Pulic Wi-Fi even less secure that previously thought

Are you sat in a coffee shop sipping a skinny latte and browsing the web right now? If you are then you might need to be a bit more careful about how you use the the web when you're out and about.

According to this article from The Register it looks like public wi-fi is even less secure than already thought and you're particularly vulnerable to attack if you use services such as G-mail or Yahoo mail and anything else that uses a session cookie.

It's not all bad news and you can protect yourself by using permanent encryption while using these types of online services and if you're serious about protecting your net connection when you're out & about check out the Defcon Survival Guide to find out what you can do to stay secure.

Go-fast stripes

According to Which? magazine it seems that many of are not getting the broadband speeds that we signed up for.

In one of the test carried out Which? found that broadband packages that promised speeds of 8Mbps were actually only achieving and average of 2.7Mbps on tests of 300 customers net connections.

With ever increasing competition over broadband costs it's worth knowing how much bandwidth you're really getting and who you should switch to if you're not.

To test your broadband connection click here to do the Broadband Speed Test and if you're thinking of switching suppliers then try out the broadband supplier comparison over at Think-Broadband.

Goldrush 2.0

As social media explodes and we all use the web to do lots of different things so there's a second explosion in dot com mania. This time round things look a little more encouraging with folks like Last.fm being snapped up by CBS from across the Atlantic.

Refreshingly, there also seems to be a number of UK ventures that are reaping the rewards from the uptake of web 2.0(try www.moo.com to print your own business cards from pics on your flickr account - it's cheap too!).

Moo's not the only dot com success over here and there is a list of top ten UK dot-commers worth watching over at the Guardian Media section today.

Selling at a profit

The, some say, ‘original’ eCommerce site Amazon.com has seen profits grow to over £37M in the three months to June this year - this is an increase of 35% from the previous year.

It’s not only the results that are big – the Amazon share price shot up 11% after the announcement of the results yesterday and perhaps providing a good source of revenue was the two million pre-orders that they took for the final Harry Potter tome.




I think what this demonstrates is that internet retail has really now come of age, and that some (only some!) of those that crawled out the sea at the time of dotcom madness are now very viable businesses.

Amazon only hit profit for the first time in the last three months of 2001… and to give you some context it made a loss of over half a billion dollars ($545m) the year before. Not bad for a company that had been in the red since 1995 - now that’s a long term investment…