Tuesday, February 8

PC Magazine has resumed their listing of Top 10 Modems.

Intel announced plans to buy modem chip maker Ambient Technologies (formerly Cirrus Logic) for $150 million in cash.

Free and/or cheap computers and/or Internet access

Ford and Delta have teamed up with PeoplePC to provide employees with free Hewlett-Packard computers and Internet access for $5 a month.

After merging with with free PC maker FreePC, Inc., eMachines has stopped its free computer program. Customers are being given title to their computers, and the free Internet access program will cease February 14.

Computer security and privacy

Yahoo! was besieged by a denial-of-service attack Monday, causing a three hour outage.

Disappearing Inc. is demoing a new product that shreds old email after a set amount of time. The idea is to reduce corporate liability by getting rid of unguarded comments that could surface in a lawsuit.

In other shredding news, a Microsoft employee has admitted in a deposition to destroying documents that would have hurt Microsoft's position in the suit filed by Caldera.

---

Friday, February 11

One of CNET's Top Ten Tech predictions for 2000 is that DSL will dominate over cable modems. However, a study by the Cahners In-Stat Group predicts that DSL installations won't pull ahead of cable modems in the US until 2004, with 10.1 million DSL installations and 9 million cable installations. CNET also repeats the myth that cable modems slow down as more customers use them. There's an element of truth in that, but the limiting factor in most cases is the egress bandwidth to the Internet, which is true of DSL and any other system.

Cable modem company and search engine Excite@Home plans a broadband portal to take advantage of high-speed Internet connections. Salon.com has likewise launched a broadband division to deliver multimedia content.

Phone company and now DSL provider BellSouth is cutting 2,100 jobs in a move to consolidate its infrastructure.

One impediment to Internet access in many countries is per-minute phone charges. In Japan, Nippon Telephone and Telegraph Corp plans to cut the cost of unlimited phone service in half as early as May. For customers near access points, costs will be cut by three-fourths. About a quarter of the Japanese population - roughly 20 million people - currently use the Internet.

In Germany, AOL Europe has asked the German government and Deutsche Telekom to cut Internet access charges by 20 to 50 percent to increase Internet usage and e-commerce. Rates for voice calls would be unaffected.

Another country with enormous Internet growth potential is India. India's has one billion citizens, but only three million are currently on the Internet. In India the problem is related to a scarcity of PCs and telephone access.

Computer security and privacy

A number of prominent web sites were attacked this week using brute force nuisance attacks. Yahoo! was shut down for three hours when it was hit with a large-scale denial-of-service (DOS) attack. Kurt Seifried of SecurityPortal.com explains how DOS attacks work and what can be done to minimize their impact.

Yahoo! is working with the FBI to find the perpetrators of the attack, but some Internet security experts say the hackers will not be caught.

The recent attacks could benefit the insurance industry with new hacking insurance policies. The attention on security has benefited makers of computer security software.

A new Mac-only security site, SecureMac.com, examines Macs and cable modem security.

Previous week