The Blaugh

Worldwide mobile telephone subscriptions reached 3.3 billion — equivalent to half the global population — on Thursday, 26 years after the first cellular network was launched, research firm Informa said.

But although mobile subscriptions have reached the equivalent of 50 percent of the population, this does not mean that half the people in the world now have a mobile phone, since Informa said 59 countries have mobile penetration of over 100 percent — where some owners have more than one phone.

The Wi-Fire is a compact, range-extending USB device that enables you to access a wireless Internet connection from up to 1,000 feet away–three times the range of your internal wireless adapter.

The Wi-Fire uses a powerful directional antenna, highly sensitive receiver and proprietary software to find and enhance normal Wi-Fi signals. With it you can connect wirelessly to the Internet faster and with a stronger signal than an internal wireless adapter can achieve.

To help California residents affected by the fires stretching across Southern California, AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T – News) today announced that AT&T Wi-Fi service will be offered free of charge at nearly 600 hot spot locations across Riverside, San Diego, San Bernardino, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Orange and Ventura counties.

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Residents will have free access to the AT&T Wi-Fi service 24 hours a day beginning tomorrow, Saturday, Oct. 27.

“We want to help residents in Southern California in any way that we can,” said Kieran Nolan, AT&T vice president and general manager, Los Angeles area. “By enabling free Wi-Fi at hundreds of AT&T hot spot locations, we’re hoping to provide families and friends with another way to stay connected — and to reconnect — throughout this difficult time.”

Passwords are supposed to be kept secret, but due to continuing advances in technology, they are becoming weaker every day. The threat has grown to the point where using a password as the sole form of authentication provides you with almost no protection at all. Randy Nash outlines the dangers facing passwords and suggests some additional measures needed to protect even ordinary digital assets.

A technique for cracking computer passwords using inexpensive off-the-shelf computer graphics hardware is causing a stir in the computer security community.

Elcomsoft, a software company based in Moscow, Russia, has filed a US patent for the technique. It takes advantage of the “massively parallel processing” capabilities of a graphics processing unit (GPU) – the processor normally used to produce realistic graphics for video games.

Using an $800 graphics card from nVidia called the GeForce 8800 Ultra, Elcomsoft increased the speed of its password cracking by a factor of 25, according to the company’s CEO, Vladimir Katalov.

Whether you are a consumer, a hardware maker, a software developer or a provider of cool new services, it’s hard to make a move in the American cellphone world without the permission of the companies that own the pipes. While power in other technology sectors flows to consumers and nimble entrepreneurs, in the cellphone arena it remains squarely in the hands of the giant carriers.

After expanding across Earth, the Internet is now set to spread into outer space to reach parts no network has gone before, one of its co-creators predicted Wednesday.
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Vinton Cerf said the proposed “interplanetary” Internet would allow people an ability “to access information and to control experiments taking place far away” from Earth.

Expanding into the solar system would bring new rules and regulations too, he told an annual Seoul forum, saying he and other experts were working on a set of standards designed to guide space-era Internet communications.

“Finally, the Internet can take us where no network has gone before,” said Cerf, who is Google’s vice president and chief internet evangelist,

Britain prepared Tuesday to begin the switchover from analogue to digital television broadcasting, with a seaside town the first to make the move.
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The BBC2 channel’s analogue signal was to be switched off from around 2:00 am (0100 GMT) Wednesday in the northwest English resort of Whitehaven, affecting 25,000 households. The other analogue channels will be switched off on November 14.

Region by region, Britain is switching to digital broadcasting, due to be completed by 2012.

Every television set must be connected to satellite, cable or broadband transmissions, though the majority are already signed up to such services