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Comcast is offering new, higher internet access speeds to its customers in some of Comcast’s biggest markets. This is the first step in Comcast’s plan to offer the higher speeds to all of its customers over the next two years. The new Internet connection speeds have been designed to access large amounts of information more quickly, facilitating access to videos, online games, and large software programs. The new Internet connection speeds will also make Comcast’s Internet access more competitive with Internet access offered by phone companies. Consumers will be able to choose between two new connection speeds through Comcast, and businesses will be offered one new speed, Reuters reported.

Comcast will offer an “Ultra” service package with 22 megabits per second downstream speed and 5 Mbps upstream speed for $62.95 per month, and an “Extreme 50″ package with 50 Mbps downstream speed and 10 Mbps upstream speed for $139.95 per month. Currently, Comcast Internet connection speeds range from 6 to 8 Mbps, Reuters reported. The new Internet connection speeds are based on a technology known as “Docsis 3.0,” and Comcast will make them available in the Boston metropolitan area, southern New Hampshire, and parts of New Jersey and Philidelphia. Comcast has already offered one of the new speeds in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minn., for several months as a test run.

Source: CRN

Konami and Sony’s limited edition  Metal Gear Solid 4 PS3 may have been enough to satisfy a few fans of the game willing to pay a premium for their console of choice but, for sheer excess, it has nothing on this custom-made system built by the folks at Morpheon Mods, which is now up for auction on eBay. Among the many details adorning this shiny creation is a laser-cut, stainless steel MGS4 marquee, a laser-etched image of Solid Snake, a carbon fiber Fox Hound logo on the rear, and 14 white micro LEDs to light everything up just right.

They even got Hideo Kojima himself to autograph the console and, perhaps best of all, they wrapped everything around a fully backwards compatible 60GB PS3. Just don’t expect any of that to come cheap, as bidding is already topping the $1,500 mark with six days left, though you do also get pretty impressive collection of Metal Gear swag with it, and 15% of the proceeds will go to help the Child’s Play charity.

Source:  Engadget

Christopher Laddise of San Francisco on Tuesday became the very first private owner of a T-Mobile G1, unwrapping the first smartphone running Google’s open-source Android software platform to wild applause at a special pre-launch event in the City by the Bay.T-Mobile, headquartered in Bellevue, Wash., will officially launch the G1 at its retail stores in 95 cities across the United States Wednesday, many of which will open early at 8 a.m. for the release of the $179 handset, and as many as 1.5 million existing T-Mobile customers have reportedly pre-ordered the devices. But for one night only, a couple hundred customers who lined up outside the telecom provider’s store at Market and 3rd streets in downtown San Francisco had the 3G-enabled smartphone all to themselves.

The T-Mobile G1 is available with a two-year voice and data agreement. Support for Web-based services from Mountain View, Calif.-based Google includes popular apps like Gmail and Google Maps, and the G1’s full HTML Web browser is already winning rave reviews. In addition to T-Mobile’s 3G network, the G1 has built-in support for the telecom’s Edge network, as well as WiFi and GPS. The new smartphone, 4.6 inches by 0.6 inches and weighing 5.6 ounces, has a 3.2-inch HVGA touchscreen but also sports a QWERTY keyboard, unlike the iPhone. It featurs a 3.2 megapixel camera and a microSD card slot.

Source: CRN

An 18-year-old New Jersey man will plead guilty to the January online attacks that took down the Church of Scientology’s Web site, federal prosecutors said Friday. Dmitriy Guzner of Verona, New Jersey, was part of an underground hacking group called Anonymous that has made the church a target of several attacks. He was charged Friday but has agreed to plead guilty sometime in the next few weeks, the U.S. Department of Justice said in a statement. He faces 10 years in prison on computer hacking charges.

The attacks began Jan. 19 and managed to knock the Scientology.org Web site offline by hitting it with several bursts of unwanted Internet traffic. The attack, known as a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack, flooded the site with as much as 220M bps of traffic, according to computer security firm Arbor Networks. That’s considered to be a decent-sized DDOS attack and was enough to disable the Web site temporarily. Anonymous quickly followed its attacks with a series of YouTube videos, claiming its actions were a response to what it said were efforts by the Church to suppress a video of movie star Tom Cruise professing his admiration for the religion.

Source: PC World

Less than a week after the release of Google’s T-Mobile G1 smart phone, security experts detected a serious security flaw in its Android operating system that leaves it wide open for hackers to launch drive-by attacks on users’ devices.The security vulnerability, detected by researchers at Baltimore, Maryland-based Independent Security Evaluators, follows last week’s release of Google’s T-Mobile G1 phone Oct. 22, which is powered by the Android operating system. Researchers at ISE posted an advisory warning users of the potential security threat that would allow their mobile devices to be compromised or exposed if they visited a malicious Web page.

