Tuesday, January 11

Wired reports that the $10 million dollar bid on eBay for the year2000.com domain turned out to be bogus, "Along with the $9 million bid, the $2 million bid, and the $1 million bids."

PC World looks at the latest G.Lite DSL modems from 3Com and Intel. In the process, they help explain why G.Lite hasn't set the world on fire: it's not really a standard, and it doesn't always eliminate the need for a splitter. Worse, G.Lite only works over very good phone lines.

DirecPC parent company Hughes Electronics is planning a new satellite Internet service. The $1.4 billion SpaceWay service will be a two-way service, unlike DirecPC, which requires a regular modem for uploading data.

A Nielsen/NetRatings study found that analog modem users still dominate the market in home Internet use.

Modem Use by US Home Internet Users
8.3%	-	14.4 modem
45.2%	-	28.8/33.6
40.7%	-	56K
5.9%	-	High speed*

* includes cable, DSL, ISDN, T1 and satellite
Source: Nielsen/NetRatings study

An 18 year old Russian hacker claims to have stolen 300,000 credit card numbers from CDUniverse.com, and only went public after the company declined to pay his $100,000 blackmail demands.

The "I" in ISP is for insanity

AOL and Time Warner are merging. No small consequence will be that AOL will get access to Time Warner's Road Runner cable modem installations.

Excite@Home is planning to offer free Internet access. The company hopes to hook people with free 56K Internet access, then convert them to cable modem customers.

Free ISP maverick NetZero claims to have three million users just 15 months after launch. As with any free service, some of those users have probably signed up for the service but never use it.

Reason magazine looks at the effect open cable access could have in delaying broadband Internet rollout.

PC Magazine looks at more plans for free, advertising-supported DSL. Bonus: a reminder that Earthlink and Flashnet tried giving away PCs to lure people online, but eventually canned those plans.

Apple is investing $200 million in number 2 US ISP EarthLink.

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Friday, January 14

Andrei Popescu writes "Software drivers for Motorola SM56 PCI Modems can be found at http://www.mot.com/networking/products/sm56_pci_software_modem/drivers.html."

Bill Gates is stepping down as CEO of Microsoft. Second-in-command Steve Ballmer will become president and CEO, while Gates becomes chief software architect.

Big bandwidth

Boeing in planning a US$3.75 billion bid for Hughes Electronics' satellite-building business. Hughes, a subsidiary of GM, owns the DirecTV and DirecPC services, and recently announced plans for SpaceWay, a new Internet satellite network that can provide two-way Internet service.

CBS Marketwatch looks at how the AOL-Time Warner merger will affect the market for broadband Internet access.

CableLabs has approved a new DOCSIS cable modem from DX Antenna.

3Com and Best Buy are rolling out a trial program in Washington, D.C. Buyers will be able to qualify their phones lines, buy a 3Com cable modem, and order DSL service from Bell Atlantic from within the Best Buy store.

Security and privacy

The Sacramento Valley Hi-Tech Crime Task Force reports that a 16 year old hacker broke into 27 ISPs and gained root access, the highest level of access on a UNIX computer. The hacker was able to obtain password records, prompting Pacific Bell to require its 200,000 customers to change their passwords.

FBI assistant general counsel Steven Chabinsky told attendees of an Internet Society discussion that they should be more concerned about private abuse of computing privacy than government abuse.

The Clinton administration is planning to relax encryption export laws, making it easier for U.S. companies to sell encryption products overseas.

Security certificate provider VeriSign recently announced it would buy it's #2 competitor, Thawte. Now another competitor, Entrust, claims that the merged company will have 99% of the market and will prevent fair competition. E-commerce web sites and other sites that collect confidential information must have security certificates to encrypt data between the web browser and the server.

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