP service this morning because of what the company describes as "peer-to-peer network issues". The service has been down all morning UK time, with connectivity returning for irregular short periods and then dropping off, according to users. A Skype company blog carried an apology today for the connectivity issues. "Due to peer-to-peer network issues there are problems with Skype login. This issue is being investigated. We will give new updates when the issue has been resolved. We apologize for any inconvenience," said the entry. Since going to press Skype has issued the following statement: "UPDATED: Some of you may be having problems logging in to Skype. Our engineering team has determined that it's a software issue and hopes to have this resolved quickly. "Meanwhile, you can simply leave your Skype client running and as soon as the issue is resolved, you will be logged in. We apologize for the inconvenience."

The FCC trying shut the door on free wireless broadband
The Federal Communications Commission is seeking to shut the door on a plan by a group of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to offer free wireless broadband Internet service nearly everywhere in the U.S., the chief executive of the group said. M2Z Networks Inc. issued a statement in which it said it would take the FCC to court in an attempt to force the agency to conduct a thorough analysis of the plan before it determined whether it would back it. The Menlo Park, Calif., company has proposed taking 25 megahertz of spectrum that is currently vacant and using it to build a wireless broadband Internet network to provide free service to 95% of Americans within a decade. In addition to the backing of well-known Silicon Valley venture capitalists who count among their earlier investments Amazon.com Inc., Netscape, Google Inc., social-networking site MySpace and TiVO Inc., the plan has the backing of a number of prominent lawmakers. In order for the M2Z plan to succeed, it would require the FCC to hand over 25 megahertz of spectrum, which goes against a principle established a decade ago that the agency should sell off any spectrum in an auction. In exchange for being given the spectrum, M2Z would return 5% of any gross revenue its network derived to the U.S. Treasury. The company would then use that spectrum to construct a wireless broadband network covering 95% of the U.S. population within 10 years. The company would seek to gain a return on its investment by offering access to the network on a wholesale basis. A group of high-tech companies including Google, Intel, eBay and Yahoo had lobbied the FCC to mandate that another swath of spectrum being sold early next year be operated on a wholesale basis. The companies were ultimately unsuccessful in their campaign.

Viagra spam edges out pump-and-dump
Pump-and-dump spam, which dominated inboxes in the first half of the year, has given way to image spam and messages pushing 'sexual enhancement' drugs, according to a report from security firm BitDefender. In the seven months since January, BitDefender found that 75% of all image spam was penny-stock related, while text-based spam was the preferred choice for drug-related topics. Spam messages for sexual enhancement and weight loss drugs accounted for 56%of all text spam. This was followed by spam hawking replica watches, which came third in BitDefender's image and text spam lists. New types of spam have also emerged in 2007, most notably hosted-image spam, which instead of containing an image provides a link to a website hosting the spam. Spam with attachments, such as a PDF file, has also become more prevalent since the beginning of 2007. The latest measures used by spammers to try to defeat filters are malformed mail boundaries, which make it hard to unpack emails for inspection, and the use of malformed HTML code in an attempt to confuse parsers.

Travelocity Fined for Cuba Bookings
In a first for an online travel company, Travelocity.com has been fined by federal regulators for booking trips between the U.S. and Cuba, in violation of a 45-year-old embargo. Travelocity.com this month paid $182,750 to settle a complaint brought by the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control, which said the company violated the prohibition nearly 1,500 times between January 1998 and April 2004. The agency's complaint said Travelocity "provided travel-related services in which Cuba or Cuban nationals had an interest by arranging air travel and hotel reservations to, from, with or within Cuba without an OFAC license." "The trips to Cuba were unintentionally permitted to be booked by consumers online because of some technical failures several years ago, and it's just now being finally settled with OFAC," a Travelocity spokesman said in an email. "In no way did the company intend to allow bookings for trips to Cuba, and the company has fully cooperated with OFAC and implemented corrective measures."

Hotmail passes Gmail in webmail storage race
The bar in free web-based email has just been raised – this time by Microsoft. The software giant in Redmond on Wednesday said that it would bump its 2GB storage limit for Hotmail users up to 5GB. The storage race may have started with Gmail, but now Google’s webmail service sits in last spot of the “big three” with under 2.9GB of storage. Yahoo still leads the pack with its advertised unlimited storage. More than twice the storage isn’t the only thing new for Hotmail users. Hotmail has also taken a page from Gmail’s playbook and now blocks images and links in messages from unknown senders as protection from spammers and phishing scams. The new version also opens up email forwarding, but free accounts may only forward to other Hotmail accounts – and area that Gmail is still ahead. .

Couple tries to name baby 'at' symbol
A Chinese couple seeking a distinctive and modern name for their child chose the commonly used Internet 'at' symbol, much to the consternation of Chinese officials. The unidentified couple and the attempted naming were cited by a Chinese government official as an example of bizarre names creeping into the Chinese language. The father "said 'the whole world uses it to write e-mails and translated into Chinese it means 'love him,'"' Li Yuming, the vice director of the State Language Commission, said at a news conference. The symbol pronounced in English as 'at' sounds like the Chinese phrase "love him." Written Chinese does not use an alphabet but is comprised of characters, sometimes making it difficult to develop new words for new or foreign things and ideas. In their quest for a different name, Li said that the parents of baby '@' were not alone. As of last year, only 129 surnames accounted for 87% of all surnames in China, Li said, suggesting that the uniformity drove people to find more individual given names. "There was even a 'Zhao-A,' a 'King Osrina' and other extremely individualistic names," Li said, according to a transcript of the news conference posted on the government's main web site, http://www.gov.cn. Li did not say whether police, who are the arbiters of names because they issue identity cards, rejected baby '@' and the others. But nationwide last year there were 60 million people's names that used "unfamiliar characters," Li said.

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