Faster wireless telecoms may be offered to UK firms this summer, as more mobile operators have announced plans to roll out High-speed Download Packet Access (HSDPA) services, sometimes referred to as Super 3G.

Most mobile operators have now revealed their launch plans. The latest to do so is 3, which said its trials based on Nokia and NEC infrastructure are now delivering speeds up to 1.4Mbit/s – over three times faster than current 3G services based on UMTS technology. The company said it currently offers 3G coverage to 88 percent of the UK population.

The growth of HSDPA is likely to limit demand for other wireless broadband technologies such as WiMax, argued Vodafone chief executive Arun Sarin, speaking at this year's 3GSM congress in Barcelona. "I think WiMax will be less interesting after HSDPA launches," he said.

Some pundits believe that WiMax technology will be restricted to a niche role.
A report published by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has concluded that WiMax's main use might be in areas that have poor 3G and Wi-Fi connectivity.

However, even here WiMax systems might require significant subsidies from the government before the technology could be widely used as an access mechanism, it said.

The OECD said its main reason for predicting WiMax will have only a limited role is that in some places governments have been slow to allocate spectrum, and licensees have been slow to develop services.

The report says, "The success of WiMax partially will depend on the availability of spectrum in OECD markets. Initial equipment will work in one of three main frequency ranges, 2.5GHz, 3.5GHz and 5GHz. Existing allocations of spectrum should be examined to see where space could be available for new broadband wireless technologies. Spectrum allocations should be technologically neutral."

In the UK the most likely band for WiMax is at 3.5GHz. Currently only PCCW-owned telecoms provider UK Broadband has rolled out a limited service using this band, in the Thames Valley.

Nearly four out of five online banking customers now ignore emails that purport to be from their bank, according to data commissioned by RSA.

The annual study, conducted by market researchers Infosurv, found that lack of trust in such emails had risen from 70 per cent ion 2004 to 79 per cent. Nearly two thirds of those questioned hadn't seen any drop oin the number of phishing emails they received.

The research also found that people want to have their online banking monitored, with nearly nine out of ten people saying they would be happy to be monitored while online and 59 per cent of respondents feeling that the bank should contact them if it suspects suspicious activity on their accounts.

Consumers seem to feel comfortable with the notion of their financial institution monitoring their online activity and contacting them when something suspicious is detected, just as they have become accustomed to for years in the credit card space.

Although the banking community has been making noises about introducing stronger identity management systems early progress has been slow and the survey shows little support for some products.

Less than half of those questioned felt comfortable using a hardware token to access their accounts, although nearly three quarters want some form of stronger security.

Consumers will soon be able to make their choice in the battle for the high-definition DVD format as players for the two main competing formats finally get release dates.

Toshiba has announced a March launch for its HD DVD format player, making it first to market in the new format. However, this date may be put back to April coincide with the first films to appear on HD DVD.

Warner Home Video said it will release three HD DVD films on April 18th: Million Dollar Baby, The Last Samurai and The Phantom of the Opera. Warner will follow those up with 17 other titles, including Batman Begins, Constantine, Training Day and The Matrix.

The rival Blu-ray format is set to have its first working DVD player in the shops in April. Samsung will launch its player that month, although Sony won't have its first model available until July. Sony said its BDP-S1 Blu-ray player will cost around $1,000 (£570).

However, the launch of the Blu-ray players may also be delayed until content for that platform is available. The earliest Blu-ray titles won't be released until May 23rd. In a move that will please consumers not wanting to back a doomed format, LG is creating a player that handles discs from both systems. The company has told its dealers to expect delivery of the dual-format player in autumn.

LG joins fellow original Blu-ray backer Hewlett-Packard in deciding to support both Blu-Ray and HD DVD.

The Wireless-G VPN Broadband Router is the advanced, complete networking solution for your small business, incorporating four essential networking functions in one high-powered box. First, there's the Wireless Access Point, which lets you connect Wireless-G (802.11g) or Wireless-B (802.11b) devices to the network. There's also a built-in 4-port full-duplex 10/100 Switch to connect your wired-Ethernet devices. Connect four PCs directly, or daisy-chain out to more hubs and switches to create as big a network as you need.

Third, the Router function ties it all together and lets your whole network share a high-speed cable or DSL Internet connection. And finally, the Virtual Private Network (VPN) function creates encrypted ""tunnels"" through the Internet so up to 50 remote or traveling users can securely connect to your office network from off-site, or users in your branch office can connect to a corporate network.

To protect your data and privacy, the Wireless-G VPN Broadband Router can encrypt all wireless transmissions with 128-bit WEP encryption, and also supports the industrial-strength wireless security of 802.1x authentication and authorization. The Router can serve as a DHCP Server, and has a powerful SPI firewall to protect your PCs against intruders and most known Internet attacks. It can be configured to filter internal users' access to the Internet, and has MAC or IP address filtering so you can specify exactly who has access to your network. Configuration is a snap with the web browser-based configuration utility.

