Miscellaneous
03 January 2013
The Secret Ways of Chinese Telecom Giant Huawei Der Spiegel
Almost a third of the planet is thought to be using its products and yet few know much about the highly secretive Chinese telecommunication equipment company Huawei. Should customers be concerned about the company founder's military background or the security vulnerabilities of its products?
25 December 2012
Little Sign of a Predicted E-Book Price War New York Times
Right about now, just as millions of e-readers and tablets are being slipped under Christmas trees, there was supposed to be a ferocious price war over e-books.
13 December 2012
Google Chairman Says Android Winning Mobile War With Apple; Says Tax Avoidance Is "Called Capitalism" Bloomberg
Google Inc.'s Android is extending its lead over Apple Inc. in the mobile-software market at a rate that compares with Microsoft Corp.'s expansion in desktop software in the 1990s, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said.
02 December 2012
Head of Tehran's Cybercrimes Unit Is Fired Over Death of Blogger New York Times
Iranian's national police chief fired the commander of Tehran's cybercrimes police unit on Saturday for negligence in the death of a blogger in prison.
26 November 2012
Australia's copper network is 'Rooted' ABC News
An industry insider has told ABC Tech in no uncertain terms that Australia's copper network is "Rooted." The insider has been in the industry for well over a decade and has worked in many different sectors and companies. They didn't want to be named because of the current nature of their work with the rollout of the National Broadband Network and the sensitivities surrounding that.
18 November 2012
Why Steven Sinofsky Really Left Microsoft Businessweek
Microsoft is sure to miss some of Sinofsky's attributes. He was the fixer, and the guy who kept the trains running on time at a company that made a religion out of being late. "He would be able to tell a year in advance what day the product would ship to the customer," says Vince Mendillo, a former Microsoft employee who spent years working with Sinofsky. "He's a brilliant engineer who understood the customer's articulated and unarticulated needs better than anyone else."
17 November 2012
WiFox: New technology can improve public WiFi connections The Independent
Could this spell the end for frustratingly slow internet connections in coffee shops, libraries and airports? Scientists have developed a new system which can improve WiFi connections by 700 per cent.
16 November 2012
Actually, the GIF Is Dying The Atlantic
Oxford American Dictionaries has named GIF, the acronym for graphical image format, its word of the year. "Like so many other relics of the 80s, it has never been trendier," said the head of US dictionaries at the press.
12 November 2012
Astronaut uses space internet to control robot on Earth BBC News
The interplanetary internet has been used by an astronaut at the International Space Station (ISS) to send commands to a robot on Earth.
10 November 2012
Apple showed lack of integrity in Samsung dispute, says judge The Guardian
A senior judge has criticised Apple again in the latest round of a legal row between the iPad maker and rival Samsung.
AT&T, Verizon Phase Out Copper Networks, 'A Lifeline' After Sandy Huffington Post
... But just a few miles away, her parents, who are in their 80s, had no problems communicating. They could make and receive calls during the power outage because they still rely on an old form of technology: a corded telephone that runs on copper wires.
28 October 2012
Data centres: The best places in the US to store your terabytes The Economist
Prineville, Oregon, Is home to only about 10,000 people but to hundreds of thousands of servers. In January 2010 Facebook decided to build a huge data centre on a 124-acre plot in the high, juniper-pocked desert east of the Cascade mountains. The first building is as long as an aircraft carrier. A second, nearing completion, is slightly bigger.
18 October 2012
Cutting the cost of internet data on submarine cables ABC News
Have you ever considered how far Internet traffic has to travel to get to Australia?
14 October 2012
Anonymous distances itself from WikiLeaks: says has become the 'Julian Assange show' The Guardian
The computer hacker collective Anonymous has distanced itself from WikiLeaks, claiming the whistleblowers' site has become too focused on the personal tribulations of its founder, Julian Assange.
26 September 2012
Google Builds Web of Influence in Berlin Der Spiegel
Berlin's famous boulevard, Unter den Linden, is a coveted address for lobbyists in the German capital. The Bertelsmann Foundation has an office there, as do Deutsche Bank and the pharmaceutical group GlaxoSmithKline. Their offices exude sophistication, and the only time male employees would show up without a tie is on casual Fridays, if then.
24 September 2012
An online voice for a handwritten newspaper LiveMint
According to the Wired magazine, the only handwritten newspaper in the world is in India. The Musalman has been published daily since 1927, written in Urdu by calligraphers known as katibs. According to the Handwritten Newspapers Project (handwrittennews.com), the only entry from India is the The Musalman, as registered on 15 July 2011. But that is not true.
20 September 2012
Yahoo! Japan's 'explosive speed' changes Japan Times
This spring, Japanese Web titan Yahoo! Japan appointed a new CEO and new board members -- the first big change to its board since the company was founded 16 years ago.
Deutsche Telekom plans to double German super-fast broadband connections by 2016 ZDNet
The CEO of Germany's Deutsche Telekom has announced plans to increase the availability of high speed broadband access to around 24 million households over the next four years.
Up to speed: Telstra broadband still hard to beat ZDNet
The latest analysis of ZDNet's Australian Broadband Speed Tests shows that Telstra is still faster, whatever the connection type.
18 September 2012
Why Wi-Fi Is Often So Slow Wall Street Journal
A number of Internet service providers, including Comcast Corp. and Verizon Communications Inc., have recently upped the maximum speeds of broadband they offer residential customers to as much as 305 megabits per second.
11 September 2012
Why Do We Call Them Internet Packets? His Name Was Donald Davies Wired
The fundamental technology underpinning the internet is called packet-switching. And Donald Davies was the first one to call it that.
10 September 2012
HTC may be able to seek US import ban on LTE iPad and new iPhone ZDNet
Summary: Apple won a major case against Samsung, but all may not be rosy for Apple as patents that HTC owns are holding strong at the moment. Apple screwed up HTC's EVO 4G LTE launch and now HTC may return the favor with the new iPhone.
08 September 2012
Google blacklists websites run by family of UK Tory party co-chairman The Guardian
Google has blacklisted a network of websites run by the family of the newly promoted Tory party co-chairman, Grant Shapps, for breaching its rules on copyright infringement. A string of at least 19 sites run by the wife, sister or 75-year-old mother of Shapps have been banned from carrying Google's adverts and been relegated to the bottom of its search results.
06 September 2012
Singapore Launches 'Super Wi-fi' Internet Trials Wall Street Journal
Like other underdeveloped regions, the boom in Southeast Asia's digital economy has been fueled by explosive growth in mobile Internet usage rather than the development of vast broadband cable networks. Internet access, however, remains far from ubiquitous for the millions of people that live across the region's tens of thousands of islands, where broadband or 3G penetration remains weak or nonexistent.
22 August 2012
Apple manufacturer Foxconn improves on Chinese workers' hours and safety The Guardian
Foxconn, Apple's top manufacturer, has improved safety conditions and cut working hours in an effort to resolve violations at its plants that triggered a global scandal for the iPad and iPhone maker.
