Tuesday, October 19 

ZDNet's Brock Meeks looks at the potential for federal Internet access fees in "Modem tax myth may be for real." Unlikely, considering reiterated statements from the FCC that is wants a hands-off policy towards Internet regulation. The historical origins are in long-distance telephone fees, so would cable modems be exempt? Cable modems and DSL are always-on devices, so how would per-minute fees be charged?

SBC Communications, the largest local phone carrier in the US, will spend US$6 billion to upgrade its network to support high speed DSL.

The Encyclopedia Britannica is now available online for free.

A new version of the Melissa Word macro virus is active. Dubbed Melissa.U (Gen 1), the strain deletes system files.

In "Online grocery stores are a dead duck," John Dvorak raises a good point: why should grocery delivery succeed now when it didn't before?

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Thursday, October 21

CERT has issued a security advisory concerning the WU-FTPD daemon, one of the most common FTP server daemons.

Palm Pilots

3Com has released PalmOS 3.3, with Euro support, faster Hot Syncs, and other features.

Motorola announced a new, 33 MHz version of the DragonBall, the processor used in the Palm. The new processor provides 256 color support. The next day, 3Com announced it will release a color Palm in the first half of 2000.

TRG, makers of Palm memory upgrades, have designed their own Palm clone, the TRGpro, complete with a CompactFlash expansion slot.

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