AT&T try to sell wireless broadband laptops

AT&T Inc. is going to go beyond cell phones and test selling laptops in its stores in Atlanta and Philadelphia.
The move, announced Wednesday at a trade show in Las Vegas, comes as the cell phone market is starting to saturate, and wireless carriers are looking for ways to expand into other gadgets.
Just as it does with cell phones, the phone company will subsidize the price of laptops when the customer signs a two-year contract.

In Atlanta, customers will be able to buy a small "netbook"-type laptop for $50 if they sign up for home and wireless broadband service for $60 per month.
That offer is also new for AT&T: it normally charges $60 per month for wireless access alone. It is being tested only in Atlanta.
AT&T stores in both Atlanta and Philadelphia will be selling more expensive laptops as well, ranging up to a Lenovo X200 for $850 when bought with wireless broadband. Lenovo Group Ltd. sells it for $1,120.

Dallas-based AT&T started subsidizing netbooks sold at RadioShack Corp. stores late last year, bringing the price to $100, down from $500, for buyers who signed up for wireless broadband.

BlackBerry maker launches add-on applications

Research in Motion Ltd., the maker of BlackBerry phones, launched its awaited one-stop shop for add-on applications on Wednesday.
While third-party programs have long been available for BlackBerry phones from many sources, the Waterloo, Ontario-based company is now following in Apple Inc.'s footsteps by creating and operating a central store. Every other major company in the "smart" phone industry is doing the same.
BlackBerry App World is available as a free download from RIM's Web site, with 1,000 applications. Users need an account with eBay Inc.'s PayPal payment service and a BlackBerry with a trackball or touch screen.

RIM Co-Chief Executive Jim Balsillie said the company is looking to strike deals with wireless carriers so that shoppers can charge their purchases to their phone bill instead of using PayPal. App World will share revenue with the carriers and allow them set up their own stores within the store.
Microsoft Corp. on Tuesday announced that carrier stores and billing will be part of its Windows Marketplace for Mobile, an applications store that will launch with new phones toward the end of the year.
Nokia Corp., the world's largest maker of cell phones, has several application stores but said earlier this year that it would combine them into one. Google Inc. runs an Android Marketplace of programs for the T-Mobile G1 phone, which will be joined by other phones running Google's Android software this year.
The launch of App World coincides with a speech by RIM's other co-CEO, Mike Lazaridis, at a cell phone trade show opening Wednesday in Las Vegas. He plans to profile the BlackBerry as a music-playing device, an important capability now that RIM is taking it from a business-oriented e-mail gadget to a mainstream smart phone competing with the iPhone.
But Balsillie said RIM has no plans to launch a music store of its own, like Apple and Nokia have.

Giant Internet worm set to change tactics April 1

SAN FRANCISCO - The fast-moving Conficker computer worm, a scourge of the Internet that has infected at least 3 million PCs, is set to spring to life in a new way on Wednesday — April Fools' Day.

That's when many of the poisoned machines will get more aggressive about "phoning home" to the worm's creators over the Internet. When that happens, the bad guys behind the worm will be able to trigger the program to send spam, spread more infections, clog networks with traffic, or try and bring down Web sites.

Technically, this could cause havoc, from massive network outages to the creation of a cyberweapon of mass destruction that attacks government computers. But researchers who have been tracking Conficker say the date will probably come and go quietly.

More likely, these researchers say, the programming change that goes into effect April 1 is partly symbolic — an April Fools' Day tweaking of Conficker's pursuers, who for now have been able to prevent the worm from doing significant damage.

"I don't think there will be a cataclysmic network event," said Richard Wang, manager of the U.S. research division of security firm Sophos PLC. "It doesn't make sense for the guys behind Conficker to cause a major network problem, because if they're breaking parts of the Internet they can't make any money."

Previous Internet threats were designed to cause haphazard destruction. In 2003 a worm known as Slammer saturated the Internet's data pipelines with so much traffic it crippled corporate and government systems, including ATM networks and 911 centers.

Far more often now, Internet threats are designed to ring up profits. Control of infected PCs is valuable on the black market, since the machines can be rented out, from one group of bad guys to another, and act as a kind of illicit supercomputer, sending spam, scanning Web sites for security holes, or participating in network attacks.

The army of Conficker-infected machines, known as a "botnet," could be one of the greatest cybercrime tools ever assembled. Conficker's authors just need to figure out a way to reliably communicate with it.

Infected PCs need commands to come alive. They get those commands by connecting to Web sites controlled by the bad guys. Even legitimate sites can be co-opted for this purpose, if hackers break in and use the sites' servers to send out malicious commands.

So far, Conficker-infected machines have been trying to connect each day to 250 Internet domains — the spots on the Internet where Web sites are parked. The bad guys need to get just one of those sites under their control to send their commands to the botnet. (The name Conficker comes from rearranging letters in the name of one of the original sites the worm was connecting to.)

Conficker has been a victim of its success, however, because its rapid spread across the Internet drew the notice of computer security companies. They have been able to work with domain name registrars, which administer Web site addresses, to block the botnet from dialing in.

Now those efforts will get much harder. On April 1, many Conficker-infected machines will generate a list of 50,000 new domains a day that they could try. Of that group, the botnet will randomly select 500 for the machines to actually query.

The bad guys still need to get only one of those up and running to connect to their botnet. And the bigger list of possibilities increases the odds they'll slip something by the security community.

Researchers already know which domains the infected machines will check, but pre-emptively registering them all, or persuading the registrars to neutralize all of them, is a bigger hurdle.

"We expect something will happen, but we don't quite know what it will look like," said Jose Nazario, manager of security research for Arbor Networks, a member of the "Conficker Cabal," an alliance trying to hunt down the worm's authors.

"With every move that they make, there's the potential to identify who they are, where they're located and what we can do about them," he added. "The real challenge right now is doing all that work around the world. That's not a technical challenge, but it is a logistical challenge."

Conficker's authors also have updated the worm so infected machines have new ways to talk to each other

growth of iPhone gaming submitted by iGames Summit

When the iPhone was first announced, few people would have anticipated the waves the device would make in the gaming community.

 Now, only a few days before San Francisco’s Game Developers Conference, a separate iGames Summit addressed the growing popularity of the iPhone gaming platform.

Australian Internet prompts `blacklist'

SYDNEY, Australia - A whistle-blower organization claims a secret list of Web sites that Australian authorities are proposing to ban includes such innocuous destinations as a dentist's office.

iPhone offer Cut and paste enhancements to up coming version

Apple Inc. is updating its software for iPhones so that users can cut, copy and paste text — a basic computing feature that was missing from the gadget that seems to do everything.

At an iPhone event for journalists Tuesday at Apple headquarters, the company also pledged to broaden the way that third-party software programmers can build and sell content for the device.

Among other things, software developers now will be able to create applications that have items for sale within them, such as electronic books or additional levels of a video game. And developers will be able to access the music within users' iPhone libraries, so songs they own can be included in games, for example.

IBM in talks to buy Sun Microsystems

IBM Corp. is in talks to buy Sun Microsystems Inc. for at least $6.5 billion in cash, a deal that would shake up Silicon Valley and the corporate computing market, The Associated Press has learned