Articles tagged with: wifi

If you thought WPA Wi-Fi encryption was the bullet-proof alternative to the wide-open WEP, think again. A German graduate student Erik Tews claims to have discovered a security exploit in WPA encryption and plans to present a paper on his findings at the PacSec conference in Tokyo this week.

It’s far from a gaping security hole – the exploit takes up to 15 minutes to effect and does not allow the WPA encryption keys to be discovered. In fact Tews states that so far, it simply allows correctly-encrypted information to be injected into the network so that they appear to be sent from the router. In other words, it cannot be used to break into a wireless network, nor decipher all of its data – yet.

Is there a trend developing for the resurrection of affectionately-held computing brands? First it was Commodore, which just last month was reborn as a manufacturer of netbooks. And now Apricot, which has just been reborn as, yes – a manufacturer of netbooks.

The revived company’s first offering is the PicoBook Pro, a netbook with an 8.9in screen, 1GB of RAM, 60GB hard disk drive and 802.11a/b/g Wi-Fi and powered by a 1.2GHz Via C7-M processor. The price? £279 including VAT for the Linux edition, with XP available at "additional cost".

A bunch of additional pictures and the full press release after the cut. Read the latter, incidentally, and you’ll note that the chap behind the new Apricot is a one Shahid Sultan. Who he? Well, he's worth Googling – try adding "Acorn" to the search, too. 

Hmm, let's see, a slider with a large screen, GPS, Wi-Fi and a decent camera - it's the Nokia N95, right? Wrong, it's Sony Ericsson's new G705, a phone it claims will help you "stay organised the stylish" - much like the N95 did two years ago.

O2's come up with an attractive offer for mobile broadband users. It's giving customers who sign up to its £20 a month mobile broadband tariff free home broadband for a year.

For that you'll get 3GB of HSDPA data per month, unlimited access to O2's Wi-Fi hotspots (which includes BT's Openzone network) and O2's standard 8meg home broadband package. As a sweetener it's also throwing in a Wi-Fi router.

The offer's available from tomorrow till 31st October.

[O2]

iPhone users on O2 already enjoy unfettered access to the Cloud's network of Wi-Fi hotspots but now BT openzone is also opening its 3000 wireless zones to the iPhone, for free.

Donning its counting hat, O2 says the deal now brings the total number of hotspots at iPhone users' disposal to over 9000. It's also reaffirmed its commitment that wi-fi use will be completely unlimited for personal use - unlike those notorious 'unlimited 3G; claims the networks are so fond of.

The world's first memory card with built in Wi-Fi, has now morphed into the world's first memory card with geotagging. From today the simple Eye-Fi card we've come to know and love will be split into three models - Home, Share and Explore.

The Share appears to be the standard model we've already seen, with ability to transfer shots from camera to a PC wirelessly, or to sites such as Skype via your home network. The Explore adds a roaming agreement - currently in the US only - to upload photos to photo sharing sites via a network of hotspots across the country. Lastly the least expensive, Home, is for simple transferring to PCs only.

As an added bonus the Explore gets the new geotagging service to add location information to each photo's EXIF data. It's not quite perfect as it doesn't use GPS but rather the Skyhook system as featured on the iPhone, which triangulates from known nearby hotspot locations.

They'll be on sale in the US for $79, $99 and $129. No word yet on when we'll see them here.

[Eye-Fi]

Using Wi-Fi across Europe could be about to get a lot easier. Hotspot network, The Cloud, has just introduced Mycloud, a service that joins several operators across the continent into one subscription.

Hot on the heals of Nikon's S52c, Panasonic's launched its own Wi-Fi packed camera - the TZ50. If it looks familiar that's because it's essentially at TZ5 with a wireless chip bunged in, so you get a huge 10x wide-angle zoom (the equivalent of 28-280mm on an old 35mm cam), Panasonic's legendary Mega OIS anti-shake and a healthy 9.1 megapixels.

Getting your laptop online via 3G is no big deal these days, thanks to the wide range of mobile broadband deals that are available. If you just want to get one laptop online somewhere that isn’t served by an ISP, they work great, but what if you have more than computer, or want to try a little online play with a games console?

One solution is to use a Windows Mobile smartphone as a mini Wi-Fi router – all you need is a suitable smartphone and a handy program called WMWifiRouter. Full details after the cut.

Taking a short rest from knocking out DSLRs, Nikon's produced another of its Wi-Fi toting compacts. Taking its place in the Coolpix S series line-up, the 9mp S52c has a periscope-style, non-extending 3x zoom and VR optical image stabilisation for blur-free photography.