Pc News

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High-Speed Internet Subscribers Revved in 2005

High-speed Internet connections reached 37.9 million subscribers in the U.S. last year, according to a report released by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Ninety-nine percent of the U.S. population is now able to subscribe to broadband, according the study.

Twice a year, the FCC collects data on the number of high-speed connections from broadband providers with at least 250 high-speed lines in a state. Broadband is divided into two classifications. High-speed lines deliver services at speeds exceeding 200 Kbps (define) in at least one direction. Advanced services lines deliver services at speeds exceeding 200 Kbps for both download and upload streams.

The 2005 calendar year saw a 34 percent increase in broadband subscribers for residential, small and larger business accounts. The second half of the year experienced a slightly higher conversion rate of 17 percent. The first half of 2004 generated 15 percent overall growth.

"It is certainly growing, and growing strongly," Jupiter Research analyst Joseph Laszlo told ClickZ Stats. "Growth is strong, but we don't see a trend in growth over time. It's going to be harder to sustain high percentage growth rates over time."


High-speed increases broken down by delivery method from the first to the second-half of 2004 break down to a 21 percent increase in ADSL subscribers, a 15 percent rise in coaxial cable subscribers, a nine percent increase in fiber or powerline delivery, 30 percent in satellite or wireless, and a four percent increase in other wireline means.

Advanced service lines also experienced growth from the first half of the year to the next. ADSL delivery increased by 51 percent, coaxial cable grew by 15 percent, fiber and powerline increased nine percent, satellite and wireless went up by 30 percent, and other wireline by four percent.

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LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - The man who packaged the Internet to the masses is trying his hand at television, but for a more discriminating audience.

In April, America Online co-founder Steve Case rose from the ashes of his company's ill-fated merger with Time Warner by declaring his intent to build a new empire based in the health care industry.

His private holding company, Revolution, has been on a buying binge funded in part by $500 million of his own fortune. Among the companies acquired was Wisdom Media Group, a small, family-run cable venture based in Bluefield, W.Va., not too far from AOL's Dulles, Va., headquarters.

At this past weekend's Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing convention in Philadelphia, Revolution announced plans to rebrand and relaunch the Wisdom cable channel as the keystone of a multiplatform media play including radio, Internet, wireless and DVD.

In line with Case's ambitions in the health care business, his media strategy is aimed at a loosely defined market segment interested in healthy, eco-friendly goods and services ranging from Whole Foods groceries to Toyota Prius hybrid vehicles. Known to market researchers by the acronym LOHAS, or lifestyles of health and sustainability, the group has a spending power pegged at more than $230 billion.

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TOKYO-- A couple of weeks ago I was in South Korea to attend the SEK electronics show, where SK Telecom, the leading cellular carrier, talked about a digital music service it's calling "Melon." More interesting than the specifics of the service itself was the fact that a cellular carrier is trying to get into the digital music market.

People have been talking for some time about the battle between cell phones, which increasingly have music player functions, and digital music players, which increasingly have all manner of other functions. What I learned from talking to SK Telecom is that this competition could work out to be bad news for consumers.


SK Telecom is using its own digital rights management system to protect downloaded music. Music loaded onto its phones won't play anywhere else--not in handsets from other carriers or in stand-alone digital music players. SK Telecom's handsets also won't play songs protected with other DRM systems, so you can forget about using Apple ITunes Music Store or any other portal to acquire music for your handset. Of course, the same incompatibility exists in the music player world between, say, Apple's IPod and Napster's subscription music service. The situation isn't new, but the entrance of cellular carriers could make it more confusing.


That aside, SEK was also the venue for the launch of IRiver's cool little U10, which supports Microsoft's DRM. And back in Japan, Olympus added to its M:robe music player line with two new models, and Kenwood entered the music player market with a hard-drive device.

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Windows Vista--the next version of Windows, formerly code-named Longhorn--hits a major milestone today with the release of Beta 1 code, Microsoft announced. Microsoft also released the first beta of Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP (as well as the version bundled with Windows Vista).


The preproduction code being released today--several days before the August 3 deadline Microsoft gave itself when it announced the name of the OS last week--will be made available immediately as a download to 10,000 technical beta testers, most of them from the enterprise information technology and developer community.


Another half-million or so members of the Microsoft Developer Network and Microsoft TechNet (a support group for IT professionals who use Microsoft products) will soon have access to Beta 1, but without the support available to the official testers.


Beta 1 will not be available to the general public, at least in part because it lacks many of the user-oriented features Windows Vista will have when it ships in the second half of 2006, Microsoft officials say. a??The whole canvas is not complete," says Greg Sullivan, group product manager in the Windows client division. "We've painted less than half the picture here."

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Microsoft Warms Up to Linux

For those rabid, open-source conspiracy theorists still holding on to the popular notion that Microsoft is secretly working on its own version of the Linux operating system, Bill Hilf has some sobering news.

