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Same thing that also happened in Europe. Nikkei Research Survey say, Japan citizen which have age more than 50 year is often equal with the youngster which surfing at the cyber world. In average old man citizen in Japan use the Internet to arrange traveling and read the news. "Citizen of Japan between 50 till 69 years old which familiar by Internet in average spending 2,4 hour/day for online," said Nikkei Research.

That Number is not far differ from the online average of the entire age group, there is 2,5 hour/day. The old man of Japan, man and woman, using Internet to read the news, opening map, exercising eat manner and restaurant guidance, and also to order the air transport ticket, train, and hotel. Some old woman of Japan say, they also enjoy the surfing to learn about life style and trend, like fashion, cosmetic, and food. But, citizen of Japan in 50 till 69 year age not so interested by blog and online community site.

On the contrary, young man of Japan very interested in blog and online community site. Japan old man also not so interested to buy recent technological device, music, and multimedia content which can be ordered online. This also quite contrary with the habit of online expense of young man of Japan.

About 41% pensioner chosen surfing in Internet, while 39% pensioner chosen to gardening and setting right house.

Traveling and take the air is become the third choice to all the pensioner with the percentage about 28%. Most activity is often conducted by all pensioner in Internet is send the e-mail with the percentage of 84%, and also look for the information as much 83%.Almost half from surveyed pensioner is had ordered the travel ticket through the Internet and one from three of pensioner have tried the Internet banking.

About 28% pensioner in England use the Internet to read the online news . About two from three pensioner routinely communicate with its son or daughter through the Internet. And, four from ten England pensioner use the Internet to communicate with their grandchild.

In the statement, cabinet minister of Saudi Arabia agreeing the draft of Information Technology Cyber Law which have been proposed by the kingdom parliament.

This approval, like reported on Reuters.com, Tuesday (27/3/2007), used by Saudi Arabia kingdom to get the authentication to execute the penalization.

This law applicable to arrest all site criminal or enter the site without permission with an purpose to change the layout or damage it. Others, its also affirm the enjoinment of hand phone abuse which equiped by the camera and dissimilar appliance used to impinge other people privacy, for example with making a picture without permission.

Hand phone technology in Saudi Arabia in fact have been opposed by conservative Saudi Arabia police union with the existence of hard Islam law. During some month in 2004, the state also prohibit the hand phone sales transaction. unfortunately, enjoinment to discontinue the decrease of technology new trend have been failed.

Country with the youth population which rapidly grow also very tight in observing the user of Internet with always following to consumer footstep. Not only that, sexual problem and political content is blocked and also some forum which followed by liberals and Islam extremist also forcibly discontinued.

"This time student don't even know who omit two door in side its room. Hostel culture, like night of friendship and socialization among the student, have losed. This very indisposed," say the Gopalan yesterday.

Others, because preoccupation play the internet, a lot of student spending the night till early morning. As a result, a lot of them do not come in morning class or attend but sleep in class.

During the time, IIT Mumbai give the unlimited internet access for its student which live in the hostel to facilitate they to do the shool duty. But, a lot of student use the the facility for chatting or play game. In consequence, start yesterday, at 23.00 AM, the internet access is shutdown . Its purpose, student immediately go away from the computer and start to associate with its friend. Or except that, they can sleep earlier.

IIT Mumbai is one among seven IIT campus which exist in India region. IIT known as one of best technic university in the world. But because the intense of emulation and difficulty of curriculum, IIT student often experience of the depresion and abnormal life style. In the last two year, two student of IIT Mumbai is reported being suicide. Not to mention, some other attempt suicide.

New policy of ITT Mumbai direct protested by the student. " Wait until they oblige student to hear the "sleep baby"song before sleep,"said Rajiv, one of the IIT student.

Anyway, protest which emerge do not make the IIT manager backward. Oppositely,they also had a plan to apply the same order in other IIT hostel in India.

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UUSee distributes live and on-demand TV from CCTV, China's largest TV broadcaster; CSAT, China's largest satellite TV company; and Beijing TV. The content includes subtitled U.S. shows like "CSI: Miami" and "24."

The investment round was led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Highland Capital Partners. It included Steamboat Ventures, the venture-capital vehicle of The Walt Disney Co. Two other firms, Sequoia Capital and Susquehanna International Group, invested in UUSee in a previous round and joined in this one.

The site has 36 million registered users, making it China's largest Web TV operator, according to Dan Nova of Highland.

