European wireless carriers have sharply raised prices for making and receiving calls outside the European Union to compensate for regulator-imposed lower tariffs within the EU, a market research firm said.

Informa Telecoms and Media said on Friday roaming charges had risen as much as 163 percent since the EU capped rates last year at 0.49 euros ($0.76) a minute for making calls abroad in the 27-nation bloc and 0.24 euros for receiving them.

The average price of a call home by an Italian subscriber in Russia was 3.67 euros a minute in 2006, but this has risen 25 percent to 4.58 euros, Informa said.

For customers in most European countries, the cost of roaming in Africa, China, India, Japan, the Middle East, Russia and the United States has risen, the Informa data showed.

The Firefox evangelists at Mozilla have a novel goal: they want to set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours. To get there, the open source browser builders declared a Download Day and are soliciting pledges to grab the browser on release day, which hasn’t yet been announced.

Interesting idea, and I sure hope the marketing folks had a long talk with the network group before running with this one. It’s normally sound practice to try and spread out major traffic so as to not overburden your network. Mozilla learned that lesson when it first implemented automatic updates in Firefox- it didn’t stagger them out well enough and ended up slamming their network.

Here’s hoping they’re better prepared this time around (I strongly suspect they are). In any case, I’m eager to see the new browser launch, and even more eager to see my must-have add-ons (like Foxmarks) update for version 3

Hackers took over Comcast Corp.’s Web portal for several hours overnight, denying 14.1 million subscribers access to the cable company’s site for e-mail, news and technical support.

The front page of Comcast.net went down shortly before 11 p.m. EDT Wednesday and was replaced with a note saying the hackers had “RoXed” Comcast, according to postings at BroadbandReports.com.

Comcast spokeswoman Jennifer Khoury said Thursday that the hijacking had been reversed in the morning, but that it was possible some users were still unable to access Comcast.net and Web-based e-mail.

There was no indication that e-mail or other private information was compromised by the attack, Comcast said. It didn’t stop customers from getting their e-mail through programs like Outlook.

The hackers appeared to have seized control of the Comcast.net domain name at registrar Network Solutions Inc. and redirected it to other servers, Khoury said.

China has ratcheted up surveillance and security in every phase of the Beijing Olympics - even the tickets.

In a move unprecedented for the Olympics, tickets for the opening and closing ceremonies are embedded with a microchip containing the bearer’s photograph, passport details, addresses, e-mail and telephone numbers.

The intent is to keep potential troublemakers from the 91,000-seat National Stadium as billions watch on TV screens around the world. Along with terrorists, Chinese officials fear protesters might wreck the glitzy ceremonies, unfurling Tibet flags, anti-China banners or even T-shirts adorned with strident messages.

Aside from concerns about privacy and identity theft, the high-tech tickets also threaten chaos at the turnstiles.

Tickets for the Aug. 8 opening ceremony are the most expensive of the Games - with a top price of US$720 - and many are in the hands of dignitaries and friends. Delays could create terrible publicity on opening night.

Malware hunters have spotted a previously unknown — and unpatched — Adobe Flash vulnerability being exploited in the wild.

The zero-day flaw has been added to the Chinese version of the MPack exploit kit and there are signs that the exploits are being injected into third-party sites to redirect targets to malware-laden servers.

Adobe’s product security incident response team is saying that all versions of Flash Player 9.0.124.0 are not vulnerable to these exploits.

So, hosting and managing a ton of Ajax calls, even when working with mootools, dojo or scriptaculous, can be quite cumbersome, especially as they get updated, along with your code. In addition, several sites now use these libraries, and the end-user has to download the library each time.

Google now will provide hosted versions of these libraries, so users can simply reference Google’s hosted version. From the article, ‘The thing is, what if multiple sites are using Prototype 1.6? Because browsers cache files according to their URL, there is no way for your browser to realize that it is downloading the same file multiple times. And thus, if you visit 30 sites that use Prototype, then your browser will download prototype.js 30 times.

Today, Google announced a partial solution to this problem that seems obvious in retrospect: Google is now offering the “Google Ajax Libraries API,” which allows sites to download five well-known Ajax libraries (Dojo, Prototype, Scriptaculous, Mootools, and jQuery) from Google. This will only work if many sites decide to use Google’s copies of the JavaScript libraries; if only one site does so, then there will be no real speed improvement. There is, of course, something of a privacy violation here, in that Google will now be able to keep track of which users are entering various non-Google Web pages.

Call/Recall has announced it is developing a 1TB optical drive and disk, backwards compatible with Blu-ray, in partnership with with the Nichia Corporation of Japan.

Call/Recall began synthesizing 1TB materials for Nichia’s blue-violet laser diodes in December 2007, with first initial testing successfully completed in March 2008.

