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.

Gas is creeping to $5.00 a gallon. Your commute by car is ever worse, anyway. You're asked to put in more hours in the day, somehow, even if that means staying up late to handle email and prepare for meetings. Isn't there a way out?

Perhaps. While I can't wave a magic wand and put more hours in the day or days in the week - I'd prefer an extra one between four and five a.m., myself - I can tell you that broadband on public transportation is moving past the "nice idea" phase into the "necessary amenity" stage.

Everyone might be focused on the launch next week of the iPhone 3G, a speedier version of Apple's original iPhone that's been restyled and has a GPS radio to boot. But what about those left behind? The "2G" iPhones that use the slower EDGE network run by AT&T in the U.S. and other carriers worldwide? There could be hundreds of thousands of these phones--possibly even over a million--hitting the market as customers upgrade to the spanking new model.

In the U.S., owners of 2G iPhones with a two-year contract can be released from that contract and get a subsidized iPhone 3G, as long as their accounts are in good standing. Because 2G iPhone buyers paid the full cost of the phone, they get to keep the older model, which is deactivated as the iPhone 3G is enabled.

Nokia's move to buy out the other shareholders in Symbian may signal another large shift in the cellular industry as it moves slowly and angrily from closed networks with restricted devices and walled gardens, to something that starts to resemble the free-wheeling Internet.

Nokia's deal is obstensibly about control. The Symbian platform, which runs on about 60 percent of the smartphones sold worldwide each quarter, has been developed by Symbian, the company, but Nokia's 48-percent ownership left them less than satisfied. At the same time, Nokia and some Symbian owners had developed and deployed competing platforms. The Symbian deal folds three others mobile systems--UIQ, MOAB, and Nokia's S60--into Symbian over the next couple of years.

American Airlines yesterday flew the first commercial jet with in-flight broadband enabled since the shutdown of Connexion by Boeing in 2006. American's Boeing 767-200 was to make a routine, scheduled round-trip from JFK to Los Angeles International (LAX) on Wednesday; American and its provider Aircell haven't provided follow-up detail yet. On the maiden test flights, service was free.

American said Tuesday that they'd be ready to go live with all 15 of its Boeing 767-200 planes in a few weeks. They run these planes only on cross-country routes to and from JFK, flying to San Francisco International, LAX, and Miami's airport. When the service branded as "Gogo" launches, it will cost $12.95 per flight. When Aircell starts to serve Virgin America with Gogo later this year, it will charge $9.95 for flights of three hours or fewer.

American choose its 767-200 fleet partly for uniformity, as the FAA has to approve equipment in conjunction with specific plane models; partly for duration, since these craft all fly cross-country routes; and partly for power. Their 767-200s have auto-style DC trickle charge jacks at all first-class and business-class seats, but also scattered throughout coach. (Consult American's 767-200 plane layout when booking.)

Don't expect cable modem speeds, but Aircell should be able to give each plane about 2 Mbps per second up and down, and they promise to prioritize data to make sure one passenger doesn't bogart the pipe.

Verizon is peeved, the Associated Press reports, because its cable competitors are running advertisements across the U.S. that make light of the telecom giant's fiber-optic based FiOS service by pointing out, "We already have a fiber-optic network serving ALL our homes."

True: Comcast, Cablevision, Time Warner, Cox, and Charter all have fiber-optic core networks that extend in most cases to neighborhood head-ends. It's also true that I have champagne running through refrigerator; I just have to pop out the corner store to buy it.

Verizon is building fiber to the home (FTTH), also called fiber to the curb. (Correction: Fiber to the curb brings the connection much closer to a house, but not directly into the home.) They're bringing strands of glass directly to the home, which allows them to run essentially a single physical network, the upper limit of which capacity and throughput is more a factor of how rapidly technology advances, and how their business model allows them to charge.

Running a gigabit per second (Gbps) over FiOS shouldn't be a big deal some day as long as there's content to feed that and the rest of their upstream infrastructure can handle it. A few days ago, Verizon bumped their FiOS speeds up quite a bit, while keeping prices the same or slightly higher.

The cable providers, by contrast, are running fiber to the node (FTTN), which is also AT&T and Qwest's strategy, although the cable companies were in a position to need to run that fiber much earlier to fight erosion of their business. With FTTN, the cable providers were able to offer data combined with on-demand video and an ever-increasing channel line-up.

With FTTN, the local loop is still copper, whether as a pair of wires twisted around each other, or a coaxial cable. In both telecom and cable plants, the figurative "final mile," as it's known, uses an encoding scheme that can push tons of data over short distances.

DSL emerges from the central office of a telephone company and, in some cases, must runs thousands or even 10,000 to 20,000 wire feet--actual passage through wire. That requires a lot of trickery to avoid crosstalk among wires, attenuation (the diminution of a signal the greater it travels through obstructions), and old wiring installations.

If you have to travel just a few hundred feet, those problems tend to disappear as there are fewer bundles of wire, and attenuation is kept to a minimum.

With FTTN, cable and phone companies are kept in check for their top speeds by the latest wire standards. Advanced flavors of DSL are used by telecoms for that final hop to the house, while cable companies use DOCSIS, now in the process of moving to version 3, which promises far greater capacity.

The reason we're not seeing FTTH everywhere is that it's a massively expensive undertaking, and it will take years to see a substantial minority of urban and suburban markets equipped for fiber to their homes. In the meantime, you'll likely continue to see who-has-the-bigger-pipe marketing while companies try to claim some kind of supremacy.

For us as consumers and business users, only four interrelated factors are truly important: is the service competitively priced and getting cheaper? And is it consistent and reliable?