Tuesday, March 14

Motorola will shut down its Iridium network of more than 60 satellites if a qualified buyer is not found by March 17. Iridium, LLC is in chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

On the wired side of data connections, Motorola has received CableLabs DOCSIS certification for its DM100 and PL100 cable modems. The PL 100 is a multi-user cable modem which can connect to computers via Ethernet, USB, or HomePNA, and all three options can be used simultaneously.

ISP news

NetCompeteNow is a coalition of companies fighting against open cable access.

Shares of Juno jumped after receiving a buy rating from Jeffries and Co. and launching high-speed access in New York.

CoreComm is buying ISP Voyager.net's operations and 360,000 customers for $540 million in stock and cash.

Excite@Home continues to have email problems, with some mail being lost or undelivered. The company has plans to upgrade its email system in August.

Covad Communications will provide DSL for Prodigy customers. Rollout will begin in April for some Prodigy service areas.

Computer security and privacy

Former CIA director James Woolsey stated that the US engages in economic espionage against European countries, though he claimed that the spying was primarily to counteract bribery.

A two-year old hole in Microsoft IIS allows snoopers to gather credit card and other information from sites that haven't patched their systems. A hacker named Curador has used this and other holes in Windows NT hosting systems to make a name for himself by posting stolen credit card information.

Last week a scandal erupted at MIT when it was announced that someone had broken into a computer and changed 20 grades in a biology class, raising two students' grades, and lowering 20 others. In a reversal, biology professor Harvey Lodish now says that the changed grades were a result of incorrectly sorting the grades in a spreadsheet.

Some innocuous-looking HTML code can cause IE 5.0 to use 100% of CPU cycles.

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Friday, March 17

Today is Saint Patrick's Day. It's also the deadline for a buyer to step forward to purchase bankrupt satellite phone company Iridium. What will happen if no one buys the company? Iridium will bring its 66 satellites out of orbit, allowing $5 billion in spacecraft to burn up in the atmosphere.

A researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has found a relationship between exposure to extremely low frequency electromagnetic radiation and suicide rates.

If you have Windows 2000, don't install any version of IE earlier than 5.01, or you could be locked out of your computer.

A shortage of LCD-related components could affect cell phone supply and pricing.

Computer security and privacy

In the largest credit card heist to date, 485,000 credit cards were stolen, then stored on government computers.

MSNBC examines the stolen credit card market and looks at business interest in better credit card security and credit card alternatives.

Mattel - makers of Barbie, Ken and CyberPatrol - is suing two programmers who reverse-engineered the encryption in CyberPatrol, allowing people to see what sites were blocked.

A Washington state judge struck down the state's anti-spam law, ruling that it violated the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution.

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