Internet

Those wanting to see a glimpse of the future need only look to the upcoming Internationale Funkausstellung in Berlin, the largest consumer electronics convention in Europe. Here, some of the biggest electronic companies in the world are set to ... showcase their latest products, with the main focus of the convention centered on wireless interconnectivity in the home. Manufacturers are closer than ever to releasing technology that allows televisions, stereos, computers and even kitchen appliances to communicate with one another wirelessly and automatically over the Internet. Among the new gadgets ... (view more)

In the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, a new breed of hacker-investigators monitoring how traffic is routed through countries where web sites are blocked and why it is happening are reportedly conducting digital espionage --- turning their ... attention to a new weapon of international warfare: cyber attacks. "Hacktivists," led by Ronald J. Deibert, director of Citizen Lab, referred to as the "NSA of operations," set out to help residents in countries that censor online content, but have ended up tracking wars. Citizen Lab researchers created a software tool called Psiphon that helps ... (view more)

The promise of unlimited high-speed Internet access could become a thing of the past with more and more carriers putting limits on monthly downloads. The issue has become a hot one since Time Warner began a trial scheme in Texas limiting users to ... 5GB of downloads a month, charging penalty fees for any extra use. It's looking as if rival firms may feel they can get away with similar tactics. One firm, Frontier, is already planning to mirror the 5GB limit next year. What makes that particularly concerning for customers is that in Rochester, Frontier's biggest market, the main alternative is ... (view more)

Aiming to put a much stronger emphasis on traditional fixed-price retailing, eBay is making dramatic changes to its fee structure. Analysts say it's a move to compete with Amazon, though the company insists it's not abandoning the auction model. The ... main changes include a reduction in listing fees for flat-rate goods to 35 cents per item: previously this had cost as much as $4, depending on the value of the product. This fee now covers multiple identical items, whereas previously sellers had to pay extra to list multiple quantities. In addition, fixed-price listings now last for a month ... (view more)

Innovative online music site Pandora appears to be on the brink of shutting its doors after failing to find a solution to increased royalty costs. The site's appeal, a 'personalised radio station' service by which users could list some of their ... favourite songs and performers, may no longer be marketable after recent demands the site pay more cash for the music it uses. How does Pandora work? Users rate songs and the Pandora system (looking at more than 400 attributes including tone, pitch, style, speed, instruments used and so on) would then play similar styles of music. The technology was ... (view more)

Rhode Island has the fastest broadband speeds in the United States, but overall the country continues to lag far behind the likes of Japan. The figures come from a study by the Communication Workers America, which is campaigning for faster access ... nationwide. Rhode Island had a median speed of 6.8MBps, narrowly pipping Delaware (6.7), with New Jersey (5.8), Virginia (5.0) and Massachusetts (4.6) rounding out the top five. Alaska was the slowest at 0.8MBps, just below North Dakota (1.16) and Montana (1.32). Wyoming and Idaho also ranked in the bottom five meaning that, aside from Virginia, ... (view more)

Security researchers have revealed that the current military hostilities between Russia and Georgia may have actually begun online a couple of weeks ago. There's no official word as to who was behind cyber attacks which brought down Georgian ... government websites, including that of the country's president Mikheil Saakashvili. The Russian government has denied any involvement in the attacks, which were routed through servers based in the US. Whoever was responsible used denial of service (DOS) attacks, a brutally simple technique which involves sending repeated requests to a website's server. It ... (view more)

Delta Airlines is the latest airline to announce plans to offer WiFi Internet service on its domestic flights. The new service will allow laptops, smartphones and other handheld devices to access the Internet while en route. Delta will charge a flat ... $9.95 for short flights of 3 hours or less and $12.95 for longer flights. Internet WiFi service will begin initially with Delta's fleet of MD80-type aircraft and expand throughout its entire fleet by the end of summer 2009. (Source: nytimes.com ) With the pressure of rising fuel costs, new airline revenue opportunities have gained momentum. Delta ... (view more)

A recently-discovered security flaw in fundamental operation of the Internet could be much more serious than first believed. Every form of network, including email services, could be vulnerable. Dan Kaminsky, the security expert heading efforts to ... solve the problem, told a Las Vegas convention that the central problem can be exploited in at least 15 different ways. As we recently reported , the heart of the problem is the Domain Name System (DNS), which translates website addresses into the identifying number of the particular computer where the content of site is physically stored. A key ... (view more)

Your turn on Scrabulous? Too bad. As of July 29, 2008 the popular application will no longer be available to Facebook subscribers in Canada and the US. Before it was disabled, the app closely resembling Hasbro and Mattel's board game Scrabble had ... over half a million players daily. The battle began in January as legal dispute between the Agarwalla brothers (Scrabulous' Indian developers) and the two distributors of Scrabble (Hasbro in Canada, Mattel in the United States). Both toy companies accused the Agarwalla's RJ Software company of intellectual property infringement. Currently, it is ... (view more)