naming

Siri is a by-the-book type of app; if a word is spelled a certain way, but is pronounced completely different, Siri doesn't care. Similar to how it handles punctuation, Siri will read or write using the exact information available to it.

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For years, I wanted a button on Gmail messages that said "import all this contact info into your address book." When Kwaga's WriteThat.Name service added just that ability--only without my even having to click a button--I eagerly signed up for a year's worth of service.

Now the French company is taking care of another item that should have been standard with Gmail and its paid-service equivalent in Google Apps: consolidating account data from up to three different Gmail accounts.

The company plans to announce and launch the service Wednesday, but it gave CNET News an … Read more

Several of Microsoft's online services suffered an outage last night but are reportedly all back up at this point.

The company's Office 365, Hotmail, SkyDrive, and various Windows Live services were down throughout the world for a period of around three hours. Microsoft acknowledged the outage late yesterday in its Inside Windows Live blog and on its Office 365 Twitter feed and said that it was working to resolve the issue.

After a couple of hours of investigation, the company pinned the cause on a DNS (Domain Name System) issue and said that it was starting to see … Read more

Porn and adult entertainment sites can now officially register under the .xxx domain, the domain's operator, ICM Registry, announced today.

The new .xxx top-level domain is open not just to porn sites but to nonporn sites that want to block the use of their names on the .xxx domain. Located in Florida, ICM is managing and supporting the new domain but will work with 50 individual registrars around the world to handle the actual registrations.

Promoting the advantages of .xxx to potential customers, ICM said that holders of the domain name will be able to tap into global marketing … Read more

A U.K. domain name registrar confirmed today that an attack on its system redirected traffic for some of its customers' sites to a Web page controlled by hackers.

Fewer than a dozen domain names registered by NetNames were affected by the attack, which occurred on Sunday, according to Stuart Fuller, a spokesman for NetNames parent Group NBT. He declined to name the sites that were redirected.

A list on Zone-H, which retains copies of Web defacements, shows seven sites registered by NetNames or affiliate Ascio that were affected by the Domain Name System (DNS) redirect attack on Sunday, including … Read more

The Sri Lankan branch of Anonymous claims to have hacked into the DNS servers of Symantec, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and several other large organizations over the past few days.

Posting the news and records of its exploits on Pastebin, the group is taking credit for launching "DNS Cache Snoop Poisoning" attacks against its victims.

DNS cache snooping is the process whereby hackers can query a DNS server to find out which domain names are being resolved into IP addresses.

DNS cache poisoning is a method through which hackers are able to insert malicious and fake records into the … Read more

OpenDNS, Google, and a few others have built a new technology into their Internet operations that's designed to speed up the delivery of data around the globe.

The technology augments the Domain Name System that provides the numeric Internet Protocol (IP) address needed to get data to an Internet domain such as news.com. Those that developed it include OpenDNS, Google, and VeriSign. Called edns-client-subnet in technical circles, or more ambitiously the "Global Internet Speedup," it uses geographic information associated with IP addresses to help computers fetching data get it from the closest--and therefore fastest--server.

"Anybody … Read more

The Senate's controversial Protect IP Act, which would significantly expand both public and private enforcement of online copyright and trademark infringement, is returning to center stage.

That was the message yesterday from U.S. Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), who led a town hall meeting yesterday in Palo Alto, Calif. Goodlatte, a leader in Congress on technology policy, told a crowd of over a hundred that the House is working on its own version of the Senate bill.

Protect IP passed unanimously out of committee in May and now awaits a full floor vote. Goodlatte acknowledged that the Senate version … Read more

A federal court has sanctioned the efforts of U.S. law enforcement to seize domain names belonging to suspected pirate sites.

In February, U.S. customs agents seized the domain names Rojadirecta.com and Rojadirecta.org. In June, Puerto 80, the owners of the domain names, filed a lawsuit and asked that the names be returned.

Yesterday, however, a U.S. district court in Manhattan denied Puerto 80's request. According to court documents, Rojadirecta was being used to publish links that led users to illegal Web broadcasts of live sporting events and other pay-per-view shows, which is a copyright violation.

Managers at Puerto 80 said that the seizing of the domain names would cause a financial hardship and violate First Amendment rights of readers and viewers since many posted comments to the site's forum. Critics of domain-name seizures say that the practice could be used as a form of censorship. Anytime that the government wants to silence dissension on a Web site, all it need do is claim that the site is guilty of copyright violations. … Read more