My relatives live in the countryside and Internet access speed via a GSM network is abysmal (I'm talking solely about G2/Edge traffic) - around 4-6KB/sec vs theoretical limit of ~14KB/sec. Also access is very intermittent.

Is there a simple working solution (like the one outlined in this article) of boosting GSM connectivity for a 3G modem (which, alas, works only in 2G mode, since 3G masts are too far away).

In amongst the ITC court papers in the recent HTC versus Apple spat is an argument which claims that Andy Rubin got inspiration for Android framework while working at Apple, hence infringing an Apple API patent.

This means that Android started at Apple, just by virtue of the fact that one of its former employees happened to have invented it. If this logic was applied, it would mean that it did not matter where an employee worked in their life all their inventions would be legally owned by the first company they worked for.

If cannot live without The Register, put into your hosts file

Linux: /etc/hosts
Windows: C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\host

these two lines:

72.3.246.59 theregister.co.uk
72.3.246.59 www.theregister.co.uk

And the summary of the article is apparently wrong, someone stole/hacked into TheRegister DNS zone, TheRegister www servers are intact.

... multiplies as mad and definitely has a split personality disorder.

He has already voted almost 5000 times.

It's a bit sad they haven't tested betas of Firefox, IE and Chrome.

E.g. Firefox 7 includes some memory usage optimizations which could easily halve its memory usage under the stress test Tom's Hardware guys carried out.

Usually only computer enthusiasts buy high end Intel CPUs, many of them buy these CPUs for overclocking and setting performance records.

These people have never installed stock Intel coolers, so this decision made by Intel seems like a no-brainer to me. Besides with 180W TDP many will install water cooling kits which allow noise free operation and increased overclockability.

I attribute it mainly to the fact that Windows 7 by defaultt at least includes a basic AV software (Windows Defender) whereas Windows XP has none.

And don't mention UAC, please - most people either ignore it and answer YES to all its alerts or disable it altogether right after the installation.

And no, "pirated" versions of Windows XP (most of them are just a VLK version with a valid serial key included) have nothing to do with Windows XP security or lack of it.

A very good article about ... nothing.

Ah, sorry, Symantec is good for you! how could I have missed that?

Using public WiFi spots is a much more dangerous issue, since a lot of websites still don't employ SSL encryption of the traffic and your POP3/IMAP/HTTP credentials can be easily eavesdropped.

Like it's mentioned earlier not storing passwords in an open or reverse encryptable form is not possible, since your Android device has to supply plain text password to many Internet servers.