InPhase has just this year announced its revolutionary 300GB holographic disk and here is another optical format with more than three times the capacity. How realistic is this?

Call/Recall and Nichia will jointly develop the ultra high-capacity optical disc recording and playback system. It is designed around Nichia’s commercially available violet and blue laser diodes and Call/Recall’s one terabyte media.

One secret sauce is the use of a Rhodamine-type dye in a recording layer. It is excited by laser light and reacts to give off light when excited by another laser at a different wavelength. Such light emission or its absence can be used to indicate binary ones and zeroes.

The dye spots are tiny and can exist in 200-250 layers thus providing the 1TB capacity. The use of a single lens to read multiple layers is enabled by having a fluid-filled lens and increasing/reducing the fluid content and thus the lens’ profile and its focal length.

The I/O rate is said to be around 100MB/sec, five times faster than InPhase’s holographic drives.

The process is not reversible and produces write-once-read-many (WORM) media. Reversibility is being worked on and there is a generalised roadmap out to 5TB, still on CD-sized 120mm platters.

Google Inc. showed off its nearly completed mobile software system to about 3,000 computer programmers Wednesday, hoping to cultivate more services and advertising for people on the go.

Although brief, the demonstration at the Internet search leader’s annual developer conference in San Francisco represented the most extensive public look so far at “Android” - an open-source platform being designed for “smart” phones and other mobile devices that surf the Web. Android was first announced nearly seven months ago.

The bells and whistles unveiled Wednesday included: a way to unlock phones by drawing a specific shape on the touchscreen instead of entering a password; bookmarks for favorite Web sites on the device’s home page; a “compass” tool that automatically roams with the phone while a user looks at photographic images of a city map; a magnifying tool to zoom in on Web content; and a mobile version of the video game “Pac Man.”

The demonstration relied on touchscreen technology similar to Apple Inc.’s iPhone, but Android can also be tailored to work with a tracking ball, said Andy Rubin, who is overseeing the project.

While acknowledging the work on Android is nearly done, Rubin deflected a question about how much longer consumers will have to wait for a phone powered by the new software. Sticking to the timetable Google has used throughout the project, Rubin said Android will hit the market some time during the final six months of this year.

Amazon.com Inc, the largest Internet retailer, will launch a streaming video service in the next few weeks to augment its digital offerings, the company’s chief executive said on Wednesday.

Jeff Bezos, speaking at The Wall Street Journal’s three-day D: All Things Digital conference taking place north of San Diego, did not elaborate, and a company spokeswoman would not provide more information.

The Seattle-based company has been beefing up its digital media offerings in order to better compete with rivals such as Apple Inc, which dominates the category with the popular iTunes music download service.

Adobe Systems released beta versions of three key applications from its upcoming Creative Suite 4 package of graphic, Web and multimedia software on Tuesday. Preview versions of Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Southbound are available for download.

Adobe did not say when beta versions of Photoshop and Illustrator may be available. David Burkett, vice president of product management for Creative Suite, suggested Photoshop and Illustrator will not be released as beta previews like the other three applications. “Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Soundbooth are the major applications we’re unveiling as public betas before the next release of Creative Suite,” he said.

Current customers of CS3 can use the beta software until the final CS4 package ships. New users will only have 48 hours to try out the new programs. The final version of CS4 is expected in the last quarter of 2008 or the first quarter of 2009.

A New York judge concluded Tuesday that Dell Inc. engaged in repeated false and deceptive advertising of its promotional credit financing and warranties.

State Supreme Court Justice Joseph Teresi ordered the computer retailer to more clearly disclose that most customers don’t qualify for free financing or get “next day” repair service.

“It appears likely that there are many more New York consumers who are entitled to restitution who are not included in the complaints,” Teresi wrote.

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo sued Dell last year. Teresi gave him until Dec. 1 to identify all consumer claims for third-party repairs, new computers or higher interest payments than they would have paid otherwise.

“For too long at Dell the promise of customer service was a bait and switch that left thousands of people paying for essentially no service at all,” Cuomo said. “This decision sends an important message that all corporations will be held accountable for the promises they make to consumers.”

Microsoft Corp. said Tuesday that its next operating system will be made for touch-screen applications, an alternative to the computer mouse.

Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer unveiled the iPhone-like touch-screen feature at The Wall Street Journal’s “D: All Things Digital” conference, calling it “just the smallest snippet” of the Windows 7 operating system slated for release in late 2009.

A Microsoft employee showed possible applications like enlarging and shrinking photos and navigating a map of San Diego by stroking the screen.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates framed the new feature as an evolution away from the mouse.

“Today almost all the interaction is keyboard-mouse,” Gates said. “Over years to come, the role of speech, vision, ink - all of those - will be huge.”