EU legislation clears way for e-commerce
Legislation has been approved by The European Parliament designed to promote e-commerce by setting out rules in areas ranging from consumer protection to liability of ISPs.

The EU endorsed and strengthened the principle outlined in the original text that companies selling online goods or services across borders should only be regulated by the EU country where they are established.

This comes as a relief to telecommunications operators and ISPs in member-states, who had feared that e-commerce would be stifled if they had to comply with 15 different national regimes. The MEPs also agreed that consumers should be able to sign registers to opt out of receiving spam but rejected pleas to ban it altogether.

Netmarket exposes customer order data
Security holes within e-commerce sites, recently, seem to have become the norm. Web retailer Netmarket exposed information about hundreds of thousands of customer orders, including names and addresses.

A software engineer in Bellevue, Washington, last night discovered, while purchasing speakers, that he could view other customer orders on-line.

When checking his order, the engineer, who asked to remain anonymous, noticed that his order number was incorporated into the URL. By replacing his order number with random numbers, he obtained access to pages revealing information about other customers. Information on those pages included names, addresses, and phone numbers, as well as details about the orders.

"It's kind of scary to me," the engineer said. "I'm glad no credit card numbers were there or else I'd be really freaked out."

Council formed to fight Net fraud
Fresh initiatives to combat Net crime were launched yeaterday by U.S. authorities and anti-fraud groups. With fraud on the Internet shaping up as the multibillion-dollar crime of the decade, it is seen as a major area of concern.

A coalition of antifraud companies, who have joined together as The Internet Fraud Council said they will create a set of standards for companies doing business on the Internet, a clearinghouse of information on online crime, and a fraud-free "seal of approval" for such businesses operating in cyberspace.

"It's hard for law enforcement to keep up," John Hiatt, president of the National Coalition for the Prevention of Economic Crime, said at a news conference during a meeting on economic crime.

"The bandits change hardware and software every six months. In law enforcement, that number is 48 months," he said.

Paul Fichtman, chairman of the Internet Fraud Council, said estimates of the cost of Internet fraud ranged from $9 billion to $108 billion in 1998.

"Clearly, there's no way anyone can estimate the amount of fraud on the Internet," he said.