Old channels opened to broadband

A new communications tool that uses busy radio channels could enable broadband Internet services for wireless devices or hook up rural areas that cannot yet get fast Web access, reports News.com.

Inventor Joe Bobier says xMax is a very quiet radio system that uses radio channels already filled up with noisy pager or TV signals.

xMax can emit signals that are too weak to be picked up by normal antennas, but that can be "heard" by special aerials which know where to "listen", enabling dual usage of the same scarce radio spectrum.

xMax needs no special radio band of its own and can sit in the valuable low-frequency bands, which characteristically carry very far and through buildings.

The first xMax network is being built in Miami and Fort Lauderdale where one base station can deliver broadband Internet over a 100 square kilometre area.

China has joined international enforcement efforts against spam by adopting the London Action Plan on Spam Enforcement Collaboration, reports Silicon.com.

China is second only to the US in terms of contributing to the volume of global spam and was long seen as a haven for spam servers due to a lack of willingness on the part of its government to prioritise the problem or accept its responsibility.

A 22-year-old unnamed man has become the first person in the UK to be convicted for modifying a video games console.

The Cambridge graduate was sentenced at Caerphilly Magistrates Court in Wales to 140 hours of community service for selling modified Xbox consoles, reports BBC News.

The conviction is the first of its kind in the UK, where the modification of video games consoles has been an illegal practice since October 2003, when the UK enacted the EU Copyright Directive.

Consoles such as the Xbox can be modified by chips that are soldered to a console`s main circuit board to bypass copyright controls.

Security vulnerabilities have been discovered in a widespread Web service protocol which could allow an attacker to take control of a vulnerable server, reports Techworld.

According to GulfTech, the holes were discovered in XML-RPC For PHP and PEAR XML_RPC, which could affect a large number of Web applications such as PostNuke, Drupal, b2evolution and TikiWiki, but latest versions of the software contain fixes for the problem.

The Mozilla Foundation has confirmed that it has ported the popular Firefox browser to the Apple Mac OS running on the Intel-based processors, reports Techwhack.

Apple is due to release computers running Intel processors next year following an announcement that the company was ending its collaboration with IBM to use their PowerPC processors for Apple Computers.