Latest Technology News

A defect in the protocol that secures monetary exchanges and other private transactions throughout the Web, discovered by wireless security engineers last August, continues to go unfixed as vendors work towards a solution. It can only be described as miraculous that a working exploit hasn't yet been detected for a security hole that hid in plain sight ever since Transport Layer Security was developed.

The problem was inadvertently made public last November. In short, it has to do with the transition Web sites make between the older Secure Sockets Layer protocol and the augmented TLS. During the transition process, the Web sites leave one protocol, but have to remind each other what they were transitioning from and to -- like asking one another, "What were we talking about again?" The question and answer get sent in the clear, making it easy for a man-in-the-middle to spoof the site with the answer.

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Google announced today that it is planning to build and test broadband networks in several trial deployments across the US which promise to be "100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today with 1 Gbps fiber-to-the-home connections."

A careful read of that line suggests that Google is promising 1 Gbps fiber, which is 100x faster than the average broadband user's transfer rate, as opposed to a 100 Gbps pipeline. The company says the service will reach 50,000 people initially, with a potential reach of up to 500,000, the company announced.

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Almost exactly a year after Verizon Wireless named its LTE equipment partners, AT&T has done the same. And like Verizon, AT&T has chosen Swedish wireless technology provider Ericsson and French telecommunications company Alcatel-Lucent, to make the transition from 3G to LTE more streamlined.

Rather than start fresh and attempt to install all new hardware at its cell sites, AT&T is going for hardware that is easily upgradeable. All 3G equipment purchased from the Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent this year will be easily convertible to LTE, AT&T said.

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Prominent developers sometimes tease us with products made on the iPhone platform that have not yet been approved by Apple. Frequently it's because their applications face certain rejection; sometimes on the famous grounds of "duplicate functionality", sometimes for other reasons.

Mobile World Congress next week will be hosting the mother of all iPhone app teases: Opera Mini for iPhone.

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Since Windows 7's final release last fall, some testers have been reporting that dual-boot network computers seem to consume power more efficiently running Windows XP than Windows 7. One example came last October from JKOnTheRun's Kevin C. Tofel, who saw his own Toshiba notebook battery die 45 minutes sooner running Win7 than Windows XP. But even then, Tofel was skeptical of a few curious facts, including that Toshiba changed its power management utilities.

Since 1999, the system that has reported battery capacity and relative power levels to the operating system has been the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI), developed by industry leaders such as Intel, Phoenix Technologies, and Toshiba. But ACPI was developed with the BIOS in mind; and as PC architecture evolves, as even Phoenix will readily concede, the conventional BIOS is becoming an historical remnant. And history has also shown that as a lithium-ion battery degrades, its capability to report its own health degrades with it. Only now have batteries become capable of reporting their capacity -- how much charge they can hold -- as compared to their manufacturers' specifications.

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By many measures, Microsoft is simply too big. The bigness is in the gut, like a middle-aged man who drinks too much beer and eats too many classic potato chips. In computing years, Microsoft most certainly is a middle-aged company. So is Apple, which by comparison is leaner and healthier. What's up with Microsoft's gut?

Based on communications with current and former employees, Microsoft's midriff problem is one of middling middle management. The number of middle mangers swelled over the last decade, and they also are the employees making key management decisions, which includes who gets laid off or fired and where the remaining people work. What manager will fire himself or herself? (Before continuing, let me be clear that only former Microsoft employees will be quoted, and anonymously at that. Current employees would only communicate with me on background, for concern of risking their jobs).

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Now nearly a decade old, RealNetworks' online music service Rhapsody is going to be spun off into an independent company. The spin-off will mean that RealNetworks will no longer have operating control over the service, and it will have no single majority owner.

Currently, Rhapsody is a joint venture with RealNetworks and Viacom subsidiary MTV Networks, with real owning 51% of the equity of Rhapsody and Viacom owning 49%.

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Rather than create another new destination social network like Facebook, Twitter or Foursquare, Google today announced that it has added social networking and location-based features into Gmail, Google Profiles, and Google Maps with a new service called Google Buzz.

Late last week, rumors surfaced that Google was debuting a new "Social Gmail" this week, and that really is kind of what Buzz is. With it, you can post status updates and share links, photos, and location-based updates with your Gmail contacts, and the content being posted by your contacts is automatically ranked according to your interactions with that contact. Ultimately, it's a lot like FriendFeed but with a Google flavor.

