Wi-Fi reaches out to gadgets (Reuters)

Suited executives, grungy teens and even some savvy grannies are already using Wi-Fi to wirelessly link their laptops to the Internet. It may not be long before the short-range high-speed technology is just as popular for those looking to connect music players, phones, cameras, game consoles and more.

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Google Confirms Bid for Wireless Spectrum (PC Magazine)

Google announced today that the company will be trying to buy a national block of wireless spectrum from the U.S. government, opening up the possibility that Google will become some sort of cell-phone provider.

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Super Fast and Super Green (Baseline)

New ranking of supercomputers compares their performance against their energy consumption.

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3G iPhone on the Way? (Digital Trends)

AT&T's Chief Executive Officer says a 3G iPhone is coming - but when, and for how much, remain unknown.

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Windows XP outshines Vista in benchmarking test (CNET News.com)

New tests have revealed that Windows XP with the beta Service Pack 3 has twice the performance of Vista, even with its long-awaited Service Pack 1.

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Microsoft Exchange 2007 SP1 Hits the Street (eWeek)

The update features support for Windows Server 2008 and better integration with Office Communications Server 2007.

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EFF study confirms Comcast's BitTorrent interference (Ars Technica)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has released a study that contains evidence of Comcast's P2P blocking activities. The EFF also provides instructions that explain how users can test to see if their own ISP is interfering with traffic.

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Microsoft adds iPhone, iPod sync to Office 2008 (Computerworld)

Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac will let users port PowerPoint presentations to iPhones and video-equipped iPods, Microsoft Corp. said yesterday as it unveiled the latest details of the suite scheduled to ship in January.

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Google My Location to ease mobile map use (Reuters)

Internet search leader Google Inc said on Wednesday it is introducing a novel mapping system that uses cell phone towers to let mobile phone users locate nearby services without typing in addresses.

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Zoho Adopts Offline Mode For Its Web-Based Applications (CIO.com )

Zoho, a web-based suite of productivity applications, announced yesterday that users of its word processor software can edit their documents in an offline mode. The announcement quells one of the primary criticisms mounted against the two-year-old start-up and its primary competitor, Google Apps, by businesses accustomed to traditional installed tools like Microsoft Office.

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Nigerian firm sues Negroponte, OLPC for patent infringement (Engadget)

Just months after a slew of OLPC XOs made their way into Nigeria, a Nigerian-owned company is filing suit against Nicholas Negroponte and the OLPC Association for patent infringement. Lagos Analysis and subsidiary LANCOR filed the lawsuit on November 22nd in Nigeria, claiming that the aforementioned parties willfully and illegally reverse engineered its keyboard driver source codes.

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Google GDrive preps for takeoff, but is late to the launch pad (Ars Technica)

Google's long-rumored online storage project, GDrive, is reportedly close to launch with free and paid options. This is one of the first times Google isn't in the lead, though, meaning that the competition has an opportunity to blow us out of the water before Google can.

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Verizon Wireless "Opens" Its Network (Red Herring)

In what might be seen as a concession to pressure applied by Google and others, No. 2 U.S. wireless carrier Verizon Wireless on Tuesday said it will open its network to independent application developers and device makers by the end of 2008.

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Google hopes to spawn world-wide renewable energy movement (TG Daily)

Google announced a new initiative yesterday called RE<C (Renewable Energy less than Coal), one designed to speed up the development pace on clean, renewable energy sources. They'd like to bring forth a 1 Gigawatt capacity clean, renewable energy generation system, one producing energy which costs less than coal, enough to power a city the size of San Francisco.

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Robot with soft hands chats, serves meal (Reuters)

A pearly white robot that looks a little like E.T. boosted a man out of bed, chatted and helped prepare his breakfast with its deft hands in Tokyo Tuesday, in a further sign robots are becoming more like their human inventors.

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Why the RIAA may be afraid of targeting Harvard students (Ars Technica)

The RIAA has targeted over 4,000 students at 160 colleges and universities with its prelitigation settlement letters. None of them attend Harvard. What gives?

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Overly-broad copyright law has made USA a "nation of infringers" (Ars Technica)

Even without using P2P networks, a Utah law professor calculates that he racks up $4.5 billion in copyright liability in a single year. The time for reform, he says, has arrived.

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Amazon launches wireless book reader Kindle (Reuters)

Amazon.com, the world's largest Web retailer, said on Monday it will begin selling an electronic book reader with wireless access, the latest attempt to build consumer interest in portable reading devices.

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Philly’s Wi-Fi net said to run into snags, delays (Network World)

Philadelphia’s path-breaking citywide Wi-Fi network is running into snags and delays, according to a new Associated Press report.

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Vista Migration Scaring Off IT Pros (eWeek)

Now more than a year out of the business gate, Microsoft's Vista operating system is having trouble making friends in the exact place it needs them the most—the IT department.

