Do you take your wireless notebook with you when you hit the road?  Then you’ll be interested in Hotel Chatter’s Best WiFi Hotels 2006 list.  Check it out. Tomorrow, Hotel Chatter posts its 2006 listing of The Worst WiFi Hotels.

“Hotels have finally realized that WiFi is a must-have, something that tops the wish list of many potential guests. But the rush to quickly set-up hotel WiFi networks, coupled with the fact that wireless fidelity is still a fairly new technology, means that consistent wireless internet access, pricing, and service, is not a given across hotel brands, small hotel groups or even from the lobby to your room.

What’s more is that while charging hotel guests for WiFi certainly gives a hotel a bad rep, having “Free WiFi” plastered on your website and uttered by your reservation agents, no longer makes a hotel stand out from the pack.

This year, our Hotel WiFi report is all about how well a hotel’s WiFi network works, how the hotels service and support that network, and how conducive these hotels are to what we will call a “WiFi Friendly” environment. That’s right, in 06 hotels have to have a certain wireless je ne sais quoi to make this list. “

In a move that could ignite a major debate about consumer “fair use” of TV programming, Cablevision Systems will unveil plans to test a service that gives cable subscribers the ability to record and time-shift shows using existing digital set-top boxes.

Although it works just like TiVo and other digital video recorders (DVRs) — consumers choose in advance which shows to capture and can fast-forward through ads — the recording itself will be stored at the cable system, not on a hard drive in the consumer’s home.

The technology for what Cablevision calls its “remote storage digital video recorder” (RS-DVR) “is here today, and in Cablevision’s case, we can use it to put DVR functionality in more than 2 million digital cable homes instantaneously, without ever rolling a truck or swapping out a set-top box,” COO Tom Rutledge says in a statement.

It will be tested on Long Island (NY) in the second quarter in advance of a broad commercial rollout. The system will give each subscriber about 80 gigabytes of storage capacity — enough for about 45 hours of programming — on the central server. They’ll also be able to record two programs simultaneously while watching a previously recorded show.

Although pricing hasn’t been set, the company expects it to be less than what it charges for DVR, currently $9.95.

Cablevision’s plan is sure to irk TV networks and programmers. If it catches on, it would weaken their ability to sell reruns of their shows via Internet downloading or video on demand. They also have long held that recordings of their shows — particularly by commercial entities — violates their copyrights.

From Ben Worthen at CIO Magazine: 

What is this ball of colors? It is the North American Internet, or more specifically a map of just about every router on the North American backbone, (there are 134,855 of them for those who are counting). The colors represent who each router is registered to. Red is Verizon; blue AT&T; yellow Qwest; green is major backbone players like Level 3 and Sprint Nextel; black is the entire cable industry put together; and gray is everyone else, from small telecommunications companies to large international players who only have a small presence in the U.S. If you click on the map it will take you to much bigger version complete with labels that tell you the address of many of the routers.

 A few notes on reading the map. First, it is not geographic. Things on the right aren’t on the East Coast and so forth. It looks the way it looks for readability purposes. The lines are actual connections between routers, but the length of the lines, again, do not correspond to geographic distance. Also, you’ll notice four thick green dots on left. Those routers belong to Bell Canada. Ches says that they probably represent rings around major Canadian cities that all connect at a central point. And in fact if you open the big map that has the labels you can see that some of the routers have different city names in their addresses.

So what can we conclude by looking at this? For starters, while AT&T and Verizon are clearly the two biggest owners at the core (they dwarf Qwest, the other remaining baby bell), they don’t own anywhere near enough for us to be worried about a monopoly. Also, the cable companies really own very little of the core, which isn’t much of a surprise since they are primarily focused on the last mile. Nonetheless, it is startling to see.

Riya’s Beta should be starting soon. Check here.

Life’s Kodak moments captured on film - your parent’s 25th wedding anniversary, your first “set of wheels” or your son’s preschool stage debut - may be hard to locate from desktop folders.

Click-happy, amateur photographers can rejoice, for finding that elusive picture just became easy with Riya.com, a new photo search engine. It sorts photos using face and text recognition to determine who and what text is in the photo.

Pitted against the likes of Google’s Picasa and Yahoo’s Flickr, this Silicon Valley start-up is run by an Indian entrepreneur, Munjal Shah.  Riya’s software enables automatic labeling of images, while Flickr adopts a manual tag approach. “The technology we have developed is 70 per cent accurate in identifying images and will be free for users,” Shah said.

The tech start-up is considered hot property in Silicon Valley with acquisition rumours making the rounds. Reports say that tech giants Microsoft and Google have eyed buying out Riya.com, but Shah refused to comment stating legal reasons.

The tedious task of sorting pictures accumulated over the years is what prompted Shah to embark on this entrepreneurial adventure. “ I have 37,343 digital photos and after spending weeks organizing them, I realised that there had to be a better way,” he recalls.

Back on Jan. 29th, NotJust4Techs ran a post about the creation of StopBadware.org.  They just released their first reports and they are worth the read:

In addition to naming Kazaa, the StopBadware.org group, started by researchers from Harvard and Oxford universities, also named a video download manager distributed by Movieland.com, a spyware removal program from SpyAxe.com and Waterfalls 3 by Screensaver.com.

A corporate-backed watchdog group that monitors software for deceptive and abusive practices on Wednesday named a widely used file-sharing program and three other applications as violators of its guidelines.

Kazaa, which its producer Sharman Networks claims is the most popular program for sharing files over the Internet, “misleadingly advertises itself as spyware-free, does not completely remove all components during the uninstall process, interferes with computer use, and makes undisclosed modifications to other software,” according to a report from the group StopBadware.org.

The group, started by researchers from Harvard and Oxford universities, also named a video download manager distributed by Movieland.com, a spyware removal program from SpyAxe.com and Waterfalls 3 by Screensaver.com.

“We chose four quite common applications to highlight, and we have found that in each instance the applications do things to violate the guidelines,” said John Palfrey, a professor at Harvard Law School.

The report, the first to be released since StopBadware.org announced its formation in January, comes as critics say that spyware and other abusive software has emerged as a top scourge of Internet use.

Ever use www.freepay.com or any website connected with the Gratis Network?  You might want to read this:

New York’s attorney general sued an Internet company Thursday over the selling of e-mail addresses in what authorities say may be the biggest deliberate breach of Internet privacy ever.

Attorney General Eliot Spitzer accused Gratis Internet of selling personal information obtained from millions of consumers despite a promise of confidentiality.

The consumers thought they were simply registering to see a Web site offering free iPod music players or DVD movies and video games, Spitzer spokesman Brad Maione said. On sign-up pages, Gratis promised it “does not … sell/rent e-mails.'’

Instead of confidentiality, Spitzer said, Gratis sold access to their e-mail information to three independent e-mail marketers, and hundreds of millions of e-mail solicitations followed.

A company spokesman, George Thompson, said the allegations “are completely untrue.'’

He said Gratis hired Datran Media of New York City, a leading e-mail marketer, to manage “the logistics of marketing products and services via e-mail to Gratis’ own user base.'’ Datran and two other hired companies “at no time ever engaged in a sale or purchase of data,'’ Thompson said in a statement.

Gratis, based in Washington, D.C., always controlled and owned the users’ information and never profited from any sale of data, he said.

In a related lawsuit March 12, Spitzer accused Datran Media of using unauthorized personal data “mined'’ by other firms from about 6 million e-mail addresses nationwide. Datran agreed to reform its practices under a $1.1 million settlement.