Planned 4G Network Draws Fire From House Science Panel

A multibillion dollar proposal to create a 4G wireless broadband network in the United States could interfere with several scientific services that use the Global Positional System (GPS), including forecasting the weather, monitoring climate change, and tracking volcanic activity, U.S. federal officials told a Congressional panel yesterday. Their concerns are the latest in a crescendo of objections raised against the proposal by federal agencies and providers of GPS-based services. LightSquared, a company based in Reston, Virginia, has already spent over $4 billion to set up the network, which would provide improved cell phone and Internet connectivity across the country. The network would be supported by LightSquared's geostationary satellites and some 40,000 ground transmitters operating...

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Windows 8 Boot Time Will Wow, Microsoft Says

Tired of being cast as the laggard in the computer boot time contest, Microsoft says that its forthcoming Windows 8 operating system will start quickly. In a post to the Building Windows 8 blog, Steven Sinofsky, president of Microsoft's Windows division, acknowledged the importance of boot time. "[N]o feature gets talked about and measured more," he wrote, which is surprising considering that boot time is only loosely related to the performance and utility of the operating system. It ought to be possible to ignore boot time, to turn on one's computer and go get a cup of coffee while the necessary files are loaded into memory. But the real...

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Google Urges Iranian Users to Secure Accounts After Hack

In the wake of a digital certificate hack that potentially allowed hackers to gain access to the Google accounts of 300,000 Iranians, the search giant this week urged those users to take certain steps to secure their data. "While Google's internal systems were not compromised, we are directly contacting possibly affected users and providing similar information below because our top priority is to protect the privacy and security of our users," Eric Grosse, vice president of security engineering at Google, wrote in a blog post. First of all, Google urged users in Iran to change their passwords. Second, the company suggested people verify their...

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