As the center point of your office network, the Linksys Wireless-G VPN Broadband Router gives you the flexibility, speed, and security you need!

Features:

The number of victims in the world's largest identity theft case could surpass one million, authorities in South Korea have reported.

Police announced this week that the number of victims of ID theft connected to the online game Lineage is between 980,000 and 1.22 million, according to the Korea Herald. 

The game's developer, NCsoft, said that, as of Sunday, it has received confirmation from over 175,000 people in South Korea that their national identity numbers have been used without their knowledge to register accounts in its Lineage series of multiplayer online role-playing games. 

As reported on vnunet., the bogus accounts were apparently used by China-based groups to generate virtual items in the game world which were then sold to gamers in exchange for real world cash.

Police now report that they have traced email addresses to China. Approximately 1,500 different IP addresses were used to connect to the illegal accounts.

New account registrations which provided a free trial period of several days could previously be obtained simply by entering an ID number into an online form. NCsoft said that it has since tightened up its registration procedures.

Previous reports estimated the number of active, legitimate Lineage accounts at between three and four million.

Despite the surprising addition of about one million new accounts in only four months, the company was slow to take action, according to local press reports. News of the unprecedented ID theft did not become public until February.

Police have suggested that the huge number of stolen Korean ID numbers could have been handed over during a legitimate business deal between Korean online shopping websites and their Chinese subcontractors.

Earlier reports blamed hackers for stealing the ID numbers from Korean websites' databases.

In a case in which damage claims could theoretically exceed $1bn, Korean lawyers are planning to sue NCsoft for $1,000 per ID theft victim in a class action lawsuit. Reports late last month said that 3,500 potential plaintiffs had joined the action so far.

The furore generated by the case has reportedly led the Korean government to strengthen ID theft penalties with a new three-year jail sentence for offenders.

The US Department of Justice and the Toronto Police have busted a major child pornography network, leading to the arrest of 27 individuals in England, the US, Canada and Australia.

US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said at a press conference that undercover investigators had infiltrated an internet chat room being used to trade images of child pornography.

The content included live streaming video of adults sexually molesting children and infants.

"The behavior in these chat rooms, and the images many of these defendants sent around the world through P2P file sharing programs and private IM services, are the worst imaginable forms of child pornography," said Gonzales.

"This investigation is an example of how American law enforcement can and will work side-by-side with our international law enforcement partners to shut down these rings and protect young, vulnerable victims from the horrors of sexual abuse."

Gonzales added that those arrested had not yet been convicted, but that the department intended to prosecute them and others engaged in similar practices " to the fullest extent of the law".

Seven of the abused children have been identified and rescued, one as young as 18 months old. One chat room member who called himself 'Acidburn' had streamed live abuse over the internet.

The US hosts 40 per cent of the world's child pornography, according to figures released last week by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF). Russia was the second most used country, hosting over a quarter of such images. 

Peter Robbins, chief executive of the IWF, praised US internet providers for reacting promptly when notified and taking down sites and message boards hosting such content.

He added that so much content is posted in the US because of the country's freedom of information laws.

"It is difficult to see abusing children as freedom of speech," he said. " Most US ISPs will take content down, but there's a huge amount of work to do in Russia."

Adobe is urging users of its document and graphics server equipment to harden their systems after the discovery of a critical flaw.

Danish vulnerability testing firm Secunia first reported the flaw, which it describes as 'moderately critical', in July 2005 but it has taken until now for Adobe to fix the problem. Adobe has issued an advisory on its website. 

The problem is caused when the 'saveContent' and 'saveOptimized' Adobe Document Server commands are used. This may save files anywhere on the system, including those areas with full access privileges.

"This can be exploited by sending a specially crafted Soap request to the web service to write a graphics file containing malicious JavaScript as metadata to e.g. the server's 'All Users' start-up folder," warned Secunia.

"The request can be constructed to save this graphics file with an HTA extension causing the file to be executed the next time any user logs in.

"A request containing 'loadContent' can also be sent to retrieve arbitrary graphics or PDF files from the server, potentially exposing sensitive information."

Adobe recommends adapting local access controls to mitigate against the problem, and officially thanked Secunia for bringing the issue to its attention.

The Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) has reported a sharp rise in the number of phishing attacks, combined with an increased sophistication among attackers.

In its monthly report (PDF) for November 2005 the APWG said that reported attacks grew to 16,882 from 15,820, the third month of growth after a slowdown over the summer.

The UK and Europe were particularly hard hit as phishers looked for new targets outside the US.

The bulk of targets are still financial companies at nearly 95 per cent of attacks in November, up from 86 per cent in October.

