Tuesday, September 26

Mindspring, Earthlink and UUnet were the top three ISPs in an Inter@ctive Week poll.

Bowing to pressure from their record label, the Offspring won't release their next album for free on the Internet.

The first AOL-branded hardware will be released next month. The AOL version of the BlackBerry pager will allow wireless Instant Messaging.

Wireless 

Cyber India Online examines some of the differences between WAP and i-Mode, which Japan-based DoCoMo plans to release its popular i-Mode phones in the US and Europe. One significant difference is that WAP uses a circuit-switched, dial-up model with subsequent per-minute charges, whereas i-Mode is packet-switched. Another difference is that i-Mode uses c-HTML (a subset of HTML), while WAP uses WML (a subset of XML). For more information on DoMoCo and i-Mode, read the Fortune magazine profile.

The WAP Forum plans to move to XHTML and TCP with WAP 2.0, planned for finalization in mid-2001.

VisorPhone is a new GSM cell phone SpringBoard module for the Palm-compatible Handspring DA. The plug-in hardware module synchronizes with the Handspring and has its own battery. Cost is $299.

Motorola and Palm are collaborating on a new phone/PDA combo. The unit will feature a color screen that's larger than a normal cell phone screen and wireless synchronization with a desktop PC. The first phone will use GSM, which is popular in Europe but almost unheard of in the US.

Computer security and privacy

On Sunday The Observer reported that Ralph Dressel had been enable to obtain banking account information coordinated by Fiserv, which provides online banking services for dozens of banks. However, Further research by vunet.com indicates the data he discovered was actually test data representing fictitious accounts.

Wired looks at the problems caused by web filtering software, particularly keyword-based blocking schemes.

A 16 year old hacker was sentenced to six months in jail for breaking into NASA computers that support the International Space Station.

SafeMessage is a new encrypted instant messaging system that uses one-time keys.

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Friday, September 29

In a new announcement, Radio Shack will begin selling MSN's DSL service immediately, and will begin selling MSN's two-way satellite service in October.

MSN got into how water recently over the built-in spam features of its MSN Explorer software, which spammed everyone in the users address book when their email address changed. MSN has since issued mea culpas.

A new study by the Cahners In-Stat Group predicts that the ISP market will grow by 36% this year, but 80% of the new business will go to the 20% of ISPs who offer national service.

The number of people using wireless Internet access will grow from 170 million in 2000 to more than 1.3 billion in 2004, according to another Cahners In-Stat Group study.

A Forrester Research report says that retailers will be disappointed in the number of sales driven by non-traditional computers (such as cell phones, handhelds and TV-based Internet appliances). The devices will account for only 3 percent of online retail sales in 2005. One bright spot in the report is a note that such devices will influenced 10 times more sales than they transact.

With lots of days to go until Christmas, don't get your hopes up for a Sony PlayStation 2 or Intel Pentium 4. Both are expected to have supply problems.

Computer security and privacy

Slashdot got hacked by a couple of people who found a test box running a fresh copy of Slashcode with the default password.

Online discount broker E*Trade is admitting security problems involving cookies and cross-site scripting. The first problem was that the cookies contained the customer's username and password in a scrambled but not encrypted format that could be decoded without a great deal of effort.

The Digital Freedom Network has announced the results of its Foil the Filters contest, which set out to show the undesirable results of filtering web pages. The winner came from a student at Carroll High School, where the web filtering software in the school's library wouldn't let him access the school's own web site. The high school's web site contained the word "high," an obvious drug reference.

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