Wireless carriers are turning to Wi-Fi hotspots to ease congestion on its networks. The cost of Wi-Fi infrastructure has decreased enough that making citywide hotspots has become a popular additional to carriers’ coverage. AT & T alone now owns over 20,000 Wi-Fi hotspots.
(Shelly Palmer)
Read the full story at CNet News http://news.cnet.com/8301-30686_3-20035698-266.html
Friday, February 25, 2011
MacBook Pro Shows Off Thunderbolt Technology
Apple’s newest MacBook Pro comes equipped with Intel’s Thunderbolt technology which adds a port that can transfer data 20 times faster than USB 2.0. The Thunderbolt conduit can produce transfer rates of 10 gigabits per second, which means it can transfer an full-length HD movie in under 30 seconds. Intel’s technology was brought to the market by Apple, but it may have the power to become a mainstream staple.
(Shelly Palmer)
Full article at: http://mashable.com/2011/02/24/thunderbolt-explained/
(Shelly Palmer)
Full article at: http://mashable.com/2011/02/24/thunderbolt-explained/
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Apple May Announce iPad 2 March 2nd
Apple’s iPad 2 may finally be on its way to store shelves. A rumor from within Apple says that the company will announce the device during an event on March 2nd. The release would be consistent with Apple’s production cycle and could step on the heels of Motorola’s Xoom launch. Read more on this story Apple will reportedly hold iPad event on March 2 at Apple Insider www.appleinsider.com/articles/
Motorola Zoom Ships Without Flash
Motorola Xoom is supposed to be the first Android tablet to compete with the iPad, but it won’t be launching with Flash support. Flash is one of Android’s main selling points over iOS with over 6 million downloads in its app store. Xoom’s support for flash should roll out by Spring 2011. Read the full article Xoom Debuts Sans Flash: What's Going On, Adobe ? at http://mashable.com/2011/02/21/xoom-flash-tablets/
Monday, February 21, 2011
Libya Turns Off the Internet and the Massacres begin
First, Libya blocked news sites and Facebook. Then, beginning Friday night, according to Arbor Networks, a network security and Internet monitoring company, announced that Libya had cut itself off from the Internet. Hours later the Libyan dictator’s solders started slaughtering protesters. As of Sunday afternoon, U.S. Eastern time the death toll was above 200 in the city of Benghazi alone.Welcome to 2011. While dictators in the most repressive regimes, such as North Korea and Cuba, have long kept Internet contact to the world to a bare minimum, less restrictive dictatorships, such as Egypt and Libya left the doors to the Internet cracked open to the public. Now, though, realizing that they could no longer hide their abuses from a world a Twitter tweet away, the new model autocracies, such as Libya and Bahrain have realized that they need to cut their Internet links before bringing out the guns.
Additional story at: ZD Net http://www.zdnet.com/blog/networking/libya-turns-off-the-internet-and-the-massacres-begin/711
Monday, February 14, 2011
US Internet Censorship fight falling short
State Department efforts to combat Internet censorship in China and other countries have fallen short and funding for the drive should be shifted to another US agency, a Senate committee report says. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee report sharply criticizes the State Department for being slow in spending money allocated by Congress for Internet Censorship Circumvention Technology (ICCT).
The report, a copy of which was obtained by AFP, recommends that the funding be given instead to the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which oversees the Voice of America, Radio Free Asia and other US radio and TV networks.
The report is to be released on Tuesday, the same day Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is scheduled to deliver remarks on Internet freedom at George Washington University here. Mrs Clinton also delivered a major Internet freedom speech in January 2010, but the Senate committee report said there had been “scant follow-up” in the next 12 months.
Congress has given the State Department $50 million for Internet freedom programs since fiscal 2008, the report said, but $30 million remains unspent and little has gone to Internet Censorship Circumvention Technology. “Such technology should be given a much higher priority by the US government,” it said. “US government support for ICCT development is vital, given the weak private sector market interest in funding such technologies.”
The report suggested the delays in allocating funding were partly because some of the most sophisticated ICCT software - DIT and UltraReach - was developed by two US companies founded by members of the Falungong, which is banned in China, to allow followers to break through the “Great Firewall.” The report said DIT and UltraReach have been used to circumvent Internet censorship in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, Myanmar and Vietnam - “countries which have looked to China for lessons in Internet control or to whom China has directly provided technologies to counter such products.” It said the delays in allocating funding have “strengthened the hands of those governments, including China’s, who seek to restrict their citizens’ access to information.”
