New Wi-Fi spec challenges Bluetooth

The WiFi Alliance has unveiled a wireless networking specification, which will enable devices to establish simple peer-to-peer wireless connections without the need for a wireless router or hotspot, reports PCWorld.

WiFi Direct has a wide array of potential uses, many of which encroach on Bluetooth territory and threaten to make the competing wireless protocol obsolete. The new spec, previously referred to by the codename 'WiFi peer-to-peer', will be finalised soon and the WiFi Alliance expects to begin certifying devices as WiFi Direct compliant by mid-2010.

"WiFi Direct represents a leap forward for our industry. WiFi users worldwide will benefit from a single-technology solution to transfer content and share applications quickly and easily among devices, even when a WiFi access point isn't available," says WiFi Alliance executive director Edgar Figueroa.

A number of lawsuits have been filed, including two in federal court in Northern California, that allege both negligence and false claims on the part of Microsoft and T-Mobile, states CNET.

The suits come amid a massive outage of the service that powers the Sidekick, which has hampered data service since early this month and left many users without access to their calendars, address books and other information.

At one point, Microsoft and T-Mobile indicated that any data not yet recovered was probably lost permanently; however, the companies said they were more optimistic about being able to bring back users' information.

A Pennsylvania organisation that helps develop affordable housing learned a painful lesson about the hazards of online banking using the Windows operating system when a notorious Trojan siphoned almost $480 000 from its account, says The Register.

News reports say $479 247 vanished from a bank account belonging to the Cumberland County Redevelopment Authority after it was hit by Clampi. The Trojan gets installed by tricking users into clicking on a file attached to e-mail and then lies in wait for the victim to log in to online financial Web sites. The authority has so far been able to recover $109 467 of the stolen loot.

The theft is part of a rash of online heists that have stolen millions of dollars from businesses and non-profit organisations. While circumstances are different in each case, they all point to a single point of failure: each theft relied on the successful compromise of a Windows-based system.

The Technology Strategy Board is to trial applications over next-generation optical fibre to test whether consumers and businesses would use the extra bandwidth provided by the technology, reports Computing.co.uk.

The board is looking to find out whether residential customers would make use of the sort of services that a high-bandwidth network would enable. BT and other ISPs fear their expensive build out of network infrastructure will be underutilised and fail to generate sufficient revenue to justify the upfront capital costs.

UK incumbent Telco BT has said the commercial case for a full rollout is questionable, even in areas of high density. However, its recent commitment to deploy a variant of fibre-to-the-home, called fibre-to-the-premises, gets around the problem.