The Inquirer

Sprint and Samsung sharpen WiMax efforts

Sylvie Barak — Fri, 16 May 2008 16:29:23 GMT

Sylvie Barak the Inquirer, Friday 16 May 2008. 16:57:00

Sprinting towards launch

THE PARTNERSHIP between Sprint and Samsung Electronics has edged closer to delivering its first WiMax network the firms annouced as they held hands today. The network hardware hass apparently now jumped through all the relevant hoops of Sprint's commercial acceptance criteria, which checks its overall performance, handoff performance and handoff delay. Apparently they were all fine. The companies reckon this is a really important milestone for them, clearing the way for a launch of commercial WiMax in both Baltimore and Washington D.C later on this year. Sprint had been letting Samsung test its XOHM mobile broadband Internet service in the US for compliance with the mobile WiMAX standard....

ISP guarantees net neutrality

Nick Farrell — Fri, 16 May 2008 08:14:56 GMT

Nick Farrell the Inquirer, Friday 16 May 2008. 08:59:00

They can take away our bandwidth, but they'll never take our freedom

A NEW ISP is trading on the bandwagon that it will guarantee punters' net neutrality. Copowi, which went online two weeks ago, aims to capture the US's customers' interest by claiming it has a neutral network. The outfit is marketing itself as a "social enterprise" instead of a traditional business, and sends free Ubuntu CDs to its punters. Currently the outfit only offers a service in 12 Western states, but wants to eventually become international. It claims that the telcos want to "privatise the Internet" because they can use it to make big bucks. Copowi wants usage to be unrestricted and traffic will not be shaped, throttled, or otherwise prioritised....

Top level domain .pro lets in the riff-raff

Sylvie Barak — Wed, 14 May 2008 14:21:21 GMT

Sylvie Barak the Inquirer, Wednesday 14 May 2008. 14:50:00

Pro nouveau

OPERATOR OF THE .pro Internet domain, Registrypro has had the ok from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to make the .Pro TLD available to more professionals worldwide. Launched in 2004, the elitist .pro domain has usually been the private brandy room of only four professions thought worthy of its honour: Accountancy, Engineering, Law and Medicine. As if that wasn't restrictive enough, the exclusive .pro club was also only available to members of those professions lucky enough to reside in civilised .pro countries like Canada, Germany, the UK and US. But now new terms of service mean that .pro will soon be letting in all the riff-raff, with all those holding some form of professional credential, from any kind of government authority, in any country, to enter....

Doctors fear wireless internet killers

Nick Farrell — Wed, 14 May 2008 08:41:03 GMT

Nick Farrell the Inquirer, Wednesday 14 May 2008. 09:32:00

An Iphone killed my patience

DOCTORS are getting concerned that the proposed use of unoccupied TV airwaves for high-speed Internet services could kill critically ill patients. The American Society of Healthcare Engineering, an arm of the American Hospital Association, claims that signals which monitor critically ill patients could be lost because of interference. The medical boffins say that using empty channels for unlicensed broadcsts could disrupt the monitoring of patients' heart rates, blood oxygen levels and other vital signs at hospitals. If the machines go down, even for a few seconds, doctors lose information on the patient's physiological condition. Sometimes the patient will croak because the healthcare gets too basic....

Parents' evenings could be replaced by the Interweb

INQUIRER Staff — Thu, 08 May 2008 11:45:17 GMT

INQUIRER Staff the Inquirer, Thursday 8 May 2008. 12:03:00

Reduces fist-fights

SCHOOL PARENTS' evenings could become a thing of the past, replaced with online reports and text messages, Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, Ed Balls said yesterday. Balls told a gathering of the Parent Know How programme that research shows parents prefer informal chats with teachers rather than parents evenings and want to be able to moinitor their children's progress online. Only one in five parents thinks parents evenings a good idea, according to the reasearch. Mr Balls said parents, "tell us they like informal contact with their child's school - whether that's a chat in the playground or the chance to go online and see their teenager's marks and make sure they're going to all their classes." He said parents' evenings would become less important. As it happens, part of the Parent Know How programme is the idea of giving parents more information through the Web or by phone and text messaging. The scheme has government backing to the tune of £44 million. Children's minister Kevin Brennan said: "All parents need a bit of help sometimes - and the best way to get that advice may be by text message or in a chatroom. We want to reach out to parents who may not normally ask for advice or might not know where to go." µ SCHOOL PARENTS' evenings could become a thing of the past, replaced with online reports and text messages, Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, Ed Balls said yesterday. Balls told a gathering of the Parent Know How programme that research shows parents prefer informal chats with teachers rather than parents evenings and want to be able to moinitor their children's progress online. Only one in five parents thinks parents evenings a good idea, according to the reasearch. Mr Balls said parents, "tell us they like informal contact with their child's school - whether that's a chat in the playground or the chance to go online and see their teenager's marks and make sure they're going to all their classes." He said parents' evenings would become less important....

