Networking and Security

Try this: open up a new tab and type “kindle” into the address bar. Chances are it will send you to a Google search results page. That is, unless the ISP is intercepting such rogue queries and doing what they will with them. A pair of computer scientists at UC Berkeley have found that at least a dozen ISPs are still doing this, the result being that, for example, when someone types “kindle” into the address bar, it doesn’t go to your preferred search results, but directly to Amazon’s Kindle page.

Some Internet Service Providers who work with third-party proxy servers may be redirecting and possibly hijacking their users’ search queries, according to a blog posted last Thursday by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which worked in collaboration with UC Berkeley-affiliated researchers. Researchers at the International Computer Science Institute, a campus-affiliated institute, began their work over two years ago and discovered that some service providers routed brand-related term searches in the search engines Yahoo!, Bing and Google to brand websites instead of the intended search engine results.

Takeaway: Do you trust the results returned from your chosen search engine? Michael Kassner looks into search engine hijacking and redirection.

Internet delays are now as common as they are maddening. That means they end up affecting system engineers just like all the rest of us. And when system engineers get irritated, they often go looking for what's at the root of the problem. Take Jim Gettys, for example. His slow home network had repeatedly proved to be the source of considerable frustration, so he set out to determine what was wrong, and he even coined a term for what he found: bufferbloat.

Keeping tabs on your favorite celebrities might be easier than you think -- and much easier than they want. But they likely have no one to blame but themselves. According to two teams of computer scientists, Hollywood stars could be unintentionally giving up the exact locations of their homes and private whereabouts through pictures uploaded to the Internet, leaving them wide open to attacks by tech-savvy thieves (not to mention unwanted visits by starstruck fans).