Stories about: Island

Rick Hill won't say where he launched his "wardriving" balloon on Friday, but he will tell you that it got a pretty good look at about 370 wireless networks, while scanning up and down the Las Vegas Strip.

Mozilla has released the first preview of Firefox 3.1, the fast-track update that the open-source company has pegged with a late 2008 or early 2009 ship date.

Hong Kong and China are the "most dangerous" places to surf the Web based on country domain, according to McAfee's annual assessment of the riskiest and safest places in cyberspace.

Responding to the momentum around data portability, MySpace has launched its own "Data Availability" effort with big-name partners Yahoo, eBay, Twitter and fellow News Corp. unit Photobucket.

In this week's show: Vietnam launches a telecom satellite, Samsung introduces the Soul, the European Commission asks for video game ratings, Honda's Asimo robot has a new job, technology runs the Boston Marathon, disgruntled eBay users plan a boycott and Sony shows off a razor thin OLED display.

While CNN recently faced distributed denial-of-service attacks from Chinese hackers angry about the television network's coverage of a recent Chinese crackdown in Tibet, Chinese security officials remain worried hackers will strike while the Olympic Games are being held in Beijing.

Vietnam launched its first satellite over the weekend to provide telecommunications, broadcasting and Internet links across the country.

Microsoft held out the peace pipe to the Open Source community when the company announced that its offering free access to its most important APIs and formerly proprietary protocols, and will offer more support for open standards. Why has Microsoft seen the light? I have a one-word answer: Google.

Jonathan Oxer is technical director of a Web application development company called Internet Vision Technologies and for the past couple of years has been president of the Linux Australia community group. At January's Linux.conf.au in Melbourne he presented a tutorial entitled Hardware / Software Hacking: Joining Second Life to the Real World. Computerworld recently spoke to Oxer about how he is knocking down the boundaries between the real and virtual world. Oxer also sheds light on his how his lifetime obsession with electronics has transformed his home-life into a software controlled environment.

The Consumer Electronics Show trade show is showcasing this year's batch of better, cheaper and cooler gadgets. Services that enable ever more powerful mobile capabilities abound. Wireless networks are popping up everywhere. It's now possible to travel around town, across the country and all over the world, working and playing online thanks to the collective efforts of thousands of companies and the enthusiasm of millions of users.

The Taiwan government plans to work closely with the island's chip makers to move forward on advanced chip production using 18-inch round silicon wafers.