The high bids totalled $3.2 billion in the U.S. Federal Communications Commission's auction of wireless spectrum licenses in the 700MHz band after three rounds and a day and a half of bidding.

That figure is far short of the $10 billion Congress and the FCC expect to raise in the auction, which opened Thursday, but bidding could continue for weeks. In most cases, the high bids don't yet meet the FCC's reserve price set for minimum winning bids.

A fourth round of bidding was scheduled for today.

The 700MHz auctions represent the last large chunk of spectrum available for the FCC to auction in the foreseeable future. The spectrum, now used to carry over-the-air television signals, can be used to carry long-range wireless broadband traffic. Consumer groups have said the spectrum represents the "last, best hope" for a nationwide wireless broadband network that competes with cable and telecom broadband services.

700MHz Auction Update: High Bids Total $3.2 Billion

According to people familiar with the new-generation notebook, there are no special tools or knowledge required to swap out the MacBook Air's battery, which Apple has billed its "thinnest ever" in a product. Instead, the process requires a single size-0 type phillips screwdriver and some diligence.

Once flipped upside down, the MacBook Air's bottom cover is easily unscrewed and removed, providing immediate access to the battery cavity. From there, the battery can be unscrewed from the chassis with the same screwdriver and unplugged from the circuit board with a simple tug -- it's not soldered to the board.

The entire process, according to those in the known, can be completed by any service technician in as little as three minutes.

For its part, Apple has announced its intent to offer a MacBook Air Out-of-Warranty Battery Replacement Program, which promises authorized replacements for US $129. The mail-in repair process normally takes 5 business days, the company says.

MacBook Air battery replacements take only minutes

According to people familiar with the new-generation notebook, there are no special tools or knowledge required to swap out the MacBook Air's battery, which Apple has billed its "thinnest ever" in a product. Instead, the process requires a single size-0 type phillips screwdriver and some diligence.

Once flipped upside down, the MacBook Air's bottom cover is easily unscrewed and removed, providing immediate access to the battery cavity. From there, the battery can be unscrewed from the chassis with the same screwdriver and unplugged from the circuit board with a simple tug -- it's not soldered to the board.

The entire process, according to those in the known, can be completed by any service technician in as little as three minutes.

For its part, Apple has announced its intent to offer a MacBook Air Out-of-Warranty Battery Replacement Program, which promises authorized replacements for US $129. The mail-in repair process normally takes 5 business days, the company says.

MacBook Air battery replacements take only minutes

For
now, videos are available for streaming from the U.S. only.
That said, our intention is to make Hulu's growing content lineup
available worldwide in the future.

This private beta is our chance to gather real user feedback, so
let us know not only what you like, but also what you think we
could be doing better. There is a feedback button located to
the left of every video screen. By clicking on the feedback
button, you will open up a feedback form where you can easily
provide a suggestion or comment. You also have the option of
sending your feedback directly to feedback@hulu.com.

The team will be reading these messages every day and we hope
to address your feedback as soon as possible. Over the course
of the private beta, we will be adding more content and updating
features, so please check back often.

We hope you enjoy the Hulu service and look forward to hearing
from you,

The Hulu team
http://www.hulu.com

I just got the invite... so far it looks like a blast... will report back soon... can someone else sign up and lets see what you think...

Hulu Private Beta

The phone rings. But no one is there.

Ghost calls have long been a staple of horror movies and urban legends about frightened baby sitters. Ray Bradbury wrote a teleplay about a telephone switch that reached sentience only to start stalking a person.

But the culprit behind what is becoming a common occurrence in some households may have a less than otherworldly explanation. More often than not it is a telemarketer — and one that complies with federal regulation. Indeed, adherence to the rules may be one reason for the ghost calls.

Most fingers point at telemarketers who use a predictive dialer, a device that makes hundreds of calls a minute and uses artificial intelligence to detect when a person actually answers. These are then connected directly to a telemarketer waiting to promote a new low mortgage rate, a political candidate or a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. If no one in the cubicle farm is ready to start pitching, the predictive dialer just hangs up.

Speaking from firsthand experience, it is hard to get all the variables right in
predicting when a person has answered the phone and when you have an answering device, and so on, switching, timing, and other factors are hard to do in software....

Battling Ghost Calls, That Telemarketing Annoyance

A group of Digg users organized a temporary boycott of the site because they felt the new algorithm would leave submissions from some Digg "power users" stuck in the queue.

In an open letter to Digg's executives posted this morning, four of the site's so-called top users Andy Sorcini, David Cohn , Muhammad Saleem and Reg Saddler said that they planned to stop submitting to Digg.

"The alternatives are plenty - now is the time to venture into new territory," the letter said. "Digg is, in part, a game. It always has been - and that is one of the reasons we love it. Unfortunately the rules to the game have never been under the community's full control. The latest change in the algorithm, along with rumors of secret editors, auto-buries, etc., have led us to believe it is time to break ties with Digg.com."

In addition, the group later organized a live podcast where about 125 users discussed the changes and thousands more listened in, according to Saleem.

The latest revolt is the second collective move by Digg users in less than a year. In May, many of the site's users staged an "Internet riot" by continuously posting a software key for cracking the encryption technology used to limit the copying of HD-DVD and Blu-ray discs after Digg management had removed it. The users prompted Digg to relent and allow the key to be posted.

Here we go... Need to kick up recruits for memestreams...

