After having used Reliance Wimax Broadband Service in Pune for well over a year now, it is time for another review of the service. During the past 16 months, we notice that the Base Stations (bs) usually go down once every week. The most common problem is that the DHCP server fails to respond, and your working lease which is set to 2 hours times out. You end up without a working connection for upwards of 2 hours a week at least. Apparently, Reliance uses Cisco equipment at the Base Stations for the routing and DHCP.  read more »

After email services that 'read' your emails and display relevant advertisements, aka Google Mail, a new service is here that 'listens' to your internet phone calls and displays relevant advertisements. Call it a 'breach of privacy' or call it 'subsidized by ad revenues'; either way, looks like services like these are here to stay.  read more »

Tilera Corporation, a startup founded by Dr. Anant Agarwal of MIT, and financed by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and NSF (National Science Foundation) made headlines in the world of Technology with the launch of their 64 core processor. Using technology created by Dr. Anant Agarwal way back in 1996, this CPU is now on the market for embedded devices.  read more »

Research in Motion (RIM) will launch its BlackBerry 8820 in the US in the next few months. This will be RIM's first dual-mode smartphone and the thinnest with a full keyboard. Apart from its push e-mail software which allows customers to access their e-mail on their wireless devices in real time, this BlackBerry 8820 also features Wi-Fi and GPS satellite navigation. This phone will compete with the Apple iPhone in the US.  read more »

Microsoft's Windows Media DRM (Digital Rights Management) has been cracked yet again. This time all DRM protection on Windows Media versions up to version 11.0.6000.6324 can be unlocked using a simple set of utilities available freely on the internet since July 13, 2007.  read more »

Does lightning affect iPod and Cellphone users more than others? A first glance at the headline of an article by Associated Press certainly seems to suggest so. The article reads:
"Listen to an iPod during a storm and you may get more than electrifying tunes. A Canadian jogger suffered wishbone-shaped chest and neck burns, ruptured eardrums and a broken jaw when lightning traveled through his music player's wires." and adds another anecdote "Last summer, a Colorado teen ended up with similar injuries when lightning struck nearby as he was listening to his iPod while mowing the lawn."  read more »

According to this article on Yahoo, sensitive US military files were found openly available online during a survey conducted by Associated Press.
Detailed schematics of a military detainee holding facility in southern Iraq, Geographical surveys and aerial photographs of two military airfields outside Baghdad, and Plans for a new fuel farm at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan were among the sensitive materials found generally available online.  read more »

Symantec is working on the latest version of their corporate anti-virus software, codenamed Hamlet. The Beta versions have been in closed testing since March 2007. Symantec has not yet announced the official name for this new next-generation product that integrates firewall, zero-day protection and network access control features into this all-in-one anti-virus product. Buy Norton Internet Security 2007 and get Norton SystemWorks Basic for ONLY $10!  read more »

Mozilla is working on the latest version of the Firefox Browser, codenamed Gran Paradiso. The preview edition of Firefox 3 is currently in Alpha stage, and is expected to reach the the first Beta version release in the end of July.
Firefox 3 will feature the bookmarks portion of Places, the feature that at one time was slated to appear in Firefox 2.0, but was later pulled out. The Places feature that is slated to make searching through Browser History and Bookmarks easy, depends on the Open Source SQLite database engine.  read more »

Wenchi Chen, the CEO of VIA revealed the prototype of the smallest computer motherboard developed till date. This motherboard was introduced as the 'world's first industry-standard form-factor for PC/phone convergence,' at Computex this week. The "mobile-ITX" board measures 3 x 1.8 inches which is half the size of Via's "pico-ITX" form-factor, and will be available with 256MB or 512MB of RAM soldered on-board, and will run Linux or Windows XP Embedded.  read more »