“The State Department is poorly placed to handle this issue due to its reliance on daily bilateral interaction with these very same governments, particularly China,” the report said. It said BBG stations, which also include Radio MartÃ, which targets Cuba, and the Middle East Broadcasting Network “must all work on a daily basis to ensure their radio, Internet and television programmes are being received by audiences in certain countries that try to block, jam or outlaw these efforts.”
“As such, the BBG, and not the State Department, would appear to be the logical lead agency in the federal government to focus current and future ICCT funding,” the report said.
The report also criticized what it called the “inept handling of an untested technology” - ICCT software called Haystack created by the San Francisco-based Censorship Research Center to assist Iranian democracy activists. “The Haystack team had not sufficiently tested its software nor allowed it to be submitted for independent cryptological analysis before it released a beta version to unsuspecting Iranians,” the report said. “In September 2010, just after the beta version was released, an independent team was able to crack the code in six hours and also determined that the Iranian government would be able to manipulate the software to identify any users,” it said. “Once these weaknesses were made public, the Haystack project quickly collapsed.”
The report, which also called for the US government to increase its public diplomacy efforts to counter China’s “vigorous” moves on the outreach front, was prepared at the request of Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, the top-ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
(Source: AFP/R Netherlands Media Network Weblog)
The report, a copy of which was obtained by AFP, recommends that the funding be given instead to the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which oversees the Voice of America, Radio Free Asia and other US radio and TV networks.
The report is to be released on Tuesday, the same day Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is scheduled to deliver remarks on Internet freedom at George Washington University here. Mrs Clinton also delivered a major Internet freedom speech in January 2010, but the Senate committee report said there had been “scant follow-up” in the next 12 months.
Congress has given the State Department $50 million for Internet freedom programs since fiscal 2008, the report said, but $30 million remains unspent and little has gone to Internet Censorship Circumvention Technology. “Such technology should be given a much higher priority by the US government,” it said. “US government support for ICCT development is vital, given the weak private sector market interest in funding such technologies.”
The report suggested the delays in allocating funding were partly because some of the most sophisticated ICCT software - DIT and UltraReach - was developed by two US companies founded by members of the Falungong, which is banned in China, to allow followers to break through the “Great Firewall.” The report said DIT and UltraReach have been used to circumvent Internet censorship in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, Myanmar and Vietnam - “countries which have looked to China for lessons in Internet control or to whom China has directly provided technologies to counter such products.” It said the delays in allocating funding have “strengthened the hands of those governments, including China’s, who seek to restrict their citizens’ access to information.”
“The State Department is poorly placed to handle this issue due to its reliance on daily bilateral interaction with these very same governments, particularly China,” the report said. It said BBG stations, which also include Radio MartÃ, which targets Cuba, and the Middle East Broadcasting Network “must all work on a daily basis to ensure their radio, Internet and television programmes are being received by audiences in certain countries that try to block, jam or outlaw these efforts.”
“As such, the BBG, and not the State Department, would appear to be the logical lead agency in the federal government to focus current and future ICCT funding,” the report said.
The report also criticized what it called the “inept handling of an untested technology” - ICCT software called Haystack created by the San Francisco-based Censorship Research Center to assist Iranian democracy activists. “The Haystack team had not sufficiently tested its software nor allowed it to be submitted for independent cryptological analysis before it released a beta version to unsuspecting Iranians,” the report said. “In September 2010, just after the beta version was released, an independent team was able to crack the code in six hours and also determined that the Iranian government would be able to manipulate the software to identify any users,” it said. “Once these weaknesses were made public, the Haystack project quickly collapsed.”
The report, which also called for the US government to increase its public diplomacy efforts to counter China’s “vigorous” moves on the outreach front, was prepared at the request of Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, the top-ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
(Source: AFP/R Netherlands Media Network Weblog)
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Google launches Twitter workaround for Egypt
Google Inc has launched a special service to allow people in Egypt to send Twitter messages by dialing a phone number and leaving a voicemail, as internet access remains cut off in the country amid anti-government protests. “Like many people we’ve been glued to the news unfolding in Egypt and thinking of what we could do to help people on the ground,” read a post on Google’s official corporate blog on Monday.
