Intel has announced a new power-saving technology called Remote Wake that will let outfitted computers doze in a power-saving mode until an appropriate message is received over the Internet, either via a VoIP call or another messaging medium. While the Wake on LAN protocol has been around for some years, allowing computers with the right Ethernet card and software to monitor a network even while sleeping for a Sleeping Beauty like magic kiss, Remote Wake goes far beyond that.

Intel has only released sketchy details--there's not even a link on their Web site--but Remote Wake would have to maintain a persistent network connection with a central server to function as Intel intends, as most computers in homes are behind Network Address Translation (NAT) gateways that prevent direct access. It's possible that a combination of UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) and Remote Wake are required to leave an external port on the Internet-facing side of the gateway active, that can be used to route traffic to the snoozing system.

The Transportation Security Administration is apparently trying to make our lives a bit easier while not reducing one aspect of the security theater that's more reality than acting. The TSA will, starting tomorrow, let you keep your laptop in a bag that provides a clear image.

The "checkpoint friendly" bags either have to open up in a butterfly or trifold style so that the laptop can lay flat and be seen from top to bottom as it passes through a scanner. Laptop sleeves are also acceptable.

Delta Airlines said today they'll put in-flight broadband on their entire fleet of 330 planes by 2009. The airline will use Aircell's Gogo Internet service, which hasn't yet launched in a production run on any craft.

American Airlines ran a public test flight a few weeks ago, and will launch service on its 15 trans-continental Boeing 767-200 craft. But that's still a test. Virgin America will launch Gogo later this year on its fleet, which numbers just 22 planes so far.

A California judge may have disrupted the way in which cellular carriers charge early termination fees (ETFs) to discover who want to exit a contract before the period they agreed to. Sprint was ordered to repay subscribers $18.2 million and stop collecting $54.7 million that subscribers had refused to pay.

ETFs have long been a point of contention. Carriers fought number portability for years, where cellular numbers could be as easily transferred among carriers as they could among landline providers. The mobile phone companies suspected that once customers could keep their number and escape, that there would be enormous churn. This has turned out to be true, with nearly 10 million subscribers leaving carriers each quarter, presumably for other carriers.

T-Mobile is the latest cellular carrier to realize that it's bad business--and bad for families--to present parents with the sticker shock of a multi-hundred-dollar bill the first month a kid text messages far beyond the plan for their cell phone.

The Family Allowances plan, which launches in August, lets parents set a variety of rules and controls over their kids' usage for a rate of $2 per month per line, which T-Mobile describes as "introductory." Other carriers charge more. The service allows limits to be set and modified for how many minutes are used, how many text messages sent and received, and the downloads carried out. Parents can also add specific numbers, like theirs, that may always be called. Limits on calls during certain times of day, and per-line blocking is also included. It works with both metered plans and unlimited plans.

print will release August 17th its Airave "femtocell," a tiny extension of their cellular network that instead of using their own tower backhaul relies on your home or office broadband network connection. Cellular networks comprise overlapping regions or cells. There are microcells for small areas, picocells for offices and buildings, and now femtocells for the home or small office.

The carrot for spending $100 on an Airave and $5 per month for the unit is that you can place unlimited domestic calls that originate through the unit for $10 per month for an individual line or $20 per month for a multi-line account (not including taxes). "Originate" is a key point: If you're placing or receiving a call outside its limited coverage and then move into its coverage area, you're charged for or have minutes counted for that call as under your normal plan. But if you place or receive a call while within its coverage, your call's minutes are under the Airave's umbrella even if you wander out.

A few days ago, I wrote about a fundamental flaw in the Domain Name Service (DNS) protocol that handles the lookup from human-readable names into machine-processed Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, advising all readers to determine their vulnerability and take action.

There's one more warning I should pass on, however. Because this flaw allows an attacker to poison the DNS for anyone whose system connects to an unpatched DNS server, an attacker can also bypass a protection built into encrypted Web sessions.

Do you run domain name service (DNS) nameservers in your company? Not sure? Go check. Now. Really. I mean it. DNS is the glue that binds the Internet, connecting human-readable names like www.pcworld.com to machine-assigned Internet Protocol (IP) numbers, like 172.32.0.155.

Security researcher Dan Kaminsky discovered an ancient flaw in how DNS works, one that could affect any DNS server in operation, and with help from others - significantly original DNS designer Paul Vixie of Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) - pulled together a secret meeting at Microsoft earlier this year that involved all major operating system and DNS server developers. Simultaneous work was performed to release patches all at the same time for every system, which happened just a few days ago.

San Francisco's information technology disaster has been averted. According to Wired's Threat Level blog, Mayor Gavin Newsom managed to convince a city IT employee charged with a number of cybercrimes to provide passwords that allowed administrators to regain full control of their FiberWAN network. Had he kept the passwords to himself, officials had indicated that the system might never have been fully accessible.

The employee alleged to have seized control of the system, Terry Childs, is also apparently the lead architect of that system. Which begs the question about who handed him the keys to the kingdom? An enormous breakdown occurred in what should be typical protocols to avoid this situation. Imagine if Childs had been hit by a bus with no alleged misdeeds involved?

SSDs (Solid State Drives) will change the face of mobile computing one day, by making high-capacity storage more reliable, dramatically increasing the battery life of laptops, and speeding up performance of reads and writes. But that day hasn't come yet.

SSDs use a fancier form of flash memory that's packaged with the same interface used for 2.5-inch laptop hard drives, and that's designed to handle the far higher amount of rewriting that a hard drive experiences versus, say, a Secure Digital card used with a digital camera. They also cost the dickens--several hundred dollars buys you a 64 GB SSD, like the one available for the Apple MacBook Air (included in one option or an add-on for others).

Lenovo pushed out a pile of new laptops today for consumers and businesses that aren't behemoths, but the bigger news might be a package of warranty and support that they're targeting for small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMBs), coincidentally the kind of business that I target in this blog.

The ThinkPlus Secure Business suite combines next-business-day warranty service, protection against equipment damage from accidents (the flight attendant pouring water on your laptop, for instance), and an Internet-based backup system.

The iPhone 3G is getting all the attention today, with lines wrapping around the block at Apple Stores and mobile carrier outlets worldwide. But iPhone 2.0, the software included with the 3G iPhone and available at no cost to owners of the first iPhone model, shouldn't be ignored. Enterprise users and IT managers will find that they can now integrate the iPhone into their array of mobile devices.

Key to the use in any company with a few hundred to tens of thousands of potential iPhone users is the free iPhone Configuration Utility. The utility, available from Apple's Support site, comes in both a standalone application version for Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), and Web applications for Windows XP/Vista and Mac OS X 10.5.