Tej Kohli Business Blog

China’s crackdown on dissent in Tibet has spilled over to YouTube. Chinese authorities have blocked access to YouTube in an effort to limit coverage of violence in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa. Other online news sites have reportedly been blocked too.

China has claimed sovereignty over Tibet for hundreds of years. Following a military invasion in 1950, Chinese Communist forces took control of Tibet in 1951, in accordance with an agreement with the Tibetan government. The current unrest in Tibet flared up after the March 10 anniversary of a failed 1959 uprising by Tibetan Buddhists protesting Chinese rule.

Reporters Without Borders on Monday said that YouTube has been censored since March 16, after videos of street demonstrations in Lhasa were posted on the site. The press advocacy group also said that the BBC, CNN, and Yahoo News have been inaccessible over the past few days.

Reporters Without Borders also decried Chinese authorities’ refusal to allow foreign correspondents into the country and the expulsion of some 25 journalists already there.

“The freedom of movement for foreign journalists had been one of the few positive developments ahead of the Olympic Games, but this is now being flouted by the Chinese government facing Tibetan protests,” the press freedom group said. “Yet again the Chinese government is trampling on the promises it made linked to the Olympics and has preparing the ground to crackdown on the Tibetan revolt in the absence of witnesses.”

Google (NSDQ: GOOG) had relatively little to say on the matter. “We understand there are reports of users being unable to access YouTube within the People’s Republic of China,” a company spokesperson said via e-mail. “We are looking into the matter, and working to ensure that the service is restored as soon as possible.”

YouTube has been blocked before by countries like Burma, Brazil, China, Iran, Morocco, Thailand, and Turkey. Last month, Pakistan’s effort to censor the site for showing allegedly anti-Islamic material inadvertently disrupted access to the site around the globe.

While news about the uprisings has been censored from YouTube.cn (currently inaccessible from the U.S.) and various Chinese video sharing sites, Reporters without Borders notes that “one can find news Web sites on which racist comments have been posted about Tibetans, calling for the murder of the ’separatists.’”

The top search result for “Tibet” on YouTube.com at the moment is a video titled, “Tibet WAS, IS, and ALWAYS WILL BE a part of China.” It comes with over 32,000 comments in support of Chinese nationalism and against it.

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Tej Kohli gives a report on storm worm courtesy Internetnews.com.

A report by e-mail and content security firm Marshal claims that just six botnets  are responsible for almost 90 percent of spam, but others in the spam filtering business disagree with the report’s findings.

For the month of February, Marshal found that the most dominant botnet spewing out junk e-mail was not the vaunted Storm worm but a network called Srizbi, which first emerged last summer. Symantec reports Srizbi as a “Trojan horse that sends spam and uses a rootkit to hide itself.”

Srizbi seems to be in the seeding stage, as it were, because all it’s doing now is perpetuating itself. It sends out spam to other people so they open a link that infects them with the Srizbi Trojan

Marshal has it accounting for 39 percent of spam it discovered in February. Just the month prior, the botnet Mega-D, so dubbed because it was selling male sexual enhancement products, was the major nuisance, with 35 percent of the spam.

Glen Myers, an engineer with Marshal, said Mega-D lost its place because it shut down for 10 days. Why he does not know, but he said that didn’t lessen the amount of spam on the Internet. “It just moved to other networks. That’s why other networks came in so high,” he told InternetNews.com. “I don’t know if that means there’s a relation between people running botnets or if advertisers are moving their content around.”

Storm, by contrast, only accounted for two percent of the spam in the Marshal report. That seems extremely low considering how resilient and ubiquitous the worm was. “Storm got a lot of publicity, and people started specifically targeting that worm. That is impacting their ability to use it,” said Myers.

Paul Piccard, director of threat research for Webroot Software, agrees on that point. “We have seen a decrease in the Storm network. There’s been less instances and samples of Storm that we’ve seen recently. There’s been a large push by security vendors to roll out signatures that detect and remove Storm,” he said.

However, he’s not so sure that just six botnets are responsible for the millions of spam messages floating around on the Internet. “If it was only six, we would have a much easier time protecting our customers, said Piccard. “It’s a little misleading to say there’s six botnets because there’s multiple variants of each. There are some times close to 100 variants to specific pieces of malware.”

Scott Montgomery, vice president of global technical strategy for Secure Computing, was even more blunt in his assessment. “Their premise is that the snapshot from their spam traps constitutes fact. Srizbi is a pretty neat little Trojan, I just think their scale is way off. To think this ten million machine behemoth Storm botnet is not relevant, I don’t think is reflective of what’s going on,” he said.

