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.: LCD TVs now hottest holiday gadget

From 2003 to 2005, digital cameras generated the most revenue when it came to U.S. holiday spending on consumer electronics, computers and cameras, NPD analyst Steve Baker said. But this year, the $925 million spent on televisions with liquid-crystal displays topped the $825 million spent on digital cameras.

"Clearly, price was a huge driver this year, and availability," Baker said of the LCD TV surge. In addition, LCD TVs spread to the more lucrative 30-inch-and-larger category, which plasma and rear-projection TVs previously had had largely to themselves, he said. A total of 1.3 million LCD TVs shipped in the holiday season, he said.

.: Asia scrambles to fix quake damage to data cables

HONG KONG--Several ships were on their way Thursday to repair regional telecommunications cables broken by an earthquake off southern Taiwan, but officials warned that it could take several more days before Internet access across much of Asia returned to normal.

Fixed-line and mobile international telephone connections were largely back on line, two days after the quake, with a magnitude of 6.7, struck the Luzon Strait, telecommunications companies and regulators in several countries said.

Property damage was limited, but six of seven undersea cable systems, accounting for 90 percent of telecommunications capacity of the region, broke "one by one" in the quake and its aftershocks, the Office of the Telecommunications Authority in Hong Kong said


.: Virtual reality to get its own network?

A nonprofit group says it plans to build a network called Neuronet purely to support virtual-reality game and business applications.

Neuronet, which is planned to be separate from the Internet, "will evolve into the world's first public network capable of meeting the data transmission requirements of emerging cinematic and immersive virtual-reality technologies," according to a Thursday announcement from the Vancouver-based International Association of Virtual Reality Technologies.

The first-generation Neuronet is scheduled to go live in 2007, the group said. Consumer applications are expected as early as 2009.

"The first-generation network is strictly an R&D network and will function as a sort of sandbox for virtual reality and gaming innovators around the world to develop new applications for a second generation network," IAVRT co-founder Chistopher Scully said in an e-mail. No services yet are signed up to use the network, he added.

Virtual reality generally refers to environments with visual and audio information that makes a person feel immersed in a computer-generated realm. The growth of environments such as Second Life has spotlighted such efforts, and IBM believes that virtual worlds will open new doors to e-commerce as well.


.: This worm wishes you a Happy New Year

An e-mail worm disguised as a New Year's greeting is making the rounds on the Internet.

Worm-laden messages are titled "Happy New Year" and contain an attachment called either postcard.exe or postcard.zip, according to experts at VeriSign's iDefense Labs, which provides information on security flaws and exploits. If the attachment is opened, malicious software is downloaded from the Internet and can infect computers running Windows operating systems.

Once a computer is infected, it looks for open mail proxies and begins spamming mail to infect other computers. The worm is already moving quickly across the Internet, at a rate of five e-mails per second on at least one large network, according to the iDefense Labs Web site.

Security experts say that although the virus looks similar to the Warezov Trojan horse that has plagued the Internet for the past month, it is actually a new variant of the worm and has been largely undetected as of December 28. iDefense performed a triage analysis of the threat and found that more than a dozen codes were installed on a computer from several worm and Trojan horse families. More than 160 e-mail servers are used by the worm to send out spam to potential victims, the company said.

High volumes of mass e-mails are usually sent around the holidays. This year has been no different, experts say. The spike in holiday spam is largely attributed to the fact that people have been more likely to open the messages.

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