Tuesday, March 7

You can finally buy a Sony PlayStation 2, but only if you live in Japan. Sony sold 980,000 PlayStation 2s between Saturday and Monday.

AMD beat Intel to the 1K finish line on Monday when it released the 1000 MHz Athlon processor.

ISP news

After just one day, WebTV has stopped including banner ads in users' email. Users reacted negatively, balking at having to watch email ads on a small screen with a service that costs $25 a month.

The latest alliance of a broadband carrier and a portal site marries cable modem provider RoadRunner with LookSmart directory services.

The idea of transferring Internet data over power lines isn't new. Nortel, based in Canada, worked on an implementation for several years, though it eventually failed. Now three new companies - Germany's Veba and American firms Enikia and Media Fusion - are picking up the torch.

AltaVista is poised to launch a completely free ISP service in the UK. Not only will users not pay a monthly fee, they won't have to pay per-minute telephone access charges. There will be a 30 pound ($47) signup fee.

Terra Networks Mexico launched a free Internet service in Mexico on Monday.

Wireless

Lucent's new Phone Browser will access a web site and read it to you over your cell phone.

Nokia chief Jorma Ollila believes that web-enabled cell phones will outnumber Internet-connected PCs within three years.

Failed satellite phone company Iridium is spending $3 million to keep its satellites in operation for another 11 days while it looks for a buyer.

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Friday, March 10

Free ISP NetZero unveiled a new feature on Wednesday. "Auto dial" cycles through a sequence of local access numbers to balance the load on the modem pool, reducing busy signals caused by inefficient call distribution.

Ashley Dunn of the LA Times reviews the Netpliance i-opener, a $99 Internet appliance.

DSL provider Covad Communications is buying LaserLink.net for $387 million in stock.

A Virginia court has issued an injunction against AOL subsidiary Digital City. HotJobs.com claimed that Digital City illegally canceled its advertising contract after AOL signed an exclusive agreement with its competitor, Monster.com.

CNET has a review of the Apple AirPort 1.1 wireless networking station, finding that many 1.0 problems were fixed, but that network performance still isn't up to par. Also reviewed: the iBook SE, PowerBook G3/500 and Power Mac G4/500.

Computer security and privacy

Police have arrested Dennis Moran, AKA Coolio, for breaking into a Los Angeles police department anti-drug web site. Coolio is suspected of being the perpetrator of the massive distributed denial of service attacks against Yahoo, eBay, eTrade and Amazon.com, though police have found no evidence linking him to those attacks. Moran has admitted to breaking into the LA police site, but he denies he was behind the larger attacks.

Chad Davis, member of a hacking group known as Global Hell, was sentenced to six months in jail and a $8054 fine for breaking into the US Army's web site.

Would you like every web site you visit to know your phone number? That's currently what happens when AT&T and Sprint customers use their phones' wireless web feature. Sprint announced it will stop transmitting customer numbers in April or May, but AT&T hasn't made a similar commitment.

Quicken is being sued by a user who claims his financial data on Quicken.com was given to third parties.

EDS, a company founded by Ross Perot and later sold to GE, recently admitted that it had given tens of millions of dollars in equipment to two men falsely claiming to represent a secret Air Force project.

The Yankee Group is set to release a study enumerating the inherent security problems with frame relay and ATM.

Microsoft has released a patch for a security problem in Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 and Microsoft Data Engine 1.0.

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