US slaps fine on company blocking VoIP

In what is thought to be the first case of its kind, the Federal Communications Commission has acted to prevent a North Carolina company from blocking VoIP phone calls over its network. A local telco, Madison River Communications Corp., which runs a number of phone companies in rural areas in the south-eastern and mid-western United States, agreed to refrain from blocking VoIP calls and pay a $15,000 dollar fine to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). ...more

Tesco sells Apples

Tesco has dedicated an area of one of its superstores to selling Macs, iPods and accessories. If successful, separate Apple zones will be created in other Tesco Extra stores nationwide. Retail Week reports that this is the first time that the UK's biggest retailer has set aside an area of its stores for a single, non-food brand. ...more

Updated: ISPs named for extended broadband test

A preliminary list of the ISPs that are participating in BT's extended reach broadband trials has been released. The trials are designed to see whether BT can successfully extend the range of current broadband services to include homes and businesses that are currently too far (more than 5.5km) from ADSL-enabled exchanges. ...more

Microsoft promises public beta IE 7 early next year

Microsoft has promised a public beta of the upcoming Internet Explorer 7 in the first calendar quarter of next year. On the IE developers' blog, Dean Hachomovitch, general manager of the Internet Explorer team, said he was constantly being asked for a public beta and promised: 'an updated pre-release build of IE7 for Windows XP publicly - no MSDN membership required - during the first calendar quarter of 2006. 'We want to make sure that everyone has an opportunity to try a pre-release version of IE7 and tell us how it works with their websites, their applications, their add-ons, and how they use the web overall,' he wrote. ...more

Sun goes AJAX

Sun Microsystems has given the AJAX bandwagon a major shove forward by joining both the DoJo Foundation and the Open Ajax alliance. Sun joins both AOL and IBM as key members of the DoJo project that is looking to create an Open Source JavaScript toolkit to make it easier to develop AJAX pages. AJAX, or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, is not so much a programming technology but more of an approach to building Web pages. ...more