Tuesday, August 17

AltaVista will offer free dialup Internet access. News.com looks at the announcement, and analysts' opinions of the potential for free dialup service.

Satellite phone company Iridium has filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection after defaulting on US$1.5 billion in loans.

Sony and Nintendo have dropped the price of their current game systems to $99. Both companies will debut new game consoles in time for Christmas 2000. Sega's Dreamcast will available this Christmas, and Next Generation has the details of what will be in the package. All three companies are building Internet gameplay into their consoles. Wired has a Sony PlayStation II preview.

Forbes takes a look at Bluetooth, the 2.4 gigahertz wireless protocol that may be the basis for upcoming intelligent communications systems.

Recent outages in the Excite @Home network may be partly the fault of 3Com equipment, according to News.com.

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Friday, August 20

Shades of Y2K department. The U.S. Coast Guard is warning GPS users that their systems may not be reliable over the next few weeks, as the systems experience the so-called End-Of-Week rollover: the 20-year old Global Positioning System only had enough memory to count up to 1024 weeks, and time's up. Last year the U.S. Navy dropped sextant training for officers because navigation by GPS had become so widespread.

Salon's Janelle Brown examines the free PC phenomenon and how it's causing increased interest in non-Windows operating systems.

Broadband

A new report from The Pelorus Group predicts that DSL will be available to 70% of U.S. homes by 2004.

A Telechoice report shows that DSL installation rates grew 300% in the first half of 1999. Total U.S. installations were 159,150 at the end of the second quarter. U.S. cable modem installations recently topped the one million mark.

Simson Garfinkel of The Boston Globe looks at DSL and cable modems in the Boston area.

UPC will launch a satellite access service in New South Wales, Australia.

Microsoft security problems

Tuesday - Microsoft released a new music format - Windows Media Audio - to compete with MP3. One of the selling points of WMA was that it has copy protection to prevent piracy. Wednesday - hacker releases tool to break WMA copy protection and allow pirating.

If you use Microsoft Messenger, don't leave your computer unattended. Otherwise someone can steal your Microsoft Messenger password.

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