remove the labels – Gadgets and Life

The FCC this week levied more than .3 million in fines on some 660 small telecommunications companies for failing to adhere to new FCC guidelines regarding customer privacy. After complaints in recent years surfaced about data brokers illegally gleaning consumer information from many carriers (like in the HP scandal), the FCC crafted new regulations for [...]

Alaska Airlines today announced that they’ve launched a trial of in-flight broadband service, with technology provided by Row 44. Creatively named “Alaska Airlines In-flight Wi-Fi,” the service trial will last for 60 days, after which Alaska will determine pricing and deployment specifics. Wi-Fi guru Glenn Fleishman has a nice break down of where your in-flight [...]

Apparently fearing the fate of newspapers such as the Rocky Mountain News, Cablevision has decided to buck the trend of free news content and start charging Newsday readers for online content. The cable provider purchased the paper last May for 0 million, and apparently wants to make the news content a value-addded service to their [...]

In a filing with the CRTC, Canadian cable provider Videotron has thrown its support behind the “graduated response” (aka three strikes) approach to handling P2P users on the ISP’s network. That’s not particularly surprising, since Videotron is part of the Quebecor entertainment family, with a vested interest in protecting their owner’s content from P2P distribution. [...]

User uid://1263119 offers this CNET report that the notes the Obama administration, in it’s quest of finding money to finance their spending, is considering charging wireless companies that license wireless spectrum in the U.S. an additional fee. “According to their 2009-2010 budget plan, they would start out at 50 million and would increase to 200 [...]

Obama Transition Team Tech Advisor: Broadband Grant Program A ‘Balancing Act’ Europe ditches Skype probe theregister.co.uk Mobile WiMAX Market Up 5% in 4Q08; Cisco, Huawei Begin Challenging Market Leaders cellular-news.com UK households to get 32 Mbps by 2019 techwatch.co.uk Visa Sued Over SMS Alerts Service cellular-news.com Unlocked G1 Phones Blocked From Some Apps internetnews.com Early [...]

New Trade Body to Boost Mobile Broadband Services in Rural USA cellular-news.com UK has ‘uphill struggle to 2Mbps’ bbc.co.uk Acting FCC Chairman Copps: Time To Include Internet In Public Interest Dialogue multichannel.com Hacking contest offers ,000 for iPhone exploit theregister.co.uk Intel Pushes WiMAX Technology in Japan cdrinfo.com Google offers EU help to nail MS theinquirer.net [...]

Cablevision should be announcing new faster speeds very soon, according to company COO Tom Rutledge. The cable provider is spending 0 million to upgrade all of their markets with the speedier technology and deploy free Wi-Fi to a growing number of areas. Speaking on a conference call with investors and analysts, Rutledge stated they are [...]

For much of the week, Roadrunner/Time Warner Cable customers in Southern California have been complaining about sluggish DNS performance in our forums. Time Warner Cable spokesman Jeff Simmermon (who you can follow on Twitter) has subsequently confirmed that the company’s DNS servers in the region have been under DDoS attack for seven days now, impacting [...]

Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear an antitrust case that claims AT&T (then SBC) engaged in anti-competitive behavior against smaller ISPs by charging too much for wholesale access to its network (frequently more than retail, making it nearly impossible to compete with them). The case began in 2003 when Linkline and several [...]

Sources at a number of smaller ISPs tell us that Jupiter Media has made the decision to no longer host or fund ISPCON, a yearly convention for ISPs, WISPs, and other Internet service companies. While we’ve confirmed the move with sources at Jupiter, details are scarce at the moment — though additional information should be [...]