"It really is the country's and the world's largest Web TV operator," Nova said. He will join UUSee's board along with DFJ's Barry Schuler, the former chief executive of America Online.

There's no close equivalent to UUSee in the U.S., where the TV shows and movies that are available online are spread out among several sites owned by TV networks and online titans like Google Inc.

"There's no one leading Web TV operator here in the United States," Nova said. "In many ways I think China is a lot more advanced, when it comes to the organization and distribution of video content."

UUSee distributes the videos from servers, but to reduce long-distance Internet traffic, it also has a feature that uses viewers' computers to distribute video to other, nearby viewers. It's the only peer-to-peer network approved by Chinese telecom regulators, Nova said.

"When you look at the government approval, the content relationships, the management team, and the growth and acceptance by the Chinese community, one could conclude that they're in a pole position to capture the Web TV market," Nova said.

UUSee makes money from ads and from premium text-messaging services used to vote in contests.

Nova expects UUSee to have revenue of at least $10 million this year, and to become profitable on a quarterly basis by the end of the year.

PETER SVENSSON
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The report by US market research firm comScore Networks found that 747 million people aged 15 and up used the Internet worldwide in January 2007, a 10 percent increase from January 2006.

The United States still held the largest number of users with 153 million, but growth was just two percent, comScore found.

China was second overall with 86.7 million, according to comScore, but growth was 20 percent. The figure differs from the official Chinese estimate of 137 million, which includes users in cybercafes and other public locations.

The strongest growth was seen in India, where the number of users increased 33 percent to 21.1 million. That placed India with the eighth largest Internet population, just behind France.

Russia saw its number of users up 21 percent to 12.7 million.

In terms of overall Internet users, the highest numbers after the United States and China were, in order, Japan, Germany, Britain, South Korea, France, India, Canada and Italy.

"The importance of the worldwide Internet population continues to grow," said Bob Ivins, managing director of comScore Europe.

"Internet users outside the US now account for 80 percent of the world's online population, with rapidly developing countries experiencing double-digit growth rates year-over-year."

Canadians spent the most time online, with the average user on the Web for 39.6 hours each month. That was followed by Israel, South Korea, the United States and Britain, which all have high broadband penetration.

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Entrepreneurs have been taking advantage of a five-day grace period to sample millions of domain names, keeping the relative few that might generate advertising revenues and dropping the rest before paying.

It's akin to buying new clothes on a charge card only to return them for a full refund after wearing them to a big party.

The grace period was originally designed to rectify legitimate mistakes, such as registrants mistyping the domain name they are about to buy. But with computer automation and a burgeoning online advertising market, entrepreneurs have turned the return policy into a loophole for generating big bucks.

Experts believe spammers and scam artists are also starting to use the grace period as a source of free, disposable Web addresses.

With up to 6 million names tied up at any given time through a practice known as domain name tasting, individuals and businesses are having even greater difficulty finding good names, particularly in the already-crowded ".com" space.

"The system really doesn't work to the advantage of people who have legitimate reasons for wanting names," Frederick Felman, chief marketing officer with MarkMonitor, a brand-protection firm. "It allows people with criminal or speculative intent to dominate."

Cybersquatting has been around for more than a decade, and scores of entrepreneurs have made thousands and even millions of dollars reselling names they had bought for as little as $6 each. With tasting, entrepreneurs generally aren't grabbing names to resell but to generate traffic and share in online advertising revenues.

The Internet's key oversight agency for domain names, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, has for years required operators of major Web suffixes such as ".com" to refund cancellations within five days. Tasting became more practical about two years ago when automation allowed newly available ".com" names to go live almost immediately, providing an additional half-day for sampling.

Millions of domain names daily

The practice has spiked, with an average tasting of 1.2 million names each day in December, compared with 7,200 two years earlier, according to data from Name Intelligence Inc., which analyzes domain name patterns. Legitimate registrations made up 2 percent of the registrations at the end of 2006, down from about half in 2004.

In an e-mail statement, one company that engages in tasting, Wang Lee Domains, said the practice was "perfectly legal" and brings "customers to the companies that advertise."

Moniker Online Services LLC, which lets customers try out domains for a small service charge it keeps, said companies can identify the right names to buy and not overspend for ones that don't matter. Monte Cahn, Moniker's founder and chief executive, said many leading brands do it, although he would not name them.

"Tasting is similar to test driving a car before you buy it or doing a walkthrough of a house before you buy," Cahn said.