Bournemouth boggers get faster connection

Stewart Meagher — Wed, 07 May 2008 13:29:46 GMT

Stewart Meagher the Inquirer, Wednesday 7 May 2008. 13:46:00

Brings a whole new meaning to logging on

BRITAIN'S ANSWER TO MIAMI, Bournemouth, is to get the country's first network of super fast Interweb connections. The Dorset seaside town, where many of the UK's old folk are sent to trudge through their declining years wearing weary grins and plastic raincoats, will soon have the best Internet connections the nation has to offer in the form of ultra high bandwidth fibre optic cable which will run through the town's sewer system. The cabling company H20, which has been providing fat pipes to businesses and universities throughout the UK for some years now, is planning to roll out a nationwide network in the future....

Europe rules the internet

Stewart Meagher — Fri, 02 May 2008 14:44:26 GMT

Stewart Meagher the Inquirer, Friday 2 May 2008. 15:40:00

Just don't mention Japan or South Korea

NUMBER CRUNCHING maths marvels at the International Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) have worked out using complicated numbery stuff that, of the top 15 Internet using nations on earth, ten are in Northern Europe. The complex (for us) formula took into account the number of subscribers per household, the average speed of the line and the price per Mbps and aggregated the results down into a single score. Poor old America was whipped into a rather weedy 15th place by little old Luxembourg. You can get the full figures here but be warned, the server (obviously based in America) is complete and utter pantaloons....

Adobe opens screen project

Stewart Meagher — Thu, 01 May 2008 13:46:50 GMT

Stewart Meagher the Inquirer, Thursday 1 May 2008. 14:25:00

Wants Flash everywhere

PHOTO AND VIDEO specialists Adobe has today announced The Open Screen Project, in an attempt to unify the way content is delivered via the internet to a variety of devices including computers, TVs and mobile phones. The project - which is supported by a group of industry leaders, including ARM, Cisco, Intel, LG, Marvell, Motorola, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Qualcomm, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Toshiba and Verizona - aims to provide a consistent runtime environment to developers using Flash Player for online media and Adobe AIR for desktop applications. Client-side support comes from the likes of the BBC, MTV, and NBC Universal....

Apple deal could kill DVD sales

Stewart Meagher — Thu, 01 May 2008 10:54:08 GMT

Stewart Meagher the Inquirer, Thursday 1 May 2008. 11:53:00

Itunes movie release dates sharpened

APPLE IS EXPECTED to announce later today that future feature film release dates on its media marketplace, the Itunes Store, will now coincide with retail DVD release dates. The groundbreaking move is expected to involve the likes of Fox, Disney, Warner Bros, Paramount, Universal, Sony, Lionsgate and New Line. MGM is conspicuous by its absence. No official figures are available as of yet on current volumes of sale, but the announcement later today, predicted by the Hollywood Reporter, should include the relevant data, and we'll bring that to the party as soon as we have it. The move is expected to bring pressure to bear on the likes of Amazon's Unbox service and Microsoft's Xbox Live Marketplace, and we fully expect similar deals to be hammered out by all major competitors lickety split....

Europeans robbed of streaming XM radio

Fernando Cassia — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 08:10:56 GMT

Fernando Cassia the Inquirer, Wednesday 30 April 2008. 08:53:00

Tears roll as "AOL Radio" kisses XM good-bye

AROUND the globe, users of the free "AOL Radio" on-line music streaming service will find themselves without the popular American XM satellite radio channels, after the agreement between the two firms lapses today. Since AOL opened up its "walled garden" on-line service and web sites and decided to offer free services and AOL accounts to anyone with a third party broadband provider a couple years ago, AOL Radio has been one of the highlighted features promoted by the firm to lure users into its freebie services. The reason for this free-for-all change of heart was, of course, to have more eyeballs for its on-line adverts, by now its main source of revenue -or lack thereof....

Tech unions found fantasy island in Second Life

Mark Ballard — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 14:00:31 GMT

Mark Ballard the Inquirer, Friday 25 April 2008. 14:23:00

Socialism gets second wind

IF FAT CAT executives ever needed reassurance that socialist ideals were nothing but fantasy, this might be it: the international union movement is setting up a virtual centre in Second Life. Unison, a UK union, said today it was backing the launch of Union Island, a virtual workers' movement featuring beautiful cartoon girls with big hair and tight t-shirts. But it might not be a move to cloud cuckoo. The world's first virtual union protest at an imaginary company headquarters last year may have led to tangible results for downtrodden techies. After IBM had arbitrarily cancelled performance bonuses in Italy, 1,853 protesters swarmed IBM's virtual headquarters in Second Life and stormed a management meeting with cartoon placards....

