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A federal court of appeals ruled today that cable companies cannot have exclusive rights to deliver cable or Internet service to members of an apartment community, or in buildings that they, themselves, have specifically wired. The ruling upheld a previous FCC ruling which banned the exclusive agreements, deeming them anti-competive and harmful to consumers. As a result, [...]

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A Russian Internet investment firm has invested $200 million in Facebook, giving the social networking company a cash buffer during the recession and pegging its value at $10 billion.

thanosk sends in a story at Wired Magazine about how online culture is, in many ways, trending toward communal behavior. Sharing and collaboration have become staples of active participation on the Internet, while not necessarily incorporating a particular ideology or involving a government. 'Most people in the West, including myself, were indoctrinated with the notion that extending the power of individuals necessarily diminishes the power of the state, and vice versa. In practice, though, most polities socialize some resources and individualize others. Most free-market economies have socialized education, and even extremely socialized societies allow some private property. Rather than viewing technological socialism as one side of a zero-sum trade-off between free-market individualism and centralized authority, it can be seen as a cultural OS that elevates both the individual and the group at once. The largely unarticulated but intuitively understood goal of communitarian technology

DST's 1.96% holding values the social networking site at $10bn, down from $15bn when microsoft bought a $240m stake in 2007Russian internet company Digital Sky Technologies (DST) has snapped up a small stake in Facebook for $200m (£125.5m) in a deal that values the five-year-old social networking site, which has yet to make a profit, at $10bn.Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said he wanted to use DST's experience in making money from its millions of social networking users across Russia and Eastern Europe to help propel his business, which has over 200 million users worldwide, into the black.'These guys really have a unique profile, they are not the traditional investors that you get at a stage like this,' said Zuckerberg. 'They have a lot of experience that they can bring.'DST, run by Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner, has also indicated that it is willing to spend at least another $100m buying out existing Facebook shareholders as part of a plan that would allow current and former sta

...20 Mbps until the end of June a GPS-enabled PDA with the map of Romania and a wireless modem. The ...

Virgin America's CEO says airline sees 12 to 15 percent of passengers using in-flight Internet access across airline: As I keep saying, VA has just 28 aircraft (all Airbus A319 and A320s) and flies just 100 scheduled routes per day. However, this number reported by Joe Sharkey in his New York Times travel column is quite useful. Virgin America's passenger traffic isn't available; it ranks below the top 10 airlines' by passengers that the Bureau of Transportation Statistics reports on monthly. The airline's two Airbus types can carry either 125 or 150 passengers, although configurations can reduce those counts. The airline did report an 81 percent load factor in the fourth quarter of 2008. If I take a lot of variables into account, let us assume that VA flies roughly 110 people on average on each flight each day given the capacity and load factor. That's about 330,000 per month or 4m per year. (In contrast, No. 10 carrier SkyWest put about 1.4m passengers on its aircraft in each of Ja

(Telecompaper) German ISP United Internet's subsidiary 1&1 Internet and German telecom services provider Freenet have signed an agreement for the acquisition of Freenet's DSL business and a preferred distribution partnership for DSL products. 1&1 Internet will acquire all freenetDSL and freenetKomplett contracts, equal to around 700,000 customers, while Freenet will retain customers of associated companies and wholesale partners. This will see United Internet's total DSL customer base grow to more than 3.5 million, making it the second largest DSL provider in Germany behind Deutsche Telekom, while passing Arcor/Vodafone, which had 3.22 million DSL customers on 31 March. The agreed purchase price is EUR 123 million, payable as EUR 70 million in cash and 4.58 million United Internet shares. To the extent the trading price of a United Internet share is below EUR 12 at the time of the technical migration of Freenet's broadband contracts, a compensating per-share cash amount, capped at EUR

Financial analysts at Morgan Stanley see Apple as the long term winner in the mobile Internet market, and have raised the company's target stock price from US$105 to $180. iphone demand through 2010, according to analyst Kathryn Huberty, is being underestimated by the market and will help drive Apple's stock value up.

The world today is very different from that of just a decade ago, thanks to our ability to readily access enormous quantities of information. Tools that we take for granted--social networks, Internet search engines, online maps with point-to-point directions, and online libraries of songs, movies, books and photographs--were unavailable just a few years ago. We owe the arrival of this information age to the rapid development of remarkable technologies in high-speed communications, data processing and--perhaps most important of all but least appreciated--digital data storage.Each type of data storage has its Achilles’ heel, however, which is why computers use several types for different purposes. Most digital data today, such as the information that makes up the Internet, resides in vast farms of magnetic hard disk drives (HDDs) and in the HDDs of individual computers. Yet these drives, with their rotating disks and moving read/write heads, are unreliable and slow. Loss of data be

Computer users could be forgiven if they kept their machines off on April 1. Since it first appeared last November, the malicious software known as the Conficker worm has established itself as one of the most powerful threats the Internet has seen in years, infecting an estimated 10 million computers worldwide. The malware slipped into machines running the Windows operating system and waited quietly for April Fools’ Day (the timing did not go unnoticed), when it was scheduled to download and execute a new set of instructions. Although no one knew what was to come, the worm’s sophistication provided a stark example of how the global malware industry is evolving into a model of corporate efficiency. At the same time, it raised calls for security researchers to steal a trick from their black hat counterparts.A worm takes advantage of security holes in ubiquitous software--in this case, microsoft Windows--to spread copies of itself. Conficker, though, was a strikingly advanced