Web Round-Up W/E 05/12/97

The blatant pinching of big company brand names to use as Internet sites just for fun has come to an end, as a court ruling has demanded that all adopted trade names must be handed over to the big guys. As you may remember from a previous Web Round-Up, a couple of likely lads going under the name of One In A Million were registering domain names for their Internet sites which bore more than a passing resemblance to a number of large companies’ names. The sites were addressed as such things as marksandspencer.co.uk, sainsburys.com, virgin.org and bt.org. The battle commenced between the incensed corporations and One In A Million until the High Court ruled that there had been an infringement of trademarks. The culprits, Richard Conway and Julian Nicholson, registered the names in an attempt to then sell them on to the companies concerned. The pair have been ordered by the Court to pay legal costs of £65,000 and to relinquish the names to their respective ‘owners’.

…The safety of your data on the information superhighway has come a step closer with an approved method of data encryption which could prevent the state’s intelligence agencies from getting their hands on everyone’s information. US firm RSA Data Security has applied to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to grant its S/MIME email encryption method license for it to be used as the de facto standard. The IETF will examine the specification of the encryption method and is expected to announced a specification in February. A secure means of transferring information, particularly that pertaining to financial transactions, will mean that businesses and consumers can use the Net as a business exchange with a far greater degree of security. For further information visit the RSA Data Security site at http://www.rsa.com/.

Not content with residing on your PC the Web is now tangling itself into other mediums such as television (many digital TV services will provide Internet access) in it pursuit of its ethic of access to all. The latest development is the iPhone; ‘i’ standing for, yes, you’ve guessed it, Internet. The iPhone is a telephone unit with a built in display screen. The phone allows you to send and receive emails as well as browse the World Wide Web. Developed by InfoGear the iPhone also features a touch-sensitive screen and its makers are planning to make the retrieval of commonly needed information (cinema listings, entertainments etc.) much clearer and simpler to find than it often is now. This, they hope, will attract the non-technical user.