Tuesday, March 28

With 3Com exiting the dialup modem market, Zoom pledges to continue with dialup modem sales while pursuing a broadband strategy.

Ric Ford at Macintouch reports on problems with the iMac and G4 internal modems. Many connection problems are apparently solved by installing alternative 56K modem scripts.

Iridium's dead, the postmortem is written, and now Globalstar doesn't feel too good, either. The satellite phone company expects to have just $700,000 in revenue for the first quarter, and may have to slash prices.

No ruling is expected in the Microsoft antitrust case until after Tuesday. The judge is giving both sides more time to reach a settlement.

What if there was a browser war and no one came?

CNET reviews Internet Explorer 5.5 Beta for Windows and the just-released Internet Explorer 5 for Mac.

Netscape 6.0 will be here in a month, and Netscape 4.72 is out now.

Opera 4.0 is in public beta.

Net.toasters.

3Com plans to launch a new Internet appliance this summer, and hopes it will outsell its wildly successful Palm organizer.

Last week Ken Segler realized the potential of the Netpliance i-opener as a cheap, subsidized PC. Now Andrew Gilham has gotten FreeBSD running on his i-opener.

Computer security and privacy

Police in Wales arrested two young men who broke into e-commerce sites in five countries and stole credit card and other information from 26,000 accounts. Bill Gates' credit card was among the ones stolen.

Wired's Michelle Finley examines the privacy implications of free DSL service.

Salon's Mark Compton has an interview with AntiOnline's John Vranesevich.

The two programmers who broke Cyber Patrol's encryption have settled out of court, agreeing to cease distribution of the software and to turn over rights to the software to Microsystems. One little catch: the software was released under the GNU public license, so anyone can use, copy, or modify the program.

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Friday, March 31

Randy Barrett and Carol Wilson of Inter@ctive Week examine the unfair competition between phone companies and DSL service providers. In some cases, the phone companies are offering their own DSL service at such a low price that the ISPs can't compete.

Comcast will open its cable networks to competing ISPs once its exclusive agreement with ExciteAtHome expires two years from now. Comcast is the third largest cable operator in the US.

Sony is recalling the 1.25 million PlayStation 2s sold in Japan. There's no defect, but the DVD-ROM in the PS2 can play DVDs from non-Asian territories, which is against the DVD licensing rules.

Slashdot has a discussion of how much a web site should sell for. (Make me an offer I can't refuse. -Leslie)

April Fool's day is on a Saturday this year, which eliminates some of the potential for workplace highjinks.

Wireless

EchoStar is investing US$50 million in iSKY Inc. to roll out two-way, high-speed Internet satellite service in the US. The service is rated at 1.5 megabits per second (1500 Kbits/second).

NetSat Express's Impact ISP service is designed to provide a complete infrastructure for provisioning ISP services via a satellite link.

Sci-fi author Bruce Sterling has written a eulogy for the Iridium satellite network.

Computer security and privacy

The FTC is investigating Yahoo to see if its use of customer information complies with consumer protection laws.

The author of a book on hacker Kevin Mitnick is suing Mirimax and parent company Disney, claiming Mirimax used materials from his book without permission in a movie. The movie - tentatively titled "Takedown" after the book on which it was based - has been released in Paris as "CyberTraque," but hasn't made it to US theaters. Joel Deane of ZDNet News covers the movie's legal and ethical controversy.

Silicon.com discusses concerns about the security of Linux and open source in general. ZDNet advocates a hybrid approach of open and closed source. Kurt Seifried of SecurityPortal.com takes issue with some of the negative claims about open source and Linux security.

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