•Around the Industry:
EU opens music royalties probe
All hail Lord Murdoch Of The Internet
NBC Universal on-demand with Internet TV firm
'Emergency legislation' lowers tower regs in Maryland to facilitate rural broadband access
Treo EVDO rumors
Telstra says pricing increases changes should encourage competition
•SecurityBits:
Microsoft gives workarounds for new IE, Windows flaws
Spyware triples during 2005
•TidBytes:
Forget the browser wars, prepare for the toolbar wars
Google blacklists--fair or not?
Google: Firefox AdBlock Interferes With Gmail Chat
•More news from around the industry, SecurityBits, and interesting Tidbytes inside!
Around The Industry:
•EU opens music royalties probe:
European Union antitrust regulators said they were investigating the European agencies that collect royalties for musicians from Internet sites — in parallel with other EU moves to open up the European market for on-line music. The European Commission said it was concerned that the groups' contracts with composers — organized strictly along national lines — might violate rules on restrictive business practices and give national copyright agencies a de facto monopoly.
•All hail Lord Murdoch Of The Internet:
A magazine is hailing Rupert Murdoch as "a leader in digital media after some smart bets". Most of the media hype didn't think Murdoch "got" the internet until his company dropped $580 million on MySpace little more than six months ago, and his strategy since then has been less than convincing. There's little to suggest Murdoch's much of a visionary: basically, they're going to put targeted ads on MySpace, and he thinks video to mobile phones is more important than downloads to computers or the iPod. Murdoch and News Corp. may be throwing money around on acquisitions, but that's about it. To paint him as some sort of internet-media visionary is awfully premature.
•NBC Universal on-demand with Internet TV firm:
Aeon Digital confirmed a licensing agreement with NBC Universal that will make movies and television events available on-demand over the Internet. Titles will be available for a 24-hour period after they are selected, but pricing has yet to be finalized. Consumers will need an Aeon Digital set-top box connected to broadband to access the services' music, television and movies. The first of these, the DV-200, will become available at retail this spring for $299. Aeon already has its own music service lined up that will provide users with a library of more than 2 million tracks and that additional movie and TV deals are expected in the near future.
•'Emergency legislation' lowers tower regs in Maryland to facilitate rural broadband access:
County commissioners passed emergency legislation that will lower requirements for telecomms tower sites, a move meant to help the ever-struggling effort to provide broadband Internet access to rural residents. The bill was a solution to the latest snag for the Lower Shore Broadband Cooperative, a nonprofit company attempting to provide wireless Internet to Eastern Shore residents in wooded and isolated homes. Co-op officials said a county rule requiring telecomm poles to be a certain distance from buildings was limiting their possible sites to install antennas.
•Treo EVDO rumors:
An unidentified source high up at Palm has disclosed some info about the future of EVDO. First, EVDO is a software solution—not hardware—so with some clever hacking it is possible for everyone's favorite Treo 650 to do EVDO. Secondly, Q4 will begin seeing EVDO run at 1.2 to 4.5Mbit download speeds. Thirdly, early 2007 will see the release of WiMax, which is a flavor of 802.116 that runs on cell towers. And lastly, the Palm source would not confirm a release date for the anticipated Treo 700p, but he did say to "wait a little bit" if you are planning a phone upgrade in the future.
•Telstra says pricing increases changes should encourage competition:
Telstra says it is encouraging, rather than avoiding competition, by averaging the amount it charges rivals to use its copper wire network. The telco's comments came after main rival Optus labelled Telstra's new pricing as "unfortunate, destructive and negative". Telstra will charge competitors a flat $30/month unbundled local loop access fee, despite the corporate regulator indicating it would prefer Telstra retain a four band pricing regime - with different prices charged for remote, rural, regional and city areas. The charges will rise by up to 240% in some areas from $13, and fall from $100 in other areas.
•Broadband powerline vendor promotes 'smart grids':
BPL provider Current Communications announced a network of companies designed to help electric utilities better manage and troubleshoot their networks after installing BPL equipment. The network of services is designed to give electric utilities another reason to offer customers BPL. service. Current Communications has about 50,000 BPL customers in the Cincinnati, Ohio, area, and has trials operating in Maryland, Southern California and Hawaii.
•Wanadoo 8Mb complaints leveled by other ISPs upheld by ASA:
Four out of the five complaints leveled at UK ISP Wanadoo by rivals BT, Tiscali and Bulldog Broadband (plus two members of the public) on the grounds that "Up to 8Meg" was not available to most people and the ads was therefore misleading were upheld by the ASA, the UK Ad watchdog. ASA ruled the TV ads breached Misleading advertising, Evidence, and Qualifications standards and ruled the ads must not be shown again in their present form(s). The press ads breached Substantiation and Truthfulness standards.
•PanAmSat delivers 'Vis-a-TV' international video platform:
PanAmSat unveiled a platform of niche international programming that's aimed at cable systems, satellite TV services, IPTV and broadband network distributors. The satellite services provider described the offering as an a la carte portfolio of international programming for subscribers. Named Vis-a-TV, the business will acquire rights to programming and distribute the content to cable MSOs, IPTV platforms and broadband Internet service providers either for linear subscription or video-on-demand service.
•RFID: A market in waiting?:
The burgeoning number of methods for implementing enterprise RFID solutions continued to expand with Nokia's healthcare deployment for its near field communications (NFC) radio frequency tagging technology. Based on a new short-range wireless specification, the NFC technology has been built into Nokia's 3220 mobile phone so that it can act as an RFID tag reader. Despite the growing interest in RFID for a host of apps, however, the technology has yet to make the leap beyond its core vertical markets.
SecurityBits:
•Microsoft gives workarounds for new IE, Windows flaws:
MS issued two separate advisories with pre-patch workarounds for a privilege escalation vulnerability in Windows and a new code execution hole in older versions of IE. One IE flaw could allow an attacker to use a rigged WMF image to take complete control of an affected Windows machine, but MS made it clear that the WMF issue is different from the zero-day vulnerability released earlier. A separate advisory acknowledged a warning from a pair of Princeton University researchers that it is easy to pinpoint privilege escalation vulnerabilities in third-party apps running on Windows.
•Spyware triples during 2005:
According to anti-spyware developer Webroot, 2005 ended with 400,000 spyware-distributing sites and a global count of 120,000 different traces, or spyware components. At the start of the year, Webroot had identified only 40,000 traces, a tripling Webroot credited to the increasing sophistication of spyware. "Even with the availability of anti-spyware software, there hasn't been much of a change in the overall infection rate," said Webroot's director of threat research.
•Symantec sees future in online protection services:
Symantec says its plans for the future include the delivery of online protection services that prevent phishing and identity theft while also warning about spyware-infested Web sites. "Our vision of the future is that you'll see either 'Safe Site' or 'Unsafe Site,'" said Symantec. The company will make these broad determinations based on constantly scouring the Web with crawlers to look at site contents and activities, while also checking digital certificates for authenticity. Symantec is also mulling establishing "community credibility ratings" for Web sites. The goal is to guarantee a "trusted search experience" to subscribers of the Symantec services of the future.
Hardware, Software, and other TidBytes:
•Forget the browser wars, prepare for the toolbar wars
•Google blacklists--fair or not?
•Google: Firefox AdBlock Interferes With Gmail Chat
•Dell in search tests with Google
•Microsoft Releases OneCare Pricing Details
•December 1st slated for Vista? Maybe... take a guess, win a prize
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NEC rolls out next gen Ultra Wideband tech