WiMax? Why not? | CNET News.com

A superfast wireless technology known as WiMax is getting its second wind here in the Windy City.
Leading the charge are U.S. telephone operators BellSouth and AT&T, which both said here at the Supercomm 2005 trade show that they are looking at WiMax. The companies hope the technology can solve problems with expanding into areas where terrain or density make traditional wire-line telephony impractical for delivering service over the last mile between homes and nationwide phone networks.

It's clear here in Chicago that WiMax--once eschewed as an undeveloped plaything for geeks, and beset by interoperability testing problems--has once again caught the attention of major carriers and equipment makers.

"Our contention is that 2005 is truly the year in which WiMax technology will emerge in multiple markets worldwide, as the leading companies in the industry move forward with significant product development, compliance testing and initial field deployments," said Keith Horn, senior vice president of Fujitsu Microelectronics America, one of several major vendors to announce WiMax products or relationships here.

WiMax, another name for the 802.16 standard for wireless broadband, has a range of up to 30 miles and can deliver broadband at a theoretical maximum of 75 megabits per second, which is more than 20 times the speed of the fastest wired broadband available commercially. WiMax serves as a partial successor to the wildly popular Wi-Fi protocol, which works over far shorter distances--measured in feet rather than miles.

But for all its promise, WiMax was been plagued by the sort of problems any fledgling technology bumps up against, ranging from working out kinks in the technology to persuading the biggest in the industry that it's for real.

In January, the technology suffered the indignity of having its first-ever equipment interoperability tests pushed back for six months, until June.

But along came Intel, credited by many with breathing new life into WiMax. In April, the chip giant began shipping its PRO-Wireless 5116 chipset for mobile WiMax, which will likely be built into commercially available PCs by 2007.

That has helped light a new fire under WiMax technology, and it has renewed talk about how valuable it will be to operators--how it's much cheaper than laying cables as a way to extend a network's reach
Previous Next BellSouth plans to blanket portions of Georgia, including college communities, with WiMax services, while AT&T will soon announce two more cities where it's trialing the service and testing a new voice-over-WiMax feature, representatives for the operators said.

"We're looking to move into several more major urban areas," said AT&T Vice President Eric Shepcaro. "Our goal is a full-scale rollout in these areas."

While not as far along as AT&T or BellSouth, U.S. operator Sprint is also working on a WiMax service. And most Korean operators recently joined the board of the WiMax Forum, a WiMax trade association, a sign of their commitment to the technology.

Meanwhile, the long-awaited introduction of consumer WiMax modems and other products is finally beginning to happen. Some of the new WiMax gear uses a system-on-a-chip design by Fujitsu. That includes gear from equipment maker Aperto, a Milpitas, Calif.-based company that on Tuesday revealed that its own WiMax lineup will be at the heart of WiMax equipment trials by telephone operators in Spain, the Netherlands and the United States.

Though much of the WiMax gear is rooted to a single location for now, mobile services appear just around the corner, especially since heavyweight Nortel Networks says it's developing mobile WiMax gear with partner LG.

But WiMax products still suffer from sticker shock. Aperto's PacketMax products, rolling out at the end of the year, will cost a consumer between $400 and $600 just for the modem. Though pricey for most consumers, WiMax modems used to cost about $2,000, putting them even further out of reach of the mainstream.

Prices are expected to slip even further because a growing number of different chipmakers, led by Fujitsu and Intel, are introducing WiMax chips. That means WiMax equipment makers no longer have to develop their own chips, as Aperto said, which saves on research costs that drive up prices.

"Remember when Wi-Fi first came out?" Aperto Vice President Alan Menezes said. "The same things are happening here. Wi-Fi cards used to cost $1,000. Now they're $40."

Microsoft's road map for Longhorn tools

Microsoft later this year will look to populate the market for Windows Longhorn applications with development tools and the company's own server applications, including long-awaited updates to the Visual Studio programming tool and SQL Server.
At its Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in September, Microsoft plans to provide further tooling for the forthcoming Visual Studio 2005 to encourage the creation of Longhorn applications. Company executives discussed its product plans, including new versions of Exchange and BizTalk server due next year, at its TechEd conference here Tuesday.

Applications that exploit the latest features in Windows, such as the new user interface or Web services-based connectivity, help compel customers to upgrade Windows.

Earlier this year, Microsoft released developer kits, called technology previews, for building Windows applications that use the Avalon presentation and Indigo communication systems in Longhorn. Those toolkits plug into Visual Studio.
"With the Avalon technology preview today, it's not as easy (to build Longhorn applications) as we want," said Ilya Bukshteyn, director of SQL Server marketing. "You're going to see at the PDC in September the next set of information of how we're going to help people build Longhorn apps."

