Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

Remember the rumor back in February that Google was buying Plaxo for $200 million? Well, for the most part, it turned out to be a trumor.  However, instead of Google making the purchase, it turns out that Comcast is doing the buying. The cable company plans to utilize Plaxo to deliver upcoming social-networking features currently in the works for their TV, Internet, and phone service. Plaxo will be used to bridge all three Comcast services together, linking devices such as TVs, DVRs, and wireless devices. The terms of the deal have not yet been disclosed, but the two companies have already been working together in developing SmartZone, an online portal available to millions of Comcast broadband and phone customers that provides easy access to several communications tools (e.g., email and voicemail)—all in one place.

Plaxo was founded in 2001 with an original premise of keeping users’ address books updated by automatically sharing data among friends. With the emergence of social networking sites, the start up company now offers capabilities to keep in touch with family and friends by sharing photos, videos, and messages. According to the Plaxo blog:

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Plug your PC into a wall electrical outlet, and that’s all your need to surf the web at high speeds. Tell the cable and DSL service providers where they can stuff their plugs, while you ride the wave of yet another next-generation technology at cheaper prices.

Well...not yet.

It’s been a bad couple of weeks for the concept of broadband over power line (BPL), which the Federal Communications Commission has been touting since 2003 as possible pricing competition for cable and DSL providers. It’s only a pilot program in a handful of cities, but the FCC commissioned studies on the technology and wanted an accelerated rollout of the program. Now you can scratch one of those cities off the list, while the FCC studies themselves are being attacked by amateur radio operators.

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London based company En-Twyn have shown at CeBIT a great new networking device to make sure problems like poor Wi-Fi signal and wire clutter are kept to a minimum.

The idea is simple. You share the broadband connection of one room, and users can pick it up from other rooms. The socket fits on to any regular front, and the 4 LEDs indicate power and internet activity. It allows up to 64 users to take up the circuit, but in my opinion, if you’ve got a house that big, Ethernet is the least of your worries.

The En-Compass is at the stage where it was shown during at CeBIT, but I really hope it will catch on and become available worldwide.

Via [Digital Lifestyles]

Celrun TV may not match Apple’s library and service, but this media streamer device looks awesome and has some impressive features under the bonnet. The 320GB hard drive should be enough to hold a vast collection of movies and programs. It has Ethernet, Wi-Fi, USB, built-in Digital tuner as well as HDMI, component and optical audio for the connoisseurs of audiovisual entertainment.

It is compatible with almost every video file under the sun, such as AVI, MPEG1/2/4, DivX, ASF, XviD, OFF, FLAC, WAV, H.264, WMV just to name a few. Currently, there hasn’t been a release date or price confirmed yet, but I hope it makes it here soon.

Via: [Engadget]

Why routers had traditionally been so boxy in design is anyone’s guess but Linksys finally says goodbye to its blue-face square design for its new range of wireless routers. The ugly looking antennas are also history. The new WRT160N and WRT310N not only look cool in black with its new sleek design, it also use internal antennas instead of external ones. I wish Linksys had already introduced this new design when I bought my WRT54G many months back so that it can sit in perfect harmony alongside my black-themed desktop PC, LCD screen, keyboard, mouse and speakers. At $100 and $130 for WRT160N and WRT310N respectively, I would have happily parted with my hard earned cash for either one.

Via [CNET]

PLC or Powerline Communications is what Sharp believes is the easiest way to network your home.  This comes in comparison to what we saw from NETGEAR this morning, a wireless over the air network.  Sharps PLC relies on the electric wires already in your house to transmit data. 

It works like this, you plug in the TV to the adapter, then the adapter into the wall.  This connection offers fast data transfer at speeds of up to 85 Mbps.Sharp uses government-adopted AES 128 bit encryption for security.

“As the home becomes more connected, there is a pressing need for simplified and secure ways to build a reliable network,” said Bob Scaglione, senior vice president and group manager, Product and Marketing Group, Sharp.  “Using the most pervasive home wiring medium – power outlets – Sharp’s PLC adapters provide consumers with the best and safest solution for high-quality content distribution.”

