Tuesday, August 24

AOL will begin offering free Internet access in Britain. AOL Europe had been the largest Internet service in Europe until Freeserve began offering free access and quickly amassed one million members.

The Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance (WECA) is creating standards for wireless Ethernet at speeds up to 11 Mbps. Sponsoring companies include 3Com, Aironet, Intersil, Lucent Technologies and Nokia.

ActionTec's 56K PCI Master modem is a controller-based modem (not a software-based or "Win" modem) that supports all popular operating systems. Bad news: popular does not include Macintosh. Good news: it does include Linux and OS/2, and the cost is only $59.

Sprint will use 3Com InterWorking Forum (IWF) technology as the backbone for the wireless PCS data access service to be unveiled next month.

A new study reports that the top 50 web sites account for 35% of web surfing.

Breakin' the law

A serious security flaw in Microsoft Office 97 and Office 2000 is being largely ignored, even though it may be the biggest yet in any Microsoft product. The bug allows HTML commands embedded in an email to execute commands through Microsoft's "Jet" OBDC engine, which is present in Excel, Microsoft Publisher, Microsoft Streets and Trips, Microsoft Visual Studio, and some third-party, non-Microsoft software. A free patch is available that fixes the bug, but the sheer number of installed copies of Office means that the vulnerability will be around for years.

The Kriz virus is set to go off on December 25. The payload deletes a PC's CMOS using a procedure similar to that of the CIH virus, which destroyed thousands of computers. The virus has not yet been detected in the wild.

The Department of Justice has won its first conviction in a case involving pirated music distributed as MP3s.

Two men were arrested in Sweden for trying to hack into computers belonging to NASA, the U.S. military, and a British company, Wide Intellectual Resources.

---

Friday, August 27

A study by Inverse Network Technology finds that V.90 modems are fulfilling their promise, with V.90 users getting connections speeds of an average of 61 percent faster than 33.6 modems, with 31 percent better throughput on web pages.

PC Magazines asks, "Does the Pentium III improve web surfing?" Spoiler: it doesn't, except for small speedups on sites using advanced multimedia technologies such as Flash or Shockwave which require more processing power.

Cisco will spend US$6.9 billion to buy network technology company Cerent, in spite of the fact that privately-held Cerent has never shown a profit.

The Dell'Oro Group has a new market report on router and remote access sales for second quarter, 1999.

Peter Henig of Red Herring examines the open cable access issue.

Previous week