Sept. 5 (Bloomberg) -- Maags MacLoch wanted to prepare for the coming transition to digital television. Using a $40 federal subsidy, the Web site designer bought a converter box and hooked it up at her home in the Ozark Mountains. ``It just wouldn't work,'' says MacLoch, 55, who lives in rural northwest Arkansas. The paperback-size RCA box wasn't able to find a digital signal strong enough...

No doubt, Google’s forthcoming open source browser — known as Chrome — is going to challenge other open source browsers, most notably Firefox. It could be a devastating blow to Firefox, which has amassed and taken roughly 18 percent of browser market share away from Internet Explorer in a short time. Or is this a prelude to Google acquiring Mozilla? Google, after all, recently extended funding to...

Comment In March, Microsoft announced that their upcoming Internet Explorer 8 would: "use its most standards compliant mode, IE8 Standards, as the default."

Note the last word: default. Microsoft argued that, in light of their newly published interoperability principles, it was the right thing to do. This declaration heralded an about-face and was widely praised by the web standards community;...

The IEEE has completed 802.11r, a standard that lets Wi-Fi devices roam quickly between access points, improving the performance of VoIP on enterprise LANs. The IEEE 802.11 standards were originally defined with single access points in mind, but in offices multiple access points are needed. Devices can move from one access point to another, but it takes around 100ms to re-associate, and ...

Want to know when someone is preparing to take away your First Amendment rights? It's when they claim that they have a proposal that involves "balancing" those rights with other events (sent to us by Eric Goldman). In this case, the proposal comes from a professor from Brigham Young University, Cheryl B. Preston, who's proposing the idea for an Internet Community Ports Act (ICPA), which would...

A second plaintiff has joined the lawsuit against Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) regarding problems with its iPhone 3G, giving the company until Sept. 10 to respond to charges that it sold a defective device under false marketing promises. Wilton Lee Triggs II is now the second complainant on the lawsuit initially filed Aug. 19 by Jessica Alena Smith, regarding the purchase of 3G iPhones from a...

The DSL-2540B includes a built-in QoS engine that helps prioritize Internet traffic to enable smooth Internet phone calls (VoIP) and lag-free online gaming. In addition, this device includes Dual Active Firewalls (SPI and NAT) to help protect your network from potential attacks from across the...

The WBR-2310 features robust security to protect the wireless network from intruders, complying with the latest wireless networking security protocols, including WEP encryption and Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) support for both 802.1x and WPA-PSK. The WBR-2310 is also capable of supporting the government-grade AES encryption and upcoming 802.11i...

The Router has a 802.11b wireless access point, up to 128-bit encryption, as well as a 3-port built-in network switch to allow your wired computers to share printers and data. The switch features automatic detection so it will adjust to the speed of connected devices. The switch will transfer data between computers and the Internet simultaneously without interrupting or consuming...

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The Dual-Band Wireless-N Gigabit Router is really four devices in one box. First, there's the dual-band Wireless Access Point, which lets you connect to the network without wires. There's also a built-in 4-port full-duplex 10/100/1000 Switch to connect your wired-Ethernet devices together at up to gigabit speeds. The Router function ties it all together and lets your whole network share a...

The Dual-Band Wireless A+G Access Point actually contains two separate wireless connectivity radio transceivers, which support all three popular wireless networking specifications. The first transceiver uses the 2.4GHz radio band, supporting both the widely-used and inexpensive Wireless-B (802.11b) standard at 11Mbps, and the new, almost five times faster, Wireless-G (802.11g) at 54Mbps. The...

Windows Vista introduces a number of new features to the TCP/IP stack, including CTCP, and TCP Window Auto-Tuning. This new implementation works much better by default than previous Windows versions with broadband internet connections, and is able to adjust the RWIN value on the fly, depending on the BDP (bandwidth-delay product). This, however, introduces some problems with older routers and restricts the user from tweaking some of the TCP/IP parameters. Still, there is always some room for...

This is a reference of IP networking parameters that are configurable as described in our linux tweaking article -here-.   /proc/sys/net/ipv4/* Variables: ip_forward - BOOLEAN 0 - disabled (default) not 0 - enabled  Forward Packets between interfaces.  This variable is special, its change resets all configuration parameters to their default state (RFC1122 for hosts, RFC1812 for routers) ip_default_ttl - INTEGER default 64 ip_no_pmtu_disc -...

Windows 2003 SP1 and SP2/R2 (as well as Vista/2008) introduce some interesting new NDIS 6.0 hardware features to improve network performance. The parameters discussed below intended as an addition to our recommended XP/2003 network settings. Most of those parameters are new, introduced with the "Scalable Networking Pack".   TCP Chimney Offload TCP Chimney Offload is an extesion of NDIS 5 offloading, and makes it possible for network cards to replace the Windows TCP stack with...

I've often found it useful to get just the wireless functionality out of a WiFi router and reuse it as an access point. Wireless routers seem more common, and are often priced even lower than wireless access points. Adding an access point to a wired network already in place, or to one where the main NAT router is provided by the ISP is usually the easiest solution. However, introducing a second NAT router on the network is not a good idea, especially without some tweaking to set it up...

Introduction The Travel Mate 292XC is a part of the 290 Series laptops from Acer. There is a large range of models within the 290 series with different specifications, some Centrino based, and others just Pentium M. This particular model being reviewed, the LX-T3505.455, is a Celeron M 330 processor version and it is a very well priced for its specifications. This model was purchased for about $599.99 CAD and has the following specs: Processor: Intel Celeron M 330 Processor...

Introduction D-Link was founded in 1986, and since then has catered to both consumer and SOHO users. D-Link is already a well known name in the home networking market, however in the past D-Link products have been considered inferior to those of their competitors such as Linksys (Cisco) and Netgear (Bay Networks). Recently this stigma has begun to disappear with D-Link taking a large portion of the home and SOHO markets. The D-Link DI-524 is one of the company's new series of Wireless-G routers,...

Introduction Compex is an established, yet forward-thinking company in the networking, wireless and telecommunications industry. The company was founded in 1987 and focuses on designing, development and manufacturing a complete line of networking products for the home, SOHO, broadband, and WLAN market needs. The NetPassage 26G is a notable addition to the wireless wave of broadband routers that is sweeping the current home/SOHO market. It comes with a...

Netgear is well known in the networking market.  Originally a consumer-oriented subsidiary of Bay Networks, they have since been spun off to become their own company.  Some of the first consumer routers came out of Netgear, and they have been a major player in the home networking scene.  Their latest line of products sports a new sleek look, a major change of the square purple boxes for which they were known.  Personally, I was a fan of the old box, but then again, not everybody wants a...