Sarkozy’s broadband tax plan snagged by Eurocrats

Ian Young — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 09:51:44 GMT

Ian Young the Inquirer, Thursday 24 April 2008. 10:35:00

Illogical

THE EU COMMISSION has warned that France's quest for universal internet access would be hampered by a presidential proposal to tax broadband usage. The plan is to supplement the licence fee for public broadcast television and radio which has a funding shortfall due to the decision to abolish advertising in order to 'raise standards'. Speaking in Paris this week, EU Telecoms Commissioner Viviane Reding, condemned President Sarkozy's proposal arguing it contradicted his own ambition to make broadband available to all French people. "One cannot wish to solve the problem of (low) broadband penetration in France and want to create a tax on broadband at the same time, I think that goes against any logic and I say it loud and clear," Reding warned....

Danish telco offers free music downloads

Stewart Meagher — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:57:20 GMT

Stewart Meagher , Monday 31 March 2008. 17:02:00

Foolish launch date fails to rain on music parade

DANISH COMMS company TDC has launched a new free music download service for its mobile and broadband customers. It will offer unlimited access to over a million tracks from three of the biggest record companies in the world as well as some less well-known Nordic artists. The service, called Play, launches at midnight on April 1st, sparking rumours that the whole thing was an elaborate April Fools gag. TDC press spokesman, Ib Jensen, however, assured us that all was above board. "I know it all seems too good to be true but I hope we have convinced most people that it's not an April Fool." He then went on to explain how the whole thing works: "TDC pays a cash sum to the labels we have agreements with....

Native Americans lose connection

Nick Farrell — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:57:19 GMT

Nick Farrell , Friday 4 April 2008. 08:03:00

Bury my heart at Wounded ISP

AFTER LOSING THEIR LANDS and being forced to march to new a location, thousands of Navajo Nation residents are about to be disconnected from the world wide wibble. It appears that last year OnSat Network Communications double-billed the tribe, and it raised questions about how the tribe requested bids for the Internet contract. As a result, the Universal Service Administration, which monitors the service under the Federal Communications Commission's E-rate program, told the tribe it would not have to pay $2.1 million to OnSat. It says it is withholding money for OnSat for 2006-07 because of the possible overbilling and because the tribe didn't comply with federal rules that require it to select the most cost-effective service or equipment through a fair, open and competitive bidding process....

Interweb made obsolete

Nick Farrell — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:57:19 GMT

Nick Farrell , Monday 7 April 2008. 07:52:00

Outdone by superfast grid

THE WORLD-WIDE wibble is officially obsolete, according to quality organ the Jellygraph. Apparently a new "grid" system which is 10,000 times faster than broadband connections will replace the Internet. Swiss boffins have stopped concentrating on the great cheese versus black hole philosophical questions and have started working out a way of replacing the internet with something a bit faster. The grid system is a spin-off from Cern and could provide shedloads of power down the web. The paper quotes David Britton, a physics boffin at Glasgow University who claims that with this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like him cannot even imagine....

Ebay forces Aussie buyers to use Paypal

Sylvie Barak — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:57:19 GMT

Sylvie Barak , Thursday 10 April 2008. 15:16:00

Kangaroo caught

USING THE FLIMSY PRETEXT of insecurity, Ebay Australia has announced that as of June, buyers will only be able to pay for their goods via the online commerce website Paypal, which just happens to be owned by the online auction company. Australians are seething at the decision, which they see as a blatant effort by Ebay to siphon off even more money from user sales, to fill its own fat pockets. A customer email alert from Ebay to its Australian users warned that as of 21 May, all customers will have to offer Paypal on their listings, in addition to other currently permitted payment methods, but from June 17th, only Paypal or cash on delivery options will be available, meaning that direct deposits, money orders and personal cheques will no longer be accepted....

Virgin wages war on net neutrality

Sylvie Barak — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:57:19 GMT

Sylvie Barak , Monday 14 April 2008. 13:04:00

If you want Virgin, pay premium

THE NEW CHIEF executive officer of Virgin Media, Neil Berkett, isn't one to mince his words. And he's not Neutral in the debate over net neutrality either. In fact, he thinks that the whole concept is, " a load of bollocks". After only a month in the job, Berkett has laid into critics who claim that ISPs like Virgin Media shouldn't be allowed to control data traffic, and says that Virgin are already well on their way to signing deals with various content providers who will pay a premium to have their content delivered faster than others. Network neutrality is the tenet that Web users should be the ones to control what content they access online, and that that content can be equally accessed across the Internet....

