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And I thought I had seen everything - then I stumbled across the worlds first Internet enabled coffee pot. Do note that an Internet-enabled hot pot has already been created. Beyond - makers of the IceBox in Kitchen PC and a number of innovative household entertainment products have created a coffee pot that you can schedule to make a pot of coffee for you on a each different day of the week. Perfect for a student or someone else with an irregular schedule. If you have the IceBox and the NIC attachment you can even program it over the web or integrate it with your calendar. This is the perfect gift for that truly geeky caffeine addict in your life!
Read More 
| Beyond via Red Ferret Journal
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In case you missed it, the Mozilla Foundation has released Firefox 1.0.5 from beta, and it is now available for download. Basically, this one patches a few security holes and improves browser stability.
Read More | Firefox
Comcast Raising Cable Internet Speeds
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Corporate News, Hot Deals, Internet,
Good news for those of us who are serviced by Comcast for cable and high speed Internet. Beginning in July, Comcast will be upgrading subscribers speeds by a whole 2.0 Mbps at no cost. If you currently subscribe to at least Comcast Expanded Basic Cable TV service or above, the following HSI options are available to you:
6.0/384 - $42.95 - Up from 4.0/384
8.0/768 - $52.95 - Up from 6.0/768
As Comcast just recently upgraded their network just a few months ago, a second speed increase leads me to believe that they are feeling the heat from services like Verizon FIOS.
Read More | Venturus
Latest Gear Live Videos
The folks over at Control Our Junk have created a working train set which can be controlled by anyone with an Internet connection. Using a Java console, visitors can control the speed of the train. The commands are routed to the server running a .NET application, which in turn sends the command to the train set. The train is always on, and can be viewed and/or controlled at any time.
Read More | Control Our Junk via Slashdot
We have written about the Internet Archive recently and are surprised to see that they are being sued - for providing the archive itself! A Philadelphia law firm was defending a health care company being sued in a trademark violation. The firm used the way-back machine to show the courts old web-pages dating back to 1999 to prove their use of the trademark. Now the plaintiff is filing suit against the Internet Archive for violations of two federal laws: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Now I am not a lawyer, but I don’t see how they broke copyright by archiving a copy of a public website, and making it available for the Internet in general.
Read More | NYTimes - Reg Required
Just about 30 percent of households in the United Kingdom have broadband now, a number that suggests that by 2010 the number of people watching TV via their broadband connection will be higher than those viewing with an analog television. Media regulator Ofcom also says that there are now 8.1 million broadband connections accross the UK, while only 7.5 million households are using dial up, a number that has dropped 1.1 million in the last six months alone. It seems falling broadband prices and increased connection speeds are responsible for the nearly 2 million people who have signed up for broadband since December of 2004.
Read More | BBC News
Is Canada about to outlaw search engines and Internet archive sites? Bill C-60, which calls to amend the Copyright Act, hints that it just may be illegal for sites such as Google or the Internet Archive to provide someone with copyrighted information through “information-location tools”. Right now, it’s not all that clear, but thats due to the bill being written so vaguely.
The way it is drafted strongly suggests that the reproduction and caching activity done by Google or the Wayback Machine at archive.org and similar essential research tools would be illegal in Canada. It could be read by a court as a ‘deeming’ provision, which was hopefully not the intention. “We shouldn’t cripple the Googles of the world by imposing copyright chill on the very basis of their architecture. In fact, they perform a very useful service to copyright owners by enabling easy detection of infringement. The owners should go after the actual infringer, rather than effectively shooting the messenger.
Read More | Globe Technology
We’ve all heard that the entertainment industry expects ISP’s to hand over IP information when suspected pirating has occured. On a positive front, Tuesday in the Netherlands a court ruled that Dutch ISP’s do not have to hand over IP info, and even went as far as to say that doing so is a violation of privacy laws. As with everything in life, there are a few exceptions, and this ruling is pretty specific to the case, but it’s nice to see a court protecting privacy instead of giving out information over little evidence.
Read More | Constitutional Code
Less than a week after tragedy struck the city of London, a Windows virus is being distributed through an e-mail that claims to have amateur footage filmed minutes after one of the bombs exploded in the London Underground subway system. The letter reportedly looks like a newsletter from CNN, with the subject line reading, “TERROR HITS LONDON”. The body of the letter tells the reader to click on the attached file, “London terror moovie.avi”, to view the amateur footage.
Anyone clicking on the file will not be shown a video. Instead their PC will be infected by the as yet un-named Trojan. Next time the compromised machine is started, it will report in to the virus creator and become part of a spam-sending zombie network. Because it relies on people clicking on the attachment, the malicious program can affect Windows 2000, 95, 98, Me, NT, XP and Windows Server 2003.
Read More | BBC News
Have you ever tried to access a website from your mobile phone only to find that the site wasn’t phone friendly? That problem will soon become a thing of the past, as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has approved the suffix .mobi to be used for mobile phone friendly websites. Many powerful mobile phone makers and operators lobbied for the suffix, in hope that it will encourage websites to create mobile phone sites and in turn cause consumers to upgrade their phones to those with Internet access. You can look for the new .mobi websites to be out next year, featuring limited memory and bandwidth fit for a small screen.
Read More | PC Magazine
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