After the release of Longhorn in late 2006, Microsoft plans to release another version of Visual Studio, code-named Orcas, which will be optimized for building Longhorn applications. The code name for the follow-on release to Orcas is Hawaii.
The biggest product release of 2005 will come in November, when the company makes its Visual Studio 2005 programming tool and SQL Server 2005 database available. The releases of these products have been delayed several times.

Microsoft executives on Monday said that with the Visual Studio 2005 release, developers will be able to build applications that use the Outlook e-mail and calendaring program as a front-end application, which users interact with directly.

Until this week, the company has said the Visual Studio Tools for Microsoft Office System would only allow programmers to build applications for Word and Excel.

New BizTalk and Exchange in 2006
In the first quarter of next year, Microsoft intends to release BizTalk Server 2006, its integration software for linking together disparate systems.

The follow-on release of BizTalk Server 2006 is code-named V-Next. That version of BizTalk will focus on simplifying the job of building workflow applications that involve collaborations among several people, said Steven Martin, group product manager at Microsoft's business process and integration division.

The BizTalk engineering group is working on two other projects expected to be released next year.

In the first half of next year, Microsoft will release its first radio frequency ID software, which will make it easier to collect data generated by RFID devices.

The RFID tools will be based on Microsoft's .Net development software. The company will seek to license it to other software vendors to build RFID data-gathering capabilities into third-party applications, Martin said.

The company has not said how it will package up the software but device drivers for a range of RFID devices will be built into Windows, said Paul Flessner, senior vice president of server applications.

The BizTalk group is also working on a unified workflow product which will be used by several different product groups at Microsoft, Martin said. Code-named Windows Workflow Services, the software will likely be available with Longhorn, he said.

Also due out around the same time as Longhorn will be a major upgrade of Exchange, Microsoft's messaging and calendar server.

Called Exchange Server 12, the software will have a "unified in-box" that will allow people to store e-mails, voice calls and also query their e-mail and calendar remotely with voice commands, said Kim Akers, senior director of Microsoft's Exchange Server division.

The server upgrade will also have improved antispam tools and support a scripting language, called Monad, which will make it easier for administrators to manage several servers at once, she said.

Microsoft also will make Exchange server functions available to programmers via Web services interfaces, which will make it easier to build applications with Exchange, Akers said.
By Martin LaMonica
Staff Writer, CNET News.com

Alleged hacker faces extradition to U.S

A British man suspected of hacking into 53 U.S. government computers is facing extradition.

Gary McKinnon, 39, an unemployed man from north London, was arrested Tuesday night.

McKinnon, known as "Solo" in the hacking world, was set to appear Wednesday before the Bow Street Magistrates Court on an extradition warrant from the U.S. government.

According to the warrant, McKinnon gained illegal access and made unauthorized modifications to 53 computers belonging to the U.S. government, including computers from the Department of Defense and the National Security Agency, between February 2001 and March 2002.

If extradited and found guilty in the United States, he faces five years in prison for eight crimes he was indicted for in 2002. Among the charges, McKinnon is suspected of stealing administrator identities, deleting 1,300 user accounts and copying a file containing usernames and encrypted passwords.

Siebel announces first-ever stock dividend

Enterprise software maker Siebel Systems announced its first-ever stock dividend payout to shareholders on Wednesday, just ahead of what could prove to be a contentious meeting of the company's investors.
In a statement, Siebel's board of directors said that on July 15 the company will pay a quarterly dividend of 2.5 cents per share to shareholders who have purchased their stock before the Nasdaq's close of business on June 30.

The company said that it would also continue to pay a dividend to investors each fiscal quarter going forward, but that the board will determine the size of future disbursements on a case-by-case basis.

The dividend announcement comes just hours before the kickoff of Siebel's annual shareholder meeting and board elections in Burlingame, Calif. Several of the company's major investors had been expected to withhold their votes for Tom Siebel, company founder and chairman, and two other directors. Among investors leading that effort were Jana Partners and Providence Capital, which have both publicly stated their displeasure with the company's current management.

A potential dividend payout had been rumored as one of the ways Siebel might appease investors who wanted the company to put its estimated $2.2 billion to work in increasing shareholder value. But that option had been considered unlikely because the company had never taken such a measure before.

In a letter to investors posted on the company's Web site on Wednesday morning, George T. Shaheen, Siebel's recently appointed chief executive, explained why the board, of which he is a member, decided that the time was right to create a stock dividend. The letter described Siebel's current business plans, which are focused on reviving its growth in the market for software designed to help with customer relationship management, or CRM. It's a market that Siebel helped create, but one in which the company has seen rivals such as SAP and Salesforce.com take away its leadership role.

