Rogers Releases The Rocket MiFi 2372 3G Hotspot

My “best friends at Rogers” dropped me an e-mail this morning to let me know that the Rocket MiFi 2372 3G Hotspot was now available for sale, which makes them the second Canadian wireless provider to have this device (as Bell carries it as well).

What does this device do you ask?

It’s a small box that takes a 7.2Mbps HSPA-based 3G connection and shares that connection via 802.11g Wi-Fi to up to five other devices. So it’s basically a router for those who need to surf the Internet in High Park or in locations where traditional broadband Internet isn’t available. It can run on battery for up to 4 hours, but it can also be connected via USB for power as well. It does have a couple of extra party tricks in the form of GPS positioning (which only works with Windows, sorry Mac Fanbois) as well as a MicroSDHC slot to give you storage for the purpose of file sharing. Commit to Rogers for three years, and it can be yours for $50. So for those of you who want to play Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 from anywhere, you know what to do.

Google Buzz Might Be Probed By The FTC

I’m going to guess that right about now, Google is thinking that Buzz wasn’t the best idea they came up with. That’s because US lawmakers are asking to have Google investigated by the FTC over the privacy issues that surfaced when Buzz was released:

The representatives — six Democrats and five Republicans from the House Energy and Commerce Committee — noted in their letter that Google’s roll-out of Buzz exposed private information of users to Google’s Gmail service to outsiders. In one case, a 9-year-old girl accidentally shared her contact list in Gmail with a person who has a “sexually charged” username, the lawmakers said in the letter, sent to the FTC Friday and released Monday.

“Due to the high number of individuals whose online privacy is affected by tools like this — either directly or indirectly — we feel that these claims warrant the commission’s review of Google’s public disclosure of personal information of consumers through Google Buzz,” said the letter, organized by Representative John Barrow, a Georgia Democrat.

If you’re wondering how Google responds to this possibility, here’s their answer:

Asked for a response to the letter, a Google spokeswoman said user transparency and control are important to the company. “When we realized that we’d unintentionally made many of our users unhappy, we moved quickly to make significant product improvements to address their concerns,” she said, repeating Google’s past statements on Buzz. “Our door is always open to discuss additional ways to improve our products and services moving forward. “

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that this response won’t stop this probe from happening. I could be wrong, but I doubt it seeing as this is a mid-term election year, and politicians tend to be at their blood thirsty best during election years.

Yahoo Targeted In Hack From China… Here We Go Again…

First it was Google, and now Yahoo seems to be the target of a hack from China. According to Reuters, The Yahoo email accounts of foreign journalists and activists based in China have been hacked:

Several journalists in China and Taiwan found they were unable to access their accounts beginning March 25, among them Kathleen McLaughlin, a freelance journalist in Beijing. Her access was restored on Wednesday, she told Reuters.

The compromised accounts include those of the World Uyghur Congress, an exile group that China accuses of inciting separatism by ethnic Uighurs in the frontier region of Xinjiang.

Charming. Yahoo for it’s part did some half hearted chest thumping:

“Yahoo! condemns all cyber attacks regardless of origin or purpose,” spokeswoman Dana Lengkeek said in an email response to a Reuters query.

“We are committed to protecting user security and privacy and we take appropriate action in the event of any kind of breach.”

Yeah, but are you going to pull out of China the way that Google sort of did or are you going to go further? That’s what we really want to know. Besides, the optics of letting something like this slide would just suck. But they may be thinking of the revenue that they’d lose if they pulled the plug on China.

Apple Kicks Out Snow Leopard Update To Keep Their Fanbois Safe… Although There’s This One Detail That Bothers Me

Those who buy their computers at the temple of Steve Jobs Apple Store are likely installing an update to Snow Leopard that promises 70 security fixes and brings in 50 or so “improvements” according to Apple. Mac OS X 10.6.3 is a massive update that weighed in at over 400MB for me (your mileage may vary depending on what version of Snow Leopard you’re updating from) and so far I’ve had no issues after installing it. Although, there is one thing that bugs me. After reading the release notes associated with this, I noted this “improvement:”

Data Collection: Mac OS X v10.6.3 can collect diagnostic and usage information from your Mac and send it to Apple for analysis automatically. The information is only collected with your explicit consent, and is submitted anonymously to Apple. For more details, see this article.

At least they’re asking for my consent first. I suggest that anyone who updates to 10.6.3 take a look at the article that I’ve linked above to make sure they fully understand what Apple is up to. While it’s not any different than what various versions of Windows have been doing for years, the fanbois might be just a bit caught off guard by this.

What are your thoughts? Please leave a comment and share your wisdom.

Apple Sued Over Multi-touch Patent… As If The iLawyers Don’t Already Have Enough To Do

Bloomberg News is reporting that a company called Elan Microelectronics has decided to sue Apple over a patent that involves Apple’s use of multi-touch in its devices. Here’s what the company had to say about why they were suing Apple:

“Our goal is to protect our technology and to stop sales of those products in the U.S.,” Dennis Liu, spokesman for Hsinchu, Taiwan-based Elan, said by phone today. The complaint was filed yesterday and is in addition to a suit brought against Apple in a California court in April last year, Liu said.

