At least according to this article on InformationWeek, Comcast has removed their “blocks” on file sharing.  But according to this article on Hothardware, they have a new network throttling system in place.  What gives?  InformationWeek says Comcast sent a letter to the FCC on Dec 31st 2008 that they no longer manage their networks the sleazy way.  Yet Hothardware explains the new system monitors traffic, regardless of where it’s coming from and hits you with a monthly 250GB quota.  Comcast has always had some sort of hidden monthly quota according to the numerous reports from customers getting letters in the mail.  You couldn’t find the maximum you were allowed to download in a 30-day period until you actually hit it.  It appears that they’re fessing up and finally throwing the quota number out there.  Either way, they’ve pissed off enough customers and made enough of us so bitter that we will never go back to them.  Comcast is overdue for new management, it’s time to get some new fresh people in there.

EDIT:  This article over at gigaom.com states that this new system is content-agnostic.  The bandwidth for heavy Comcast users is throttled down regardless of the type of information you are downloading.  I can’t believe the FCC approves of this over throttling just P2P.  How much did Comcast payoff to the FCC?

The no good dirty rat bastards at the RIAA have dropped MediaSentry, which is the company they used to help gather evidence for cases against consumers downloading illegal music.  The RIAA is a bunch of filthy rat scumbags that should die a painful, long lasting, yet self indulging death.  Their filth, slim, and utter disgusting presence has echoed throughout the world in a lavishing distaste for what the music industry has become.  Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate the RIAA, I just know that their management and general business practices are morally and ethnically wrong.  Suing 70 year old grandmothers for their entire 401K and investment portfolio’s while in the same breathe hitting college kids and single moms in one quick swipe with no remorse is just utter bullshit.  Not to mention shows total lack of business management skills.  Usually when a company does not do good making profits and has to dig into such a low stance to generate money, isn’t the management accountable?

Unfortunately, the RIAA has announced they will use Copenhagen-based DtecNet Software ApS in place of MusicSentry to continue their despicable business practice.  I have a better idea for the RIAA, why don’t you stop hoarding all of this cash for your army of legal teams and outsourced tracking systems and use that extra money to figure out a way to make music more affordable to download?  Why not make it a more predictable business model and create an affordable monthly/yearly subscription, instead of charging $1-2 per song packed with DRM where customers shit themselves when they realize they don’t have the flexibility they once had before.

Amazon has done well during the holiday season as their track record shows.  With the debut of cool trendy products such as the Amazon Kindle, a wireless eBook reading device that connects to EVDO cell networks for updates and downloads that book worms go GaGa over, they’ve been hot this year over any previous year since founded in 1994.

TechCrunch has the stats, but here’s a brief overview:

Peak Items Order on a single day:

2008: 6.3M
2007: 5.4M

Items ordered per second:

2008: 72.9
2007: 62.5

These are some impressive numbers, and I’m sure with Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing platform, their website has no problems with traffic spikes.

I guess the Apple TV’s market share traction is about to hit a slow bump.  According to The Inquirer, Intel has a prototype of a new Internet TV hybrid.  Intel says they will unveil this new device at CES in Las Vegas.  Intel plans to add widgets which will allow users to chat with friends, order food, and shop online without needing to leave their seats.  The Intel developer toolkit will allow developers to make TV Internet apps using Javascript, XML, HTML, and Flash.  In reality, the gaming consoles are also a competitor in this market segment.  The Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 already have some of these features.  Time will tell what Intel’s true intentions are.

I just love the smell of malware in the morning.  According to The Reg, researchers from Websense have caught on to some disturbing news.  Apparently some of Google’s sponsored links bring innocent visitors into the pit of malware infested sites.  Some of these sites have malware that hijack your web browser to block out the top search engine websites and coincidentally, Google’s site too!  The Reg reports.

Great news for compulsive masterbaters and porn addicts!  According to search company’s statistics, there’s been a sharp increase in porn that’s viewable on the iPhone.  Now with 3G technology users will be able to get multimedia faster and probably stream movies right off the Internet onto the touch screen.  I use the phrase “touch screen” loosely as I’m sure programmers will find a way to make interactive naughty apps.  Apple has said that it will be a cold day in hell before they allow any adult-related applications on the iPhone app store but so what?  You can also install your own.

The Internet is in a transition period from the Web 2.0 era(about 1998-2008) to Web 2.5(2008-2010).  During this time a whole slew of different applications and innovations will come about that will be the determining factors for the Internet of tomorrow.  There’s no definitive era’s or time frames of what makes each version of the web except for what the experts and industry leaders have been touting off.  So these are my personal estimates.

