Wireless

McDonald's said on Saturday it would offer free wireless Internet access across its 1,200-strong restaurants in the UK, making it the country's biggest provider of free wireless broadband access.

The move reflects increasing competition in the UK's broadband market dominated by contract or pay-as-you-go services, where a regular hotspot user usually has to pay around 5 pounds for an hour log-on.

On Thursday, BT Group said it had teamed up with Wi-Fi crusader FON to allow more than three million broadband customers to use hundreds of thousands of hotspots for free.

U.K. wireless broadband service provider Eircom is contacting as many as 250,000 of its customers after discovering that hackers can tap into certain models of its Netopia series routers without the account holder's knowledge or consent.

The security breach affects the Netopia 3300 and 2247 series routers, according to a report.

BT has taken up one of the oldest ideas in Wifi to hold out the promise of global wireless internet access.

Way back in the days when homes first began to sprout Wifi routers it was suggested that these could have both a private and a public face, with access available both to the householder and passers-by.

The idea was taken up by the Spanish hotspot provider Fon, which claims to have a network of 500,000 access sharers, known as foneros, in Europe Asia and America.

Broadcom has put 802.11n wireless networking fast Wi-Fi on a single chip, which could make fast Wi-Fi cheaper in the New Year. "This will make life significantly easier for people developing 802.11n solutions," said Gordon Lindsay, Broadcom's European wireless product manager. "It uses our 65nm tech, and is half the size of our previous devices, and cuts the power demand by 50 percent to a more manageable 1.6W."

ThinkSECURE (http://securitystartshere.org) today announced that it will be running AIRRAID2™ (http://airraid2.securitystartshere.org), its cutting-edge wireless-and-wired hacking tournament, in Bangkok Thailand on 21 December 2007.

Wi-Fi security vendors are releasing new products to protect customers against weaknesses in the WEP encryption scheme, even though it has been obsolete for years. AirTight Networks has launched a system that detects and prevents attacks on wireless networks secured by the WEP protocol, which are still in widespread use in retail systems, even though the protocol was cracked in 2001, and swiftly replaced by WPA. In April, security experts showed how to crack WEP in three seconds..

'm sitting with Richard Rushing, chief security officer of AirDefense, on a stone bench that sits neatly between the White House and the U.S. Treasury Building. As we both look intently at the laptop on Rushing's lap, a three-foot Radio Shack antenna protrudes from his briefcase, pulling in transmissions from both of these carefully-secured national institutions.

Yup, we're "war walking" the White House. We're looking for wireless networks that are open to hack.

Factories present challenging environments for wireless systems, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) wants to help.

In its blog on Thursday, the Federal Trade Commission's non-regulatory federal agency said that factories and production plans could gain a lot from wireless technology like robotic controls, RFID tag monitoring and local area network (LAN) communications.

Data centre management is about to go mobile. Network and systems administrators are tired of working in a cramped environment that is alternately too cold or too hot, and so the idea of managing software and servers via a wireless hookup is about to come into its own, some observers believe.

An ambitious plan to blanket the city with wireless broadband Internet will be shelved because it is too costly and too few residents would use it, Chicago officials said Tuesday. "We realized -- after much consideration -- that we needed to reevaluate our approach to provide universal and affordable access to high speed Internet as part of the city's broader digital inclusion efforts," Chicago's chief information officer, Hardik Bhatt, said in a statement.