Tesco breaks free of WMA chains

Stewart Meagher — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:57:19 GMT

Stewart Meagher , Tuesday 15 April 2008. 12:44:00

Retail monster takes on Itunes

TESCO DIGITAL will soon be launched in the UK. The partly DRM-free music download concern will now offer 1.6 million Ipod-friendly MP3 files alongside the current roster 1.7-million Windows-hamstringed tunes. Later in the year, the whole site will switch over to unprotected files, as well as offering downloadable video content including TV progs and movies. Download prices for tracks and albums will be variable, and Tesco have also suggested that they will offer free Flash games to registered punters. Tesco, which already swallows up a pound for every eight spent in UK shops, and unveiled record profits of £2.8 billion today, looks like it might be trying to muscle in on Apple's turf, as well as pre-empting Amazon's moves to offer a one-stop entertainment shop this summer....

Broadband customers ripped off

Andrew Thomas — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:57:19 GMT

Andrew Thomas , Tuesday 15 April 2008. 16:40:00

Beware surveys bearing gifts

IT IS a truth universally acknowledged that an ISP in possession of some creaky old infrastructure must be in want of more suckers to sign up. We hold these truths to be self-evident, but now find ourselves forced to add another - that surveys purporting to show punters how to increase their broadband speeds are about as believable as the Iraqi Information Minister's protestations that everything was under control as the tanks hove into view behind him. Any fule no that ISPs lie through their teeth in their claims of the speeds on offer. Indeed, an asthmatic ant with some heavy shopping exhibits a more convincing turn of speed than most 'high speed' Internet connections....

Interweb prepared for quantum leap

Sylvie Barak — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:57:18 GMT

Sylvie Barak , Tuesday 15 April 2008. 16:47:00

Once its photons are all lined up

SCIENCE BOFFINS HAVE been dreaming about quantum computers since the beginning of the 1980s, but now advances in the field mean that the working reality could be that much closer, and not just in isolated lab experiments, either. A professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Northwestern University, Prem Kumar, has just published new research in the journal Physical Review Letters, detailing how his team managed to put together a quantum logic gate, essential for quantum computing, inside optical fibre. According to Technology Review, this sort of gate could now be used either as part of a circuit, able to transmit data securely over hundreds of kilometers, from one quantum computer to another, or individually, to crack really hard math problems....

Internet addresses run out in three years

Nick Farrell — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:57:18 GMT

Nick Farrell , Thursday 17 April 2008. 07:12:00

Move to IPv6 now or else

MAJOR tech companies are warning that IP4 addresses are running out faster than a well-greased Cheetah on its way to a wildebeest convention. The Global IPv6 Summit in Beijing has heard how the situation was reaching crisis point and all the IP4 addresses will be gone in three years. This means that the move to IP6 will be sudden and not particularly well controlled. Tony Hain, IPv6 technical leader for Cisco said that the world+dog was in a state of denial about upgrading to Ipv6 and no one will ask for IPv6 until they run out of IPv4 addresses. Sandeep Singhal, Microsoft's director of Windows networking, said that companies need to develop a phased approach to the use of native and dual stake IPV6 they cannot simply wait until it is out there....

Internet addresses run out in three years

Nick Farrell — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 07:08:00 GMT

Nick Farrell the Inquirer, Thursday 17 April 2008. 07:12:00

Move to IPv6 now or else

MAJOR tech companies are warning that IP4 addresses are running out faster a well greased Cheetah on its way to a wildebeest convention. The Global IPv6 Summit in Beijing has heard how the situation was reaching crisis point and all the IP4 addresses will be gone in three years. This means that the move to IP6 will be sudden and not particularly well controlled. Tony Hain, IPv6 technical leader for Cisco said that the world+dog was in a state of denial about upgrading to Ipv6 and no one will ask for IPv6 until they run out of IPv4 addresses. Sandeep Singhal, Microsoft's director of Windows networking, said that companies need to develop a phased approach to the use of native and dual stake IPV6 they cannot simply wait until it is out there....

Broadband customers ripped off

Andrew Thomas — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 16:36:08 GMT

Andrew Thomas the Inquirer, Tuesday 15 April 2008. 16:40:00

Beware surveys bearing gifts

Interweb prepared for quantum leap

Sylvie Barak — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 16:36:08 GMT

Sylvie Barak the Inquirer, Tuesday 15 April 2008. 16:47:00

Once its photons are all lined up

Tesco breaks free of WMA chains

Stewart Meagher — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 12:40:57 GMT

Stewart Meagher the Inquirer, Tuesday 15 April 2008. 12:44:00

Retail monster takes on Itunes