Excerpt from InforWorld article:

The sun came out for EarthLink’s Philadelphia Wi-Fi network on Thursday even as prospects for its San Francisco project remain shrouded in fog.

Wireless Philadelphia, a nonprofit group formed by the city of Philadelphia, has approved the 15-square-mile Wi-Fi test network EarthLink built, opening the door for the operator to finish building out a 135-square-mile network covering the city.

The approval comes just a month after EarthLink announced it would scale back its city Wi-Fi initiative, focusing on existing and large cities for the rest of the year. The company has seven or eight cities under contract now and is negotiating with five more, Vice President of Product Strategy and Marketing Cole Reinwand said last week. It decided to stagger its Wi-Fi expansion to conserve resources, he said.

Residents can already use the 15-square-mile network in Philadelphia. The full network is expected to be complete in the third quarter. EarthLink is financing, building and managing the network and will share revenue with Wireless Philadelphia, which will offer cut-rate access for low-income people.

For six months, customers of a 1Mbps will pay an introductory rate of $6.95 per month, which bumps up to $19.95 thereafter. A faster 3Mbps service is available for $9.95 for the first six months and $21.95 after that.

City parks will have free access, and low-income residents can sign up for service at $9.95 per month, before promotions. Customers can also pay for service on an hourly, daily or three-day basis.

The Philadelphia Wi-Fi network is notable because when announced, it set off a storm of controversy that resulted in a Pennsylvania law requiring municipalities to receive approval from incumbent telecommunications operators before building Wi-Fi networks. The law was created after incumbents complained that by financing Wi-Fi networks, cities were building networks that would compete with their businesses.

The San Francisco project, which has drawn attention partly because of Google’s planned involvement as provider of a free citywide service, has run into fierce opposition from activists as well as some local elected officials. The Budget and Finance Committee of the city and county’s Board of Supervisors held a hearing on the contract on May 14 and will meet again on the issue in July.

From Sony press release:

Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) today announced that the next regular system software update for the PLAYSTATION3 (PS3) computer entertainment system (version 1.80) will be available on Thursday, May 24, and will add upscaling of PlayStation/PlayStation2 games and DVD movies up to 1080p resolution. Upscaling games requires an HDMI or component AV cable, while upscaling DVD-ROM (including DVD Video content) requires an HDMI cable and HDMI compatible TV set.

The latest firmware update also gives PS3 owners more flexibility to enjoy their digital entertainment content where they want to. The Remote Play feature for using a PSP(PlayStationPortable) system to access photos, videos, and music on a PS3 systems hard drive will be available from outside of a users own home via any Wi-Fi Internet connection, upon the next PSP firmware update. To take advantage of this feature, users will have to update their PSP systems firmware to the next version, 3.50, slated for release next week.  Additionally, PS3 can now play back media content stored on a personal computer or digital video recorder with Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) capability over a home network.

Version 1.80 also allows PS3 users on a home network to stream media content (photos, videos, and music) stored on a DLNA-enabled device onto their PS3 system. DLNA is a system that enables digital devices such as personal computers, DVRs, and TVs to be connected to a network and share data with other connected devices, in this case a PS3 system. This new functionality reinforces the value of PS3 system as a home entertainment hub.

Other feature upgrades include: copying saved data to a memory card ; photo printing, viewing, and editing (currently, select Epson printers connected via USB are compatible) ; and users will find a new type of slideshow for displaying photos, zoom functionality and the option to crop images.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project has released a study that says “The volume of spam is growing in Americans’ personal and workplace email accounts, but email users are less bothered by it.”.  The study goes on to say, “Users have become more sophisticated about dealing with spam; fully 71% of email users use filters offered by their email provider or employer to block spam. Users also report less exposure to pornographic spam, which to many people is the most offensive type of unsolicited email. Spam has not become a significant deterrent to the use of email, as some observers speculated it might when unsolicited email first began flooding users’ inboxes several years ago. But it continues to degrade the integrity of email. Some 55% of email users say they have lost trust in email because of spam.”

They study, done by phone with 2,200 American adults earlier this year, shows that 37% say they are getting more spam in their personal email account and 51% say they have noticed no change. 29% say they are getting more spam in their work email account, and 55% say they have noticed no change.

View the study here

From ZDNet.com:

A key Internet standards body gave preliminary approval on Tuesday to a powerful technology designed to detect and block fake e-mail messages. It’s called DomainKeys Identified Mail, and it promises to give Internet users the best chance so far of stanching the seemingly endless flow of fraudulent junk e-mail.

Yahoo, Cisco Systems, Sendmail and PGP Corporation are behind the push for DomainKeys, which the companies said in a joint statement will provide “businesses with heightened brand protection by providing message authentication, verification and traceability to help determine whether a message is legitimate.”

The draft standard that the Internet Engineering Task Force adopted is more promising than most other anti-spam and antiphishing technologies because it harnesses the power of cryptographically secure digital signatures to thwart online miscreants.

The way it works is straightforward: if PayPal sends an e-mail notice to customers about their accounts, the company’s outgoing mail server will quietly insert a digital signature into the legitimate message. (Because the signature is embedded in the message headers, it’s generally not visible to human readers.)

Let’s say the recipient has a Yahoo Mail address. Yahoo’s mail servers can automatically check PayPal’s Internet domain name listing to verify that the digital signature is valid and the message truly originated at Paypal.com. Signatures by authorized third parties are permitted as well, which is useful for outsourced e-mail.

