http://www.speedguide.net/ SpeedGuide.net - Everything Broadband. en-us Copyright 1998-2009 Speed Guide, Inc. All rights reserved. webmaster@speedguide.net http://www.speedguide.net/read_news.php?id=3075 In an attempt to spare Internet users the fear of random crackdowns on illegal downloading, EU lawmakers and governments have officially finished coming up with new rights for them on Thursday. According to EU Telecoms Commissioner Viviane Reding, they sealed the deal when EU governments accepted EU parliament demands to find a happy medium between a punishment for illegal downloading and a broader set of rights for internet users, reported the Associated Press. The EU had been working on the reforms for ... News Fri, 06 Nov 2009 09:18:55 EST http://www.speedguide.net/read_news.php?id=3074 A hacker this week released a new exploit that allows users to circumvent Apple's preventative measures that have blocked unauthorized code from being run on the new iPhone 3GS. In October, Apple unexpectedly began shipping new iPhone 3GS models to ward off hackers who run unauthorized software in a practice known as "jailbreaking." In addition to unlocking the handset for use on other carriers, the practice can also be used to run unsigned code. Hacker George Hotz this week released ... News Thu, 05 Nov 2009 09:28:07 EST http://www.speedguide.net/read_news.php?id=3073 Researchers say they've uncovered a flaw in the secure sockets layer protocol that allows attackers to inject text into encrypted traffic passing between two endpoints. The vulnerability in the transport layer security protocol allows man-in-the-middle attackers to surreptitiously introduce text at the beginning of an SSL session, said Marsh Ray, a security researcher who discovered the bug. A typical SSL transaction may be broken into multiple sessions, providing the attacker ample opportunity to sneak ... News Thu, 05 Nov 2009 09:21:26 EST http://www.speedguide.net/read_news.php?id=3072 The Swedish police network was taken down last week in a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. Today it was the turn of the Swedish Signals Intelligence agency (Försvarets Radioanstalt FRA), and the attacks are raising eyebrows in the security community. No one is prepared to go out on a limb, particularly since the source of the attacks is unknown, but I wonder whether the incidents aren't in some way connected with the recent shenanigans over the Pirate Bay torrent site. While there's no proof, ... News Thu, 05 Nov 2009 09:14:11 EST http://www.speedguide.net/read_news.php?id=3071 Electronics retailer, Best Buy, and Sonic Solutions, the digital media company that last year acquired the pioneering broadband VOD service, CinemaNow (it subsequently added "Roxio" to the service's name in order to make its branding consistent with its other products), announced Tuesday that they have formed a strategic partnership that will enable Best Buy to launch a broadband VOD service based on Roxio CinemaNow. The companies, which announced a partnership earlier this year (see the ... News Wed, 04 Nov 2009 09:31:40 EST http://www.speedguide.net/read_news.php?id=3070 A U.S. man is facing federal criminal charges for allegedly selling modified cable modems and software that enabled free Internet access at super-fast broadband speeds. Ryan Harris, owner of TCNISO, ran a mail-order Web site and retail store in San Diego that sold software and modded cable modems. The products enabled "users to obtain faster, upgraded internet service without paying the premiums charged by the ISP," according to the indictment, which is dated Aug. 19 but was unsealed just last ... News Tue, 03 Nov 2009 08:55:15 EST http://www.speedguide.net/read_news.php?id=3069 VoIP service Vonage has reportedly dropped off the net, with UK customers complaining that their voice service has disappeared since lunchtime today. Vonage customers have been complaining that the service disappeared around lunchtime today, and that once they manage to get through to technical support they are told that there's no schedule for a fix and that the whole network is titsup. Vonage usually provides a Voice over IP service, allowing customers to use a normal fixed-line handset over their ... News Tue, 03 Nov 2009 08:51:33 EST http://www.speedguide.net/read_news.php?id=3068 After a few false starts, WiMax broadband service arrives in Chicago this week, giving residents access to a technology that promises superfast Internet speeds from any location. WiMax is a fourth-generation, or 4G, wireless technology designed to trump the speed, strength and reliability of existing 3G networks or Wi-Fi. WiMax also is meant to be ultramobile, meaning consumers with a 4G-equipped device such as a phone or laptop can get residential broadbandlike speeds, even if they're sitting in a park ... News Tue, 03 Nov 2009 08:47:11 EST http://www.speedguide.net/read_news.php?id=3067 A confidential memo from one of the most secretive panels in Congress was leaked on a peer-to-peer file-sharing network, publicly detailing sensitive probes involving more than 30 lawmakers and aides. The release of the report was jarring enough that Zoe Lofgren, chairman of the House ethics committee, interrupted a series of House votes to alert lawmakers to the breach. The July document revealed a laundry list of ethics inquiries looking into possible corporate and defense industry influence peddling, ... News Mon, 02 Nov 2009 10:04:08 EST http://www.speedguide.net/read_news.php?id=3066 ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, has approved the use of internationalised domain names (IDNs), web addresses made up of non-Latin characters, such as Chinese, Korean and Arabic and other languages. ICANN's decision follows two years of investigation and will be welcomed by users of some non-European languages. "This is a culmination of years of work, tests, study and discussion by the Icann