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Windows Server 2008 approacheth: versions, pricing revealed (Ars Technica)

With Windows Server 2008 nearing a final release in the coming months, Microsoft has whetted our appetites by announcing details and pricing about each specific edition of the upcoming server OS.

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Top 5 security-menace predictions for 2008 (Network World)

Symantec’s picks include advanced botnets, cybercrime in 'virtual worlds' and cyberattacks on election campaigns.

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IBM Symphony to Challenge Google Apps (eWeek)

Big Blue's office productivity suite could eventually include live collaboration and shared storage online, making it a competitor to Google's Application combo.

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Music College's Conducting Class Goes High Tech (Campus Technology)

Varnished wood. Rosin and bow strings. Well cared for reeds. These are the images that spring to mind when one thinks of classical music--a realm seemingly rooted in tradition and antiquity--but that's not the case at the Berklee College of Music.

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Computerworld's 2007 Jobs Report: Back From the Brink (Computerworld)

After a big tumble in 2002, IT salaries have been climbing steadily. But for IT workers trying to regain their financial footing, a string of 3% increases makes the going tough.

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Video: Space Style 2007, the Zero-G fashion show (TG Daily)

Instead of fashionably pink space suits, the first-ever Space Style 2007 fashion show featured bikini-clad models sitting on exercise balls, zero g wedding dresses and space-inspired jumpsuits. The fashion show was part of a larger effort to promote space tourism, which has become a very real possibility in recent years.

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LTE 4G trials promising, but tech faces stiff challenge from WiMAX (Ars Technica)

A consortium of companies has announced a successful conclusion to tests of 3GPP LTE, a 4G wireless technology that could offer speeds of up to 100Mbps down and 50Mbps up. It's not expected to hit the market until 2010, however, giving competing technologies like WiMAX plenty of time to establish a beachhead.

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Stanford Offers Advanced Security Certification Online (Campus Technology)

Stanford University this fall began to offer its advanced computer security certificate program completely online in an effort to improve access to the program.

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Invention Of the Year: The iPhone (TIME)

Stop. I mean, don't stop reading this, but stop thinking what you're about to think. Or, O.K., I'll think it for you:

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First Look: The Curl Development Environment (Campus Technology)

Curl, which has recently been released in part to the open source community under the Apache 2.0 license, is an object-oriented hybrid markup language with similarities to HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The Cambridge, MA-based company behind the Curl language, Curl Inc., describes it as an alternative to AJAX--one that allows the programmer to define the structure, style, and function of Web applications in one language instead of several.

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Whitaker votes for 'Dewmocracy' (Variety)

Forest Whitaker is doin' the Dew. As his first foray into branded entertainment, the thesp partnered with Pepsi-Cola North America to produce the web-based fantasy game "Dewmocracy," that culminates in consumers creating a flavor of Mountain Dew to appear on store shelves next year.

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Major League Baseball's DRM change strikes out with fans (Ars Technica)

Major League Baseball has apparently switched DRM clearinghouses. As a result, some fans are stuck with DRMed footage that they purchased, but are unable to watch because their licenses can't be verified.

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Photo Gallery: FogScreen features breakthrough projection technology (TechRepublic)

FogScreen is a fascinating projection technology that uses tap water and ultrasonic waves to create a thin curtain of "dry" fog that serves as a translucent or fully opaque projection screen. Find out more in this image gallery.

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Google at the gas pump (CNN.com)

Lost drivers in the United States soon will be able to Google for help at the pump.

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DARPA race pushes robotics forward (ZDNet)

The Urban Challenge's competitive drama seeds the idea in people's minds that self-driving cars are possible.

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It's official: Google announces open-source mobile phone OS, Android (Ars Technica)

Google's mobile play is centered on an open-source (Apache license), Linux-based mobile operating system that is open to all. The company announced an impressive cadre of carriers and handset vendors backing the OS.

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The Future of Solar-Powered Homes (New York Times Blog)

This year's Solar Decathlon illustrates that "solar" no longer means “hippy hangout,” “ugly box” or “Spartan shack.”

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New Apple Trojan Means Mac Hunting Season Is Open (Wired)

The Mac has officially gone mainstream.

The proof? On Halloween, professional online criminals were found using Trojan-horse software to target, for the first time, computers running Apple's OS X operating system -- just as they have been doing for years on the more ubiquitous flavors of Windows.

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A Computer That Works With Google, Not Microsoft (New York Times)

Advocates of Linux, the free open-source operating system, like to say that buying a standard-issue computer involves a Microsoft Tax, because you have no choice but to pay for Windows. New versions of Linux and inexpensive hardware like the new Everex gPC TC2502 make that tax avoidable.

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NBC axes DotComedy website (Variety)

NBC Universal is pulling the plug on its little-viewed DotComedy website, barely a year after the service first launched.

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