Wednesday, August 19

Hayes is planning layoffs, and will sell its modem manufacturing facility and outsource modem production, according to Computer Retail Week.

Mirabilis has fixed a security hole in ICQ, its popular instant messaging software. The hole made it possible to obtain someone's ICQ password, which could allow a hacker to impersonate the victim on ICQ.

Lucent and Sun are working together to make email, voicemail, and fax interchangeable, and accessible from a wide array of consumer devices, from cell phones to computers. Under the plan, your email might be converted from text to speech and sent to your answering machine, or faxed to your PC for immediate delivery.

Forbes Digital Tool examines the competing cellular phone standards of CDMA, GSM, and TDMA.

Logicode update

I spoke to Logicode on August 14th to follow up on previous conversations. It's still possible that I will be able to distribute their drivers, firmware, and other files from their web site. They haven't yet decided. (And I don't currently have the files.)

I inquired about V.90 upgrades, and the news wasn't good. The company has closed its doors and most of the employees are gone, so there's don't have the money or the manpower to modify the code. In short, don't expect a Logicode V.90 upgrade.

V.90 news

Several readers inform me that they are suddenly getting V.90 connects with BellSouth.net. Ron Smith reports that a BellSouth.net tech posted a message to a support board to the effect that V.90 testing is over and the company is rolling out V.90 across its coverage area this month.

Pro-nets has V.90 upgrades for their Speedcom modems.

The Equinox Digital Modem Pool provides 6 to 96 V.90 modem ports for a Windows NT RAS.

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August 21

Ariel is offering a 30 day trial of their RS1000 Windows NT RAS board. The RS1000 provides up to 48 ISDN, V.90, or K56flex connections for remote users. Ariel claims the system can be installed and configured in less than one hour.

Lucent has a new 3.8b21 beta for the Livingston Portmaster, dated August 21st. According to the release notes, the new version improves V.90 compatibility and correctly reports V.90 connect speeds as seen through SNMP.

Looking for a USB modem? Martin Shin is selling his U.S. Robotics V.90/x2 USB modem in the classifieds.

FCR Software offers a line of useful communications products for Macintosh:

• LinkUPPP is a full-featured PPP client that works with AppleTalk and TCP/IP.
• LinkUPPP Turbo supports bonding two 56K modems for speeds up to 112K.
• LinkUPPP Pro is a multilink PPP client for ISDN
• LinkUPPP Quattro can combine four ISDN channels
• LinkUPPP Personal Server is a remote access PPP server that runs on the Mac OS.
• Internet Gateway allows a network of Mac, PC, and Unix computers to share a single modem and ISP connection.

The company's web server is slow, so it may take several attempts to get in.

V.90 Upgrades

Jason Budget spotted V.90 upgrades for the European Accura 5670 external speakerphone modem. These are the first non-North American upgrades from Hayes.

SVEC has V.90 upgrades for PCMCIA cards model FM560LK and MD56002 and ISA modems model IS560LH.

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