The service, which Google said was developed with engineers from Twitter, allows people to dial a telephone number and leave a voicemail. The voicemail is automatically translated into an audio file message that is sent on Twitter using the identifying tag #egypt, Google said.
Google said in the blog post, titled “Some weekend work that will (hopefully) enable more Egyptians to be heard,” that no Internet connection is needed to use the service. It listed listed three phone numbers for people to call to use the service.
Internet social networking services like Twitter and Facebook have been important tools of communications for protesters in Egypt who have taken to the streets since last week to demonstrate against the 30-year rule of President Hosni Mubarak. Internet service has been suspended around the country and phone text messaging has been disabled.
A source familiar with the matter said Google, whose corporate motto is “Don’t Be Evil,” was not taking sides in the crisis in Egypt, but was simply supporting access to information as it has done with other services such as video website YouTube, which has been streaming live coverage of Al Jazeera’s broadcasts of the events in Egypt.
Dozens of the so-called speak-to-tweet messages were featured on Twitter on Monday. The messages ranged from a few seconds to several minutes and featured people identifying themselves as Egyptians and describing the situations in various parts of the country. “The government is spreading rumors of fear and of burglary and of violence,” said one of the messages from an English speaker. “The only incidence of theft and burglary are done by the police themselves.”
Google listed the following numbers for people to use the service:
+16504194196
+390662207294
+97316199855
(Source: Reuters/R Netherlands media Network Weblog)
The service, which Google said was developed with engineers from Twitter, allows people to dial a telephone number and leave a voicemail. The voicemail is automatically translated into an audio file message that is sent on Twitter using the identifying tag #egypt, Google said.
Google said in the blog post, titled “Some weekend work that will (hopefully) enable more Egyptians to be heard,” that no Internet connection is needed to use the service. It listed listed three phone numbers for people to call to use the service.
Internet social networking services like Twitter and Facebook have been important tools of communications for protesters in Egypt who have taken to the streets since last week to demonstrate against the 30-year rule of President Hosni Mubarak. Internet service has been suspended around the country and phone text messaging has been disabled.
A source familiar with the matter said Google, whose corporate motto is “Don’t Be Evil,” was not taking sides in the crisis in Egypt, but was simply supporting access to information as it has done with other services such as video website YouTube, which has been streaming live coverage of Al Jazeera’s broadcasts of the events in Egypt.
Dozens of the so-called speak-to-tweet messages were featured on Twitter on Monday. The messages ranged from a few seconds to several minutes and featured people identifying themselves as Egyptians and describing the situations in various parts of the country. “The government is spreading rumors of fear and of burglary and of violence,” said one of the messages from an English speaker. “The only incidence of theft and burglary are done by the police themselves.”
Google listed the following numbers for people to use the service:
+16504194196
+390662207294
+97316199855
(Source: Reuters/R Netherlands media Network Weblog)
Internet restored in Egypt as violence escalates
Internet services were at least partially restored in Cairo and other Egyptian cities today after a five-day cut aimed at stymieing protests against President Hosni Mubarak’s regime, Internet users said. Egypt’s four main Internet service providers cut off access to their customers in a near simultaneous move overnight last Thursday, two days after anti-Mubarak protests - many coordinated via the Internet - began.
Social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook have become increasingly important for protest organisers, with only a tiny number of users in the Egyptian capital able to access the Internet since Friday. Internet on mobile telephones was also cut, while mobile voice and text services were also severely disrupted.
Around 23 million Egyptians have either regular or occasional access to the Internet, according to official figures, more than a quarter of the population. The shutdown in Egypt was the most comprehensive official electronic blackout of its kind, experts said.
(Source: AFP/R Netherlands Media Network Weblog)
Social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook have become increasingly important for protest organisers, with only a tiny number of users in the Egyptian capital able to access the Internet since Friday. Internet on mobile telephones was also cut, while mobile voice and text services were also severely disrupted.
Around 23 million Egyptians have either regular or occasional access to the Internet, according to official figures, more than a quarter of the population. The shutdown in Egypt was the most comprehensive official electronic blackout of its kind, experts said.
(Source: AFP/R Netherlands Media Network Weblog)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)