Top Digg Users Revolt Against Algorithm Change on Site

According to a press release issued earlier this month by Finjan, a security research firm, compromised Web servers are infecting thousands of visitors daily with malware that turns their Windows machines into unwitting bots to do the bidding of an as yet unidentified criminal organization. Security firms ScanSafe and SecureWorks have since added their own takes on the situation, though with varying estimates on the number of sites affected. All reports thus far say the compromised servers are running Linux and Apache.

According to an article on ServerTune.com, the exploit involves a rootkit installed on the compromised server that replaces several system binaries with infected versions. When the system is booted, the infected binaries are executed, and as a result, dynamically created JavaScript payloads are randomly and intermittently served to site visitors. The malware JavaScript attempts to exploit vulnerabilites in Windows, QuickTime, and Yahoo! Messenger on the visitor's machine in order to infect them.

We asked the Apache Software Foundation if it had any advice on how to detect the rootkit or cleanse a server when it's found. According to Mark Cox of the Apache security team, "Whilst details are thin as to how the attackers gained root access to the compromised servers, we currently have no evidence that this is due to an unfixed vulnerability in the Apache HTTP Server."

We sent a similar query to Red Hat, the largest vendor of Linux, but all its security team could tell us was that "At this point in time we have not had access to any affected machines and therefore cannot give guidance on which tools would reliably detect the rootkit."

cPanel, a popular administration tool used by hosting companies that allows clients to manage their hosted sites, has posted a security note describing what the rootkit does after it's installed, and suggests two ways to check a server for the rootkit.

According to cPanel, if you are unable to create a directory name beginning with a numeral -- as in mkdir 1 -- you're infected. Another test is to monitor the packets from the server with the following tcpdump command:

tcpdump -nAs 2048 src port 80 | grep "[a-zA-Z]\{5\}\.js'"

One great unknown thus far is how the servers come to be infected. Absent any forensic evidence of break-ins, the current thinking is that the malware authors gained access to the servers using stolen root passwords. The earliest known victims, according to quotes by researchers in this ComputerWorld story, were sites run by large hosting companies, which could give attackers root access to hundreds or even thousands of Web sites when compromised.

Other than using and safeguarding secure root passwords, not much can be done at this time to be proactive in preventing servers from being compromised, so searching techniques similar to the tcpdump command above, which check to see if a server has already been compromised, is probably the best course of action available to administrators. We haven't found a good answer yet for disinfecting compromised servers, but a complete reinstall of Linux, Apache, and a new root password would certainly do the trick.

Mystery infestation strikes Linux/Apache Web sites

IP addresses, strings of numbers that identify computers on the Internet, should generally be regarded as personal information, the head of the European Union's group of data privacy regulators said Monday.

IP Addresses Are Personal Data, E.U. Regulator Says - washingtonpost.com

The iPhone isn’t too crash hot, you know. It’s currently missing 3G functionality and is a closed system that’s hard to work with. Some of this will change soon, as Steve Jobs announced an SDK during his Macworld keynote, but those missing features haven’t and won’t change how Apple is marketing it.

What makes people moist whenever they use the iPhone is its interface, which is a real breath of fresh air compared to the current stale offerings from other handsets.

A lot of big companies such as Google, Intel, Nvidia, LG, Motorola and others have noticed this, and banded together to form the Open Handset Alliance Project (OHAP) to try and solve the problem. They have created Android.

Android was once an idea in a small start up, before its acquisition by Google in 2005. Now it's Linux for mobile devices. This means it’s secure and its application programming interfaces (APIs) offer complete access to the phone hardware. Even third party applications get deep access, which other operating systems can’t provide. It even virtualises everything in the name of speed and security.

For now, the OHAP has only developed phone and web browser applications for Android, however other cool applications are being written by the rest of the open source community. To encourage this, the OHAP has put US$10 million in prizes up for grabs for the most promising applications for Android. And although the applications may be on their way, Android’s core has been here for a while.

And it’s just been hacked to run on standard hardware.

Back in November last year, shortly after Android’s public release, Australian developer Ben Leslie almost got Android running on a Neo1973 phone.

Soon after, as a result of his work, Android was running on an Armadillo 500, a generic board used for prototyping and embedded systems, and more recently, a group called eu.edge successfully booted Android on a Sharp Zaurus. They even suggest that it can run on almost any ARMv5TE based device.

This should open the floodgates for tinkerers (GoogleOS on your PC, anyone?), which might even result in a version of Android forking away from mobiles and into household gadgets.

For the rest of us, and for now, Android is promising a much better smart phone experience than traditional mobile OSes deliver. The interface’s design can be customised, so we’re just as likely to see simplistic but efficient designs as we are to see rich, 3D accelerated portable media centres or iPhone competitors with unlimited flexibility. And with the actual core OS completed, the first consumer OHAP mobiles should be here in the not too distant future.

Enough speculation though: if you would like a share in that US$10m, download the SDK and get cracking. The top 50 applications developed before the 3rd of March get a slice, with another challenge slated later this year. The SDK and details are all available here.

iPhone competitor hacked!

Even though they had a tiny booth at CES, Bug Labs seemed to strike a nerve. In addition to winning CNET's Best of CES Award for emerging technologies, the Bug team excited the crowd with the promise of one gadget to replace the ever increasing menagerie of devices on exhibit elsewhere at the show. Steven Cherry has already discussed why open source hardware is so revolutionary, but its best to just see the Bug for yourself. We talked first to Mehrshad Mansouri, who gave an overview of the device and showed off some of its initial possibilities:

Next up was Bug Labs' Jeremy Toeman, who explained how the bug base, modules, and software actually work together, and what sort of engineering challenges faced the team:

My brain is just running with cool ideas...

CES Video Highlights: Bug Labs Lets You Build Your Own Gadget