Tuesday, January 23

ZDNet has an excellent broadband special report comparing cable modems, DSL, T1/ISDN, satellite and wireless. One highlight is a test of average bandwidth over time for cable modems and DSL. Though the results aren't necessarily typical for a given provider (any provider will have a bandwidth deficiency in some of their cities at any given time), it's interesting to see the variations in available bandwidth by day. An even more interesting graph would have been available bandwidth by time of day.

Katharine Mieszkowski of Salon questions the role of the Internet in California's power crisis.

The FTC ended its investigation into DoubleClick , concluding that the advertising giant had not violated its privacy policy.

George Bush has appointed Michael Powell, son of Colin Powell, commissioner of the FCC .

Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen has some advice for Bush about revising the Whitehouse.gov web site .

ISP news

Analysts for Merrill Lynch and ING Barings predict that AOL may increase its monthly subscription fees .

Prodigy announced new agreements with SBC Communications to co-develop dial-up and DSL ISP services . SBC has committed to deliver 3.75 million DSL and 375,000 dial-up subscribers to Prodigy over the next nine years.

A small town in Georgia is experimenting with Internet and TV over phone lines .

Computer security and privacy

Variants of the Ramen worm for Linux can automatically replace existing web pages on Red Hat Linux web servers, though other Linux distributions and Unix flavors could be affected. The worm takes advantage of existing vulnerabilities. Red Hat 6.0-6.2 users can close many of the default vulnerabilities with Bastille .

Speaking of Linux security, the new iptables firewall in the Linux 2.4 kernel may be much better than the ipchains in earlier releases.

The Register reports that some UK doctors are using Hotmail to transfer patient records . While all unencrypted email is insecure, Hotmail has had a terrible history of security breaches and bugs. In the US, the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is setting standards for protecting patient information.

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Friday, January 26

Edmund Morris of the LA Times has an extensive review of AOLTV.

Computer security and privacy

The Dutch government has officially acknowledged the existence of Echelon, the top secret US and British system for eavesdropping on phone calls, emails and faxes.

Microsoft is the latest denial-of-service victim. Several of the company's sites - including MSNBC, Carpoint, Homeadvisor and Windowsmedia - were knocked offline by the attacks, which were similar to the DOS attacks on Yahoo! last year. In addition, several Microsoft sites including the microsoft.com site were offline earlier this week due to DNS problems.

Due to a programming error American Express revealed customer data in 401K statements. The mixup caused statements to be mailed to the wrong customers, and showed account balance, social security numbers and birth dates.

Big bandwidth

Thirty-six senators sent a letter to President Bush encouraging him to support a bill that would provide tax incentives to companies providing high speed Internet access to underdeveloped areas in the US.

A new Jupiter Research study predicts that broadband access in the workplace will more than double by 2005.

Wireless

Ericsson is quitting the mobile handset business after losing US$155 million in its latest quarter. Ericsson is the world's third largest maker of mobile phone handsets, but makes most of its money from telecom equipment.

CNET has a list of their favorite wireless-accessible web sites .

Swedish air carrier SAS will test wireless in-flight Internet service.

Yahoo! is developing games for wireless handhelds. The initial games will be DataClash, Video Poker, Hangman and black Jack

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