DIY broadband

Two residents of Denham, a small village in Buckinghamshire, have decided to establish a wireless broadband network for villagers. Hooking into a leased line from nearby Hillingdon, a transmitter sitting atop a railway embankment will broadcast the wireless network to any villagers with a small, rooftop antenna and a wireless-capable computer. DenhamBroadband is intending to provide speeds equal to landline ADSL, and is hoping to keep costs in line with that. ...more

AMD changes the face of Flash memory architecture

The light of day shines on AMD's new Flash memory architecture, MirrorBit, as first production shipments begin. Doubling data density with no reduction in reliability is AMD's boast for what it claims to be the 'new face of Flash'. Designed to be a low-cost technology, Bertrand Cambou - group VP of the AMD memory group - has claimed that the manufacturing process has, 'a cost structure that is two generations ahead of comparable flash technologies. ...more

Vodafone launches pay-as-you-go 3G card

Vodafone has announced the release of the UK's first prepay 3G/GPRS data card, for connecting wirelessly to the Internet from a laptop. The PCMCIA card works in the 65 per cent of the UK that has 3G coverage and in 13 other countries worldwide with a 3G network plus some 20 with GPRS support. For ?199 you get the card plus 10Mb of free data traffic. ...more

Kaspersky launches Linux gateway antivirus

Kaspersky has updated its virus filtering email system for Linux and Unix. The Kaspersky SMTP-Gateway 5.5 checks incoming email for malicious code - detecting infected, suspicious or damaged messages - and also provides content filtering to help combat spam. ...more

Sony does u-turn for MP3 support

Consumer electronics giant Sony Corporation has reversed its policy and now says that it will support the popular MP3 file format for some of its portable music players. The company says that a new range of flash memory-based portable music players will be able to play both MP3 and Atrac formats. Previously Sony had insisted that its customers use its own proprietary Atrac format, forcing them to convert if they wanted to change to and from MP3. ...more