Web 3.0, as stated on Wiki, is estimated to begin in 2010.  So these next two years will be crucial to the transformation of the foundation for the new Internet.  Starting as early as 2005, and the majority in 2007, there have been online web applications popping up.  These include web based CRM software, corporate Wiki’s, web office applications, and others.  I believe this will be the heart of the Web 3.0 evolution.  Everyday applications that are currently used on the PC will move over to web based versions.  This will create subscription based content and modules.  Additionally this will also help combat piracy as it’s much harder to replicate an online application as it is for an offline application.

2008 has become the cornerstone for these web apps and now the bigger issue is…  What if your Internet or server goes down?  Company’s still need the ability to work even if they lose connectivity.  Welcome to Web 2.5 and 3.0, where there are offline versions of the online web apps that will sync up the next time you reconnect to the Internet.  Take for example, Etelos, which was founded in 1999 and provides on-demand, browser-based applications such as CRM and Project for Google Apps.  The Etelos Marketplace (TM) also allows developers to license, distribute, and host their applications.  According to this TechCrunch article, Etelos has announced that their new platform will allow web apps to run offline.  Then re-sync with the online version once you reconnect.

I think these technologies still have maturing to do.  For example, in regards to Google Apps, any document or data you create on their service becomes Google property.  I don’t think corporations will like this very much as it creates privacy issues.  There must be some sort of change in this arena to give corporations or any user for that matter a warm fuzzy feeling inside about their data.  Until then, we will be stuck in this transition period.

eBay purchased Skype for $2.6 billion back in 2005 with the intent of integrating the service into the eBay auction site.  A perfect harmony of buyers and sellers asking each other questions about items for sale via voice.  But the idea never took off and for several reasons.  eBay never really had a full plan outlined on the project.  It was a great expensive(and I cannot emphasize anymore on this) idea to integrate the two services.  But if there’s no planning involved for the project to move forward how can such an idea be executed in the first place.  If you go to eBay’s website, look through the pages, the auctions, the buyer and seller profiles, you don’t see a way to contact these users via Skype communications.  Same thing on Skype.com, no sign of eBay’s ownership or service integration.  You can send Paypal payments to Skype contacts but what good is that?  If you could chat via voice and/or video with buyers and sellers it could give each person more confidence with bidding or completing a sale.

I think eBay has the resources to still pull this off, especially with Skype’s current member count of 309 million users.  Also, how many eBay commercials have you seen?  A lot, even during Superbowl’s.  Now how many Skype commercials have you seen?  None.  eBay treats Skype like the red headed step child that it is.  But there is so much more potential behind the service that’s untapped.  eBay may seem more willing to just let Skype go and not even bother.  Especially with the recent talks of selling the service.  As Ars Technica says in this article, Google may be the best company to purchase Skype.  They definitely have the resources and the new Android cellphone platform to push it to consumers.

So you’re browsing the web after work one day at home.  You misspell the website you’re trying to access.  We have all done it, even the best writers in the world have typo’s.  But this article over at The Reg says that Internet Service Providers purposely bank off customer’s typo’s.  Those websites that you misspell and open up a blank page with a bunch of advertisements could be your ISP trying to make additional money from you.  Security researcher Dan Kaminsky said at this years ToorCon that these technique’s ISP’s use to make additional revenue could be insecure to the customers.  ToorCon is an annual hacker conference in San Diego where they discuss everything from device hacking, reverse engineering, to cryptographic algorithm’s.  Here’s an excerpt from the article:

“Comcast, Verizon and at least 70 other Internet service providers are putting their customers at serious risk in their quest to make money from mistyped web addresses, security researcher Dan Kaminsky says.

Speaking at the ToorCon security conference in Seattle, Kaminsky demonstrated an exploit class he dubbed PiTMA, short for provider-in-the-middle attacks. A variation of man-in-the-middle attacks, it stole authentication cookies and injected arbitrary content into trusted web pages by exploiting weaknesses in an ad server Earthlink used when returning results for non-existent addresses.

Once upon a time, mistyped domain names resulted in a browser returning a simple 404 error that said the address didn’t exist. Then ISPs realized they could make money by returning a failure notice that included banner ads and other content. This ad injection is done through the magic of the domain name system. As a result, browsers get fooled into thinking a request for qww.microsoft.com is a legitimate address that’s controlled by the same network responsible for www.microsoft.com.

“Guys, anything goes wrong on that subdomain [and] it isan element of the parent,” Kaminsky said. “It can access cookies, it can do other things. Normally a subdomain is trusted by the parent. Not this time.”

