NetStumbler.com

Learning Chinese is now made easy by Skype. Stephanie Xu from Beijing has been teaching Chinese for over a month now and lauded the high sound quality of the VoIP application. Xu charges 80 renminbi for her online tutorial sessions or 20 renminbi less than what her offline students pay. The reason: it saves her an hour of commuting from her home in the city’s suburbs to downtown Beijing, where she holds her face-to-face classes.

Language schools in China have also turned to Skype to shore up their business. Beijing-based eChineseLearning, which was founded last year, provides 50-minute daily lessons for a subscription fee of $100 per month. The online sessions are handled by teachers from Beijing Language and Culture University and other schools who are serving eChineseLearning on a part-time basis. In addition to Skype, the tutors use the voice chat features of Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger and Windows Live Messenger. Michael Zhong, a sales executive for the school, said, at present, eChineseLearning’s students number about a hundred, most of them hailing from the U.S.
Via [pcworld.com]

People who work in and visit the City of London can now have broadband Wi-Fi connection anytime, thanks to a network provided by The Cloud, Europe’s largest Wi-Fi network operator. “We feel it is important to provide this technology to maintain our position as the world’s leading international financial centre,” remarked Michael Snyder, who chairs the City of London’s Policy Committee. “The City is a fast-moving and dynamic environment and we are responding to the increasing time pressures faced by City workers by providing the technology for them to stay up to date, wherever they are in the City.”

The network is equipped by BelAir Networks’ advanced mobile broadband mesh technology, which connected 127 nodes installed in lamp posts and street signs. Over the next month, The Cloud, together with Nokia, will hold promotional activities, including free access for the first month. Aside from high speed Internet and email access, the network promises voice, music, video, gaming and other entertainment services over Wi-Fi, and can work with service providers such as O2, BT Openzone, iPass, Truphone and Skype.
Via [govtech.net]

Vonage has petitioned the U.S. Appeals Court for the Federal Circuit to defer its appeal and order a retrial of its patent dispute with Verizon. The company cited the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the KSR International v. Teleflex suit, which stated that the current test for patent obviousness is too stiff for suspect patents to be challenged. “According to the Supreme Court’s ruling, if you patent an orange picker, and then someone else comes along and puts a glove on it to protect the oranges against bruising, you can’t patent this new invention as ‘novel’ as it is just an obvious improvement of the original invention. The Supreme Court’s decision thus focuses on keeping only what’s truly novel and original protected by patents,” said Vonage chief legal officer Sharon O’Leary.

In March, a jury found Vonage guilty of infringing three Verizon patents and told the VoIP startup to pay $58 million worth of damages as well as royalties on future sales. The Federal Circuit agreed last week to allow Vonage to continue signing up customers during the appeals process.

Verizon deputy general counsel John Thorne said Vonage’s latest action has “no merit. Thorne regarded it as “a delaying tactic to avoid final resolution of the appeal.” Verizon plans to submit a brief on May 2 in response to Vonage’s motion.
Via [zdnet.com]

With the ease in cracking the Wireless Equivalent Protection (WEP) code, many experts have recommended the use of Wi-fi Protected Access (WPA) to secure home wireless Internet networks. Unlike WEP, which hackers can breach in as little as 60 seconds, WPA appears to be a formidable protocol. “We have had a very close look at WPA and we can’t find anything to exploit,” said Erik Tews, one of the researchers at the Darmstadt Technical University in Germany who discovered a method to break into a WEP-equipped network much more quickly. A brute force dictionary attack may defeat WPA and its later variant, WPA2, but this would entail the hacker to use millions of different words or combinations of words to obtain the correct password. As such, AirDefense wireless security expert Amit Sinha is endorsing the use of a non-dictionary password with WPA. “If you use one which is long enough – at least 20 characters – then it becomes unfeasible for a hacker to mount a brute force attack, because finding your password would take longer than the entire history of the universe.”
Via [bbc.co.uk]

Scientists at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology are offering their WiPeer software for free. The downloadable application can wirelessly connect computers within 300 feet of each other inside buildings and within 900 feet outdoors without the use of routers. Through the wireless link, users can exchange photos, perform online chats, and send 700MB files in no more than 15 minutes.

The application arose from the dissertation by doctoral students Vadim Drabkin, Gabi Kliot and Alon Kama under the supervision of Professor Roy Friedman of the Technion Faculty of Computer Science. Friedman said: “We want to bring this to as many people as possible. When there are two computers in the same room, it doesn’t make sense that they must go out to the Internet to communicate. WiPeer’s main added value is the ability to keep things local.” WiPeer is seen as a possible application for cellphones the software will enable users to do away with operators and call people close by.
Via [networkworld.com]

Is a Fon subscription right for you? Fon is a start-up wireless broadband network that uses other people’s bandwidth to get its clients online. Currently many people use someone else’s open WiFi network to get online, a practice that is generally a violation of the subscriber’s service contract. But that may soon change. Time Warner Cable has signed a deal with Fon that lets its user share their unused bandwidth with Fon customers. Meaning that Fon customers can now use these WiFi services worldwide and, in some cases, the ISP and subscriber will see a small profit for sharing.
Via [forbes.com]