"This dividend program reflects our board of directors' confidence in Siebel Systems' long-term record of positive cash flow generation, strong future growth opportunities and substantial commitment and ability to return capital to shareholders over time," Shaheen said in a statement. "We believe it is the best way to increase long-term shareholder value, while preserving the financial strength and flexibility we need to take full advantage of growth opportunities."
Shaheen's appointment in April created some controversy. He was tapped to replace former CEO Michael Lawrie, who had led the company for less than a year. Some stock analysts who cover Siebel have previously pointed out that despite being on Siebel's board for roughly a decade, Shaheen has never bought a good deal of the software maker's stock.

In late May, Siebel announced an employee retention program aimed at keeping workers from jumping ship amid rumors of a potential buyout.

In his letter, Shaeheen said that Siebel will in fact be on the lookout for companies to buy, and indicated that the company will try to keep enough money on hand to make such acquisitions.

Shaheen also announced in the letter that Siebel will look to add two independent members to its board in the coming year, thereby raising its number of directors from eight to 10.

Debian drops ball on security updates

A configuration mistake in the new Debian Linux distribution has forced a fix less than 24 hours after the software was released
New installations (of Debian 3.1 from CD and DVD) will not get security updates by default," Debian developer Colin Watson wrote in an e-mail warning. Installations from floppy disks or network servers were not affected.

Watson apologized and asked vendors to delay burning CDs or DVDs of Debian 3.1, adding an update would be available shortly. However, Steve Langasek--another member of the release team--said on his blog it would probably be a day or two before the updated CDs and DVDs were available everywhere.

"Whoops," Langasek wrote. "Don't go pressing those 10,000 copies of (3.1) just yet."

The good news for those who have already installed the operating system is that fixing the problem is a simple matter of replacing an entry in a configuration file.
Version 3.1 has been long anticipated by the Debian community, as it has been three years since the last major release of the software. This cycle is significantly slower than that followed by competing Linux vendors like Red Hat.

Debian is not the only high-profile software project to be forced to fix a security flaw shortly after the time of release.

Netscape fixed two critical flaws in the new version of its browser in a similarly short time frame after it was released late last month. Ironically, Netscape marketed the release as being able to provide users with additional security features not found elsewhere

AOL launches free Web mail service

America Online introduced free Web-based e-mail service on Monday as part of the latest upgrade of AOL Instant Messenger (AIM).
By offering an alternative to its fee-based e-mail service, AOL will compete with popular free Web mail services such as those offered by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, AOL also expanded its existing fee-based service to include unlimited storage, making it the first Web mail provider to do so.

In addition to such features as spam filters, anti-virus protection, and the ability to drag and drop messages into folders, the new AOL e-mail service offers 2G bytes of memory. This places it on a level similar to Google's Gmail, which sports 2.3G bytes of storage. Yahoo currently offers 1G byte of free storage and Microsoft's Hotmail offers 250M bytes.

Though many services are well established in the free Web mail arena, the ongoing popularity of AIM will undoubtedly help promote AOL's new service. The free Web mail service is tightly integrated with AIM 5.9 -- the user's e-mail address will be his or her AIM moniker followed by "@aim.com", and the user will be able to access the mail service from his or her AIM account. Furthermore, an icon will notify the user whether or not an e-mail sender or other message recipients are currently logged onto AIM.

Other features of the e-mail service include the option to delete sent messages as long as they have not yet been read and were sent to an AOL or AIM address. Users of the service also will be able to spell-check e-mail and write messages in rich text HTML formatting, which allows for different colors, fonts, and sizes.

Dial-up users will be able to access multiple screen names from multiple locations on the same account, a privilege previously reserved for high speed users only.

Sprint to offer enhanced Yahoo e-mail for a fee

Sprint has teamed up with Yahoo to offer an enhanced e-mail service for mobile devices--for a fee.
The companies said the premium service, which costs $2.99 a month, is faster and easier to access and sports a PC-like interface. An optional instant-messaging feature is available at standard text-messaging rates.
The new service builds on the existing partnership between Yahoo and Sprint, under which PCS Vision customers can send and receive e-mails, files and photos from their mobile phones.
Although Yahoo Mail for Mobile is already a free service, the two companies are hoping to entice customers with the improved features.
"Sprint recognizes the increasing desire of customers to have a more robust messaging experience on their handset," John Styers, director of data communications services at Sprint, said in a statement.
The service initially is available only to customers with Sprint PCS Multimedia MM A700 phones by Samsung, the MM 7400 and 5600 versions by Sanyo and Sprint PCS Vision Smart Device Treo 600 and 650 from PalmOne.
Meanwhile, Yahoo and Google have been battling it out on the cell phone front, as each seeks to grab a larger share of that market. Both now offer search services to cell phone carriers.