Celeb names banned from .xxx domain

Hundreds, possibly thousands of celebrities have had their names permanently banned from the new .xxx adults-only Internet domain, according to The Register.

Everyone from Justin Bieber to Piers Morgan has had their .xxx address placed into a permanent “reserved” status by the registry manager, ICM Registry.

This means that cyber squatters or crafty porn Web masters will not be able to register domains such as Beyonce.xxx or BritneySpears.xxx to drive traffic to their sites. It also means many celebrities will not have to pay to protect their personal brands in the forthcoming .xxx “sunrise period” or take cyber squatters to court in future.

Samsung has been banned from selling three models of its Galaxy smartphones in a number of European countries, reports the BBC.

The preliminary injunction was handed down by a court in the Netherlands, after Apple filed a claim for patent infringement.

It claimed that Samsung had copied technology owned by Apple relating to the way photos are displayed on mobile devices. The embargo is due to come into effect in seven weeks.

Hackers have infused an 18-month-old worm with Zeus financial malware to attack two-factor authentication and transaction signing systems used in online banking sessions, notes Computing.co.uk.

Configurations of the Win32.Ramnit worm, captured and reverse engineered by Trusteer, were found to incorporate tactics from the Zeus financial malware platform. Zeus source code was published on the Internet earlier this year.

Trusteer researchers found the method used to configure Ramnit to target a specific bank is identical to the one used by Zeus. This allows fraudsters to easily port Zeus configurations to Ramnit.

Nokia has unveiled three smartphones that will be released with the revamped Symbian Belle operating system later this year, as the company aims to tempt consumers with high-end specifications and NFC functionality, writes V3.co.uk.

The Nokia 700 is touted as the smallest touch-screen phone on the market, with dimensions of 110x51x9.7mm and a weight of just 96g. The handset comes with a 3.2-inch ClearBlack Amoled screen, 1GHz processor and 5MP camera.

Nokia will also ship the 700 with 2GB of memory, NFC, GPS, compass, Bluetooth and micro SD card support.