FBI wants ICANN to crack down on fraudulent domain registrations

In today's podcast: FBI wants ICANN to crack down on fraudulent domain registrations; Google is still blocking porn in China; and unpatched IE flaw exploited by two criminal gangs.

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U.S. and U.K. law enforcement officials are trying to marshal support for changes that would make it more difficult for criminals to register domain names under false details. Their aim is to get ICANN, the overseer of the Internet's addressing system, to impose stronger rules on registrars for generic top-level domains such as dot-com. The FBI and the U.K.'s Serious Organised Crime Agency want ICANN to require registrars to check that the information used to register domain names is not obviously fraudulent. While the proposals are likely to cut down on criminal activity, they will likely increase the cost of domain names

A bug in Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook is causing some e-mail messages to remain on Gmail servers and not be downloaded into Outlook, causing end users to overlook messages or see them late. The bug is forcing users in organizations hit by the bug to check the Gmail Web interface periodically to make sure they aren't missing any e-mail messages in their Outlook PC client. Google said the bug was inadvertently introduced along with other changes in early March, and hopes to provide a fix later today. Some Google Apps users, though, say they first noticed the problem as far back as last July.

Criminals are stepping up their attacks on an unpatched flaw in Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser, using it to install fake antivirus products and malicious back doors on victim's computers. Microsoft first warned of the bug on March 9, and by late last week, security vendor AVG was getting reports of 30,000 attacks per day. Two separate cybergangs are using the exploit, one to install fake antivirus software, the other to install a variant of the Sinowal Trojan, according to AVG. Internet Explorer 6 and 7 are vulnerable to the attack, but for it to work the victim has to first visit a Web site hosting the malicious code.

Google is still censoring pornographic search results for users in China, even though they are now being redirected to a Google search engine that does not block sensitive political content. Google is redirecting users of its China-based search engine to a version of the company's Hong Kong site that always uses Google's SafeSearch filter to block content such as porn and profanity. Other users of that site can turn off the filter. Blocking porn by default for redirected users could be meant to soften Chinese government anger over Google's decision not to block other sensitive content.

And those are the top stories from the IDG Global IT News Update, brought to you by the IDG News Service. I’m Peter Sayer in Paris. Join us again later for more news from the world of technology.