Media Rights -- Graham Duff, the director of ThoroughVisioN, the company that holds the rights to all thoroughbred racing in Victoria as well as all events of the Australian Jockey Club and the Sydney Turf Club in New South Wales, said that ThoroughVisioN will make a decision in March as to who will receive the broadcasting rights. ThoroughVisioN has heard presentations from Perrin Legal, Telstra Media, Tentendigital, Sky Channel and John Singleton.
Virus Alert -- Antivirus and security companies say that "Mydoom," the new virus that emerged this week, is shattering records for computer infections. Also known as "Shimgapi" and "Novarg," the worm has spread to 144 countries and has been detected in one out of every 12 e-mails, according to Mark Sunner, chief technology officer at e-mail security company MessageLabs. The "Sobig.F" virus that struck in August was detected in only one of every 17 messages. Mydoom arrives in e-mails with various subject lines, but "Hello" and "test" are the most common ones. The body of the message is typically filled with technical computer jargon designed to mimic automatically generated messages from e-mail servers. Two common examples of message bodies are "the message contains unicode characters and has been sent as a binary attachment," and "The message cannot be represented in 7-bit ASCII encoding and has been sent as a binary attachment." The e-mails are accompanied by an attachment that is infected with the virus. Like Sobig.F, Mydoom contains a Trojan that gives hackers access to an infected system.
Mobile Stats -- Wireless experts EMC have released "EMC World Cellular Data Metrics," a report that estimates that the total number of mobile data subscribers in the world should surpass 115 million by the end of January. Most of the growth is occurring in Asia, where e-mail and messaging are the most popular services. Meanwhile, ringtones, logos, gaming and music are more popular services in Europe. EMC says that while adult content and gambling are still in their infancy in Europe, they are growing in popularity in Japan and Korea.
Round Two in the WTO -- A second World Trade Organization panel hearing began today as part of Antigua and Barbuda's dispute with the United States. The hearing is expected to last three days. Afterward, the panel will begin preparing its findings. The first hearing began on Dec. 10, with both parties presenting statements. Representatives from the European Union, Mexico and Canada also challenged U.S. anti-gaming policy by offering evidence of their own to the dispute panel.
DDoS Prevention -- Riverhead Networks, a company that specializes in detecting and blocking distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, has developed two new products, the Riverhead Guard XT and the Riverhead Detector XT, as part of their next generation of security. The Riverhead Detector XT monitors traffic flows and identifies DDoS threats immediately. The Detector XT alerts the Riverhead Guard XT which then diverts traffic addressed to the target and removes malicious packets while allowing legitimate messages to pass.