"The bottom line is, we're wholly, 100 percent committed to Windows and think we can do amazingly powerful things in the operating system," says Hilf, director of platform technology strategy at the Redmond, Washington-based software giant. "There's a ton of stuff we can do to innovate. We don't see that level of innovation [in Linux] that makes us say there's [anything] out there that's better than or more effective than what we can do."


Hilf, who runs Microsoft's Linux/Open Source lab, says he's heard a million varieties of the question about whether Microsoft is working on its own Linux implementation, so many that "I should write a book about them all," he joked in an interview this week.


"The conspiracy theories are ripe," Hilf says. "I've had people come up to me and tell me, 'I know that Longhorn is built on a Linux kernel.'"

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HP to Drop iPod

Hewlett-Packard has decided to stop reselling Apple Computer's popular iPod music player, representatives from both companies confirmed Friday.


Several varieties of the MP3 player were still available on HP's Web site Friday, but the company will end its relationship with Apple's iconic iPod by the end of September, said Ross Camp, a company spokesperson. HP will continue to install Apple's iTunes software on its PCs, he said.

Small Set of Sales

HP and Apple announced a distribution partnership at the 2004 Consumer Electronics Show that also included an agreement for HP to install Apple's iTunes software on its PCs. Over the course of the relationship, sales through HP only accounted for about 5 percent of all iPod sales, according to Apple.


HP rival Dell chose to develop its own MP3 player, the Dell DJ, to compete with Apple. But Apple has owned the market for handheld music players with its iPod, iPod Mini, and iPod Shuffle music players, almost from the inception of the first iPod in 2001.

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Canon Launches First DVD Camcorders

Canon is launching four camcorders for the international market in the coming months, and the lineup includes its first models that record to DVD, the company says.


The company's first two DVD camcorders are the DC 20 and the DC 10. The DC 20 has a 2.2-megapixel CCD (charge-coupled device) sensor while the DC 10 comes with a 1.3-megapixel CCD. They both have 10X optical zooms, take still pictures, and can record to a miniSD memory card, the company says. Like other DVD camcorders, the models record to 3.2-inch discs.


DVD camcorders have been in shops for years and the company recognizes that it has been late to the market, according to Richard Berger, a Tokyo-based spokesperson for Canon.


But the company hasn't been satisfied with the image quality of DVD camcorder models on the market and designers thought many of the early models a bit bulky, so Canon wanted to wait until it got the quality and size issues sorted out, he says.


The company thinks it has got things right with the DC 20 and DC 10 though. The models are 1.9 inches by 3.4 inches by 4.8 inches and weigh 1.1 pounds with battery pack installed and DVD and memory card inserted. While they won't be quite the slimmest DVD camcorders on the market, they are a good enough start, Berger says.


Both will be in shops in Europe in late October; the DC 20 for around $1,208 and the DC 10 for $1091. The company hasn't announced pricing and availability for the U.S.

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Mozilla Goes Corporate

The Mozilla Foundation, which distributes the open source Firefox Web browser, has created a corporate subsidiary to support its money-making activities and help widen the use of its products, it announced on Wednesday.

While the goals of the subsidiary, called Mozilla Corporation, include generating revenue and profit, its primary interest is not in making money, the group said. Instead, its main objective is to sustain the development of Firefox and other products, and help the foundation promote its goal of driving open standards on the Web, it said.


"The Mozilla Corporation is not a typical commercial entity. Rather, it is dedicated to the public-benefit goal at the heart of the Mozilla project, which is to keep the Internet open and available to everyone," Mitchell Baker, a former Netscape attorney who becomes president of Mozilla Corporation, said in a statement.


Mozilla products such as Firefox and its Thunderbird e-mail client will remain free and open source, the group said.

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Hackers Crack Microsoft's Antipiracy System

Microsoft says that hackers managed to bypass a process it had implemented several days ago to ensure that users of Microsoft's update services possessed legitimate copies of Windows before they could download updates and content from those services.

A posting on the Boing Boing blog claimed that a JavaScript command string could bypass a check that Microsoft instituted Wednesday through the Windows Genuine Advantage 1.0 program.

According to the posting, users can override the WGA by pasting the string javascript:void(window.g_sDisableWGACheck='all') in the address bar of their browser and pressing Enter. The code "turns off the trigger for the key check," according to the blog posting.

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Internet TV: Still Fuzzy, but Promising

Several big telecommunications operators and the world's largest software maker hope to pursuade many couch potatoes to zap their old-fashioned notions about television and tune in to its convergence with the Internet.

Internet TV, or IPTV, is arguably one of the hottest new technologies in communications. A handful of operators already offer service with largely home-grown systems, but many eyes are glued to the screen to see what Microsoft is concocting with some big-name carriers.

