Alaska Airlines has announced that it will test a high-speed satellite wireless Internet service on its aircraft next year. The airline will be the first carrier in the US to offer such a service, and if the test is successful, will implement it onto the entire 114-aircraft strong fleet.

The broadband service will be provided by Californian company Row 44, and is designed to work over water and internationally. Customers will be able to access the service from Wi-Fi hotspots within the aircraft cabin.

Pricing options are still being researched at present.

Aircraft broadband services have had difficulty taking off in the past. Boeing’s Connexion option was pulled last year after difficulty in signing airlines onto the service. While support from international airlines was good, US airlines were reluctant to adopt the service following the terrorist attacks of 2001 and the subsequent industry downturn.

Alaska Airlines is not the only US carrier to be testing the waters with airline broadband services. American Airlines have also announced plans to test a broadband service, though it will use air-to-ground technology, rather than satellites.

Linux users want two things for their hardware: drivers; and easy access to those drivers. The first is finally happening; and now, thanks to a Dell Linux project called DKMS (Dynamic Kernel Module Support), the other is on its way.

Dell and Linux distributors have been working on DKMS for about five years now. Its purpose is to create a framework where kernel-dependent module source can reside, so that it is very easy to rebuild modules. In turn, this enables Linux distributors and driver developers to create driver drops without having to wait for new kernel releases. For users, all this makes it easier to get up-to-the-minute drivers without hand compiling device drivers.

According to Dell, this separate framework for delivering drivers will remove kernel releases as a blocking mechanism for distributing code. The net effect, Dell hopes, is to speed up driver development by enabling quicker testing cycles. This also means that better tested code can be pushed back into the kernel at a more rapid pace. It’s also nice for developers and maintainers, as DKMS only requires a source tarball in conjunction with a small configuration file in order to function correctly.

Adobe Reader may be subject to a security hole that creates a means for hackers to take over vulnerable Windows boxes simply by opening a maliciously constructed PDF document.

Gray hat hacker Petko Petkov, who first discovered the bug, omits details of the supposed flaw. He said security concerns over the potency of the flaw alongside concerns over the time it might take for Adobe to come up with a fix have prompted him to hold back from publishing proof of concept code.

By way of illustration, a video clip published by Petkov depicts how Windows calculator starts when a PDF document is opened. The same approach might be used to launch a malicious payload.

Petkov verified the bug on Windows XP SP2 with the latest Adobe Reader 8.1, 8.0 and 7. Previous versions - as well as other PDF viewers - might also be affected. Windows Vista users, however, are projected against the attack, according to Petkov.

A Microsoft employee has posted details about planned changes to Microsoft’s Live Search, ahead of an event next week where the company was slated to unveil the changes to reporters.

The changes to the search product, which were demonstrated at Microsoft’s companywide meeting earlier this month, include improvements in several specific types of search queries, notably in video search and in searches for products.

In a blog posting on Thursday, Windows Live program manager Akram Hussein demonstrated how the revamped Live Search handles searches for digital cameras, showing not just product details, but also reviews. The new search scrapes details from other sites that have user reviews and other information and presents it from within the search engine.

Microsoft has since taken down the blog, but the folks at Liveside.net managed to capture the images and the details Hussein provided. Microsoft plans to brief reporters at a “Searchification” event next week at its Mountain View, Calif., campus.

Apple Co-founder Steve Wozniak says one of the primary emerging technologies that is capturing his imagination these days is area of robotics and how artificial intelligence will be applied on those types of systems.

Wozniak said he hopes that someday the robotics field will take a page from the personal computer era by creating robots that are easily programmable by users to perform specific tasks rather than solely focusing on creating system that are preprogrammed to perform specific functions.

“People want things that are useful as opposed to things that do a lot of little things that we call artificial intelligence,” said Wozniak.

Speaking at an event hosted by ConnectWise, a company that provides tools designed to help IT services companies run their businesses more efficiently, Wozniak said he is also looking forward to a day when chips will come with a terabyte of memory on them so systems will no longer need disk drives and an era where displays will be more malleable and available everywhere.

Mozilla Corp. updated the preview of Firefox 3.0 to alpha 8 Thursday, unveiling for the first time to users several security features it’s talked up for months.

Among the security provisions debuting in the new alpha of “Gran Paradiso,” the code name for Firefox 3.0, are built-in anti-malware warnings and protection against rogue extension updates, according to documentation Mozilla posted to its Web site.

The malware blocker, which was first mocked up in June, will block Web sites thought to contain malicious downloads. The feature, a companion to the phishing site alert system in the current Firefox 2.0, will use information provided by Google Inc. to flag potentially-dangerous sites, warn anyone trying to reach those URLs with Firefox and automatically block access to the site.

Mozilla also pointed to a URL that demonstrates the new malware blocker for alpha 8 users.

Also taking a bow is a check meant to prevent plug-ins’ automatic updates from sending users to malicious sites where they might be infected by attack code or drive-by downloads.

Ambitious plans for big Wi-Fi networks to provide free or low-cost wireless Internet access are being abandoned or scaled back by US cities as the economics of the deals turn out to be more challenging than expected.

San Francisco and Chicago in recent weeks abruptly halted plans to set up municipal Wi-Fi networks while Internet giant Earthlink, a partner for a number of cities, has begun a reorganization that will limit new projects.

Wi-Fi, one of the most popular standards for wireless Internet access, had been seen as a means of connecting more people at a relatively low cost, and city leaders across the United States had been rushing to use the technology for “digital inclusion” programs for low-income residents.

But cities and companies are finding the economics more difficult, with many expensive access points needed and relatively small numbers of subscribers signing on.

Google Inc is in early talks to join a group looking to lay a high-speed, trans- Pacific undersea cable that could potentially lead to the Internet company becoming an investor in the project, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The potential undersea fiber-optic investment could reflect Google’s recent push to provide Internet-based services to businesses, since companies have lower tolerance for service interruptions and have offices around the world, the Journal reported on its Web site, citing a person familiar with the matter.

Three spreadsheets containing more than 5,000 Social Security numbers and other personal details about customers of ABN Amro Mortgage Group were inadvertently leaked over an online file-sharing network by a former employee.

Tiversa Inc., a Pittsburgh company that offers data-leakage protection services, traced the origins of the ABN data to a Florida computer with the BearShare software installed.

BearShare, LimeWire and scores of other programs are designed to distribute and find songs, movies and other files over the Gnutella file-sharing network.

Tiversa Chief Executive Robert Boback said file-sharing programs are commonly misconfigured to share documents their owners never intended to make public.

With such peer-to-peer sharing systems, files are obtained directly from another user’s hard drive rather than a central hub like traditional Web sites. As a result, once a file begins to circulate, copies can sit on computers all over the world, ready to be grabbed by other users.

Boback said Tiversa had yet to perform a full analysis to see how far the data had spread worldwide, but found evidence the files already had moved beyond the former employee’s computer.