But Myers defends the findings, saying it’s a “true application of the 80/20 rule, that 80 percent of the spam comes from the top 20 percent of botnets. We’ve already seen an example of this in February when the Mega-D botnet went down and everything moved to Srizbi.”

As security gets better at blocking Storm, he argues, spammers “are less likely to send out waves of Storm as they get diminishing returns because everyone is looking for Storm. How many people are looking for Rustock?” he said, in reference to a botnet that said accounted for 20 percent of spam in February.

Don’t count Storm out, warned Piccard. “Remember, when you can create variants very quickly and create new pieces of malware, it’s not uncommon for malware to make a comeback later on,” he said. “Right now could be a quiet period for Storm but we could see an uptick in activity in a few weeks to a month from now.”

According to a survey released Monday, the ailing mortgage market and and the debt burden being carried by tens of millions of households in US, has become a major concern for US economists.

They are majorly concerned over the short-term risks associated with subprime mortgages and other forms of indebtness, while they continue to cast a wary eye on inflation, says President of National Association for Business Economics, last week.

About 34 percent of the members of the National Association for Business Economics ranked the financial market turmoil from those loan defaults as the No. 1 threat to the economy over the next two years.

Concerns about mounting inflationary pressures and slowing job growth have persuaded many economists that the world’s largest economy is going into a recession although other economists and experts believe a recession will be avoided.

Internet marketing is the latest addition to the Tej Kohli Blog. Read an introductory article on internet marketing from Wikipedia.

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 AVG Technologies is the latest antivirus vendor to beef up its security suite to cover as wide a range of threats as possible by including link-scanning technology it acquired late last year.

AVG (which changed its name from Grisoft earlier this year) isn’t as well known in the U.S. as Symantec, McAfee or Trend Micro, but it has a huge international presence, particularly in Europe where it is based. It consistently scores very high in antivirus tests against known threats, but its tests against zero-day threats are a little more inconsistent.

That’s one area it’s working to overcome, and one step in the process was the December acquisition of Exploit Prevention Labs, developer of LinkScanner, a utility that scans the links of search results on Google, Yahoo and other search engines to check for hidden malware behind the link. While the company is also working on its heuristics to catch as-yet undiscovered viruses, it’s also trying to help users avoid infection in the first place.

In addition to the LinkScanner Web checking, AVG Internet Security 8.0 offers a considerable performance improvement thanks to being rewritten for multi-core processors and combining its two separate virus and spyware databases into a single database. It also sports a whole new UI and offers scanning of any file transfers over the HTTP protocol, since that’s how most infections come into a computer.

Between the link checker and HTTP scanning, AVG believes “we’ve done all the things we need to do for today’s threats,” said Bridwell.

AVG Internet Security 8.0 also adds protection to Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers against so-called drive-by downloads, protects file exchanges over MSN and ICQ instant messengers, comes with a new firewall and a new anti-rootkit shield.

AVG Internet Security 8.0 is available for download starting February 28, at a cost of $54.99 for a one-year license and $79.99 for a two-year license.

Tej Kohli quotes an InternetNews article on Stocks.

Stocks soared Monday on news that bond insurers will hold onto their top credit ratings, at least for now.

The major indexes shot higher in the afternoon and finished with gains of more 1% after Standard & Poors reaffirmed the credit ratings of MBIA and Ambac Financial, removing a big cloud hanging over financial markets. Credit downgrades for the companies could have touched off another round of losses for troubled credit markets.

Dell gained 3% ahead of its results, which are due out after the close on Thursday.

Take-Two Interactive soared more than 50% after Electronic Arts made a hostile bid for the company, and Getty Images gained 29% on a private equity buyout.

Google was a notable laggard, falling 4%, possibly on reports that Microsoft is testing a new online ad effectiveness tool.

Apple managed to finish with a small gain despite a BMO downgrade on slowing iPod and iPhone demand. Juniper was up 5% on an RBC upgrade. Smith Micro fell 12% on a JP Morgan downgrade.

Marvell was up 6% on a positive Barron’s piece.

The Nasdaq rose 24 to 2347, the S&P gained 18 to 1371, and the Dow soared 189 to 12,570. Volume rose to 3.87 billion shares on the NYSE, and declined to 2.16 billion on the Nasdaq. Advancers led by a 25-7 margin on the NYSE, and 20-9 on the Nasdaq. Upside volume was 84% on the NYSE, and 81% on the Nasdaq. New highs-new lows were 83-84 on the NYSE, and 58-124 on the Nasdaq.