community," said Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of the board of ... News Mon, 02 Nov 2009 10:01:14 EST http://www.speedguide.net/read_news.php?id=3065 Some Gmail users say they've been unable to access to the service for long stretches today and yesterday, though Google has not acknowledged any problem on its "Apps Status Dashboard." Australia-based user Jason Reed says he's been without access for at least 12 hours today, and others posting to Google's support forums here and here say they've had trouble logging into the service for 24 hours or more. "More than 30 hours without email...totally unacceptable. I'll definitely have ... News Mon, 02 Nov 2009 09:46:10 EST http://www.speedguide.net/read_news.php?id=3064 Hong Kong Broadband Network Ltd ("HKBN"), announces today 100Mbps broadband service at US$$13/month (HK$$99/month). At this price level, the cost per Mbps for the service is just US $$0.06 ... Compare this with yours. HKBN also guarantees 80% local bandwidth. Mr. William Yeung, Chief Executive Officer of HKBN said, "With at least 32% of Internet users in Hong Kong still suffering from broadband services below 10Mbps, Hong Kong is lagging behind Korea and Japan in terms of ... News Mon, 02 Nov 2009 09:11:59 EST http://www.speedguide.net/read_news.php?id=3063 The Internet recently celebrated the 40th anniversary of its founding, just in time to be welcomed in Washington by opposing political visions of its future. One is reflected in a proposal called the Internet Freedom Preservation Act, which would empower regulators to micromanage the Web. The alternative, the Internet Freedom Act of 2009, would keep regulators away. As their similar names suggest, these laws, sponsored respectively by Rep. Edward Markey (D., Mass.) and Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.), are ... News Sun, 01 Nov 2009 20:35:53 EST http://www.speedguide.net/read_news.php?id=3062 Blackberry users are being warned that a freely available spyware program will turn their crackberry into a listening device. The application is called Phonesnoop and allows remote users to listen in on a Blackberry user's surroundings. The spyware app uses standard Blackberry APIs to intercept incoming calls. Once the software is installed, a call from a trigger phone number will activate the listening feature through the phone's built-in speakerphone feature to listen to everything that's going on ... News Fri, 30 Oct 2009 09:41:30 EST http://www.speedguide.net/read_news.php?id=3061 Having looked over Google's explanation of its Google Voice call blocking practices to the Federal Communications Commission, it's clear to me that U.S. telecommunications regulations need to be thrown out and re-written from the ground up. Why does Google block certain Google Voice calls? To prevent price gouging. Some rural carriers were charging Google as much as 39 cents a minute for connecting Google Voice calls. Google's telecom and media counsel Richard Whitt spends much of the letter arguing ... News Fri, 30 Oct 2009 09:31:10 EST http://www.speedguide.net/read_news.php?id=3060 Google unveiled its own free navigation application, called Google Maps Navigation, which offers spoken, turn-by-turn directions and is likely going to be seen as a challenge to the incumbents in the location-based services market, like TeleNav and TomTom. The application currently is only available for phones running on Android 2.0, the latest version of Google's mobile operating system. Verizon Wireless launched the first Android 2.0 phone, the Motorola Droid, today. According to Forrester Research, ... News Thu, 29 Oct 2009 09:59:04 EST http://www.speedguide.net/read_news.php?id=3059 Google is changing the way it resolves music-related search queries through a variety of partnerships designed to help it provide more relevant and useful results. The updates are significant, given that Google gets millions of queries every day about recording artists, albums and songs, the company said on Wednesday. The results will now include links to audio previews of songs, thanks to partnerships with Lala.com and MySpace, which owns iLike. Google said it will also be better able to recognize ... News Thu, 29 Oct 2009 09:48:27 EST http://www.speedguide.net/read_news.php?id=3058 An estimated 5.8 million pages belonging to 640,000 websites were infected with code designed to launch malware attacks on visitors, according to a report released Tuesday. The numbers, compiled over the third quarter by security firm Dasient, represent a significant jump in number of legitimate websites that have been compromised. According to numbers Microsoft released on April, some 3 million pages were infected. The number of sites blocked by Google more than doubled between December and August, to ... News Wed, 28 Oct 2009 09:45:46 EST http://www.speedguide.net/read_news.php?id=3057 Federal regulators are considering taking back some airwaves from television broadcasters and auctioning them off to wireless companies to increase the availability of wireless broadband services. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski has warned that the U.S. doesn't have enough airwaves set aside for wireless broadband service in the future, and the agency is looking at a variety of ways to remedy that shortage. "The record is very clear that we're facing a looming ... News Wed, 28 Oct 2009 09:32:13 EST http://www.speedguide.net/read_news.php?id=3056 The world's largest supercomputer, dubbed Roadrunner, has gone online, and is starting with a terribly simple little task - modelling the composition of the universe. The model is one of the largest simulations of the distribution of matter in the universe, and aims to look at galaxy-scale mass concentrations above and beyond quantities seen in state-of-the-art sky surveys. Understanding dark energy is the number one issue in explaining the universe, according to Salman Habib of Los Alamos Laboratory. ... News Tue, 27 Oct 2009 11:17:36 EST