Using the same DSL connection that gives customers broadband Internet access over phone lines, Microsoft-aligned operators such as BT Group, Telecom Italia, SBC Communications, and India's Reliance Infocomm aim to add TV for a much-cited "triple play" of bundled voice, data, and video services. Their premise: If--in our age of the digital packet--documents, images, music, and even phone calls can be broken up into bits, thrust through networks, and reassembled by Internet protocol at the other end, why not TV?

It's a legitimate question, and one that telephone companies--painfully aware that the days of their cash-cow circuit-switched telephone business are numbered as cheap Voice over IP (VoIP) services go mass market--aim to answer, despite their failed attempts at TV service in the past.

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Internet phone carriers still seeking 911 replies

WASHINGTON - Some of the top U.S. Internet phone providers told U.S. regulators this week they are still trying to obtain acknowledgments from customers that they know the limitations of dialing 911 with their service.

Some customers of Internet phone service, known as Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP), have had trouble getting help when dialing the emergency number 911, which prompted the Federal Communications Commission to order changes.

Unlike traditional phone service, not all Internet phones provide 911 dispatchers with the location of callers, and some calls have been routed to administrative lines that are not always monitored.

The FCC in May ordered companies to fix those issues by late November and, in the interim, to get acknowledgments from all customers that they understand those service limitations. Analysts estimate there are more than 2 million VOIP customers.

Vonage Holdings Corp., the biggest U.S. Internet phone provider, said it has received acknowledgments from more than 90 percent of its customers but was unable to predict whether it would achieve the 100 percent goal by an August 29 deadline.

"Vonage is continuing its campaign to contact and obtain affirmative acknowledgment from all of its customers," the company told the FCC. Dozens of carriers reported that they were contacting customers via letters, calls and e-mails.

"Vonage expects to send out at least one e-mail per week and to continue to restrict account access of subscribers who have not yet submitted an affirmative acknowledgment," it said in an August 10 filing.

AT&T Corp. said that it had received affirmative replies from 77 percent of its customers as of August 9, but about 10 percent of its Internet phone customers may not provide acknowledgments by the deadline.

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Pirated Version of Mac OS for PCs Available

Instructions on how to install Apple Computer's Mac OS X operating system on any PC with a chip from Intel or Advanced Micro Devices were posted to the Internet this week, and they could be found on several Web sites today.

Apple announced in June that Mac OS X will run on Intel's x86 architecture chips starting in 2006. The Cupertino, California, company has been working on a version of Mac OS X for Intel's chips since 2000, even though Macs currently use PowerPC chips from IBM and Freescale Semiconductor. Apple Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs told developers that a switch was necessary to take advantage of the low-power chips Intel is expected to release in the future.


At the time, Apple executives insisted that Mac OS X would only run on x86 chips used in Apple-developed hardware. Intel PCs distributed to Apple developers with the x86 version of Mac OS X used a security chip to prevent developers from copying Mac OS to other Intel PCs, according to several reports this week from Mac enthusiast sites.

Hacker Bypass

However, several enterprising hackers have figured out ways to bypass the security chip and run the developer's version of MacOS for x86 on any x86-based PC, according to a posting on the Web page of The OSx86 Project. Posters on that site, as well as other sites within the Mac community, claim to have used the instructions to run Mac OS X on their Intel or AMD PCs, with some posting pictures and videos of x86 PCs booting Mac OS X.


The process requires a copy of Mac OS X version 4 (Tiger), VMware's virtualization software, the PearPC emulator that can run operating systems written for PowerPC on any architecture, Apple's Darwin 8.0.1 software, an x86 processor that supports SSE2 (Streaming SIMD Extensions 2), and two files created by an independent developer that can be downloaded using the BitTorrent file-sharing system.

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Microsoft urges update for flaws

Microsoft is urging Windows users to update their systems with the latest security patches it has released to fix three critical flaws in its software.



The flaws mostly affect Windows 2000 and Internet Explorer. Users with updated Windows Server 2003 and XP systems are not as much at risk.

If left plugged in, they could allow hackers and virus writers to take control of personal computers remotely.

Microsoft releases security bulletins regularly to alert people to updates.

The most serious of the flaws are awarded a "critical" status.

Open to attack

The first of the three flaws applies to Internet Explorer users. The loophole could leave a computer open to a virus or worm attack, which could then let an attacker take complete control of an affected computer.

A vulnerability was also found in the Print Spooler service and the Plug and Play (PnP) hardware detection feature in Windows, both of which could leave systems open to attack and vulnerable to remote control.

What are the threats on the net?
Users are being urged to download the patches to fix the flaws. Most security updates happen automatically if the auto update function is activated in Windows software.

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at net security firm Sophos, said that Windows users should "sit up, listen and take action."

"Although we have seen no malicious code in the wild yet which exploits these critical security holes in Microsoft's code, we have seen malicious worms and hackers follow these announcements very soon after the vulnerability's disclosure."

He added: "Fortunately with Windows XP SP2 it is easier to keep your computer up-to-date with security patches than ever before."