Digg - 250 GB Challenge & 5 Tools To Monitor Your Bandwidth [Giga Om]

[nytimes]
Comcast, one of the country’s largest Internet providers, said this week that it would place limits on customers’ broadband usage.Beginning Oct. 1, Comcast will put a 250 gigabyte-a-month cap on residential users. The limit will not affect most users, at least not in the short-term, but is certain to create tension as some technologies gain traction.

A Comcast spokeswoman, Jennifer Khoury, said 250 gigabytes was about 100 times the typical usage; the average customer uses two to three gigabytes a month. Less than 1 percent of customers exceed the cap, she said.

Many Internet providers reserve the right to cancel the service of the most excessive users. The 250-gigabyte cap is Comcast’s way of specifying a longstanding policy of placing a limit on Internet consumption, and it comes after customer pushed for a definition of excessive use.

Google has agreed to license imagery for their mapping products from a satellite due to launch on September 4th. This new satellite can take detailed imagery for an area the size of New Mexico in one day. What does that mean? Well, you could get high resolution pan-sharpened imagery for the entire country in around 30 days. Impressive.

The level of detail will be approximately 50cm per pixel — that’s just under 20 inches. If you want to see what that looks like, take a look at this. Imagine having a Google Maps/Earth content that is this detailed, 100% complete and updated once a month — that’s powerful stuff. source:zdnet

Microsoft opened up testing of Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 on Wednesday, putting the company on track for releasing by the end of the year what will be only the second major overhaul of Microsoft's Web browser since 2001.

Internet Explorer 8 adds a plethora of security, usability and manageability features over previous versions aimed at keeping Microsoft on top of the browser market share list ahead of surging Mozilla Firefox, and the new beta builds on those new features with several new usability and security capabilities that weren't available in the previous beta.
"If you look back 10 years ago, the Web was a very static place," Microsoft senior product manager James Pratt said in an interview, reiterating Microsoft's new policy of regular releases of new versions of Internet Explorer. "Fast forward and we've seen this amazing change in the Web."

Security has become an important feature of Internet Explorer in the last two versions, as Microsoft had been attacked for gaps in Internet Explorer 6. The new beta includes a number of new security features, including protection against cross-site scripting attacks and a phishing and malware filter called the SmartScreen filter.

Related Post : Windows Internet Explorer 8 Beta : The Blogger review

Malware has managed to get off the planet and onto the International Space Station (ISS), NASA confirmed today. And it's not the first time that a worm or virus has stowed away on a trip into orbit.

The attack code, which space news site SpaceRef.com identified Monday as "W32.Gammima.AG," infected at least one of the laptops used on the station, an international effort headlined by the U.S. and Russia.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration spokesman Kelly Humphries declined to identify the malware, saying only that antivirus software detected a worm on July 25.
The first public report of malware about the ISS was logged on Aug. 11. In NASA's daily status report on the station, the agency said that Sergey Volkov, the ISS commander, was "working on the Russian RSS-2 laptop" and "ran digital photo flash cards from stowage through a virus check with the Norton AntiVirus application."A week later, on Aug. 21, Volkov "checked another Russian laptop, today RSK-1, for software virus by scanning its hard drives and a photo disk."

The next day, Volkov transmitted antivirus scanning results from the laptop to Earth, and U.S. astronaut Greg Chamitoff scanned another computer for possible infection. NASA also said in Friday's report that all laptops on board the ISS were being loaded with antivirus software.

"All A31p laptops onboard are currently being loaded with [the] latest [Norton AntiVirus] software and updated definition files for increased protection," said NASA.
source:Computer world

The U.K.'s Advertising Standards Authority has banned an iPhone ad because the agency said the claim that the handset can access "all parts of the Internet" is misleading due to the lack of Flash and Java support.

The commercial in question shows a person using the touch screen to flick through various Web pages.
"You never know which part of the Internet you'll need," A voiceover in the ad said. "The 'do you need sun cream' part? The 'what's the quickest way to the airport' part? The 'what about an ocean view room' part? Or the 'can you really afford this' part? Which is why all the parts of the Internet are on the iPhone."

Two viewers complained that the ads were misleading because the handset does not have Flash or Java support, which are integral to popular sites like YouTube.

In response, Apple said the ad was meant to highlight the difference between surfing the Web on an iPhone and on a normal mobile phone, which often restricts users to simplified, WAP-versions of Web sites. The phrase "all parts of the Internet" referred to site availability, not every aspect of functionality on these sites, Apple said.
Source: Information Week

A popular application Scrabulous that was built around the concept of Scrabble has been banned by Facebook. The developers, brothers, Rajat and Jayant, have been served a legal notice by toymaker Mattel, that owns the rights to the original word-building game outside the United States.
Hasbro and Mattel launched their own official Scrabble app on Facebook but it has only 70,000 active users,as compared to the 500,00 daily users on Scrabulous (Only 10 percent of the number of Scrabulous users at its peak.)
Mattel approached the Indian courts earlier this year and the case is still pending. As a result India is the only country where Facebook users can still access the application. In light of their legal troubles, the Agarwalla brothers have launched another word-building game 'Wordscraper' which uses circles instead of squares, has a marginally different scoring system and lets users design their own boards.
The Agarwalla brothers renamed their app Wordscrapper and tweaked it so users could design their own boards, in a bid to avoid legal proceedings.
Jayant Agarwalla said: "It surprises us that Mattel chose to direct Facebook to take down Scrabulous without waiting for the decision [of the Indian courts]. Mattel's action speaks volumes about their business practices and respect for the judiciary."

With 10 weeks to go before the election, the amount of news coverage surrounding John McCain and Barack Obama is set to skyrocket (as if it hadn't already). In order to help you parse through all the chatter, Google has set up a special Web site where mobile phone users can find the latest headlines.

Google appears to be throwing everything it has at the upcoming presidential election. It is using multiple avenues and products to provide coverage. Google believes that plenty of people will be interested in accessing news from their mobile phones. So it set up a "one-stop-shop" for mobile phone users to get what they need.

The site is located at m.google.com/elections.

The products that it is tailoring to election coverage are mobile Search, News, Reader, YouTube, and Maps. Read
source:www.informationweek.com

Commissioned by Wired nearly two weeks ago, the study sought the voluntary participation of iPhone 3G users around the world to test their iPhone's network connection at TestMyiPhone.com and submit the honest results of those speed tests to an interactive Zeemap.

After analyzing over 2,600 submissions (and more than a thousand others that were discarded because they were either blank or included an incomplete set of results), Wired concluded that the widely reported iPhone data speed problems "have more to do with carriers' networks than with Apple's handsets."

Overall, the user-submitted results show that 3G networks are performing faster than EDGE around the world -- as would be expected. The best case scenarios reported 3G performance that was seven times that of EDGE, while other scenarios had 3G performing just as slowly as EDGE. In the worse case scenarios, users reported that they were unable to connect to 3G at all. Read
source: www.appleinsider.com