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Finns gain rights to broadband

By James Lawson, ITWeb journalist
Johannesburg, 01 Jul 2010

Finns gain rights to broadband

Finland is the first country to make broadband a legal right for every citizen, says the BBC.

From 1 July, every Finn will have the right to access a 1Mbps broadband connection, with government vowing to connect all citizens to a 100Mbps connection by 2015.

Finland's communication minister Suvi Linden explains: "We considered the role of the Internet in Finns' everyday life. Internet services are no longer just for entertainment. Finland has worked hard to develop an information society and a couple of years ago we realised not everyone had access.”

PCs hit with XP attack

Microsoft says it has logged more than 10 000 attacks against a flaw in Windows XP, says ITWorld.

A Google engineer released the details behind the flaw, with criminals ramping up their online attacks that leverage the bug. The attacks are concentrated in the US, Russia, Portugal, Germany and Brazil.

"At first, we only saw legitimate researchers testing innocuous proof-of-concepts. Then, early on 15 June, the first real public exploits emerged," says a Microsoft blog posting. "Those initial exploits were targeted and fairly limited. In the past week, however, attacks have picked up."

EC reports on roaming charges

The European Commission has released an interim report on mobile roaming costs, stating that prices charged by mobile operators for voice calls abroad are still not low enough, writes Computing.co.uk.

Under the June 2009 roaming tariff amendments, the cap on the maximum price for voice calls fell from 0.46 euros to 0.43 euros per minute from 1 July 2009. These are to further decrease to 0.39 euros per minute as of 1 July 2010.

EC digital agenda VP Neelie Kroes says even after the first rules on roaming tariffs and the 2009 amendments, “most mobile operators propose retail prices that hover around the minimum legal cap”.

HTML5 loses to Flash

Google, owner of the popular YouTube service, says Adobe Flash will continue to play a critical role on the Web site, reports The Register.

The search giant says the HTML5 video tag doesn't meet the site's needs. In a blog post, the company writes: “It's important to understand what a site like YouTube needs from the browser in order to provide a good experience for viewers as well as content creators."

Google has publicly backed HTML5 and other Web standards as the future of computing applications, and has offered an experimental HTML5 player on its site.

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