Sure, we've been excited about Intel's Atom CPU being used in netbook-class devices, but UK ISP Bytemark apparently thinks the power-sipping chip has the horsepower to handle low-end server duties as well. For £45 ($89) a month, you can colo a 1.6GHz Atom box running Linux with 2GB of RAM and a pair of 100GB SATA drives -- not a terrible deal, and probably a damn sight more reliable than a pile of duct tape or a dead frog. Still, we're not exactly sure we'd want to run our business on the rough equivalent of an Eee 901, you know?

If you're a lazy ass consumer (the very best kind), bent on pulling a device out of the box, plugging it into a wall, and never messing with another bit of "setup" again, you're certainly not alone. In fact, most folks never lift a finger to calibrate their displays, plug better speakers in, or place those speakers in actually advantageous spots. To that end, Mitsubishi is debuting its new LT-46149 and LT-52149 LCDs with integrated 16-speaker sound projectors. Similar to the sound bars offered up by many home audio manufacturers, the "Integrated Sound Projector" (iSP) is designed to bounce sound off walls and around the room to give the illusion of surround sound. The perk of TV integration is an easy to use room configuration on-screen tool to specify your room's dimensions, couch placement and preferred sweet spot size. At the end of the day, your sound is all coming from one spot, so directionality isn't going to quite match a for-realsie surround sound setup, and the system we listened to was a little sharp in the high end, but it's certainly a unique and appealing offering from Mitsu to the everyman TV watcher. The TV itself is CableCard ready, can support sound over HDMI and PCM inputs, and offers Mitsu's 120Hz film dejuddering -- that rather awkwardly makes your favorite films look like they were shot by a TV news crew. The 46-inch and 52-inch LCDs will sell for $3,299 and $3,699, respectively.

We've already seen where mooching off an open WiFi signal can land you in Singapore, but are we really to that point here in the US of A? Apparently, Utah lawmakers are considering "penalizing those who leave their wireless networks open" as they trial "various methods of quelling free speech controlling questionable internet content." The paranoid officials are seemingly attempting to "reward ISPs that self-police access to pornography," as the primary concern seems to stem from open signals leading to unmonitored porn surfing by kiddos under 18. Interestingly, one proponent of the plan actually goes so far as to criticize the "unregulated internet," presumably suggesting that a world of controlled, censored, and dictated material would create a much more amicable environment. Still, one (level-headed) local ISP owner stated that shutting down free WiFi zones would damage Utah's reputation, as it would appear as a locale that "is restricting technology rather than expanding it." Truthfully, we tend to agree.

[Via Wired]

In what appears to be a potentially disruptive move, French ISP Free has just opened up its network of 300,000 subscribers' WiFi networks across France to its subscribers. What does that mean? If you're a Free subscriber living in Paris, and you and you come across a Free WiFi network while in Lyon for the day on business, you can log in and use up to 64kbps of bandwidth no problem. All new Freebox HD subscribers will have this feature turned on by default, so we assume that also means you can turn it off if you're concerned about privacy. Now for those of you who might not be familiar with Free, it isn't just your garden-variety ISP, no sir. For €30 per month ($38), Free will give you a pair of boxes (known collectively as the Freebox) that comes with a DSL modem at 24Mbps, includes a digital TV receiver, 4-port switch / WiFi router with MIMO, built-in VoIP with free calls to 28 countries, and can stream TV to your computer and DVDs from your computer to your TV. Also, Free recently introduced two new handsets (pictured): its white model (WiFi-only) goes for €60 ($75), while the black model is WiFi and GSM and goes for €200 ($250). So to recap, let's say you want to roam around l'Hexagone with your laptop or your WiFi handset, and you're a Free subscriber, then you've now got one of (potentially) 300,000 locations around the country to choose from. Some industry watchers like Yannick Laclau are convinced that if companies like France Telecom or Telefonica (Spain's incumbent telco) or Verizon were to make a move à la Free, it would mean better and less expensive service for everyone, and also might wipe out FON in the process.

Read - GigaOm
Read - Yannick Laclau
Read - Net Economie

It's a sad day for Spanish content pirates, as formerly lax laws allowing P2P file sharing for personal use have just been overturned in favor of strict new rules that make file swappers financially liable for any unauthorized downloading they partake in. Furthermore, the new regulations -- which, unsurprisingly, have been blessed with the MPAA's seal of approval -- also hold ISPs accountable for the P2P activity of their customers, which could be seen as an incentive for service providers to block what they consider suspicious traffic. Even regular law-abiding citizens will be affected by the recent crackdown, as a small tax will now be levied on all blank media to reimburse copyright holders for earnings lost to piracy. While we're totally in support of intellectual property owners getting paid for their content, we worry that these tough new rules will discourage and even prohibit the many legitimate uses of P2P networks that have nothing to do with stealing movies and music -- as usual, a few  bad apples (well, maybe more than a few) have caused everyone else to suffer.

[Via Slashdot]

Instead of fighting about property lines and whose dog is keeping everyone up at night, researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign want you and your neighbors to get together and share your WiFi signal in a method that supposedly delivers better performance to each individual user. Assistant computer science professor Haiyun Luo and graduate student Nathanael Thompson of the school's Systems, Wireless, and Networking Group have released a free download that analyzes local airwaves and exploits unused bandwidth from one network to complement ones experiencing heavy usage, but always gives users priority access to their own signal. Part of the two-year-old PERM project, the application uses flow-scheduling algorithms to determine bandwidth allocation, and has so-far undergone testing on Linux clients and with Linksys routers. Security is obviously a key concern in such a sharing setup, so PERM developed the software to both "preserve a user's privacy and security, and mitigate the free-riding problem."

[Via PCWorld]