Internet domain

A new Internet domain, .tel, that became available Wednesday has the potential to become a mobile phone book because of the way it stores and encrypts contact information, industry executives and analysts said.

A .tel domain name would allow individuals, businesses and organizations to store contact information -- telephone numbers, links to Web sites, e-mail addresses, instant messaging names and even identities for virtual games, like Xbox Live or Second Life, directly into the Domain Name System, or DNS.

The U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (CERT) has disclosed the discovery of defects in an essential component of everyday Internet operations.

The flaw was found at the heart of the Domain Name System -- the Internet "phone book" for translating Web URLs into the numerical IP addresses that networking computers use to deliver information. According to CERT, hackers could use a technique called DNS cache poisoning to place forged DNS data into the cache of a name server at any Internet domain.

The Internet's key oversight agency relaxed rules Thursday to permit the introduction of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of new Internet domain names to join ".com," making the first sweeping changes in the network's 25-year-old addressing system.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers unanimously approved the new guidelines on the final day of week-long meetings in Paris. ICANN also voted unanimously to open public comment on a separate proposal to permit addresses entirely in non-English languages for the first time.

Your new Internet browser is ready -- several of them, actually.

They're all free, so take your pick.

The Mozilla Foundation, whose Firefox browser has already snared over 18 percent of the world's Web surfers, has just introduced its latest upgrade, Firefox 3. For a nonprofit outfit, Mozilla can really sling the hype. The foundation practically dared us to visit getfirefox.com on Tuesday and download the new browser, in an effort to set a world record for the most file downloads in a single day. Suckers that we are, at least 7 million of us fell for it.