Atheros plans to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs, replacing it with one that lays more golden eggs.

The company is a leading seller of wireless fidelity chips. Wi-Fi chips in laptop PCs, cell phones and other devices let those products connect to the Internet wirelessly.

Atheros sells all standards of Wi-Fi, including an older Wi-Fi standard known as 802.11g. It’s now selling chips for the cutting-edge, faster Wi-Fi standard, 802.11n. Read the rest of this entry »

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Google is pushing its voice-recognition technology to Apple’s iPhone first, before devices running its own Android mobile platform.

The New York Times offered photographs of Google employees Vic Gundotra and Gummi Hafsteinsoon using an iPhone for a voice search. The free application was expected to be available on Apple’s App Store on Friday. Google reportedly will soon offer the technology for other devices, presumably including the T-Mobile G1, which uses Android.

“This is an expansion of types of applications Google has already been developing,” said Greg Sterling, principal analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence. “Google has GOOG411, which is the underlying technical engine. They also have a voice-search client for the BlackBerry which is limited to maps. So this is an evolutionary step.”

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The Penang Government will proceed with a free state-wide WiFi initiative under its Wireless@Penang project.

Jelutong MP Jeff Ooi said the state would proceed with the project as long as there was no conclusive evidence of health risks posed by the initiative.

“There will always be dissenting views and it is only fair that we engage them and share our information. From our perspective, it is a measured risk but we have to do things for the larger group of society.

“We do not expect to fulfil everyone’s wishes and wants but we intend to continue with steps to face any questions or doubts arising from the public,” Ooi said after a public forum on the issueon Saturday.

Chief Minister Lim Guan Eng, who launched the forum, said Wireless@Penang was an important step to provide the basic necessities to transform Penang into an international city. Read the rest of this entry »

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Take the innards of an Atom-based Asus Eee PC and fit it into a desktop machine, and essentially that’s what you get with the Eee Box.

However, before you dismiss it as a severely underpowered desktop PC, think of it in this way — the Eee Box has the potential to be a very cheap, small, low-powered ­multimedia device to stream to your HDTV.

The Eee Box’s aspirations to be a part of your home theatre system is clear from its slim black (or white) design that looks a lot like a Nintento Wii, with it’s upright standing design.

If you need further proof, take a look inside the box — the Eee Box actually comes with a mounting plate that screws into the standard Vesa mounting points of most HDTVs (the screw holes that are usually meant to screw in custom wall mounts).

So, you can mount the tiny computer neatly on the back of your HDTV and turn it into a full-blown home multimedia machine.

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The Wii system is in a league of its own for a variety of reasons today, chief among them a unique control scheme and incredible sales numbers that dwarf the competition month over month.

Another differentiating factor in the Wii column is also the fact that price cuts will probably never come to the system, as they have with the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

Chief among the reasoning behind that decision is the fact that price cuts send mixed messages to the customer, said Nintendo president Satoru Iwata. Read the rest of this entry »

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Two researchers from the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany, have discovered a method of bypassing the Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) encryption used by many wireless routers.

The exploit takes advantage of a weakness on networks that use WPA with TKIP (Temporal Key Integrity Protocol, a security algorithm based on key switching that is used to strengthen the WPA encryption) by circumventing the algorithm that encrypts the Wi-Fi data packets.

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