By John D. Sutter
Oliver Yeh is the kind of guy who cooks up ideas so kooky, so out-of-this-world, that even his fellow MIT students tend to roll their eyes when they hear them.
But that never stops him.
His latest concept — to launch a camera into near-space using a weather balloon, a cell phone, hand warmers and a drink cooler — fell flat when he sent out an e-mail message to dozens of his classmates, asking for help.
Unfazed, Yeh managed to find one friend willing to chip in. And on September …

By Maggie Shiels
Mobile providers have said that US proposals to ensure all traffic on the internet is treated equally should not be applied to wireless traffic.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) wants rules to prevent providers blocking or slowing down bandwidth-heavy usage such as streaming video.
Providers claim a two-tiered system is essential for the future vitality of the net.
Mobile operators said any regulation would damage innovation.
FCC chairman Julius Genachowski said doing nothing was not an option.
In his first major speech since his appointment earlier in the summer, he told an …

When is a cyber-attack a real one?
AMERICA and other countries still have to fine-tune their cyber-defences to distinguish mere nuisances from real menaces. That, rather than any revelations about fiendish North Korean cyber-warfare, seems to be the upshot of the latest reported cyber-attack on South Korean and American websites.
Initially, it was reported that this was the first series of attacks to hit government websites in several countries simultaneously. Officials in both Seoul and Washington, DC, said they were suffering “distributed denial of service” overload (known as DDOS in geekspeak). In …

How a Taiwanese firm became one of the world’s fastest-growing chipmakers
MOST technology firms fall into one of two brackets: those that sell individual components, such as Intel, a chip giant, and those that offer finished products, such as Apple of iPhone fame. MediaTek sits somewhere in between: it sells most of the innards of mobile phones in a single package, but not the phones themselves—a strategy that has made it one of the world’s fastest-growing chipmakers. On August 4th it said its second-quarter profits were 80% higher than a year …

Data collection: Mobile phones provide new ways to gather information, both manually and automatically, over wide areas
IF YOUR mobile phone could talk, it could reveal a great deal. Obviously it would know many of your innermost secrets, being privy to your calls and text messages, and possibly your e-mail and diary, too. It also knows where you have been, how you get to work, where you like to go for lunch, what time you got home, and where you like to go at the weekend. Now imagine being able to …

This Islamic country, located in the mountainous region neighboring to the Central Asia and the Middle East, is the sixth most populous country in the world and has the second largest Muslim population in the world after Indonesia. That is Pakistan. The country is listed among the “Next Eleven” economies that means it’s among eleven countries, such as Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, The Philippines, South Korea, Turkey, and Vietnam, identified by Goldman Sachs investment bank as having a high potential of becoming the world’s largest economies in …

By Dominic Casciani
BBC News home affairs reporter
Communications firms are being asked to record all internet contacts between people as part of a modernisation in UK police surveillance tactics.
The home secretary scrapped plans for a database but wants details to be held and organised for security services.
The new system would track all e-mails, phone calls and internet use, including visits to social network sites.
The Tories said the Home Office had “buckled under Conservative pressure” in deciding against a giant database.
Announcing a consultation on a new strategy for communications …

A behind-the-scenes conflict appears to be under way—but not the sort you might think
Illustration by Claudio Munoz
IT IS the new frontier for military and intelligence activity: cyberspace. For years military experts and computer scientists have speculated about the possibility of a nation’s infrastructure being attacked using computers, rather than bombs. There have been dark warnings of the danger of a “digital Pearl Harbour”—an unexpected strike in which digital attackers shut down America’s electrical grid or air-traffic control systems, or hack into nuclear-power stations and cause them to overheat. In recent …

Internet television moves from the computer to the living room
IN THE land of free enterprise and the home of discount shopping, there can sometimes be an appalling lack of competition. High-speed access to the internet is one. Cable television is another. The reason is that in America cable-television companies, which provide a lot of the high-speed access, do not want their customers to cancel their contracts and watch television over the internet instead. Yet a growing number of people are poised to do just that.
At your correspondent’s home-from-home in Japan, …

Oracle’s takeover of Sun Microsystems is a surprise, but fits an industry trend
Illustration by David Simonds
“I AM very surprised. I have to think about it.” That was the initial reaction of Steve Ballmer, the boss of Microsoft, the world’s largest software firm. It was also the response of many in the computer industry to the news on April 20th that Oracle, another software giant, was paying $7.4 billion to buy Sun Microsystems, an embattled computer-maker and Oracle’s neighbour in Silicon Valley.
It was no secret that Sun, which never really recovered …