The European Union proposed on Wednesday cutting the wholesale roaming rates that telecoms operators pay each other when customers surf the Internet abroad to pave the way for the abolition of retail roaming charges by summer next year.The EU struck a deal a year ago to abolish mobile roaming charges across the 28-country bloc by June 2017 but that hinges on wholesale prices being competitive enough to allow firms to offer customers free roaming without operating at a loss.The European Commission, the EU’s executive, proposed cutting the maximum amount operators can charge each other to 4 euro cents a minute for calls, 1 euro cent per text message and 0.85 euro cent per megabyte of data to ensure that retail roaming charges can be abolished in a year without distorting the market.”In a year from now, we’ll say goodbye to roaming charges,” Commission Vice-President Andrus Ansip said.

Cybercrime market sells servers for as little as 6 dollars to launch attacks

A major underground marketplace acting like an eBay for criminals is selling access to more than 70,000 compromised servers allowing buyers to carry out widespread cyber-attacks around the world, security experts said on Wednesday.Researchers at Kaspersky Lab, a global computer security firm based in Moscow, said the online forum appears to be run by a Russian speaking group. It offers access to hacked computers owned by governments, companies and universities in 173 countries, unbeknownst to the servers’ legitimate owners.Access goes for as little as $6 for a compromised server. Each comes pre-equipped with a variety of software to mount denial-of-service attacks on other networks, launch spam campaigns, illicitly manufacture bitcoin currency or compromise online or retail payment systems, the researchers said.Starting at $7, buyers can gain access to government servers in several countries, including interior and foreign ministries, commerce departments and several town halls, said Costin Raiu, director of Kaspersky’s research and analysis team.