Tuesday, February 1

The ZoomAir P128 is a wireless hub and ISDN router that provides 128K Internet access at distances up to 300 feet in a typical office, or 1000 feet in an unobstructed environment. Optional antennas can extend the range up to a mile.

Salon takes a look at what it calls m-commerce: e-commerce over mobile phones.

Monster.com made a splash last year by spending their entire year's revenue on a Super Bowl ad even though they had never advertised on TV. Now dot-com companies are crazy for Super Bowl ads. Yahoo! has most of the ads in Realplayer and Windows Media Player formats. John Dvorak says he only liked three of the dot-com ads. Vote for your favorite ad at Yahoo! or yack about it at Slashdot.

Big bandwidth

A new study by the Yankee Group predicts that 3.3 million Americans will have high-speed Internet access by the end of the year, and 16.6 million by the end of 2004. The study also predicts that marketshare for cable modems will slip from 80% to 42% by 2004 as DSL and other options become more widely available.

MSNBC examines how high-speed Internet access gives small companies new capabilities.

Security and privacy

DoubleClick, the largest ad agency on the Internet, plans to use cookies to track people's surfing and spending habits. Here's how it works: you go to a site affiliated with DoubleClick. DoubleClick's servers set a cookie in your browser, but they don't know your identity. Now you go to another DoubleClick-affiliated site and give your real name in order to enter a contest. Doubleclick can now build a database that connects your real identity to your surfing habits. There's a simple way to defeat this scheme in Netscape Communicator: go to preferences and under advanced preferences choose the option to "Accept only cookies that get sent back to the originating server." (While you're there, make sure the option to "Send email address as anonymous FTP password" is unchecked. That prevents an old exploit that can capture your email address.)

The US House of Representatives passed a bill that makes electronic signatures legally binding. Italy is considering a similar bill.

Microsoft has released a patch to fix two security holes in Microsoft Index Server, an add-on in Windows NT 4.0 and a standard feature in Windows 2000

ZDNet's David Raikow asks, "What's wrong with Microsoft security?"

Now that he's out of prison, hacker Kevin Mitnick wants to go to college.

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Friday, February 4

Cambridge Computer's Databridge Elite is a new modem-bonding solution that can achieve up to 112K by using two phone lines.

CNET has a new mobile phone section. It follows the format of CNET's excellent computers.com site.

AOL is facing a US$8 billion class action lawsuit stemming from charges that the company's 5.0 software overwrites other ISP's settings. Reuter's has a look at anti-AOL sentiment. (For what it's worth, I used to be responsible for developing an ISP's software, and not only did we have a problem with AOL's software overwriting ours, we had a problem with our software overwriting other ISP's settings. It can be a tough problem to avoid.)

Computer security and privacy

CERT has issued an advisory regarding a potentially severe threat dubbed cross site scripting (CSS, not to be confused with Cascading Style Sheets), which typically involves embedding malicious scripts in hyperlinks.

A bug in Microsoft's Java virtual machine can expose data to snooping web sites. Internet Explorer and Outlook Express are affected, but Outlook is not.

PC Magazine looks at the risks involved in Internet Explorer's AutoComplete feature, which can type in previously-used passwords and personal information. The article also explains how to disable the feature and clear out stored data.

Former CIA director John Deutch stored classified information on his unsecured home computer, according to a CIA inspector general report. The same computer was used to access pornographic web sites. Deutch's security clearance was revoked in 1999.

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