Leading U.S. cable operator Comcast Corp said on Wednesday it plans to offer subscribers the option to watch their favorite TV shows on mobile devices through its new wireless Internet service.

The company is also exploring adding a voice option to the wireless package that would put it in more direct competition with mobile phone providers like AT&T Inc and Verizon Communications Inc.

Comcast recently started rolling out its wireless Internet services in some U.S. cities as part of a joint venture with Clearwire Corp, which uses WiMax technology.

As any a video game aficionado knows, it’s easy to pop a game into your Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 and spend hours working your way from one level to the next. Without the hefty console, though, you’re out of luck if you want to keep blasting those aliens while away from home.

A startup called Spawn Labs thinks it has a solution to this problem. Starting Monday, the Austin, Texas-based company began selling a box that is much like a Slingbox - a device that lets you watch your home TV remotely - for video gaming.

Spawn Labs’ HD-720 costs $200, or about the same price as Microsoft’s cheapest Xbox console. Unlike playing a video game on a Web site, when the box is connected to one of several different gaming systems you can remotely access any video game disc already inside, along with any games stored on the console’s hard drive.

You can connect the HD-720 to up to two video game systems, including an Xbox 360, Sony’s PlayStation 3, and to a TV set to play games at home. If you install Spawn Labs’ free software on a computer, you can then log in to the company’s Web site and play games remotely in real time, using a video game controller plugged into one of the computer’s USB ports or a keyboard.

Google Inc. is testing a new format that is supposed to make reading online stories as easy as flipping through a magazine, a shift that eventually could feed more advertising sales to revenue-starved publishers.

The Internet search leader unveiled the experiment, called “Fast Flip,” Monday at a conference hosted by TechCrunch, a popular blog.

The service is meant to duplicate the look and feel of perusing a printed publication. The stories are displayed on electronic pages that can be quickly scrolled through by clicking on large arrows on the side instead of a standard Web link that requires waiting several seconds for a page to load. Readers can sort through content based on topics, favorite writers and publications.

For now, Fast Flip will only show the first page of a story. Readers who want to continue will have to click through to the publisher’s site, where the display reverts to a traditional Web page.

More than three dozen publishers, broadcasters and Web-only outlets have agreed to share their content on Fast Flip. The participants include two major newspapers, The New York Times and the Washington Post, as well as large magazines like Newsweek and BusinessWeek.

The publishers providing the stories to Fast Flip will get most of the revenue from the ads that Google intends to show in the new format. That’s a switch from Google’s main search page and its news section, where the Mountain View-based company keeps all the money from ads shown alongside headlines and snippets from stories.

Novell on Monday will offer a kit for developers to build Apple iPhone and iPod Touch business applications using Microsoft’s .Net Framework instead of the Apple-designated C or Objective-C languages.

Leveraging Novell’s Mono runtime for running Windows applications on non-Windows systems, Novell’s MonoTouch 1.0 is a commercial software development kit that lets developers utilize code and libraries written for .Net and programming languages like C#.

For 38 years, TV show Tomorrow’s World wowed audiences with its coverage of futuristic developments from the world of science and technology. It was axed in 2003, but now the BBC has brought the show back from the dead, sort of.

From today, anyone after an insight into how advancements in technology led to computerised banking, mobile phones – described as “experimental” in 1979 — touchscreen computers and, of course, compact discs can do so through a dedicated digital database.

The BBC archive doesn’t list every episode of Tomorrow’s World ever aired, but instead features a cherry-picked selection of clips and full-length episodes.

For example, the archive starts with the show’s first installment – broadcast in 1965. The 35-minute episode focuses on kidney dialysis, flood defences and the possibility of life of Mars.

Quoting an inside source, the German economic newspaper, “Handelsblatt” reports that staff at IBM have been given ten days to change to Symphony, IBM’s in-house Lotus software. The use of Microsoft Office will in future require managerial approval. With immediate affect, the Open Document Format (ODF) will rule at IBM with the file ending .doc soon belonging to the past.

Lotus Symphony is an office software that incorporates huge chunks of customized Open Office without a databank module. The free software download provided by IBM is an attempt at luring customers away from Microsoft. IBM’s cooperation with Linux distributors like Red Hat, Canonical and Novell was designed to strengthen the software’s market chances.

IEEE has finally approved the 802.11n high-throughput wireless LAN standard.

Finalization of the new wireless networking standard–which is capable of delivering throughput speeds up to 300 megabits per second (and even higher)–took exactly seven years from the day it was conceived, or six years from the first draft version. The standard has been through a dozen or so draft versions.