The loophole works this way:

Speculators write software to automatically register hundreds or thousands of names. Some are variants of trademarks or generic keywords that Internet users are likely to type — or mistype. Others are names grabbed after their original owners fail to renew.

During the grace period, the entrepreneur puts up a Web page featuring keyword search ads and receives a commission on each ad clicked. Services like Google Inc.'s AdSense for Domains and Yahoo Inc.'s Domain Match help large domain name owners set them up, even as the search companies officially oppose abuses in tasting.

Addresses likely to generate more than the $6 annual cost of domain name are kept — not a high threshold given how lucrative search advertising is these days.

The rest are thrown back into the pool on the fourth or fifth day, only to be grabbed by another group of domain name tasters.

"Everyone's trash is someone else's gold," said Jay Westerdal, president of Name Intelligence. "You'll see this with three or four companies that keep going through the trash of everybody else."

And because the process is automated — the names are grabbed as soon as they are let go — legitimate registrants barely have a chance, Westerdal said.

The department store chain Neiman Marcus Group Inc. even filed a federal lawsuit last year accusing the registration company Dotster Inc. of tasting hundreds of names meant to lure Internet users who mistype Web addresses. At one point, the lawsuit said, the misspelled NeimuMarcus.com featured ads for Target, Nordstrom and other rivals.

David Steele, an attorney representing the retailer, said Neiman Marcus could have placed ads on those sites as well, but "should Neiman Marcus have to pay ... for directing people back to their Web site?"

The two parties recently agreed to settle, though Steele said details won't be announced until at least this week (Dotster declined comment). He said his law firm, Christie, Parker & Hale LLP, also was preparing litigation against other tasters.

Operators of the ".org" database have tried to strike back, winning approval in November to charge a restocking fee.

But VeriSign Inc., which runs ".com" and ".net," has not publicly backed one. The oversight agency ICANN said it was still studying the extent of the problem.

Critics of the system say VeriSign and ICANN both benefit from the thousands of names that are tasted and kept, collecting fees proportional to the number of names sold.

VeriSign said decisions should follow community-wide discussions.

"The risk is you don't want to necessarily move too fast or have a knee-jerk reaction without understanding the ramification," said Michael Denning, general manager with VeriSign's Digital Brand Management Services, which encourages companies to register additional domain names before tasters can get to them.

The 'kiting" variant

The practice, meanwhile, shows no signs of waning.

A newer variant, sometimes called "kiting," involves the same company reregistering the same name every fourth or fifth day to hang onto it in perpetuity, without ever paying for it.

Anti-spam experts also suggest that spammers and scam artists are turning to the loophole to register new names every couple of days to avoid detection.

"We see them using hundreds and hundreds of domains, and even at $5 a domain, that's costing them thousands of dollars, which they probably don't want to be losing," said Matt Sergeant, senior anti-spam technologist at MessageLabs Ltd.

Steele, the Neiman Marcus lawyer, said many of the dispute-resolution rules written for the pre-tasting days are no longer effective.

"By the time you expend the time and effort to track and figure out who's going after what names, they have moved on," he said. "A day where 100 Neiman Marcus names get registered is not an uncommon day."

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Evidence Offered

During a one-day trial that ended Tuesday, prosecutors showed how at least 50,000 computers were infected by the two defendants, who are 20 and 28 years old. Police have not released their names. The pair used a malicious program called "Toxbot," a worm that can be used to gain remote control of a computer and log keystrokes, prosecutors said.

Prosecutors also charge that the defendants threatened an advertising software maker, 180Solutions, now renamed Zango, with a denial-of-service attack after a dispute over payment. Zango settled with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission in November for $3 million after concern that distributors of its software were installing it on peoples' computers without their consent, often by exploiting vulnerabilities in operating systems or Web browsers.

Prosecutors also allege the pair were involved in phishing schemes, where fraudulent Web sites are constructed to harvest personal information such as bank-account or credit-card details. The two used a Trojan horse called "Wayphisher", which on an infected machine can redirect a Web site request from a legitimate bank site to a phishing site.
Fines, Jail Sought

Prosecutors want a three-year sentence for the 20-year-old and two years for the 28-year-old and and each to pay $38,000 to the Dutch government, Leppens said. A judge will return a verdict in the case on January 30.

Four others involved in the ring who are facing lesser charges will go to trial later this year, Leppens said.