Pretty much anything cool from Apple uses multi-touch including the iPhone, iPod Touch, MacBook, Magic Mouse and iPad. The suit will go in front of the International Trade Commission and we’ll see if anything comes of it in 30 days. If the ITC decides to follow up on this, this will get very interesting in a hurry. Frequent readers will recall that the ITC is the same forum that Apple has ongoing legal action in front of. So I’m sure that Nokia, Kodak and HTC are looking at this with great interest.

So Apple’s iLawyers have something new and fun to do, although I suspect “The Steve” wishes they weren’t so busy.

Microsoft Releases Patch For Internet Explorer Bug…. Download It ASAP!

Frequent readers will recall that I’ve mentioned a rather serious Internet Explorer bug recently that allowed an evil doer to potentially take control of your computer. Today, Microsoft released a patch for that issue that I strongly recommend that you download. The same patch fixes a bunch of other issues according to the security bulletin that was updated today. My advice is to hit Windows update and get this patch as there are apparently exploits floating around that leverage this bug.

Does My Blackberry Bold 9000 Have A Bug?

I’m posting this in hopes that this will help someone else with this issue.

I recently got a brand new Blackberry Bold 9000 and so far it’s far faster than the Blackberry Curve 8310 that it replaced, plus the GPS feature works way better as well. But a few days after I got it the indicator light stopped working. The net result was that the light didn’t blink when I got an e-mail or when my Bluetooth headset was active. The latter wasn’t a big deal, but the former had me checking my Blackberry every 5 minutes to confirm that I hadn’t missed an e-mail. That was kind of annoying. I figured it was a hardware problem originally and decided to test my theory by running the hardware test mode. You can get into that mode by going into options and status and then typing the word “test” (without the quotes). This mode allows you to test the Blackberry to see if it has a hardware problem. The weird thing is that my Blackberry came up good. So I knew that I had some sort of software problem rather than a hardware problem. So I went about going through the Blackberry option to option to figure out what the issue was. The solution was found in the most unlikely place, the clock. The Blackberry Bold 9000 has a clock that becomes live when you plug it into AC power or to USB to charge. There’s an option that puts the clock into “bedside mode” and that disables the indicator light. However, when you exit the clock is stays in that mode which keeps the indicator light off. The fix is to go back into the clock and choose the option to “exit bedside mode.” This to me seems to be like a bug as in my mind, you should exit bedside mode when you exit the clock. Perhaps there’s a logical reason why this “feature” exists in this model of Blackberry. If that’s the case, I’d love to have someone from RIM tell me the logic behind this. Until then, I’ll file this under “bug.”

Agree? Disagree? Please post a comment and share your thoughts.

Every Major Browser Gets Hacked CanSecWest… Oh My!

Here’s a wake up call for the universe. No matter what browser you use, you can be hacked. Proof of this came at CanSecWest this week as every major browser got hacked in their annual hacking contest:

The annual Pwn2Own contest at CanSecWest is underway, and on the first day Web browsers fell to attack. Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3.6.2 on 64-bit Windows 7 and Safari on OS X all were forced to run exploit code.

Charming, but there’s more:

To add insult to injury, an iPhone was cracked and the SMS database lifted from it.

The only good news in this is that the hacks that were used in this contest will be turned over to the various vendors so that they can be fixed. So you can fully expect a ton of updates to these browsers shortly. My advice? Install those updates the second they come out.

One thing I note is that apparently none of these hackers wanted to take on Google Chrome, and I believe no one was able to crack it last year. So perhaps if you’re nervous about whatever browser you’re using, perhaps you should give Google Chrome a look.

GoDaddy Now The Latest To Flee China

Wired is reporting that Internet Registrar GoDaddy.com has decided to stop selling .cn domain names as domain name holders in China would be required to provide photo ID:

GoDaddy’s top lawyer Christine Jones told Congress Wednesday that the new rules were an “attempt to exercise censorship on the subject matter hosted on domain names.”

“We are concerned for the safety of current domain name holders and about the chilling effect it could have for new registrants,” Jones said.

Jones made her statement at a Wednesday convening of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, a bicameral and bi-partisan legislative group.

With Google and reportedly Dell leaving the country, will there be any U.S. Businesses left to do business with China? At this point one has to wonder.

Rogers Unveils New Tethering Policy

Many iPhone users who have phones that are blessed by the most holy one Steve Jobs and Blackberry users use their phones as a means for them to get their notebooks onto the Internet. That’s called Tethering and if you’re a Rogers customer, you’ve been able to do this for the last little while without a problem. Today my “best friends at Rogers” sent me an e-mail to let me know about a new policy that relates to tethering:

We’ve unveiled a tethering policy that reflects how our customers are already using data on their mobile device. Effective immediately (March 24), tethering will continue to be included at no additional charge for Rogers and Fido customers who subscribe to a data plans of 1GB and above, with a few exceptions. This new policy replaces the current tethering promotion, originally set to expire on May 3.

Very cool. Full details can be found here an you can take a look at a Rogers RedBoard entry on the subject as well. Fido customers will be able to get details on this in the next few days at www.fido.ca/tethering.

I’m sure that this announcement will make a lot of people happy. If you are happy about this or not, drop me a comment and share your thoughts.