The United States' largest fiber-to-the-home deployment, Verizon's FiOS Network will be receiving a speed boost and a bump up in price.

The entry-level FiOS tier formerly offered 10 Mbps downstream and 2 Mbps upstream for $34.95 with a one-year contract, and $39.95 for month-to-month. Now it has been bumped up to 15/5 Mbps down/up for $44.99 with the annual contract and $54.99 monthly.

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In the inaugural edition of What's Now | What's Next, we mentioned that the Jülich Supercomputer Center was boasting it had used the IBM supercomputer design responsible for the world's fastest machine several times over, to build what would likely be recorded as the third fastest supercomputer in the world. This morning, Mannheim made that official with the release of the June 2009 edition of the Top 500 Supercomputer list.

There, Jülich's BlueGene/P -- a 294,912-core, 850 MHz PowerPC 450-based cluster -- claimed the #3 position, with an Rmax score of 825,500. The design that inspired it, former champion BlueGene/L at Los Alamos National Labs, lagged 72.6% behind with its historical score of 478,200.

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With the iPhone's 3.0 software update, Apple's iconic touchphone finally has access to AT&T Navigator, the carrier's branded GPS software solution provided by TeleNav, and the first turn-by-turn GPS app for the iPhone.

AT&T Navigator debuted at CTIA Wireless last year, and launched with the Motorola Z9 as well as a number of BlackBerry devices. The carrier severely lagged behind Verizon Wireless, which first began offering the service (labeled as VZ Navigator) nearly two years before, in 2006. In April of this year, VZ Navigator Global launched, which brings the turn-by-turn navigation service to more American countries, as well as half a dozen Western European nations.

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Download Microsoft Security Essentials Beta Build 1.0.1487.0 from Fileforum now.

It's an argument we've seen before from Microsoft's competitors and opponents, as well as from many sensible observers: It may be unfair for the manufacturer of the operating system to leverage its customer visibility to advance a free software platform that cuts out commercial competitors. But there's another argument from opponents as well, many of them the same people: Microsoft should be responsible for the health and well-being of its customers' systems when the operating system is threatened, either through malicious use or from system defects.

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Qik, a streaming mobile video services that has gained considerable traction over its last year in beta, has unveiled support for the Android Platform today.

The live "phonecasting" service previously supported S60 and Windows Mobile devices and dabbles in iPhone OS X, but does not yet offer support for Apple's mobile device. Now, users of Google's open source mobile OS have a chance to stream live video from their devices.

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With the debate only beginning now over whether Microsoft's Security Essentials will provide adequate protection for Windows 7 users or merely placate users who settle for mediocre security, the question becomes whether competitors in the security field have an appropriate alternative. CA has informed Betanews it's looking for willing participants in a registration-only beta test of its Internet Security Suite Plus 2010 edition.

Rather than consider anti-malware and anti-virus as separate functions, the new edition will utilize a unified engine managed through a completely new front end. So veterans of the 2009 edition should take note that this is a completely new product. Personal firewalls and spam and phishing filters are included in the new edition just as before; but for 2010, the Web site blocking filter has been expanded for more personal -- and more parental -- control. A P2P filter has also been added to the suite.

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As it turns out, Bloomberg News' source this morning on Intel's and Nokia's major news was kinda right, kinda not. In a morning press teleconference, Intel's Ultra Mobility Group SVP Anand Chandrasekher and Nokia Executive Vice President for Devices Dr. Kai Öistämö announced their two companies are jointly licensing critical technologies to one another, for the purposes of building platforms.

Now, those platforms could lead to Atom-based Nokia mobile devices, but the keyword here is "could." Through a barrage of questioning from press and analysts on this topic, Öistämö and Chandrasekher would only repeat that their companies will collaborate on their respective mobile Linux platforms -- Intel with Nokia's Maemo, Nokia with Intel's Moblin. But neither party would not say the collaboration would necessarily lead to any kind of Linux platform whatsoever that bears the opposite partner's brand, or is carried on the opposite partner's equipment.

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The average size of those little PCs that we love so much has been slowly increasing to include full-sized keyboards, yet they retain their usual slim profile and low power demand. These larger devices are beginning to fall somewhere between the category of Netbook and Notebook.

Today, Gateway launched its first "full keyboard netbook": the 11.6" LT3100 series, one of these in-between devices.

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If there was a more remarkable idea circulating in the gadget-head community back in January than Palm's got a scorching-hot new phone on the way, it was, "And they chose Sprint as the launch partner".

Seriously, Sprint? Necessary only-major-mobile-provider-in-the-heartland evil to tens of thousands of mobile-phone users? Whatever Dan Hesse was saying about customer service in those moodily lit black-and-white commercials, the prospect of putting Sprint in charge of selling the odd, pretty, pricey little Palm Pre was wince-inducing.

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Privacy advocates on Monday applauded plans by the Obama administration to kill a spy satellite program that would have pointed the cameras at domestic targets. Meanwhile, the company running the nation's biggest "Registered Traveler" program, intended to whisk customers through TSA lines, is out of business.

DHS shelves domestic spy satellite program

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Viewpoint certainly depends on where you stand; and in some quarters this morning, Apple MacBook Pro users are reading that a firmware upgrade to MacBook Pro may double their throughput from the SATA interface to their internal hard drives.

Well, sure, after the manufacturer slowed down the transfer rate by half for unexplained reasons. That fact was uncovered by readers of MacRumors.com two weeks ago, and formally reported a week ago Sunday: Customers who purchased MacBook Pros just this month are reporting slower throughput.

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A press conference call slated for 11:30 am ET with Anand Chandrasekher, who heads Intel's Atom business unit, is expected to announce a deal with Nokia to get its chips into the Finnish manufacturer's phones.

Early reports of the deal came from Bloomberg News, which in turn cited a source "close to the matter" describing what to expect from the conference call, which was scheduled just yesterday.

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Exclusive cell phone sales and distribution contracts, such as the one between AT&T and Apple Inc. for all models of iPhone, are solely responsible for the quickening pace of innovation in the American handset market, or solely responsible for its imminent demise -- solely. That's the black-and-white nature of the arguments raised before the Senate Commerce Committee last Wednesday, as executives from the nation's second largest carrier and two smaller ones joined industry advocates in debating whether locking out carriers' access to popular phones is good for competition and good for the consumer.

"Today, when you sit down at a computer and you access a broadband connection, you're not told by your broadband provider that you have to have a Dell or an HP or an Apple in order to access the network," stated Sen. John Kerry (D - Mass.), the former presidential candidate who chaired a portion of Wednesday's hearing. "And when you purchase a wireless phone in Asia or Europe, you typically don't buy it through a wireless carrier. You purchase it separately from the manufacturer or from an outlet."

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It's a question friends and family have been asking me ever since The Wall Street Journal reported last Saturday that Apple Chairman and CEO Steve Jobs had undergone a liver transplant two months ago: Should our health records be made public?

I admit I'm of two minds on the issue. On the one hand, Apple shareholders have the right to know how the company they essentially own plans to manage itself both today and in the future. They deserve enough information to make informed decisions about whether they wish to retain their ownership stake and how they wish to remain involved, as shareholders, in the evolution of the company. It's a fundamental pillar of our economic system that publicly traded companies provide enough transparency to keep shareholders informed -- not to mention senior leaders honest.

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Download Mozilla Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate 2 for Windows from Fileforum now.

Although two (2) "candidates for release candidates" for the next Mozilla Web browser have been released in the past week (with the first being given the weird title "Beta 99"), the official notice of what it's calling "the Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate" was posted this morning.

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