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Every day, it seems, a new service pops up offering to send you video over the Internet. “Desperate Housewives,” Stephen Colbert heckling the president, clips of bad dancers at wedding parties: It’s all there.

You may be up for it, but is the Internet?

The answer from the major Internet service providers, the telephone and cable companies, is “no.” Small clips are fine, but TV-quality and especially high-definition programming could make the Internet choke.

Most home Internet use is in brief bursts — an e-mail here, a Web page there. If people start watching streaming video like they watch TV — for hours at a time — that puts a strain on the Internet that it wasn’t designed for, ISPs say, and beefing up the Internet’s capacity to prevent that will be expensive.

Source: AP

An Australian man tried to auction New Zealand off over the internet, starting at just one Australian cent.

Six thousand hits and 22 bids later, New Zealand was still a real estate bargain at $3,000.

But it is a joke Foreign Minister Winston Peters could not take.

“I don’t think it’s fun. I think that kind of nonsensical stupidity, I’ll leave to the tabloid media,” he says.

Source: tvnz.co.nz

Mobile phone group Vodafone (VOD.L) could sell its stake in its joint venture with Verizon Communications (NYSE:VZ) for bout $48 billion (25 billion pounds) before the end of the month, according to the Observer newspaper.

Source: Reuters

If you use a local network and share folders over the network you probably want to be able to find out what files are opened and who is using them.

Although Windows XP does not come with a nice GUI application to show you that it does bundle a little know command line application that goes by the name Openfiles.exe

To use this program go to Start->Run and type cmd

Now in the command prompt window type Openfiles [/parameter]

where /parameter is one of three settings that you can use to configure Openfiles:

• /Disconnect: Disconnects one or more open files.
• /Query: Displays files opened locally or from shared folders.
• /Local: Enables/disables the display of local open files.

(more…)

The UK’s first made-to-order baby has sprouted in London, according to a report in The Times.

With the aid of genetics specialists, a woman has been able to make sure that her baby does not inherit a gene that might trigger a form a eye cancer. The lass - who has requested anonymity - and her husband are the first to tap a change in the laws around embryo screening. Previous rules dictated that mothers-to-be could only screen for genes guaranteed to lead to disease. In the case of the eye cancer, close to 90 per cent of the people with the gene actually get cancer, the paper reported.

Source: TheRegister

Security data on Chubu Electric Power Co’s in Japan thermal power plant have been leaked onto the Internet from a virus-infected personal computer through the file-sharing software Share, a Chubu Electric affiliate in charge of the plant’s security said Sunday.

The leaked information contains the locations of various facilities of the Owase Mita thermal power plant in Owase, Mie Prefecture, including the control room, instrument panel room and boilers, officials of the affiliate said.

Source: crisscross

A little-known spy agency that analyzes imagery taken from the skies has been spending significantly more time watching U.S. soil.

In an era when other intelligence agencies try to hide those operations, the director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper, is proud of that domestic mission.

He said the work the agency did after hurricanes Rita and Katrina was the best he’d seen an intelligence agency do in his 42 years in the spy business.

Geospatial intelligence is the science of combining imagery, such as satellite pictures, to physically depict features or activities happening anywhere on the planet. A part of the Defense Department, the NGA usually operates unnoticed to provide information on nuclear sites, terror camps, troop movements or natural disasters.

Source: Wired

Firefox usage increased about half a percentage point to nearly 12% of browser users, while IE usage dropped nearly two-thirds of a percentage point to about 85.2% since January.

Source: InformationWeek