Farecast.com has been acquired by Microsoft for $115 Million. Farecast is an airfare prediction website that uses it’s own algorithm’s to help predict the best time to purchase airline tickets. The company was founded in 2003 by Oren Etzioni, which is also the founder of MetaCrawler and is a professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. According to Wikipedia, the site has collected over 175 billion airfare observations to date.  Microsoft will most likely integrate Farecast’s services into its own barrage of networks and online content.  For example they may utilize Windows Spaces or Windows Live to help advertise the service.

LOL!  I am still laughing after reading this one.  Apparently Philippine medical staff from the Vincente Sotto Memorial Medical Center in Cebu City are in deep shit after posting a surgical video on YouTube.  The surgery is for the removal of a perfume bottle that was shoved up the guys ass from a male prostitute.  Now I have nothing against Gay’s what so ever but come on now.  If you HIRED a male prostitute can’t you do more pleasurable things than let him shove inanimate objects up your ass?  Wait a minute, don’t answer that.

Furthermore, the staff not only video taped it but also were shown laughing at the guy in the video.  The video was pulled off YouTube(DAMN!) for privacy issues.  Okay I need to post this because my ribs hurt from laughing so hard.  I feel sorry for the guy but come on we’re all human here!

I couldn’t help but chuckle a bit at the opening excerpt of this article over at The Inquirer.  Although I’m not one for bashing Apple users, especially for my recent respect of the company and its products, but I thought it was humorous:
“Wi-Fi positioning accurate to within one or two continents.  THAT APPLE users are pretty much helpless basket cases is a given. But to discover that the pastel-hued gadgets on which they base their designer lifestyles are about as much use as a chocolate teapot is more amusing than a duck shooting Dick Cheney by mistake.”

Although this technology(dubbed “feature”) would be nice if it actually works correctly.  I think there might be a future security concern here.  This feature is supposed to triangulate the position of the iPhone user with WiFi access points within your area(for um “tracking” purposes so you know where you are).  The article complains that this feature currently is pretty useless but IF they did get it working what happens if you could reverse the technology?  What if you could triangulate the users position just by using the same technology but look up their positions from the access points instead?  This means you could find that person as long as they’re within range of your access point.  I’m sure this technology has safeguards against such a practice but as with everything in this industry, NOTHING is secure.

When Viruses, Trojans, Malware, and Spam isn’t enough researchers have found a more brutal way to hack your computer.  For years, hacking software has been the norm to gain access to someone else’s computer or network.  Now, Samuel King from the University of Illinois says hacking the hardware or the chips is the next level.  A snibbit from the article:

“New research has shown that it is in fact possible to alter chips in such a way as to leave computers helpless to back-door attacks, which would be almost impossible to detect.

To prove their point, researchers set up a demo of such an attack yesterday, in San Francisco, at a security conference called the Usenix Workshop on Large-Scale Exploits and Emergent Threats. The alarming demo showed how a processor running a Linux operating system was left totally vulnerable after a malicious firmware laden chip was given instructions to allow an attacker to log on to the computer without any trouble at all.

Needless to say, this will just hype up the paranoia at the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) , who already issued a warning back in 2005 about how offshore integrated circuit manufacturing could give rise to dangerous security breaches. After all, if you let pesky foreigners handle your chips, who knows what they might do to them.”

You know those annoying squiggly numbers and letters that you’re forced to type in whenever you open a new account on a website?  These things are called Captchasand are used to help deter from automated bots to create fake accounts.  Computers have been unable to read the text in these images and humans were the only ones that could read/translate them.  Now it has been announced that this process has been cracked and can be read by a computer in under 60 seconds.  This means that spammers can use these automated bots and auto create hotmail, gmail, or any other web based email service to send out spam.  Just when you thought there’s enough spam in the world here comes a lot more.  Source: The Inquirer

The much anticipated release of Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 3 is to be released to Original Equipment Manufacturers(OEMs) on April 21st.  XP SP3 will then be available for download from Microsoft Update, Windows Update site, and the Microsoft Download Center on April 29th.  June 10th, XP SP3 will be available via automatic updates.  Sources: Neowin.net Arstechnica.com Technewsworld.com

Service Pack 3 has been reported to include a total of 1,073 fixes according to Wikipedia.  The update also allows XP to be installed without a product key and run until the end of the 30-day activation period without a product key.

These dates have NOT been confirmed from Microsoft as of the writing of this article.  So there’s a chance that these dates could be off.  This will be the last Service Pack for the Windows XP operating system from Microsoft as reported.  June 30th, 2008 was announced as the last day XP can be purchased for new PC’s.  After this date it will only be sold to OEMs installing on subnotebooks or UMPC’s until June 30th, 2010.