There is also evidence that phishers are refining their targets lists, since the number of brands attacked has fallen despite the overall increase in activity.

Almost a third of all phishing sites are hosted in the US. South Korea is the second most popular host at 11.34 per cent, reflecting the country's high levels of broadband penetration.

There is also worrying evidence that attacks are getting smarter. The APWG noted an increased in legitimate sites being cracked and used to spread malware.

"A good example of this scheme was exhibited by an attack on the ShangHai Huizhong Automotive Manufacturing Company, one of the largest car manufacturers in China," the report said.

"Crackers programmed the site to deliver key-loggers to the PCs of consumers visiting the ShangHai Huizhong site, installing a system that attempted to load and run malicious code on the visitors' PCs." 

The APWG also found a much higher percentage of domain name server redirections using Trojan software.

One example occurred when a 'security tool' was emailed out claiming to be from PayPal which, once ex ecuted, automatically redirected any attempt to access PayPal to a phishing site hosted in India.

There is also little sign that website hosting companies are getting any better at shutting down phishing sites once they are discovered. The average time such a site stayed up was 5.5 days, unchanged from October.

Web monitoring firm Netcraft has warned that a web server belonging to a state-operated Chinese bank is hosting phishing sites targeting US banks and financial institutions. 

"This is the first instance we've seen of one bank's infrastructure being used to attack another institution," said Netcraft.

The company revealed that the phishing emails sent over the weekend targeted customers of Chase Bank in the US and eBay, and were directed to sites hosted on IP addresses assigned to the Shanghai branch of the China Construction Bank. 

"The phishing pages are located in hidden directories with the server's main page displaying a configuration error," said Netcraft.

Recipients of the emails were offered the chance to earn $20 by filling out a user survey which presented a series of questions.

This was followed by a request for user ID and password so that the $20 'reward' could be deposited into the proper account.

The form also requested the victim's bankcard number, Pin, card verification number, mother's maiden name and Social Security number. Any data submitted was then sent to a free form processing service on a server in India.

One giveaway was that the URL in the phishing email used an IP address rather than a domain, typically a strong indicator of a phishing site.

Netcraft warned that the same IP address at the China Construction Bank in Shanghai was used over the weekend to host a page spoofing the eBay log-in screen.

Virus hunters have discovered a new Trojan that encrypts files on an infected computer and then demands $300 in ransom for a decryption password.

The Trojan, identified as Cryzip, uses a commercial zip library to store the victim's documents inside a password-protected zip file and leaves step-by-step instructions on how to pay the ransom to retrieve the files.

It is not yet clear how the Trojan is being distributed, but security researchers say it was part of a small e-mail spam run that successfully evaded anti-virus scanners by staying below the radar.

While this type of attack, known as "ransomware," is not entirely new, it points to an increasing level of sophistication among online thieves who use social engineering tactics to trick victims into installing malware, said Shane Coursen, senior technical consultant at Moscow-based anti-virus vendor Kaspersky Lab.

The LURHQ Threat Intelligence Group, based in Chicago, was able to crack the encryption code used in the Cryzip Trojan and determine how the files are encrypted and the payment mechanism that has been set up to collect the $300 ransom.

According to a LURHQ advisory, Cryzip searches an infected hard drive for a wide range of widely used file types, including Word, Excel, PDF and JPG images. Once commandeered, the files are zipped and overwritten the text: "Erased by Zippo! GO OUT!!!"

The Trojan then deletes all the files, leaving only the encrypted file with the original file name, followed by the "_CRYPT.ZIP" extension.

A new directory named "AUTO_ZIP_REPORT.TXT" is created with specific instructions on how to use the E-Gold online currency and payment system to send ransom payments.

The instructions, which are marked by misspellings and poor grammar, contain the following text: Your computer catched our software while browsing illigal porn pages, all your documents, text files, databases was archived with long enought password. You can not guess the password for your archived files - password lenght is more then 10 symbols that makes all password recovery programs fail to bruteforce it (guess password by trying all possible combinations).

The owner of the infected machine is warned not to search for the program that encrypted the data, claiming that it simply doesn't exist on the hard drive. If you really care about documents and information in encrypted files you can pay using electonic currency $300," the note says. Reporting to police about a case will not help you, they do not know password. Reporting somewhere about our E-Gold account will not help you to restore files. This is your only way to get yours files back.

The Trojan author uses scores of E-Gold accounts simultaneously to get around potential shutdowns, according to LURHQ, which published the complete list of E-Gold accounts in the advisory.

Officials from E-Gold, which operates out of the Caribbean island of Nevis, were not available for comment.

"Infection reports are not widespread, so it is not believed this is a mass threat by any means," LURHQ said. However, the company said social engineering malware is typically more successful when it is delivered in low volume to get around anti-virus detections.  "[M]ore attention means the likely closing of the accounts used for the anonymous money transfer," LURHQ said.

