Internet system

Update 3:15 p.m. PDT: The headline and opening sentence have been changed to clarify that VeriSign is expanding its Project Titan initiative to strengthen and secure Net infrastructure. On Thursday, VeriSign announced plans to increase the level of security within Project Titan, a global initiative to expand the infrastructure of the Internet to anticipate future demand brought by increased e-commerce transactions. In its announcement, VeriSign said that it is going to spend more than the $100 million-plus initially budgeted. One of the goals of Project Titan is to increase the overall capacity of the Internet to sustain a predicted increase in the daily load of Domain Name Server (DNS) queries. DNS is how a domain's common name (say CNET.com) is converted to its Internet address consisting of numbers. ***

Almost half of the call centers in North America will use voice over Internet Protocol systems by the end of next year, according to new research. A report from the Yankee Group says that despite VoIP adoption lagging behind earlier predictions, the call center market is embracing the technology. Forty-seven percent of call centers are expected to roll out VoIP by 2007, compared with just 17 percent in 2005. The key reasons for using the new technology are to manage multiple call center sites cheaply and flexibly, and to be able to place agents anywhere, including at home. The largest call centers--those with more than 500 seats--will see the greatest increase in VoIP adoption from now until the end of 2007, the analyst firm predicts. Though VoIP for the enterprise has been much hyped in recent years, Yankee Group said adoption has not met its predictions. ***

A problem with Google's e-mail service, Gmail, let any user query the company's servers for information on the last message sent, two hackers announced on Wednesday. The programmers, part of a community site dedicated to the Unix-like FreeBSD operating system, found that an improperly formatted address allowed Gmail users to retrieve the message body of the last HTML-formatted e-mail processed by the server. "The result is a compromise of the privacy of communications over Gmail," the two programmers stated in their write-up of the problem. "Message content and address information are easily--if somewhat randomly--available to unintended recipients." Google acknowledged the problem Wednesday and said it had been fixed. It is unclear how long the glitch lasted. ***