Tuesday, September 29

Modem maker Xircom is purchasing the Rex from Franklin Electronics for US$13.25 million.

Contrary to earlier predictions, this will not be the Christmas for retail cable modem sales, says Cable World. Price is the biggest hindrance.

Dell is pursuing high bandwidth technology, offering $49 cable modems pre-installed in new systems, and preparing to offer HomePNA 2.0-compliant devices. HomePNA 2.0 provides home networking at up to 10 megabits per second - the same as 10BaseT Ethernet - but uses your existing phone lines and doesn't require a hub.

News.com examines RoadRunner cable's race to catch up to Excite@Home in the home cable modem market.

A CableLabs initiative will help consumers determine whether cable modem service is available in their area.

ISP bidness

John Schoen of MSNBC asks, "Can Earthlink get big fast enough?" The article has an updated chart of the top 18 US ISPs. Bonus!

UK free ISP Freeserve has issued its first earnings report since being spun off. Losses increased to 5.23 million pounds, while membership rose to 1.5 million subscribers.

Cell fonz

The upcoming Orange PDA will do triple duty as Windows CE PDA, mobile phone, and video phone. The device will only be available in Europe, and will sport wireless transmission speeds of up to 128K.

Starfish Software CEO Phillipe Kahn talks about the need for global messaging, and the downfall of satellite giant Iridium in the latest Salon. [I learned something about the Iridium phone from this article: it's a line-of-sight device, so it can't be used inside. You have to go outside to make calls. D'oh! - Leslie]

MSNBC looks at tiny new cell phones from Motorola, Nokia and Ericsson. Awesome!

Mobile phone prices may be affected by flash memory shortages. Bummer.

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Friday, October 1

Excite@Home is reportedly preparing to restructure so that its cable modem network and Excite search portal can be divvied up and sold, with AT&T and AOL as potential buyers.

The FBI has discovered malicious computer code masquerading as Y2K fixes in US software contracted to foreign programmers.

Sun will make its Solaris OS source code available to programmers, but will not make the software free.

Red Herring looks at the investor's market in wireless technology.

IP addresses and privacy

Most dialup modem ISPs use rotating IP addressing (AKA assigned or dynamic addressing), so that IP addresses can't be used to identify users as they surf the Internet. Privacy is going to be a bigger issue for cable modem and DSL providers who use assign static IP addresses to their customers. Suddenly it becomes possible to identify someone through their IP address, and potentially harass them by attacking their computer through ping bombs, syn floods, and other obnoxious behavior.

For instance, your IP address is . Does it change each time you connect to the Internet? Your resolved host address, if available, is . Does that give away any information about your identity or location? (I'm using server side includes to show your addresses, but only you can see them. I've gotten several emails and one phone call from people who thought I was showing everyone their address.)

This issue came to the forefront this week when the Associated Press noted that ABC news printed the IP addresses of participants in an online chat with anchor Sam Donaldson. That resulted in a lively discussion over at Slashdot.

Now IP addressing has come up again, with California DSL ISP Fastpoint Communications in hot water over privacy concerns. The company mapped each customer's IP address to a subdomain that included the customer's real name, such as bobsmith.fastpoint.net. Fastpoint has now changed the system for new users to provide more privacy, and will change existing customer accounts on request.

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