Roy Mark

According to a report from the Government Accountability Office released Oct. 15, “NASA [does] not consistently implement effective controls to prevent, limit and detect unauthorized access to its networks and systems.” While the report found that “NASA has made important progress in implementing security controls and aspects of its information security program,” it said NASA’s […]

Sprint Nextel said Oct. 19 it is acquiring affiliate iPCS for approximately $831 million, including the assumption of $405 million of iPCS debt. The deal will also end the long standing litigation between Sprint and iPCS, which has sued to block Sprint from entering iPCS territory. Sprint Nextel and iPCS said they will seek an […]

Confirming its reputation as an exoplanet discoverer extraordinaire, the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher team said Oct. 19 it has discovered 32 new planets existing outside Earth’s solar system. Known as exoplanets, the discoveries increase the known exoplanets by 30 percent.Data from HARPS has led to the discovery of more than 75 exoplanets in […]

A federal court has rejected an American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers bid for additional royalty fees on musical ring tones. ASCAP, which once demanded royalties from Girl Scouts for singing around a campfire, contended that wireless carriers such as Verizon and AT&T are liable for direct and secondary copyright violations whenever phones ring […]

NASA is calling last week’s bombing of the moon a smashing success with the two probes that smacked into the lunar surface Oct. 9 returning tantalizing data, including faint traces of an impact plume. NASA has said it ultimately hopes the probes will yield data about the possibility of water on the moon. NASA launched […]

Industrialized nations that rank above the United States in broadband in a variety of metrics implemented open access policies — unbundling, bitstream access, collocation requirements, wholesaling, and/or functional separation — to achieve their success, according to a study commissioned by the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) and conducted by Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and […]

The Department of Justice on Oct. 13 ordered AT&T “to divest assets in eight areas in Louisiana and Mississippi in order to proceed with its $944 million acquisition of Centennial Communications,” according to a DOJ news release. Without the divestitures, the DOJ said, the deal “would substantially lessen competition” in “mobile wireless telecommunications services in […]

The Wi-Fi Alliance is nearing completion of a new specification to allow Wi-Fi devices to connect to one another without joining a traditional home, office or hotspot network. The Wi-Fi Alliance expects to begin certification for the new specification in mid-2010 and is currently called Wi-Fi Direct. In its early stages of development it was […]

The Electronic Frontier Foundation announced Oct. 14 that it is asking the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to invalidate a patent granted to Acceris for “hardware, software and processes for implementing VOIP [voice over IP] using analog telephones as endpoints.” The EFF claimed the patent “could cripple the adoption of new VOIP technologies.”In a re-examination […]

NASA is seeking 100 Twitter followers to view the Nov. 12 launch of the space shuttle Atlantis on its next mission to the ISS. While NASA has held Tweetups-informal meetings of people who use the social messaging service Twitter-before, this is the first time the space agency has invited its Twitter followers to view a […]

The Small Business SOX Compliance Relief Act was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives Oct. 8 to permanently exempt small businesses from Section 404(b) of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. Section 404 contains internal reporting requirements that many small businesses complain are costly and time consuming to implement.In an acknowledgment of continued concern about […]

Lufthansa plans to revive its in-flight Internet service next year. While Lufthansa was once a pioneer in airline Wi-Fi-it offered the world’s first scheduled flight providing broadband Internet in 2003-it dropped the service after service provider Boeing discontinued its Connexion service in 2006.Lufthansa is now partnering with Panasonic’s new broadband service, exConnect. Passengers will not […]