If you are anything like me, nothing will put a frown on your face like an automated phone system. This site has the solution for many of these stupid ill thoughtout phone systems that do little but make their customers angry.

Our goal is to improve the quality of customer service and phone support in the US. This free website is run by volunteers and is powered by over one million consumers who demand high quality phone support from the companies that they use.

We will soon publish a list of the best and worst mass-market consumer companies in the US based on how long it takes to get to a human on the phone and on the quality of support received.

Please help us grow our customer support ratings database by taking a moment to rate the quality of support you receive when calling a consumer company you use: "GET A HUMAN"

A8N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard has all the horsepower of other motherboards based on NVIDIA´s original single-chip nForce4 SLI implementation. However, the real sweet spot, as we expected, appears when running the board in high-end gaming applications in multi-GPU SLI configurations, and more specifically SLI-AA modes. A sensible improved heatpipe-cooler, a fully equipped BIOS and a great board-layout, endowed with all connectors which leaves nothing to be desired, turn the ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe into a front model.

Overclocking has always been ABIT's forte, and the AW8-MAX is no exception: "In the arena of overclocking, the ABIT AW8-MAX shined as well. With our Corsair 5400C4 Pro DDR2 memory, we were able to bring it up to over 800MHz on the memory bus. With Corsair 8000UL RAM, we were able to run the memory bus stable at 904MHz. Front side bus speeds of 325MHz were easily reached as well. For the Intel overclocker, the AW8-MAX is certainly a board to keep on your short list."

Carnegie Mellon University plans to incorporate characters and animation from the popular video game "The Sims" in its free educational software that strives to make computer programming more appealing to students.

The university will use the animation to enliven the next version of Alice, a teaching program developed over the past decade and used at more than 60 colleges and universities and about 100 high schools, said Randy Pausch, a computer science professor and director of the Alice Project.

"This is not some little crumb that got tossed. This is the most valuable intellectual property owned by the largest video game maker in the world," Pausch said Friday. "For the intended demographic we're trying to teach, 'The Sims' are more valuable than the Disney library."

The Alice programming language is designed to make abstract concepts concrete for first-time programmers, using three-dimensional images of things such as people or animals that can be controlled by clicking and dragging words with a computer mouse. Those words form a program.

While Alice has proven effective, its characters and animation remain rudimentary, Pausch said. The animation is expected to transform Alice from a crude three-dimensional programming tool into a more compelling programming environment.

The effort to revamp Alice is intended to boost interest in computer programming among students, who have historically found the skill frustrating to learn.

A 2005 University of California, Los Angeles study found there had been a 50 percent drop in computer science majors over the previous four years. The proportion of women who were considering majoring in computer science fell to levels not seen since the early 1970s, according to the study.

Electronic Arts Inc., which publishes "The Sims," wants "more women in computer science, they want more minorities in computer science ... any underrepresented group. "The Sims" is a wildly popular game that lets players control virtual humans from birth until death.

One of the most commonly exploited vulnerabilities is the buffer overflow. Buffer overflows occur when too much information can be written to a predefined memory buffer, causing a program to fail.

There are many tools that let hackers exploit this vulnerability, and knowing them will help you learn how to prevent their successful use on your systems.

One such tool is Digital Monkey's Buffer Syringe, a relatively simple, minimally documented tool that lets hackers exploit buffer overflows. In fact, Buffer Syringe includes several usage examples that make implementation of the tool a snap.

Understanding how Buffer Syringe and tools like it work should give IT managers much more confidence when evaluating, for example, a Windows vulnerability assessment tool or patch management system because it will reveal the ins and outs of how the buffer overflow is constructed.

With this information, IT managers can then exact much more specific and telling information from vendors of commercial vulnerability assessment tools as to how their tools detect such weaknesses. Thus armed, it will be much easier to evaluate, select, implement and use such tools over time.

Early in the methodical stalking of an IT resource, hackers will enumerate and identify systems in a network, looking for something of interest. After identifying an interesting target, smart hackers will gently test to see if any part of a system was left in a default configuration. Such a configuration provides easy back-door entry into what might look from the front like an impregnable fortress.

For Windows systems, start with sysinternals.com, where you'll find a host of useful no-cost and commercial diagnostic tools. -http://sysinternals.com/

Go to nessus.org to become familiar with one of the most widely used vulnerability assessment tools available. Nessus can probe a wide range of server and desktop operating systems and is frequently updated. - http://nessus.org/

Google Inc.'s shares fell to their lowest levels in 4-1/2 months on Friday as analysts bemoaned recent communication miscues and its refusal to be more open about its finances.

Though analysts say they are confident of the growth outlook for Google's search advertising business and its place in the industry, they fear that public perception is turning negative for the company, which once seemingly could do no wrong.

