Hyper-speed wireless Internet arrives

Japan's Kizuna satellite, successfully launched from the Tanegashima Island Space Centre, on a domestically developed Mitsubishi H-2A rocket, will introduce a new era of hyper-speed data communications across Asia, reports Inventor Spot.

Hyper-speed translates into 1.2Gbps: 150 times faster than the average high-speed ADSL connection rate (around 8Mbps). It's also 12 times faster than FTTP, or fibre optic communication delivery.

This means students, researchers or company employees in different Asian cities will be able to communicate with each other without experiencing any time lag.

The hacking group, Cult of the Dead Cow, has released a tool that should make Google hacking a little easier for novices, says The Washington Post.

Called Goolag, the open source software lets hackers use the Google search engine to scan Web sites for vulnerabilities. This is something that hackers have been doing for years, but it can be tricky work, involving custom scripts and tools that sift through the mountain of data available via Google.

The Cult of the Dead Cow is best known for creating the Back Orifice software10 years ago, which could be used to remotely control a Windows machine.

T-Mobile USA is testing an Internet telephony service in Dallas and Seattle that will replace consumers' wireline home phone service, says News.com.

Subscribers will be able to connect any regular home telephone to a T-Mobile router that will send calls over the Internet much the same way as services like Vonage operate.

The service costs $10 a month plus taxes and fees for unlimited domestic local and long-distance calls. But customers also have to be signed up for a T-Mobile wireless service costing at least $39.99 a month. The required router, which also provides access to the Internet, costs $50 after rebates. T-Mobile said existing phone numbers can be ported over to its service.

On Thursday, some Windows Vista users began finding Service Pack 1 (SP1) in Windows Update, even though the upgrade is not supposed to be available broadly until the middle of March, says ITWorld.

Microsoft acknowledged the error. "Yesterday, a build of SP1 was posted to Windows Update and it was inadvertently made available to a broad group. The build was intended only for our more technically advanced testers, and was meant to only be offered to those with a specific registry key set on their PC," Microsoft said in a statement. It also reiterated plans to make SP1 broadly available in mid-March.

Some customers on a Windows Vista forum reported that they successfully downloaded SP1 from Windows Update, but most others said the download did not work for them.