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The russian website involved in last week's high-profile Internet attack has finally been shut down. The attack primarily involved compromising webservers with vulnerable copies of Microsoft's IIS webserver, and using known vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer to download malicious code from a Russian webserver to the user's computer.

“Internet service providers and law enforcers, working together with Microsoft, identified the origination point of the attack in Russia and shut it down on Thursday,” Microsoft said in a statement released late on Saturday.

The Download.Ject program was not a virus or computer worm, Microsoft said, describing it as a “targeted manual attack by individuals or entities towards a specific server”.

MosNews has this story.

Bradley Edwards, a scientist, believes that developing carbon technology will make the construction of a space elevator possible within the next decade.

Edwards believes that sections of cable could be launched into space on rockets and then secured to a satellite. A “climber” – his version of an elevator car – would then be attached to the cable and used to add more nanotubes until it stretched down to earth.

The cable would then be attached to a platform on the Equator, near the Pacific coast of South America, which would be mobile to allow the cable to be moved to get out of the path of orbiting satellites.

The elevator would be powered by a laser on the platform which would aim concentrated light at the lift’s photosensitive cells and create enough electricity to move the elevator between earth and the docking satellite above.

The Sunday Herald has this story.

Liquor Baron Vijay Mallya of UB/Kingfisher fame, is all set to launch a new low-cost airline, tentatively called Kingfisher Airlines.

The no-frills airline will have a fleet of eight aircraft in the beginning. The company will file its application for a licence to start the airline with the civil aviation ministry next week.

The aircraft will be partially taken on lease, while some will be acquired by the company. The airline, to be based in Bangalore, will cover all the major metro and non-metro routes.

"Though it will be a no-frill low-cost carrier, it will be a different experience. We will cover all the important routes," Mallya said.

Air Deccan, India's other low-cost airline is also based in Bangalore. Rediff has this story. The Economic Times is also carrying a report.

Hutchison Essar has bought Chennai based Aircel for a reported value of Rs. 1200 cr, making it the largest operator in Chennai.

Hutch, which was not present in the Tamil Nadu circle, by acquiring Aircel Cellular, will become the market leader, with close to 45% marketshare. The other three operators in the Tamil Nadu circle are BSNL (4 lakh subscribers), BPL (3.2 lakh subscribers) and Bharti (2.6 lakh subscribers).

The fact that Aircel was up for grabs was in the air for quite sometime. This was further strengthened when Aircel acquired RPG Cellular in Chennai in December last year for a consideration of Rs 209 crore.

The Economic Times is carrying this article.

The US Congress has endorsed a bill that attempts to rein in spyware in downloaded computer programs.

The legislation, dubbed the SPY ACT, would require a user's permission before a program could be downloaded, and the sender would need to clearly state the software's purpose. It also prohibits hijacking of home pages, keystroke logging, and sending ads that cannot be closed by shutting down the computer.

PCWorld is carrying this report.

Paris-based Reporters Without Borders has reported that China is the largest detainer of cyber-dissidents in the world.

China also has highly developed technology for email interception and censorship, the group said.

But much of the censorship in China is self-censorship, the group said, with Internet media companies such as Yahoo, Sina.com and Sohu.com toeing the government line on content deemed unacceptable.

China's Foreign Ministry said Thursday the press group's comments were "irresponsible."

Chinese authorities lump political dissent, including any mention of the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests along with pornography as illegal content.

Reuters has this article.

With the initial success of SpaceShipOne behind us, Wired is taking a look at the future of private space flight, and the future of the X-Prize Foundation, and it's impact on the research and development community worldwide.

"Stage one is where we are now -- it's a research and development test-pilot stage," he said. "It's still dangerous, and people may die working out the demons in their systems."

The second stage will start when the first paying passenger gets strapped into a craft like SpaceShipOne. That could happen in the next couple of years if government regulations allow it, he said.

"People will be flying who realize it's dangerous, realize the risks involved, and frankly that's part of the attraction," he said. "It's extreme-adventure space flight."

Read the whole article here.

After transferring 840GB of data halfway round the world in under half an hour, Sprint and Sweden's academic research network are claiming the fastest Internet transmission.

The two organisations announced late last week that they had managed to send nearly 840 gigabytes of data across a distance of 16,346km (10,157 miles) in less than 27 minutes, at an average speed of 4.23 gigabits per second.

This was equal to 69,073 terabit metres per second (a product of the speed of the transmission and its distance), which exceeded the previous record set by Caltech and CERN earlier this year.

ZDNet is carrying this story.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports that Microsoft to turn over more of its programs to open-source software developers. This is in direct contradiction to it's previous stance on matter.

The article is available here.

Declan McCullagh has penned an interesting write-up in his column on ZDNet, outlining some of the shocking legislation that is being considered in Europe.

A key section of the treaty should shock Americans. It would criminalize using a computer to "insult" someone based on national origin, race, religion, and so on.

That's right. If you forward a Mick-and-Paddy-in-a-bar Irish joke to your friends through e-mail, the Eurocrats have concluded that you're a criminal who should be locked up, pronto.

Some serious EU bashing, with a cute li'l disclaimer at the bottom.