Technology

As one group abandons its in-flight Wi-Fi Internet access, another hopes to be more successful with an on-board mobile phone service for air passengers. Emirates Airline has signed up for a new in-flight mobile phone service offered by AeroMobile Ltd., a joint venture between communications and systems engineering vendor Arinc Inc. and Norwegian telecommunications service provider Telenor ASA, the companies said Friday.

The Dubai airline expects to launch the service on board one of its Boeing 777 airplanes early next year, provided it receives necessary approval.

I recently took part in a debate at the BBC's Free Thinking festival in Liverpool on whether or not technology empowers people. It soon emerged that I was to take on the role of technophile against the rest of the panel ? Phil Redmond of Brookside/Hollyoaks fame, historian Jonathan Sawday and ex-hacker Robert Schifreen.

When Stephen Devine drove with his family from their home in Massachusetts to New York City, he spent two frustrating hours trying to find a place to park his 9-foot-high camper van, which won't fit in most garages.

In the end, his 17-year-old daughter found a place to park online -- and she didn't even have to leave the van to do it.

A U.S.-British team of researchers from academia and the aerospace industry believes the passenger aircraft of the distant future will not only be fuel efficient, but virtually silent.

Leaders of a long-range research venture called the "Silent Aircraft Initiative" were scheduled Monday to release a conceptual design for a plane they say could cut through the air with practically no sound bothering those below, thanks to its unique shape and design features to limit engine noise.

The Federal Communications Commission has decided to classify Broadband over Power Line (BPL) as an information service, putting it in the same class as DSL and cable. As a result, BPL will follow those two broadband services down the road to deregulation in hopes that it will encourage utilities to begin offering BPL service.

Texas has started broadcasting live images of the U.S. border on the Internet in a security program that asks the public to report signs of illegal immigration or drug crimes.

A test Web site went live Thursday at texasborderwatch.com with views from eight cameras and ways for viewers to e-mail reports of suspicious activity. Previously, the images had only been available to law enforcement and landowners where the cameras are located.

"There is only one way to test it, and that's open it up for business," said Texas Homeland Security Director Steve McCraw.

Storage hardware maker Seagate has taken the wraps off its DriveTrust, technology which it claims will protect data at the hardware level of the hard drive.

A drive protected by DriveTrust will require anyone accessing it to de-encrypt its data with a password or key. Without a password, a hard drive would be useless, says the manufacturer.

Seagate says its new technology differs from most information security which either sets up a firewall around networks or encrypts data at file or operating system level.

Cheap little servers handle so much of the Internet's dirty work that giant computers known as mainframes, which debuted 50 years ago and often cost more than $1 million, are supposed to be passe.

When Hoplon Infotainment, a startup video game company in Brazil, let it be known that it uses a mainframe to operate its signature online game, "People would actually take a step back and say, 'What? Did I hear correctly?"' said Tarquinio Teles, Hoplon's CEO.

An old adage states that a frog will jump out of boiling water, but can be boiled alive if placed in cold water that is heated at a slow pace. Apparently, the process of making amphibian soup is not entirely unlike the process of cooking up a new web standard. Citing limited adoption of XHTML, Internet innovator and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) ringleader Tim Berners-Lee says HTML must be reinvented through a process of incremental change that will build on the existing standard.

The Office of the NSW Board of Studies, a state government department that develops education content, has chosen IP network solutions provider NetStar to implement a managed wide area network.

The WAN project started in June and is scheduled for completion by January 2007.

Board of Studies IT director Mitra Bhar said the department needed a managed solution that meets its performance and service level specifications.

The contract also includes managed firewall and intrusion detection and will prepare the network for IP telephony to be deployed within 12 months.