Welcome to Gahtan’s Technology and Internet Law Blog

I previously wrote about Netgear’s forthcoming Skype-compatible wi-fi phone. Imagine being able to use Skype without a computer.

Well, more recently I did a search for “skype” on Netgear’s site but did not get any results. However, using Google, I found some information at a subdomain. Overall, looks like it will be a hot product once it comes out. Netgear claims the phone will come with 802.11g support but will only be capable of WEP encryption. I’m not sure why anyone would make a new phone these days and leave out WPA support. Further details about a release date and pricing is expected to be available before the end of Q1 2006.

I guess the Washington Post needs a refresher 101 course in electronic evidence. Seems they ran a story about a hacker whose identity there were trying to keep anonymous. So the newspaper provided only a few details about the hacker - his age, the fact that he smoked and a general description of three nearby businesses. A “modified” photo was also provided. However, it appears that the modified photo contained meta data that revealed the name of the photographer and the city where the photograph was taken (a small city of about 2.6 square miles and a population of only about 2,800 people). With those details, it would not be hard to identify the subject of the article.

From cNET news

A US court has issued a preliminary injunction against Google in respect of its creation and display of thumbnails in its image search service. The court found that such action likely breaches the copyright in the original full-sized images and would not likely fall within any fair use exception. The plaintiff is a company called Perfect 10 - which produces a magazine and website featuring nude models (OK, its not sex but including the word in the title increases interest in the post). Apparently, by accessing the Google service using a mobile phone, users can save a copy of the thumbnail image to their phone, in competition to a commercial subscription service offered by Perfect 10.

Read more…

New Unlicensed Mobile Access (or UMA) cell phones from manufacturers such as Motorola, Nokia and Sony Ericsson are expected to deliver connectivity to both the traditional cell phone infrastructure (through GSM) and to VOIP services through Wi-Fi. However, its yet to be seen whether such functionality will provide competition and lower rates for consumers or whether these devices will be sucked up through exclusive deals by the dominant cell phone companies in the North American market, with the VOIP functionality tied to their networks. In other words, they’ll automatically switch to the cell phone operator’s VOIP service when used inside the home or in the office where cellular connectivity may be weak but where a strong wi-fi signal may be available, but won’t necessarily offer lower rates for such usage. To get the best of both worlds, I suspect early adopters will still need to carry two phones.

Free tools to create web pages and 100 MB of free space for hosting (at yourgmailname.googlepages.com). That’s what Google is offering with its Google Page Creator. Still in beta but it looks slick and provides yet another means for Google to capture new user-generated content (along with Blogger and Google Base).

Walt Disney, Time Warner and three other major film makers are suing Samsung Electronics over a DVD player (DVD-HD841) that was discontinued over a year ago. Apparently the DVD’s copy protection mechanism (region encoding and HDCP bypassing) could be circumvented by hackers by entering certain codes using a remote control.

From Spotlighting News

cnet News has an article about a new type of trojan that waits until an infected user logs into their bank account and then activates to transfer money out of the account. Password stealing trojans used to be the big concern (and probably still are an important threat). However, this new bread of trojan can defeat enhanced authentication schemes (such as two-factor authentication) and similar types of security measures implemented by banks, since they don’t need to grab a password or deal with getting access to an offline security token device. They simply wait for the user to do whatever is required to log in, and then they take over the computer and carry out their dirty business. Of course, these trojans have to be programmed with the intelligence for specific banking sites.

Mark Evans is reporting that Videotron will soon be offering a 16 Mbps Internet connection (as of March 8th, according to their press release (PDF)). Upload speed is also an impressive 1 Mbps.