Tuesday, February 22

The Strategis Group reports that 23 million Americans are interested in high-speed Internet access at a cost of $40 per month, and 12 million are ready to purchase high speed access now.

In a unanimous decision, the FCC has rejected a petition to treat Internet access as video programming. Under US law, cable companies are required to allow outside video programming. The petition was brought by Internet Ventures in a clever attempt to force cable TV companies to open their networks to ISPs wanting to offer cable modem access.

Palm unveiled the first color Palm computers, the $449 IIIc and the $249 IIIxe.

Within 24 hours of release, Microsoft released a Windows 2000 compatibility patch. The patch mostly affects games, but also solves compatibility problems with FrontPage 98 and Iomega Zip drives. There are still problems with AOL 4.0.

BugTraq has confirmed a Novell report of a security problem in Windows 2000 Active Directory.

The PointCast Network has pushed its last content over its original product. After failing to fund an IPO, PointCast sold to Idealab last May. The new company has a second-generation push client called EntryPoint.

Computer security and privacy

Hot on the heels of an FCC investigation and a lawsuit in Michigan over its profiling practices, DoubleClick has announced its own privacy initiative, but privact advocates are not impressed

Canada Direct, a Canadian ISP, has turned over files to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police belonging to mafiaboy, a former customer and one of the suspects in the denial of service attacks that made headlines a few weeks ago. Canada Direct released the files after being served with a search warrant. Last week the ISP reported that mafiaboy's accounts had been closed in 1998.

Aastrom Biosciences Inc.'s web site was hacked last Thursday with a bogus announcement that the company would merge with Geron Corporation. Both companies' stocks rose as much as 25% during the trading day before closing about 10% higher.

Security expert Mark Rasch this week testified before Congress that a large percentage of computer hacking is done by professionals in order to steal intellectual property. Furthermore, Rasch testified that most serious cybercrime isn't reported because the damage to the companies' reputations would be ten to 100 times more expensive than the original crime, and because many companies don't trust law enforcement.

An attorney has filed a class-action lawsuit against Yahoo! (New York Times article: use "56kcom" for the username and password) under a Texas anti-stalking law. Several attorneys interviewed in the article indicate that the suit may be a stretch.

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Friday, February 25

The inventor of Motorola's first cell phone is tackling the problem of wireless Internet with a new company, ArrayComm.

T-Online will begin offering unlimited flat-rate access in Germany starting in May for less than 100 Deutsche marks (about US$50) per month.

Coming on the heels of the announcement of an AOL-Time Warner merger, a Zogby poll found that 43% of respondents thought that large corporate mergers had a negative effect on society, while only 26% perceived the effects as positive.

The US Senate is hearing testimony this week about the failure of daytrading and brokerage firms to disclose the risks associated with daytrading. More than 75% of daytraders lose money.

Computer security and privacy

European politicians are demanding to know more about Echelon, the high-tech spy system developed by the US, UK and other partners.

GoHip.com is under fire for changing users' default home page and signature file. Using ActiveX, the site sets the visitor's home page to GoHip.com and adds "Click here for Free Video!! http://www.gohip.com/freevideo/" to their email signature. SecurityPortal has a discussion of ActiveX security problems. A Spanish software developer has discovered a flaw in Microsoft's ActiveX-based Active Setup program which Microsoft promises to fix.

Have you gotten spammed with emails for Internet Sleuth and other programs that claim to unearth information on almost anyone? Wired looks at the reality of spy programs.

eBay says they lost only $80,000 in expenses as a result of the denial of service attacks a few weeks ago, and lost no revenues.

A group of Russian hackers is taking over ICQ accounts with six-digit ICQ numbers - considered prestigious in the ICQ community because they indicate a long-time ICQ user. In one recent case, a hacker hijacked an account and offered to sell it back for $100.

The first Windows 2000 virus has been discovered a week after Windows 2000 debuted.

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