July 7, 2005

GeekCoffee Man charged with wireless trespassing CNN - Police have charged a Florida man with a third-degree felony charge, after he was arrested for accessing a St. Petersburg resident's wireless Internet network without permission. According to the police, Benjamin Smith III was seen by Richard Dinon outside Dinon's home on the night of April 20, 2005, sitting in a parked SUV and using a laptop computer. When Dinon went outside to deposit his trash, Smith quickly closed the laptop and tried to hide it. Dinon also stated that he later observed foreign icons on his home computer screen, and suspected that Smith, 41, may have been using his network. He called police and an officer confronted Smith at 11:30 p.m., two hours after the initial sighting. "The arresting officer wasn't initially sure a violation took place," said George Kajtsa of the St. Petersburg Police Department. "He consulted our legal staff and they looked up the relevant statute." The charge, unauthorized access to a computer network, applies to all varieties of computer network breaches, and gives prosecutors considerable leeway depending on the severity. It carries a potential sentence ranging from probation to 5 years in prison. 6:42:01 PM

Browsers add BitTorrent support ZDNet - Norwegian Web browser company Opera released a new test version of its software Thursday that supports the BitTorrent peer-to-peer technology, one of the most popular tools in the file-swapping world. Not far behind is an independent project aimed at providing BitTorrent support for the widely used Mozilla Firefox Web browser, although that has yet to release software publicly. Taken together, the two projects provide a powerful step toward legitimacy for a technology that has been tarnished somewhat by its association with copyright piracy, but which is increasingly being used for wholly legal purposes. 6:39:44 PM

Yahoo Expands Mobile Search with Text Messaging PC Magazine - Yahoo on Thursday is launching more ways for users to retrieve search results from their mobile phones. The Sunnyvale, Calif., company is introducing an SMS (Short Message Service) option in which users can send a text message to grab specific search results in areas such as weather, stock quotes and local business information. It also is extending its broader Web search feature for mobile-phone browsers by supporting WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) 2.0-enabled devices, company officials said. For the expanded mobile-search options, Yahoo is using search shortcuts in order to provide results to targeted queries. The shortcuts, which bring back specific information such as a weather report or a stock quote rather than a list of links, already are offered through Yahoo Search accessed through the desktop Web browsers. 6:38:20 PM

Report: Consumers Changing Online Habits Due to Spyware TechNewsWorld - So far, the types of Web sites that users are avoiding are mainly peer-to-peer networks and sites about which they know little. To date, core e-commerce uses appear to be unaffected by the concerns, with consumers confident that well-known sites -- from eBay to Amazon and with many in between -- are spyware free. 6:36:04 PM