The units are sold as a one port solution, a four port adapters and a bundle kit that includes the previous two for convenience.  Pricing is $149 for the single, $179 for the 4 port adapters and $279 for the bundle.

Company site [Sharp USA]

NETGEAR led off it’s new product introductions this morning with the RangeMax Dual Band Router, and with good reason.  Much of what the company is focusing on is their proprietary antenna arrangement and their manufacture from metamaterials, giving their products stronger signal across the network.

The RangeMax supports 802.11g devices as well as clients based on 2.4 and 5 GHz Wireless-N along with 802.11n draft 2.0 single and dual band.  The 8 antennas and support for 5 GHz utilize 23 non-overlapping channels allowing the unit to avoid interference from household appliances.  The unit also features QoS to prioritize network traffic.

$129.99 (WNDR3300).

Another version featuring the same 8 internal antennas is the RangeMax Wireless N Gigabit Router.  This five port unit costs $159.

The NETGEAR RangeMax Wireless-N Gigabit Router (WNR3500) incorporates an ultra-fast five-port 10/100/1000 Mbps switch (one Gigabit Ethernet WAN and four Gigabit Ethernet LAN ports), to deliver the fastest possible wireless-to-wired network performance, and an array of eight internal Antennas to reduce the effects of RF interference and maximize wireless performance and range. 

Company site [NETGEAR]

We are about to enter the hall where NETGEAR will be giving its CES 2008 Press Conference.  There is a pretty big crowd already here expecting something new from NETGEAR to drop.

Hit CTRL R or F5 key to refresh as we live blog this event..

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Check out the gallery: CES 2008 Press Conference: NETGEAR

How can malware be made unprofitable to hackers? It would seem that a loss of green (and we don’t mean environmentally sound), is the only way to cut into the spread of malware. Last week, Stevens University hosted a Security and Privacy Day, organized in conjunction with Columbia University and IBM Research to address this specific issue.  Unfortunately, it appears that it is easier for malware authors to mount an attack than it is to defend against one. Sven Dietrich of Stevens discussed the prospects for detecting the activity of bot-nets and tracing them back to their source. Early versions of networked malware followed a design similar to client-server, with standard point-to-point TCP connections back to a central controller. These were relatively simple to defend against.  But things have advanced, and since then, communications have moved off TCP entirely and into acknowledgment-free protocols such as UDP, and the content is often encrypted. Bot-nets now communicate on a peer-to-peer basis, either using common methods or with custom code.  According to Professor Dietrich:

“These developments have made traditional anti-malware tactics largely ineffective. It’s no longer realistic to expect to be able to identify controllers of bot-nets so that new instructions can be blocked or traced back to a source. The use of encryption to deliver payloads and instructions also makes it much harder to determine what a given bot-net is up to.”

Although several speakers had hope for a much safer future, none had any suggestions on how to ensure security from the computer science perspective. They stressed, instead, that the cultural aspects of the current malware scene were the key to future security. In the past, hackers were willing to talk with computer scientists, while now news about malware comes in hushed whispers from organized crime networks based largely overseas.  Overall, the talks were pretty depressing, given the realization that the operating systems and software we rely on will probably never be truly secure.

Read [arstechnica]

Ever since I purchased my MacBook, I’ve been video chatting with friends on both the Mac or the PC, through Skype. While I don’t actually have any friends that use Linux as their primary (or even secondary, for that matter) OS, it has always seemed unfair that our open-source brethren didn’t have this luxury.

Well, Linux users, rejoice! The Skype team has today launched the 2.0 Beta of their product, for the Linux platform.

So if you’re reading this on your Ubuntu box, hit the link below and install the number one internet audio/video client (in my eyes). Or, you’ll probably hit up your Terminal and “sudo” your way to Video conferencing galore.

Download [Skype]