The company has made a series of stumbles that have confused investors over whether the company is suffering from slowing growth. When a company has invested as much as google has in infrastructure as of late, it seems few remember that this type of investment takes some period to even deploy.

Google's stock touched an intraday low of $331.55 on Friday, a new low since its upward momentum was broken in January. It closed down $5.50, or 1.6 percent, at $337.50.

Analysts are forecasting a deceleration of Google's growth rate to still highly respectable levels of 50 to 60 percent for 2006 and around 40 percent in 2007. While this adjustment has many people running it is more like following the cattle. Long term growth is likely on target and in this model there will be oversurges and take the money and run investors.

But Google's do-no-evil image has come under siege by critics from many directions over the compromises it made to enter the Chinese market and the handling of its communications with Wall Street in the wake of last week's analyst meeting.

Among the missteps was the apparently unintentional disclosure of future product plans and financial targets in a Wall St presentation last week. The company has instructed investors that the financial targets were outdated and reemphasized its policy of not commenting on its outlook. This was exacerbated by hints of slowing growth that Google Chief Financial Officer George Reyes made in late February.

I have had a few requests for a bat file that can rename an zip archive as a scheduled task with the date that it renamed it. Below is the results of my effort since it worked so well I thought I would post it. This method actually does Month, Day, Year, though simply rearranging the three date blocks between the % % will give you what you want.

@E:
@cd "E:\Archive\bak_logs\"
ren Log_archive.zip %DATE:~4,2%-%DATE:~7,2%-%DATE:~10,4%-log.zip

WhoisThisDomain

domain lookup tool

Our Rating: (Good!)

WhoisThisDomain enables you to view owner and registration information for any domain name. It supports generic domains as well as country code domains, and you can look up multiple domain names at once by pasting the domain names or URLs into the input window. The results can be saved to text files or exported as HTML report. Standalone program, no install needed.

Freeware

Makers of new blue laser optical disk technology said this week that they have their sights firmly set on enterprise archiving applications currently handled by magnetic tape and even some nearline disk storage arrays.

But those same vendors are quick to admit that consumers must first warm up to the higher-capacity DVD formats before enterprises will accept them as products with enough longevity for their infrastructures.

Pioneer Electronics plans to release its first Blu-ray Disk in three weeks, Sony Corp. plans to ship its media by the end of this month, and Dell Inc. plans to launch its first Blu-ray-compatible desktop computer by midyear. Pioneer’s Blu-ray DVD disk drive will sell for $995 for a single platter disk with 25GB capacity. 

Sony Europe’s Recording Media and Energy division announced yesterday that its first Blu-ray Disk media will ship in Europe this month. The single-layer BD-RE (Blu-ray Disc Rewritable) media will be available next week and single-layer write-once BD-R (Blu-ray Disc Recordable) media will be available in April. Sony will launch dual-layer discs later this year. The single-layer BD-R and BD-RE discs offer a storage capacity of 25GB.

The new-generation media support 2X speed, which equates to a data transfer rate of 72Mbit/sec., making the discs suitable for video recording as well as data storage and file backup.

Toshiba Corp. also said yesterday that it is planning to launch its first laptop computer with an HD-DVD drive in Europe next month (See "Toshiba plans HD-DVD laptop for April").

HD-DVD and Blu-ray are two formats vying to replace current DVDs for high-definition content such as movies. Today’s DVDs can hold about 4.7GB of data, while Blu-ray Disk has a capacity of 25GB and HD-DVD can hold 15GB.

Microsoft Corp. is launching a revamped Internet search engine it says will help computer users find information faster, view it more easily and organize it better.

Debuting in test form Wednesday, Windows Live Search is Microsoft's latest move in a major strategy shift that has the world's largest software company focusing more heavily on Internet-based software and services.

The goal of the shift, which includes initiatives dubbed Windows Live and Office Live, is to create online products to complement its main cash cows: the Windows operating system and Office business software.

Windows Live Search will power queries on live.com, Microsoft's Windows Live Web site, beginning Wednesday. Once the technology has been fully tested, Windows Live Search will replace the existing search engine that powers MSN.com. MSN spokesman Adam Sohn said the company has not determined how long it will run Windows Live Search as a test.

A key goal with the new search engine will be to give people more control over how they search for information and how they put it to use once they get it, said Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of information services at MSN, the division that's working on Windows Live.

"A lot of people think, 'Hey, ... Didn't Google become the popular search engine? And don't they just do a great job? And there's no room for improvement.'" Mehdi said. Once people get a feel for Windows Live Search, Mehdi said, "They're going to say, 'Holy cow, I had no idea that search could get this much better!'"

