Internet nears address exhaustion

The last big blocks of the Internet's dwindling stock of addresses are about to be handed out, notes the BBC.

The event that triggers their distribution is widely expected to take place in the next few days. When that happens, each of the five regional agencies that hand out Internet addresses will get one of the remaining blocks of 16 million addresses.

The addresses in those last five blocks are expected to be completely exhausted by September 2011.

Google and the state of Connecticut have agreed to settle their dispute over the Web giant's Street View WiFi payload slurp, without going to court, reveals The Register.

In December, then Connecticut attorney-general Richard Blumenthal hit Google with a civil investigative demand - the equivalent of a subpoena - insisting that the company turn over the WiFi payload its Street View cars collected from insecure WiFi networks in the state. Google refused to do so.

New Connecticut attorney-general George Jepsen and consumer protection commissioner Jerry Farrell say the state has now reached an agreement with Google to settle the matter out of court.

The scale of Egypt's crackdown on the Internet and mobile phones amid deadly protests against the rule of president Hosni Mubarak is unprecedented in the history of the Web, experts said, writes the AFP.

US president Barack Obama, social networking sites and rights groups around the world all condemned the moves by Egyptian authorities to stop activists using cellphones and cyber technology to organise rallies.

"It's a first in the history of the Internet," Rik Ferguson, an expert for Trend Micro, the world's third biggest computer security firm, told AFP.

The former deputy head of WikiLeaks has unveiled an alternative site, OpenLeaks, after falling out with Julian Assange, reports V3.co.uk.

Daniel Domscheit-Berg unveiled the site, OpenLeaks.org, at the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland. He says the site would work with a variety of media partners and provide people with another conduit to pass on information in the public interest.

“We have to create transparency where it is refused,” said Domscheit-Berg.