(The 802.11n Task Group is part of the 802.11 Working Group, which oversees WLAN (wireless local-area network) standards. Task group members include the majority of Wi-Fi chipmakers, software developers, and equipment OEM vendors. Meru Networks, one of the members, posted the blog that broke the news.)

It’s likely, however, that final approval of the standard will be publicly announced by September 15, the date when Meru Networks puts on a public Webcast to provide answers about the ratification.

According to the Wi-Fi Alliance, the group that tests and certifies wireless products to ensure their interoperability, all existing Wi-Fi Certified Draft N wireless products will still work with the final standard.

A computer hacker who was once a federal informant and was a driving force behind one of the largest cases of identity theft in U.S. history pleaded guilty Friday in a deal with prosecutors that will send him to prison for up to 25 years.

Albert Gonzalez, 28, of Miami, admitted pulling off some of the most prominent hacking jobs of the decade - invading the computer systems of such retailers as TJX Cos., BJ’s Wholesale Club, OfficeMax, Boston Market, Barnes & Noble and Sports Authority. Federal authorities say tens of millions of credit and debit card numbers were stolen.

Gonzalez entered guilty pleas in U.S. District Court in Boston to 19 counts of conspiracy, computer fraud, wire fraud, access device fraud and aggravated identity theft. He also pleaded guilty to a New York indictment charging one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud for hacks into the Dave & Buster’s restaurant chain.

Under his plea agreements, Gonzalez faces 15 to 25 years in prison in the Massachusetts case and up to 20 years in the New York case. The sentences would run concurrently. If he had been convicted of all the charges and sentenced to the maximum, he could have received a sentence of several hundred years.

Struggling phone maker Motorola unveiled its first device using Google’s Android system Thursday, banking on it to power features that will attract consumers looking to use their phones to connect with friends, family and colleagues.

The Cliq comes with a touch screen and a standard, “QWERTY” keyboard that slides out from its side. Software on it will let users aggregate contact information from various social networks and e-mail accounts. Small application “widgets” will show such information as your friends’ Facebook status updates on the home screen.

The new device also sports a five-megapixel camera, allowing for sharper images than most other phones, including Apple Inc.’s iPhone and its three-megapixel resolution.

Panasonic has launched a new household LED lightbulb in Japan that it says lasts 40 times longer than incandescent bulbs.

The screw-in bulbs are part of the EverLed line, and they’re scheduled to hit stores in Japan on October 21, with monthly production at 50,000 units. No changes to lighting equipment used for incandescents are required.

If used an average of five and a half hours per day, the new bulbs can last up to 19 years, according to Panasonic. That’s 40 times longer than incandescent bulbs.

Google is disappointed with the lack of breakthrough investment ideas in the green technology sector but the company is working to develop its own new mirror technology that could reduce the cost of building solar thermal plants by a quarter or more.

“We’ve been looking at very unusual materials for the mirrors both for the reflective surface as well as the substrate that the mirror is mounted on,” the company’s green energy czar Bill Weihl told Reuters Global Climate and Alternative Energy Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday.

Google, known for its Internet search engine, in late 2007 said it would invest in companies and do research of its own to produce affordable renewable energy within a few years.

The company’s engineers have been focused on solar thermal technology, in which the sun’s energy is used to heat up a substance that produces steam to turn a turbine. Mirrors focus the sun’s rays on the heated substance.

Weihl said Google is looking to cut the cost of making heliostats, the fields of mirrors that have to track the sun, by at least a factor of two, “ideally a factor of three or four.”

“Typically what we’re seeing is $2.50 to $4 a watt (for) capital cost,” Weihl said. “So a 250 megawatt installation would be $600 million to a $1 billion. It’s a lot of money.”

A new security vulnerability involving the Server Message Block protocol, used for Windows file-sharing, can allow a remote attacker to take control of a vulnerable Vista, Server 2008 or Windows 7 RC computer, in addition to causing it to crash as previously reported.

Security researchers found that the bug could be hit to cause the venerable Blue Screen of Death computer crash if a PC has file sharing enabled. But in Security Advisory 975497, released yesterday, Microsoft wrote that “an attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could take complete control of an affected system. Most attempts to exploit this vulnerability will cause an affected system to stop responding and restart.”

A hole that allows for assuming control of a computer from across a network is about as bad as it gets, and I’ve asked for confirmation from Microsoft that this is in fact possible with this SMB flaw. Windows XP, 2000 and Server 2008 R2 are not at risk, nor is Windows 7 RTM.