The new search engine includes features such as support for tabbed Web browsing, which lets people keep several search panes open in a single window. Microsoft said other features will include:

_A search slider bar that offers previews of data in various forms, perhaps just the Internet address of a Web site, or maybe a snippet of text. As the slider is adjusted, more or less information appears.

_A "smart scroll" function that displays all search results at once rather than on separate pages.

_Various ways to view pictures, say, as small "thumbnail" shots or full-sized images, without leaving the search page.

_An ability for users to save their search parameters as macros that can be run to perform the same search in the future. Microsoft said people will also be able to publish their search macros so people with similar interests can use them.

Hoping to leap ahead of smaller rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Intel Corp. unveiled details of a next-generation computer chip design that it claims will perform better — and consume less power — than its current offerings.

Intel's troubles have mounted over the past year as the Santa Clara-based company has shuffled product plans, managed inventory build ups and supply shortages, and competed against AMD products that many observers say deliver performance that's superior to Intel chips.

Between the fourth quarter of 2005 and the same period of 2004, Intel lost 5.3 percentage points of market share to AMD, according to Mercury Research. It remains — by far — the largest microprocessor maker with 76.9 percent of the worldwide market at the end of 2005.

On Friday, Intel lowered its revenue forecast for the current quarter after seeing weaker-than-expected demand and a "slight" share loss to rivals.

During the semi-annual Intel Developer Forum, Gelsinger demonstrated a desktop chip based on the new microarchitecture. The processor, code-named Conroe, delivers 40 percent better performance while consuming 40 percent less power than today's Pentium, he said. It will be available in the third quarter.

Intel also gave details about a new chip for computer servers based on the new design. Dubbed Woodcrest, it will boost performance by 80 percent while consuming 35 percent less power, compared with a 2.8 gigahertz Xeon processor. It will be available in the third quarter.

Intel, which in years past focused on building faster processors, has increasingly invested in chips that consume less power. That's because today's faster chips generally use more watts than in years past, creating servers and desktops that are expensive to keep cool and laptops that burn through battery reserves.

The Core microarchitecture builds on the design of Intel's Pentium M processor for laptop computers, which debuted 2003. Intel generally overhauls its chip design every five or six years. A new architecture is usually applied to desktop processors first and gradually migrates to servers and laptops. This is the first time a new design has started with the notebook chip and moved to desktops and servers.

At New York's Kennedy airport today, an individual later discovered to be a public school teacher, was arrested trying to board a flight while in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a compass, a slide rule, and a calculator.

At a morning press conference, Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez said he believes the man is a member of the notorious al-gebra movement. The FBI is charging him with carrying weapons of math instruction. Al-gebra is a fearsome cult," Gonzalez said. "They desire average solutions by means and extremes, and sometimes go off on tangents in a search of absolute value. They use secret code names like 'x' and 'y' and refer to themselves as 'unknowns', but we have determined they belong to a common denominator of the axis of medieval with coordinates in every country. As the Greek philanderer Isosceles used to say, 'there are 3 sides to every triangle'."

When asked to comment on the arrest, President Bush said, "If God had wanted us to have better weapons of math instruction, He would have given us more fingers and toes".

The complex development of the reseller hosting business, and the relative ease with which just about anyone can create private-labeled hosting company has created a great deal of healthy competition within the industry - a situation that tends to benefit the average hosting customer. Unfortunately for that average customer, the ease of setting up a Web hosting business means that there is also no shortage of pretenders.

And for every unqualified or unreliable Web hosting company, there are dozens - at least - of dissatisfied customers, many of them inclined to believe that Web hosts are thieves, guilty of false advertising, poor performance and unreliable support.

Many of those customers are guilty, too, of failing to research before making their purchases, or being sucked in by low prices. The "buyer beware" principle applies in Web hosting as much as in any other business.

But as buyers do become more aware, even well-meaning Web hosts may discover that they set off alarms for some of those researching customers, coming close to making claims that are becoming more commonly recognized as literally too good to be true. If someone offers everything but the kitchen sink for $4.95 per month you will get exactly what you pay for.  Just take a moment to think how much time this company can provide for $4.95 per month.  Full story

After several years of what some considered VeriSign's (verisign.com) bullying of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (icann.org) through lawsuits, the two reached a settlement this week.

The deal, which ICANN passed in a 9-5 vote, allows VeriSign to raise the cost of .com domain by 7 percent per year through to 2012. Critics say the deal, which was negotiated as part of a settlement regarding legal action between the two companies, essentially gives VeriSign a monopoly over the domain name market.

This overrides VeriSign and ICANN's former contract that would have maintained the current pricing on .com domain name registration until it expired in November 2007.

The settlement has sparked an outcry from much of the Internet community, particularly from domain registrars like BulkRegister (bulkregister.com) and Godaddy (godaddy.com). Both companies made announcements voicing their indignation over the passing of the .com agreement.