“These phones will currently ship with the vulnerability present and may pose a security risk to their users until and update becomes available,” said Miller in his posting. According to the advisory, Google Android relies on more than 80 different open source packages. And the security error stems from a buffer overflow vulnerability in some of the older, more vulnerable versions of the open source software. Subsequently, an unsuspecting user could be successfully exploited simply by accessing an infected Web page using with a vulnerable operating system, experts say. Once a user in infected, attackers could then obtain access to any personal information accessible from the victim’s browser — including cookies, information entered into Web application and saved passwords — in order to steal a bank account numbers, Social Security information and other sensitive data.

Source: CRN

The U.S. intelligence community is concerned that terrorists might use micro-blogging tool Twitter to coordinate attacks, according to a purported draft Army intelligence report posted on the Web. The report–present by the 304th Military Intelligence Battalion and posted to the Federation of American Scientists Web site–examines the possible ways terrorists could use mobile and Web technologies such as the Global Positioning System, digital maps, and Twitter mashups to plan and execute terrorist attacks. The report (PDF), which appears to have been first presented earlier this month, was reported Friday by Wired magazine’s Noah Shachtman.

A chapter titled “Potential for Terrorist Use of Twitter,” presents general, introductory information on Twitter and how it works, and describes how the service was used to report details of a recent earthquake in Los Angeles and by activists at the Republican National Convention. “Twitter has also become a social activism tool for socialists, human rights groups, communists, vegetarians, anarchists, religious communities, atheists, political enthusiasts, hacktivists and others to communicate with each other and to send messages to broader audiences,” the report said. The report describes hacktivists as politically motivated hackers. However, the overview notes that the research used to generate the report was gathered from open source intelligence and not compared with information in classified venues.

Source: Cnet, ABC

On Sunday, the Dell Inspiron Mini 12, a larger version of the Mini 9, makes its debut—in Japan. Dell had reached an exclusive agreement with VIC Camera, Kojima, and SofMap—all Japanese retailers—to make the early announcement overseas. According to Dell, the Inspiron 12 will ship in the United States by mid-November. The Mini 12 is officially the first netbook to house a 12-inch widescreen; the largest so far have been 10-inch models such as the Lenovo IdeaPad S10 and the MSI Wind. The screen offers 1,280-by-800 resolution, higher than the typical 1,280-by-600 netbooks. Its shape is like a wedge, measuring 9.0-by-11.8-by-0.92 inches, becoming thicker towards the back. The weight starts at 2.7 pounds, with a 3-cell battery. A 6-cell battery will be available later on and will likely bring the weight over 3 pounds.

Like the S10 and the Wind, the Mini 12’s feature set includes three USB ports, a multicard reader, Ethernet, VGA-Out, and a 1.3-megapixel camera. Hard drives aren’t the meager solid state ones offered on the Mini 9; you have a choice of 40GB, 60GB, and 80GB spinning drives. Although it doesn’t have the antenna infrastructure to support WWAN, an empty slot is available for it, like on the Mini 9. In the meantime, the Mini 12 has both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth built in. Like the Mini 9, the new Mini uses Intel’s Atom platform: The 1.33-GHz Z520 and the 1.6-GHz Z530 Atom processor are both available come November. The Mini 12 is one of the few systems to run Windows Vista Basic, which will be the only choice for operating systems at this time. The Vista system starts at $550.

Source: Computer World

One day after Microsoft issued a rare emergency Windows security patch, the bad guys have a few new ways to take advantage of the bug. By Friday, security researchers had identified a new worm, called Gimmiv, which exploited the vulnerability, and a hacker had posted an early sample of code that could be used to exploit the flaw on the Web. Microsoft issued the patch more than two weeks ahead of its next security updates because the bug could be used to create an Internet worm attack and Microsoft had already seen a small number of attacks that exploited the flaw. This vulnerability lies in the Windows Server service used to connect with other devices on networks.

Although the firewall software that ships with Windows will block the worm from spreading, security experts are worried that the flaw could be used to spread infections between machines on a local area network, which are not typically protected by firewalls. And that’s exactly what the Gimmiv worm is designed to do, according to Ben Greenbaum, a senior research manager with Symantec. The worm then loads software that steals passwords, security experts say. Both Symantec and McAfee said Friday that they had seen only a very small number of attacks based on this exploit, but Symantec says that, starting Thursday evening, they found a 25 percent jump in network scans looking for potentially vulnerable machines. That could be a sign that more attacks are coming.

Source: NY Times