Technology / Briefly

New domain names ahead

WASHINGTON - Coming soon to the Internet: website addresses thatend in ".bank," ".Vegas" and ".Canon."

The organization that oversees the Internet address system ispreparing to open the floodgates to a nearly limitless selection ofnew website suffixes, including ones in Arabic, Chinese and otherscripts. That could usher in the most sweeping transformation of theDomain Name System since its creation in the 1980s.

More than 300 suffixes are available today, the bulk of themcountry-code domains, such as ".uk" for the United Kingdom and ".de"for Germany.

Hundreds or even thousands more suffixes could be created,categorized by everything from industry to geography to ethnicity.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers will meetMonday in Singapore to vote on its expansion plan for domain names.If ICANN approves as expected, new domains could start appearinglate next year.

Service links buyer, seller

NEW YORK - A group of Silicon Valley veterans is building ashopping service around the idea that Facebook's real-identitysystem is good for building trust in online commerce.

Copious lets people see with whom they are buying and selling.

Though it connects people through Facebook, Copious isn't aboutbuying and selling among friends.

Rather, it connects buyers and sellers based on their onlineidentities. That way, someone shopping for bike parts or handbagscan see if anyone they know has bought an item from a seller or ifthey are connected through a Facebook friend, friend of a friend orTwitter.

Copious also recommends items based on buyers' Facebook interestsand other activities, rather than on previous items they havepurchased, as they do on Amazon or eBay.

Home users vulnerable

NEW YORK - Big companies such as Citigroup and Sony have been thetargets of major hacking attacks. But a new survey finds thatregular people are also prime and often unsuspecting targets.

Parents and their teenage children regularly engage in riskyonline behavior, according to the survey of U.S. Internet userscommissioned by computer security company GFI Software.

More than half of the parents whose home computers have beeninfected with a virus said it had happened more than once. And while89 percent of parents said they have antivirus software on theircomputers, a quarter of them said they don't know if they update it.Of the teens who responded, 24 percent said they have visited awebsite meant for adults. More than half who do so said they liedabout their age to get into the sites.

Games company Sega becomes latest hacking victim

LONDON (AP) - Video game developer Sega said that its onlinedatabase has been hacked, making it the latest in a string of gamescompanies to be attacked.

The company sent an email to users of the Sega Pass system onFriday to warn them that email addresses, dates of birth andencrypted passwords had been stolen from online database.

The email stressed that no financial information was at risk andthat it has launched a probe into the extent of the breach. It isnot immediately clear how many users were affected.

"Please note that no personal payment information was stored bySega as we use external payment providers, meaning your paymentdetails were not at risk from this intrusion," the company said.

The company says it had taken its Sega Pas system offline and allusers' passwords have been reset.

The security breach came after Sony Corp. and Nintendo sufferedsimilar attacks by hackers.

In April, Sony's Playstation Network was the victim of a hugesecurity breach that affected more than 100 million online accounts.The company suffered a second data breach earlier this month.

The hackers' group that claimed credit for the Sony attack, LulzSecurity, had also said it was responsible for the recent breachesof the U.S. Senate computer system and the CIA website.

The group did not appear to be responsible for the Segaintrusion. It said on Twitter Friday that it wanted to help Sega"destroy the hackers" that attacked it.