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.

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.