Yahoo!Tech reports that “

[t]he Bush administration is moving in its last weeks to finalize regulations to enforce a controversial law that seeks to block Internet gambling. The move is drawing hot protests from Democratic lawmakers and supporters of online betting.  ‘This midnight rulemaking will tie the hands of the new administration, burden the financial services industry at a time of economic crisis and contradict the stated intent of the Financial Services Committee,’ the committee's chairman, Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., wrote this week to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.  Frank asked Paulson to postpone the regulation, which was reviewed by the White House budget office last week, usually a final step before publication in the Federal Register.”

The Washington Post’s Security Fix blog reveals that “[a] U.S. based Web hosting firm that security experts say was responsible for facilitating more than 75 percent of the junk e-mail blasted out each day globally has been knocked offline following reports from Security Fix on evidence gathered about suspicious activity emanating from the network.  For the past four months, Security Fix has been gathering data from the security industry about McColo Corp., a San Jose, Calif., based Web hosting service whose client list experts say includes some of the most disreputable cyber-criminal gangs in business today.”

And in more security-related news, NetworkWorld writes that “[m]assive distributed denial-of-service attacks against ISPs and their customers doubled in intensity over the past year, according to a new survey.  Distributed DoS attacks are now reaching 42Gbps in sustained intensity, up from 24Gbps last year and just 17Gbps the year prior to that, according to Arbor Networks' annual survey of ISPs from North America, Europe and Asia. (Some of the 66 global ISPs surveyed for the ‘Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report’ are Arbor customers, some are not.)  ‘This attack size is the largest we've ever seen,’ says Arbor CTO Rob Malan. He links the larger scale of distributed DoS attacks directly to ISPs' ever-larger network backbones as well as growth in higher-speed local connections such as cable networks.”

According to Reuters, “Sun Microsystems could be forced to sell itself or some of its assets as the economic crisis worsens problems facing the high-end computer maker, which has been struggling since the Internet bubble burst in the early 2000s.  But tight credit markets and the challenge of valuing Sun's intertwined software, hardware and services businesses could put off potential buyers such as rival server makers Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Dell, bankers and analysts say.  Last month, investment firm Southeastern Asset Management disclosed that it had become Sun's top investor with a fifth of its shares, and said it might go around the technology company's board to talk to ‘third parties’ about alternatives.  Other investors like private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. (KKR) may also support a sale to recover their money. KKR holds a seat on Sun's board and had to write down the value of its $700 million debt investment in the company.”

The Guardian reports that “Jerry Yang, the chief executive of Yahoo, said today the advertising industry is facing the toughest downturn in decades and that he was ‘watching carefully’ to see how the internet search market was affected.  Yang, speaking at the Internet Advertising Bureau's Engage conference in London, added that Yahoo had seen a surge in traffic with users looking for financial news and related information such as house prices since the latest turmoil hit global markets in September.  ‘We are looking at an extraordinary environment. The advertising industry has not seen an environment like this for decades,’ he said.”