Keno.com -- Canadian online gaming portal management company Gaming Transactions has begun beta testing its games at www.keno.com. The company acquired U.K.-based Keno Ltd., the company that owns the domain name, in September 2004 and has since then built the Web site's infrastructure, assembled a management team and contracted FourGround Image Inc to redevelop the site.
New UEFA Rules -- UEFA, the European Football League, is drafting a policy to prevent players, coaches referees and others associated with the sport from betting on games. The move follows the revelation of a major match fixing scandal in Germany, in which the results of at least 13 games are being questioned, with one referee admitting to fixing four of them. Germany is not, however, the only European country where betting or match fixing has taken place recently. A few months ago bookmakers reported suspicious betting on an otherwise insignificant game between Panionios and Dinamo Tbilisi, and last year a scandal involving several football clubs and mafia leaders erupted in Italy. The league took a major step last week toward preventing betting when it signed a memorandum of understanding with betting exchange Betfair, giving the league access to Betfair's records in cases in which suspicious behavior is detected.
Super Bowl DDoS. . . Or Not -- The threat of DDoS attacks worried many online sports book operators in the days preceding last year's Super Bowl, but a significant decrease in the number of attacks over the last few months eased a lot of minds in '05. Research firm Netcraft, which monitors the Web sites of 20 leading Internet sites, reported this week, however, that two British betting sites--Ukbetting and Totalbet--were brought offline for about six hours on Super Bowl Sunday. Netcraft originally speculated that the sites, both of whom are hosted by DDoS prevention specialist Prolexic, were knocked offline by DDoS attacks, but Prolexic CTO Barrett Lyon has since stated that the outage was caused by technical failures elsewhere and not related to a DDoS attack.
Adult Classification System -- England's Independent Mobile Classification Body (IMCB) on Monday published its rating system for adult content. The rules classify eight categories of adult content that will be restricted to mobile users under the age of 18 through age verification processes put in place by each of the mobile phone operators. The system does not apply to general Internet content, but in cases where the Internet is accessible via mobile phone, the operators can implement filters for protection. Gambling is classified as adult content, as is alcohol, explicit language, sex, nudity, violence, drugs, horror and "detailed descriptions of techniques that could be used in a criminal offense." The IMCB is a subsidiary of The Independent Committee for the Supervision of Standards of Telephone Information Services (ICSTIS), which was appointed by mobile phone operators to oversee the self-classification of new forms of commercial content on mobile phones.