Around The Industry:
The Wireless LINC initiative, a public-private partnership in Vermont and New Hampshire, has launched a series of pilot projects which are just the first step in building broadband infrastructure throughout Carroll, Grafton and Coos counties in New Hampshire and Orleans, Essex and Caledonia counties in Vermont. Tetherless Access, Inc. founded by Dewayne Hendricks, has been hired to get the wireless pilots up and running. The rural broadband project is managed by the North Community Investment Corporation (NCIC), a non-profit created in 1975 to promote economic development in northeastern Vermont and northern New Hampshire. The counties to be served by this broadband network are, like many rural regions around the world, forgotten by the large commercial broadband service providers.
Sierra Wireless announced that the AirLink PinPoint X and Raven X have been certified and are commercially available for use on the Verizon Wireless Evolution-Data Optimized, Revision A (EV-DO Rev. A) network. The devices support the latest in high speed data and are backward compatible to existing EV-DO Rev. 0 and 1x networks. AirLink X Platform customers will benefit from download speeds averaging 600 to 1.4 Mbps and upload speeds averaging 500 to 800 kbps.
Apple iTune’s “DRM free” music has a large amount of user details embedded in the track. Songs sold without an DRM will have a user’s full name and account e-mail embedded in them. The big idea is that if you stick the DRM-free song on your favourite P2P network it could come back to get you. While this could be seen as a good thing, it appears that the details embedded in the file include some scary amount of personal data including all your iTunes account information.
Alex Moskalyuk posts a chart of the top 30 broadband countries, according to ITIF. The top five are Korea, Japan, Iceland, Finland, and the Netherlands. The US clocks in at number 12, behind France (7) and Canada (10). Surprisingly, Australia (for all the broadband fireworks going on over there) ranks at number 14… above the UK, who is at number 17. The bottom of the broadband barrel includes Hungary, Greece, the Slovak Republic, Mexico, and Turkey.
The UK’s Office of National Statistics (ONS) has issued its latest quarterly Internet access report to the end of March (Q1-2007). Broadband now accounts for 82.8% of all Internet connections, up by 3.3% from 79.5% in December 2006. New Internet connections have also been going up, with an increase of 2.6% seen over the quarter. Dial-up connections have continued to decline and now account for less than one in five of all connections. The ONS also includes a very rough guide to average Internet access speeds. By March 2007 some 55.3% of people were connecting at 2Mbps or less, compared with 60.9% in December 2006.
Skyhook Wireless built the Wi-Fi Positioning System (WPS) to turn an access point into an 802.11-based GPS, but the downside was that it was only available for Windows — until now. Today, the company announced that its Loki software, a location-aware toolbar for Web browsers, is ready for MacOS as well as Windows Mobile. In addition, Web developers can now use the new Loki JavaScript API to build WPS into Web sites and applications. The WPS database of access points used to pinpoint a person’s location has grown to cover 70% of U.S., Canadian and Australian population centers. International expansion is continuing, specifically in cities like London, Amsterdam and Barcelona in Europe — Tokyo, Seoul and Hong Kong in the Asia Pacific region are coming soon.
Beijing will put a state-of-the-art wireless information service designed for visitors to the city during the 2008 Olympics to the test in the second half of 2007, according to the service operator China Netcom. The wireless service will be available in the form of a portable electronic device, similar in appearance to a mobile phone, which visitors can rent for a fee from airports, hotels and tourist sites. The cost will not be determined until the trial period ends. The service, available in the seven languages of Chinese, English, Japanese, Russian, French, Spanish and German, will provide general Games and city information, and information on tourist sites, transport, dining and business.
Presidential candidate John Edwards chose the technological nexus of Google headquarters to propose a way to make the Internet more affordable and more accessible to poor Americans. Edwards said he sent a letter to the FCC proposing that it set aside a part of the broadband spectrum that is to be sold at an upcoming auction for wholesalers to lease to smaller start-ups in an effort to improve service to rural and underserved areas. He said the United States has a huge stake in bringing technology to more people. “For this democracy to work it needs to be from the ground up, not the top down,” he said.
Telephone companies and cable operators in the U.S. are developing new weapons in their battle over the high-speed Internet business: cool Web sites. The Web-site competition is the latest front in the war between cable and telephone companies for the multibillion-dollar broadband business. Operators also are trying to beat each other by offering faster speeds and attractive prices, and phone and cable operators are competing to offer consumers the most attractive packages of TV, phone and high-speed Internet services. The race is tight. At the end of March, cable operators were ahead with 30.7 million broadband subscribers, compared with 25.4 million for telephone companies, according to Leichtman Research Group Inc. But the top telephone companies are slowly catching up, having attracted 54% of net new subscribers in 2006, Leichtman reports. In the first quarter of 2007, phone companies had 51% of the net additions.
SecurityBits:
Akonix Systems, a provider of instant messaging security and compliance products, have uncovered 170 IM threats this year—an increase of 73 percent from the same time period in 2006. It is not clear exactly why the number of IM attacks is increasing, but security researchers have their theories. Don Montgomery, vice president of marketing at Akonix, speculated the increase in the number of attacks reflects the increase in the use of instant messaging, particularly on corporate networks.
What [people] are forced to do is continually fork out for spam-busting protection, for “secure” operating systems, for funky firewalls, malware detectors or phish-sniffing software. All this junk clogs up their spanking new PC so that they continually have to upgrade to newer chippery clever enough to have a processing core dedicated to each of the bloatsome security routines keeping them safe while they surf. It’s a con, gentlemen. A big fat con. No one has a business interest in catching identity thieves or malware writers. There’s no money in it, so no-one’s bothered.
Updates to Germany’s computer crime laws banning so-called “hacking tools” have been criticised as ill-considered and counterproductive. The revamp to the German criminal code is designed to tighten definitions, making denial of service attacks and attempts to sniff data on third-party wireless networks, for example, clearly criminal. Attacks would be punishable by a fine and up to 10 years imprisonment. “Forbidding this software is about as helpful as forbidding the sale and production of hammers because sometimes they also cause damage,” Chaos Computer Club spokesman Andy Müller-Maguhn told Ars Technica. “Safety research can [now] take place only in an unacceptable legal gray area.”
F-Secure has patched several vulnerabilities in its security products, the most critical of which could be used to run unauthorized software on a victim’s computer. The most critical of these bugs affects F-Secure’s anti-virus products. A flaw in the way the software unpacks files that have been compressed using the LHA archiving format could allow an attacker to crash the system, or even run unauthorized software on the computer, F-Secure said in an advisory. Secunia rates the bug as highly critical.
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