Leading the opposition is the Coalition for ICANN Transparency (cfit.info), a group of individuals, organizations and companies concerned about the lack of visibility into the activities and operations of the Internet governing body.

"CFIT played an extraordinary role and continues to play an extraordinarily important role as an organizing influence," says CFIT spokesperson John Berard. "We consider ourselves the whiteboard for the industry in thinking through its concerns and potential solutions."

CFIT has criticized the .com agreement since its proposal last September, calling it just one of the many clear-cut reasons why ICANN cannot operate fairly on behalf of consumers and other intranet stakeholders.

We think that the contract should run its course, that the contract should be put up to bid, and that there should be no linkage between settling litigation and assigning the .com registry name."

The only people who didn't have any objection to [the .com] agreement were the other registries like .info and .uk and .us," says Berard. "They figured that if VeriSign got these sweetheart arrangements, they would get them as well."

Despite the passing of the .com deal, Berard says that CFIT is not finished fighting. It will continue its efforts against the agreement on Capitol Hill and at the Department of Commerce and the Department of Justice.

CFIT's suit against ICANN and VeriSign will certainly continue especially in light of the fact that the judge in the case has upheld our antitrust claims.

The organization may have a long road of litigation ahead of it, but things are looking somewhat hopeful. US District Court Judge Whyte issued his final order on Tuesday supporting CFIT's antitrust claims and dismissing VeriSign's motion to dismiss for lack of venue. 

Increasing prices without justification, allowing a monopoly to expand without review and giving VeriSign perpetual ownership of the .COM registry were wrong when they was first proposed and they're still wrong!!!

The .COM money scam. A monopoly for VeriSign. What to do when $450 million is not enough?

Here’s a quick and light .COM registry economics lesson.
This article will help you understand the enormity of the scam about to be pulled off by VeriSign – the .COM registry operator.

First, there are four players involved here:

1. ICANN. This acronym stands for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. They approve registry and registrar deals. The have the ability to approve or disapprove the pending .COM deal.
2. Registry. For each type of domain name (i.e. .COM, .NET, .ORG, etc.) a registry exists and it’s operated by a company like VeriSign. VeriSign operates .COM and .NET. The registry maintains the Internet routing systems, domain availability lookups and basic records. They have no end user (i.e. registrant) contact and deal only with registrars and ICANN.
3. Registrars. These companies (GoDaddy.com is a registrar) act as a go between with the various registries and the registrants. They provide registrants with customer service and also other products that enable the use of their domain names.
4. Registrants. That’s you. You’re the user of the domain name and it’s your money that pays for all of the above. It’s really important that you read this. Unless we get this turned around, you’re about to be taken – again!

The economics lesson starts here.
It’s important to first realize that it costs VeriSign, the .COM registry operator, next to nothing to add each new .COM name to the registry, because unlike registrars, VeriSign:

• Does not have to provide customer service to registrants — that’s provided by registrars like GoDaddy.com.
• Is not under any competitive pressures whatsoever to reduce prices – each registry has a monopoly until the registry contract is re-bid.
• Has everything handled by an automated process. The costs of operating these automated processes (i.e. bandwidth, storage, etc.) have been and are expected to continue to decline. Click on the link here to see historical charts.       "Full Article here"

AT&T Inc. said on Sunday it would buy BellSouth Corp. for $67 billion to expand its reach into the southeastern United States and acquire the rest of Cingular Wireless it does not already own.

Together, AT&T and BellSouth would have a national long-distance telephone and data network, residential customers stretching from Florida to California and business customers comprising more than half of the Fortune 1000, analysts have said.

BellSouth shareholders will receive 1.325 shares of AT&T common stock for each common share of BellSouth. Based on AT&T's closing stock price on March 3, that equals $37.09 per BellSouth common share, a 17.9-percent premium.

The new AT&T, which was formed in November when SBC Communications Inc. completed its acquisition of AT&T Corp., also said it would repurchase at least $10 billion of its common shares over the next 22 months.

The companies have a combined market capitalization of $165 billion and annual revenue of about $64 billion. The next largest telephone company, Verizon Communications, which bought MCI Inc. last year, has a market capitalization of $99 billion and 2005 annual revenues of about $75 billion.

The deal would bring ownership of Cingular Wireless, the No. 1 U.S. wireless telephone company, under one roof, which Wall Street analysts have said would streamline management and allow one parent company to enjoy all of the financial benefits.

AT&T currently owns 60 percent of Cingular, while BellSouth owns the remaining 40 percent. Despite its heft, Cingular has been losing marketshare of the most lucrative, post-paid customers to its main rival, Verizon Wireless.

At the completion of the deal, which is expected to close within a year, all the landline and wireless businesses will exist under the sole brand name of AT&T, the companies said.

