Information Policy

China sends its troops into cyberspace

The authorities are paying bloggers 50 cents a go to push messages on online forums: John McCain's campaign team has been at it. Wal-Mart was revealed as doing it. Sony in the past dabbled with it. Online, astroturfing - whereby stealth PR tactics are passed off as grassroots enthusiasm for a product or candidate - is flourishing. But in China, things have gone one step further - with the establishment of the country's 50-cent army.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/sep/22/chinathemedia.marketingandpr

100,000 .sg domain names registered

While some ccTLDs race past the one million registration mark, others, especially those for smaller countries, slowly add registrations. One to pass a milestone in recent days was the .sg ccTLD that passed the 100,000 registration mark last week.

http://www.domainpulse.com/2008/09/21/100000-sg-domain-names-registered/

Internet needs a strong system of self-regulation

by John Whittingdale is a Conservative MP and chairman of the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee Cyberspace does not lend itself well to censorship. But while policing every strand of the world wide web would be impossible, that does not mean it cannot be better regulated. It is almost impossible for some of the bigger websites, such as MySpace and YouTube, to screen everything. More than ten hours of video content is uploaded every minute, which means that websites have to rely upon their users to notify them of anything inappropriate.

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article4776357.ece

Govt can do more on cyber security: report

In March this year, governments from Australia, Britain, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States ran the largest-ever cyber war games, Cyber Storm II. Freedom of Information documents, obtained by AAP in Australia, show the participants, which included the private sector, were surprised by the "borderless nature" of cyber attacks and the "speed with which they can escalate".

http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,24897,24396122-5013044,00.html

Yahoo to transform Web ads with new system

Yahoo Chief Executive Jerry Yang told Reuters in an interview that publishers and advertisers would benefit from a more efficient process that would allow them to sell their products and services on more than one website at a time. Yang said the system, called APT, would be much simpler than the current process of selling banner ads through hundreds of websites - a time-consuming model with roots in traditional media like television and newspaper advertising. 'This system allows cross-selling between sales forces, it allows us to have visibility of what pricing is happening and where,' said Yang, who added the system could transform the online Web industry's inefficiencies in selling ads. Yahoo is hoping to build a system as efficient for online display advertising as the one run by Google Inc in search advertising. Google's market-leading search advertising sales system is largely automated via an auction bidding process. Yahoo's first APT partner will be the nearly 800 newspaper websites of the Newspaper Consortium which includes MediaNews Group. It will start to roll out APT in the fourth quarter, and from early 2009, will place Yahoo's own inventory on the system as well as other publishers and advertisers.

http://www.ejc.net/media_news/yahoo_to_transform_web_ads_with_new_system/