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The idea behind notebooks with switchable graphics processors is that the most common tasks are handled by the lower power integrated GPU; but should the user need more complex graphics, a discrete graphics processor will be able to kick in to take care of the hard work.

It's been an option in certain notebooks for more than three years, and it has certainly grown more common as the technology has aged. But it has never quite been a perfect, on-demand solution. In the earliest switchable setups, the computer had to be rebooted for the swap to take place, and in later iterations, it required a physical switch to be thrown or sessions to be reset. and still others could turn on the discrete GPU, but not switch back to integrated once the change was made.

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11:35 am EST Tuesday, February 9, 2010 · In a test of Google's willingness to take customer concerns this morning, Betanews Editor-in-Chief Nathan Mook -- a new Nexus One owner himself who has not experienced either the 3G connectivity problem or the touchscreen tracking problem -- contacted the Nexus One shipping support line with a technical concern. After getting off the phone with a live Google support staffer in San Francisco, Nate reported very positive results.

The problem Nate was having, he says, is minor: The phone's automatic brightness isn't working well, remaining too dark when auto-brightness is turned on. Plus, the phone's touch-sensitive panel buttons at the bottom appear non-sensitive if you touch too close to the bottom.

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At the end of January, the Federal Communications Commission's Consumer Task Force launched an inquiry into the Early Termination Fees (ETFs) of the major wireless providers with a special focus on the Google Nexus One handset.

The Nexus One is unlike other smartphones in that it is sold only by Google and available on multiple carriers. As such, if a customer terminated his contract, he faced early termination fees from both Google and his wireless provider.

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We have seen a couple of mobile broadband hotspots come to market in the last year, the Novatel MiFi on Sprint and Verizon, and the recent Sprint Overdrive from Sierra Wireless. They're pocket-sized, battery-powered devices with a 3G connection that can connect a handful of devices to the Internet wherever they're plopped down.

Today, Netgear and Ericsson announced that they have created a 3G mobile broadband-connected router like these devices, except that it's not pocketable and battery powered.

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Like many nighthawks across the continent, I found myself glued to more than one screen...all right, three. Plus my BlackBerry...as I watched this morning's launch of the Space Shuttle Endeavour. I observed the spectacle with a curious mixture of excitement and sadness because after the current STS-130 mission, the shuttle program has only four more scheduled flights before it's grounded for good.

It's not the retirement that gets me. Every technology has its day, and it's fair to conclude that a system largely designed in the early 1970s has now served its purpose and should logically be replaced. It's also fair to conclude that this same system was and is too complex to ever be fiscally feasible. Despite the orbiters' reusability, which was supposed to drive down the cost of spaceflight, extensive maintenance in-between missions made the program even more expensive to fly than conventional expendable rockets. The shuttle's inherent design flaws (you'll never see humans riding below any other part of a space vehicle again) pretty much sealed its fate.

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In a world where Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski's six principles for net neutrality are enforced, everyone who makes a living on the Internet could conceivably be "unburdened by the unnecessary intervention of network operators or government regulators." The exception would be when a pipeline provider such as Comcast merges with a content provider such as NBC Universal, to make certain classes of content viewable online only when it designates. That's the opinion of attorneys for video rental service Netflix, in a filing last month with the FCC and recently made public.

"Netflix believes that the codification of the existing network neutrality principles, together with the addition of nondiscrimination and transparency, create an effective framework for preserving an open Internet," begins Netflix' filing, written last January 14 (PDF available here). "These rules will allow all parts of the industry -- network operators, consumer electronics manufacturers, and edge providers of content, applications, and services -- to continue to innovate at a rapid pace, unburdened by the unnecessary intervention of network operators or government regulators."

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A new study from subscriber management company Allot Communications today says that worldwide mobile broadband consumption increased approximately 72% in just the second half of 2009.

Though the Federal Communications Commission is worried that there won't be enough bandwidth in the United States to support the growth in mobile broadband use, the Americas are actually being outpaced by both the Asia Pacific region (APAC) and the Europe/Middle East/Africa region (EMEA) in terms of growth rate. APAC experienced an 86% growth in mobile broadband consumption, and EMEA experienced 70% growth, while use in the Americas grew by 59%.

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