A purchase of BellSouth would recombine the former "Ma Bell" with four of the seven original Baby Bells regional telephone companies. AT&T was broken up in 1984, with the parent controlling the long-distance assets and its seven offspring controlling regional local telephone services.

As traditional landline phone businesses have been hurt by a shift to e-mail and wireless phones, telephone carriers have shifted their focus to faster growing businesses such as wireless and data services.

AT&T and other major telephone companies also have been upgrading their networks to offer subscription-television services to thwart competition from cable TV operators, which are offering phone services. AT&T in January began offering video in Texas and plans to expand service to 21 cities in its home territory this year.

Recently, Skype and Intel have announced a deal that would limit Skype's functionality on all but specific Intel processors. Currently, Skype 2.0 offers 10-way conference calls only on Intel's latest dual-core CPUs, while other chips, including all AMD chips, will only allow for 5-way conference calls. Maxxus.com now has posted an version of Skype that integrates a patch and allows users with non-Intel dual-core processors to engage in conference calls with up to 10 participants.

Details about the pathc as well as the doanload can be found here.

The company's original plan would have required all bulk e-mailers to pay a small fee — ranging from 1/4 cent to 1 cent per message — to route their e-mail directly to a user's mailbox without first passing through junk mail filters.

AOL, a unit of Time Warner Inc., said the system would reduce help reduce spam because only legitimate groups would be likely to pay the fee.

But on Monday, a consortium of nonprofit groups, including the AFL-CIO labor union and political group MoveOn.org Civic Action, blasted plans to charge for the service, claiming it would stifle communication from organizations that couldn't afford to pay.

On Friday, the DearAOL.com Coalition again criticized AOL's latest move, saying it would "create a two-tiered Internet with one standard of e-mail reliability for the big guy and an inferior standard for the little guy."

AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham said the service offered to nonprofit groups would have the same reliability as the commercial service. AOL plans to contract with a third-party e-mail accreditation service within the next two months, he said.

Call it anything you want it changes the way the web functions and adds a hook that simply not necessary. It seems that putting a white-list and black-list feature to all AOL users is clearly a better approach. 

Also they clearly cannot tell a spoofed or forged header any better than anyone else. So there is no new black magic being applied here. We know this as we have signed up to AOL's list and can confirm the emails never transited our email servers. No problem we are keeping the server transcripts in case they are ever necessary in a court case. Yeah the headers would indicate they have. Yet the server logs tell the truth and are valid in any court. Offering a service which cannot give the truth about the true path a mail is transiting is nothing new.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a class-action lawsuit against AT&T on January 31, 2006, accusing the telecom giant of violating the law and the privacy of its customers by collaborating with the National Security Agency (NSA) in its massive and illegal program to wiretap and data-mine Americans' communications.

In December of 2005, the press revealed that the government had instituted a comprehensive and warrantless electronic surveillance program that ignored the careful safeguards set forth by Congress. This surveillance program, purportedly authorized by the President at least as early as 2001 and primarily undertaken by the NSA, intercepts and analyzes the communications of millions of ordinary Americans.

In the largest "fishing expedition" ever devised, the NSA uses powerful computers to "data-mine" the contents of these Internet and telephone communications for suspicious names, numbers, and words, and to analyze traffic data indicating who is calling and emailing whom in order to identify persons who may be "linked" to "suspicious activities," suspected terrorists or other investigatory targets, whether directly or indirectly.

But the government did not act-and is not acting-alone. The government requires the collaboration of major telecommunications companies to implement its unprecedented and illegal domestic spying program.

AT&T Corp. (which was recently acquired by the new AT&T, Inc,. formerly known as SBC Communications) maintains domestic telecommunications facilities over which millions of Americans' telephone and Internet communications pass every day. It also manages some of the largest databases in the world, containing records of most or all communications made through its myriad telecommunications services. Full Article

We wish to express our serious concern with AOL's adoption of Goodmail's CertifiedEmail, which is a threat to the free and open Internet.

This system would create a two-tiered Internet in which affluent mass emailers could pay AOL a fee that amounts to an "email tax" for every email sent, in return for a guarantee that such messages would bypass spam filters and go directly to AOL members' inboxes. Those who did not pay the "email tax" would increasingly be left behind with unreliable service. Your customers expect that your first obligation is to deliver all of their wanted mail, and this plan is a step away from that obligation.

AOL's "email tax" is the first step down a slippery slope that will harm the Internet itself. The Internet is a revolutionary force for free speech, civic organizing, and economic innovation precisely because it is open and accessible to all Internet users equally. On a free and open Internet, small ideas can become big ideas overnight. As Internet advocacy groups, charities, non-profits, businesses, civic organizing groups, and email experts, we ask you to reconsider your pay-to-send proposal and to keep the Internet free.

http://www.dearaol.com/