The various schemes caused at least $75,000 in losses to victims, through online purchases and other actions, Leppens said.

Jeremy Kirk, IDG News Service
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While Bianco has yet to make a landmark discovery, he savors the rush of teetering on the cutting edge of research.

Never before have amateur astronomers had so much unfettered access to celestial data once available only to scientists with huge telescopes. In the latest frontier of astronomy, professionals are increasingly enlisting the aid of novices with personal computers to help pore through images and data — all in pursuit of the next great breakthrough.

"We're in the golden age of astronomy," said Bianco, who keeps his day job as a political science professor at Indiana University.

Thanks to technology, novices are effectively turning from lonely skywatchers to research assistants. Even before the rise of virtual astronomy, amateurs did everything from tracking asteroids to detecting supernova explosions to eyeing new comets.

In 1995, neophyte stargazer Thomas Bopp gained fame for co-discovering what would be known as Comet Hale-Bopp. Two years ago, in what was billed as the first such find by an amateur in 65 years, Jay McNeil of Kentucky took a picture of a new nebula — an illuminated cloud of gas and dust lit by what is believed to be a newborn star.

Since the late 1990s, virtual astronomy has boomed. One of the earliest online citizen scientist projects was SETI(at)home, which distributed software that created a virtual supercomputer by harnessing idle, Web-connected PCs to search for alien radio transmissions.

While the SETI project hums in the background as a screen saver, the newer efforts require more human thought.

Bianco belongs to an Internet project called Systemic, which boasts 750 amateur planet hunters. Astronomers have already discovered more than 200 planets in far-off solar systems using traditional methods, yet there are likely more out there.

Participants download software and rifle through data that measure the tiny gravitational wobble in a star's motions in search planets that orbit stars other than our sun. Users also try to decode simulated data of planetary systems invented by the project managers — a task that will help the professionals better understand real extrasolar planets.

To participate, users select a star — real or simulated — and adjust other variables such a planet's mass and orbital period by moving a slider back and forth on the screen. The goal is to design a planetary system that best fits the data and then publish the answer online.

So far, online users have pinpointed hundreds of potential candidates, but only about five might actually be real, said Systemic project head Greg Laughlin, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

"It's not an aimless game," he said.

Although the Systemic Web site provides the search tools, it doesn't promote any of the discoveries, Laughlin said. Amateurs who want to publicize their find need to look for another outlet, such as a scientific journal to get credit.

Laughlin is no stranger to Web-based astronomy. He helped start another project in which amateurs point their telescopes at potential extrasolar planetary systems and look at dimming starlight to learn about a planet's size and composition. Unlike Systemic, users have to buy expensive equipment — including telescopes and cameras — to participate.

Before Internet-based astronomy, it took a long time for novices to report their discoveries. High-speed, always-on Internet access has blurred the line between the professionals and amateurs, said Terry Mann, president of the Astronomical League, made up of over 240 U.S. amateur astronomy clubs.

Last year, Mann signed up to analyze a repository of online images of the first-ever microscopic grains of star dust brought back to Earth by a
NASA spacecraft.

The work is painstaking. Mann and her fellow 25,000 volunteers eye hundreds of thousands of digital images in search of minuscule carrot-shaped trails left by the capture of star dust, believed to be the leftovers from stellar explosions.

Mann has submitted 40 possible examples of star dust in the images. If correct, amateurs can get their names published in scientific papers written by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, which manages the Stardust(at)home project.

"Amateurs can do real science. We can actually help," Mann said.

Andrew Westphal, associate director of the Space Sciences Laboratory at Berkeley, praised amateurs — it would probably take his whole life to find all the dust sprinklings, he said.

"It's stunning how good they are. I think they're better at this than we are," Westphal said.

The Internet has also benefited professional astronomers, who often have to fight for scarce telescope time at major research observatories.

Since 2001, the National Science Foundation has funded a $10 million project to create a "national virtual observatory" that compiles data from ground and space-based telescopes — including dazzling images from the
Hubble Space Telescope and X-ray data from the Chandra Observatory. The project, which is still under development, is primarily used by professionals who want to go to one source to mine archival images. High school and college students are increasingly tapping into the Web site as well, said project manager Robert Hanisch of the Space Telescope Science Institute.

As far as amateur astronomer Bianco is concerned, the more people teasing out the mysteries of the cosmos, the better.

"It's going to take some time and collective effort to find what's out there," he said.

ALICIA CHANG
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