media outlets

After Colin Powell endorsed Senator Barack Obama for president on NBC's "Meet the Press" last month, the video was published online within minutes. In this case, it wasn't posted on YouTube. Rather, the network's online sister, MSNBC.com, showed the video hours before many television viewers could watch the interview for themselves.

Even the old media, apparently, can learn a few new-media tricks.

In the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, a new breed of hackers is conducting digital espionage.

They are among a growing number of investigators monitoring how traffic is routed through various countries, where Web sites are blocked and why it's happening. Now they are turning their scrutiny to a new weapon of warfare: cyber attacks.

Tracking wars isn't what many of the researchers set out to do. Many began intending to help people in countries that censor online content. But as the Internet has evolved, so has their mission.

Comcast fired back at the Federal Communications Commission on Thursday in its long-running duel with the agency. The cable-TV and Internet service provider filed suit in the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C.

The filing is the result of a FCC hearing last month in which Comcast was sanctioned for throttling back the broadband speed of customers using the BitTorrent peer-to-peer file-sharing application. The FCC ordered Comcast to provide plans for equitably managing its bandwidth and to make its network-management policies public.

Comcast's View

Without much in the way of fanfare, Intel added three new multi-core processors to its product price list over the Labor Day weekend. The chipmaker's stealth launch of the new low-cost chips followed price cuts at rival Advanced Micro Devices, which recently lowered the cost of selected Phenom X4, triple-core X3, and Athelon X2 processors.

To counter recent blog reports predicting that its Xperia 1 smartphone would miss this year's holiday shopping season, Sony Ericsson told media outlets this week that its first-ever Windows Mobile device will be released in the fourth quarter of 2008.

The new multimedia handset, which will feature a three-inch color display, slide-out Qwerty keyboard, Wi-Fi radio and GPS-based navigation, will be available for use on selected high-speed (HSDPA/HSUPA) cellular networks worldwide before the end of this year, the company said.

Hillcrest Labs has submitted a patent-infringement complaint against Nintendo and its popular Wii game system with the U.S. International Trade Commission, and said it has filed a separate patent-infringement suit against Nintendo in the U.S. District Court in Maryland.

"While Hillcrest Labs has a great deal of respect for Nintendo and the Wii, Hillcrest Labs believes that Nintendo is in clear violation of its patents and has taken this action to protect its intellectual property rights," the company said.

A new application enabling Apple's iPhone to share EDGE or 3G Internet connections with other wireless devices briefly appeared in Apple's App Store, only to be pulled minutes later.

The Netshare app by Nullriver is based on SOCKS -- an Internet protocol that enables client-server applications to transparently employ the services of a network firewall. Netshare essentially converts any iPhone into a portable Wi-Fi hotspot, with all Wi-Fi-enabled devices able to share a broadband Internet connection wherever a cellular signal is available.

Marco Brazzoduro in openDemocracy:

China's State Intellectual Property Office has denied a flurry of media reports suggesting the government agency was investigating Microsoft for discriminatory software pricing. In a statement briefly posted at its official Web site, according to media sources, the SIPO noted that it has never undertaken any market-monopoly investigations before, and has no plans to do so because its mandate from Chinese government agencies is "to investigate and research domestic piracy issues."

I am currently attending Google and the National Journal’s 21st Century Campaign event - the second of what is sure to be 1,000,000 + DC-area events about the impact of “new media” on the upcoming Presidential Election.