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AT&T will launch live mobile TV over the MediaFLO network in May, the carrier announced as the U.S. mobile industry prepared for a CTIA Wireless trade show in Las Vegas next week that is likely to put a big emphasis on entertainment.

The launch of AT&T Mobile TV will come about a year after AT&T's rival, Verizon Wireless, started offering the broadcast TV service. The two largest carriers in the U.S. have both embraced the FLO technology, from U.S. cellular pioneer Qualcomm, even as the European Union rallies around DVB-H (Digital Video Broadcast-Handheld), a standard backed by Nokia and others.

When it announced plans to use MediaFLO in February 2007, AT&T said it would launch the service in the fourth quarter of that year. Its statement on Thursday offered no explanation for the delay.

Qualcomm developed MediaFLO for broadcasting video and information over a network that's separate from the cellular system. MediaFLO USA, a wholly owned subsidiary of Qualcomm, has built a U.S. network that uses former TV channels. Programming is broadcast in real time and can include live events. Leaving that content to a dedicated network frees up cellular capacity for voice and data services. Mobile operators in Europe and Asia also have announced trials of FLO.

AT&T will offer FLO on two new handsets, the Vu from LG Electronics and the Access from Samsung Electronics. Programming will include shows from CBS Mobile, Fox Mobile, NBC 2GO, NBC News2Go, MTV, Comedy Central, ESPN Mobile TV and Nickelodeon, as well as two other channels that will be unique to AT&T, the company said.

In addition to FLO, the LG Vu will include a music player, 2-megapixel camera and Bluetooth. The Samsung Access will have a large landscape display, a camera, support for Bluetooth stereo headsets and other features. AT&T did not provide pricing for the service or handsets.

Verizon's basic channel lineup is the same as AT&T's. That carrier offers a package of eight channels for US$15 per month, and for $25 it throws in the V Cast V Pack, which includes unlimited airtime, e-mail and basic video clips. A limited package costs $13 per month and includes just Fox Mobile, NBC, NBC News and CBS Mobile. On Thursday, Verizon announced two exclusive channels: ESPN Radio and MTV Tr3s, a bilingual TV channel. The Verizon service is available in more than 50 markets across the U.S., according to MediaFLO USA.

Mobile video attracts fewer than 10 percent of all subscribers today, but it has strong potential, said Forrester Research analyst Charles Golvin. Lower prices, more content choices and a much wider selection of compatible phones could help it meet its potential. What's available on phones so far is mostly material edited down from TV, but in time, content producers should create shows and clips just for the tiny screen, Golvin said.

The business model for FLO is complicated, involving MediaFLO, content providers and advertisers, with revenue coming from both subscribers and advertisers, Golvin said. AT&T's launch might have been delayed by negotiations that went on longer than expected, he said.

The MacBook Air went first; a tiny Fujitsu laptop running Vista was hacked on the last day of the contest; but it was Linux, running on a Sony Vaio, that remained undefeated as conference organizers ended a three-way computer hacking challenge Friday at the CanSecWest conference.

Earlier this week, contest sponsors had put three laptops up for grabs to anyone who could hack into one of the systems and run their own software. A US$20,000 cash prize sweetened the deal, but the payout was halved each day as contest rules were relaxed and it became easier to penetrate the computers.

On day two, Independent Security Evaluators' Charlie Miller took the Mac after hitting it with a still-undisclosed exploit that targeted the Safari Web browser. After about two minutes work, Thursday, Miller took home $10,000, courtesy of 3Com's TippingPoint division, in addition to his new laptop.

It took two days of work, but Shane Macaulay, finally cracked the Vista box on Friday, with a little help from his friends.

Macaulay, who was a co-winner of last year's hacking contest, needed a few hacking tricks courtesy of VMware researcher Alexander Sotirov to make his bug work. That's because Macaulay hadn't been expecting to attack the Service Pack 1 version of Vista, which comes with additional security measures. He also got a little help from co-worker Derek Callaway.

Under contest rules, Macaulay and Miller aren't allowed to divulge specific details about their bugs until they are patched, but Macaulay said the flaw that he exploited was a cross-platform bug that took advantage of Java to circumvent Vista's security.

“The flaw is in something else, but the inherent nature of Java allowed us to get around the protections that Microsoft had in place,” he said in an interview shortly after he claimed his prize Friday. “This could affect Linux or Mac OS X.”

Macaulay said he chose to work on Vista because he had done contract work for Microsoft in the past and was more familiar with its products.

Although several attendees tried to crack the Linux box, nobody could pull it off, said Terri Forslof, a manager of security response with TippingPoint. “I was surprised that it didn't go,” she said.

Some of the show's 400 attendees had found bugs in the Linux operating system, she said, but many of them didn't want to put the work into developing the exploit code that would be required to win the contest.

Earlier, Miller said that he chose to hack the Mac because he thought it would be easiest target. Vista hacker Macaulay didn't dispute that assertion: “I think it might be,” he said.

VeriSign has raised the registration fee for domain names ending in .com and .net for the second time since the company took control of the top-level domains in 2006.

The security vendor said Thursday that the registry fee for .com would increase to $6.86 from $6.42, and the fee for .net would increase to $4.23 from $3.85. The increases are expected to take effect on Oct. 1, and are in line with VeriSign's agreement with ICANN, the U.S. organization in charge of managing the assignment of domain names and IP addresses, the company said.

In justifying the increase, VeriSign said traffic volume continues to increase with the emergence of consumer-driven services, the soaring number of Web-connected wireless devices, and the proliferation of technologies and services using the Domain Name System. The company says it processes a peak of more than 33 billion DNS queries per day, under normal traffic conditions.

In addition, the .com and .net infrastructures are continually being fortified against more sophisticated cyberattacks, VeriSign said. The company is deploying new proprietary security upgrades and monitoring tools to identify, track, and isolate malicious Internet traffic.

VeriSign plans to increase the capacity of its global Internet infrastructure by 10 times its current level by the year 2010, and increase its daily DNS query capacity to more than 4 trillion from 400 billion today, the company said. VeriSign also plans to increase the network bandwidth of its primary resolution centers around the world to more than 200 Gbps second from 20 Gbps.

VeriSign's last increase took effect on Oct. 15. At that time, the registry fee for .com increased to $6.42 from $6, and the fee for .net rose to $3.85 from $3.50.

It was the first registry fee increase for the two domain names since ICANN put the fee structure in place in 1999. Nevertheless, the increases were criticized by some as being unjustified.

See original article on InformationWeek.com