If the signature doesn’t check out, the message is probably spam–or a phishing attack designed to try to fool someone into divulging their details about their PayPal account. While the DomainKeys standard doesn’t actually specify that messages with invalid signatures should be flagged as junk, Internet service providers are likely to do just that.

From MercuryNews.com: 

Sprint Nextel Corp. has teamed with Pandora Media Inc., a popular online music service, to deliver personalized streaming radio to its mobile phone users. Pandora is a free Internet-based radio service that lets people create stations based on their favorite artists and other songs it finds that match in style. The music service has attracted 6.9 million users since launching in November 2005 and was recently banned, along with a dozen other popular media Web sites, such as YouTube and MySpace, from the Defense Department’s computer system because of network bandwidth concerns.

Pandora’s Internet radio service now will be available beyond computers - on Sprint beginning Wednesday. It will be free for the first 30 days of use but will cost an additional $2.99 per month with a Sprint data plan. The service will work initially on five phone models but will expand to all high-speed data phones sold by Sprint by the end of June, the company said.

Sprint is the first mobile carrier to offer Pandora, the companies said. But if the Oakland-based startup has its way, other cellular networks will follow suit.

“We knew that if we wanted to be radio with a capital ‘R,’ we have to be everywhere, and not just on the Internet,” said Pandora founder Tim Westergren. “We knew we had to make it mobile.”

Pandora is expanding to other devices as well. Also starting Wednesday, its music streams can be directly tapped from Sonos Inc.’s home digital music system.

Pandora, however, faces a potentially life-threatening expense of music royalty fees that a panel of copyright judges recently approved for Internet radio providers. The new royalty rates are set to kick in July 15 but are being contested by a coalition of companies, including Pandora, Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp.

“If those rates don’t change, business doesn’t make sense for us anymore,” Westergren said.

Reports are all over today that Sony may be bringing an 80 Gb version of its PlayStaion3 to the U.S..  The Associated Press is syaing that Sony is “considering selling it in the U.S. and elsewhere“.

It is currently slated to be released for sale on june 16th in South Korea.

Currently, the 60Gb PlayStation3 is the only model available in the U.S. as the 20-gigabyte version has been discontinued in the United States.

From SiliconValley.com:

Amazon.com will launch a digital music store later this year, offering millions of songs from more than 12,000 record labels, including the entire digital catalogue of major label EMI, the companies said today.

The Seattle online retailer said it will sell MP3s without digital rights management (DRM), or software that prevents songs from being transferred from computers to multiple portable devices or burned to CDs.

“Our MP3-only strategy means all the music that customers buy on Amazon is always DRM-free and plays on any device,” Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and chief executive, said in a statement.

Amazon will enter a market dominated by Apple’s iTunes online store, which last month announced similar plans to sell songs without DRM, and from labels including EMI. Yet online retail has been the core of Amazon’s business since its 1995 launch.

This morning, a memo (supposedly internal) was sent to some Apple employees saying that both the iPhone and Leopard had been pushed back again. The iPhone was allegedly delayed until October and Leopard—previously delayed from June to October—was now delayed until January. 

As it turns out, the internal memo was (apparently) a hoax. Apple sent out a follow-up memo to its employees saying:

You may have received what appeared to be a Bullet*News from Apple. This communication is fake and did not come from Apple. Apple is on track to ship iPhone in late June and Mac OS X Leopard in October.

According to Apple, both the iPhone and Leopard are still on track to ship as previously expected.

Excerpt from NY Post:

Yahoo! hired veteran dealmaker Blake Jorgensen to be its new chief financial officer yesterday in a sign the struggling Internet titan may be looking for its own deals, despite overtures from software giant Microsoft.

Jorgensen, who co-founded tech-focused investment bank Thomas Weisel Partners in 1998, replaces Susan Decker, who was promoted last December to oversee advertising sales in a management shake-up.

Jorgensen has previously served as an adviser on some of Yahoo!’s biggest deals, including the $300 million acquisition of Inktomi in 2002 and the $4.5 billion deal for GeoCities in 1999, according to data provider Capital IQ.

Since then Yahoo!, whose shareholders are upset at its stagnant stock price, has struggled on the acquisition front, losing DoubleClick to Google and flirting with - but unable to seal a deal for - social networking site Facebook.

Losing DoubleClick actually helped propel Yahoo!’s most recent deal, last month’s $680 million purchase of the 80 percent of online ad exchange Right Media that it didn’t already own.

“Blake has a strong track record of building and running a successful investment-banking franchise serving many clients in the Internet and technology industries,” Yahoo! chief Terry Semel said in a statement.

“His broad financial, operating and strategic experience, which complements the deep financial expertise of our existing team, will make him a valuable addition to Yahoo!’s senior management.”

Toby Coppel, who previously led Yahoo!’s mergers-and-acquisitions team, was appointed managing director of Europe. The company’s deal team will now report directly to Jorgensen.

“The industry has evolved so dramatically that there’s a much larger opportunity to pair up solid businesses with one another,” Jorgensen told Bloomberg News yesterday.

“We’re seeing much, much better opportunities than existed back in the bubble days of 2000 .”

Earlier this month, The Post reported that Microsoft has stepped up its efforts to acquire Yahoo!, going so far as to make an informal offer over dinner three months ago that Yahoo! executives rejected outright.

And while sources say Microsoft is still interested in a deal, Yahoo! executives are content to see how its new search-advertising platform, Project Panama, performs over the next quarter or two before revisiting the idea of such a transformative deal.