Get For Free !!!: 10/16 L.A. Times Tech Blog

Please add updates@feedmyinbox.com to your address book to make sure you receive these messages in the future.

High-speed Internet access is a legal right in Finland
October 15, 2009 at 7:38 pm

That's hot. From the land that brought you the Sauna World Championship comes guaranteed high-speed Internet for all. Credit: Heikki Saukkomaa/AFP/Getty Images

Life, liberty and the right to broadband access?

If Thomas Jefferson and our enlightened forefathers were here today, perhaps our unalienable rights would mimic Finland's, which will now include the right to broadband access. According to Finland's Ministry of Transport and Communication, 1-megabit Web access will become a legal right for all citizens in July.

France is one of the few countries that has made it a human right but Finland said it's the first country to make it a legal right.

It's not clear whether those who can't get connection can sue the government for the violation.

Since 1-megabit web access is dauntingly slow -- it's equivalent to DSL speed -- the government has pledged to expand the legal right to 100-megabit broadband access by the end of 2015. This news must come as a relief to Finns who have more important things to do than suffer the pain and frustration of a slow Internet connection. (There are allegedly 1.6 saunas for every Finn.)

How fast is a 100-megabit connection? A Best Buy representative laughed and said, "Ridiculously fast," adding, "You'd be able to download a 500-megabyte file in only like five minutes."

The government's magnanimity is not surprising, because the world's ultimate philanthropist, Santa Claus, is a Finn -- his office is in northern Finland on the Arctic Circle, according to the Finnish Tourist Board.

-- Melissa Rohlin

Google beats analysts' expectations, sending stock up in after-hours trading
October 15, 2009 at 5:00 pm

Google Inc. reported a 27% increase in profits during the third quarter, signaling renewed strength for the Internet search giant and increasing hopes that the online technology sector might be trending toward recovery.

The company's gross revenue increased 7% to $5.94 billion from $5.54 billion during the same period last year.

Following the announcement of the quarterly performance, which beat analysts' expectations, the company's stock rose as much as $15 a share -- or almost 3% -- in after-hours trading

"Google had a strong quarter," Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said in a statement. "While there is a lot of uncertainty about the pace of economic recovery, we believe the worst of the recession is behind us and now feel confident about investing heavily in our future."

Schmidt praised his executive staff, saying the relative health of the company through the nation's recession "has proven the worth of this team," which focused on cost-cutting measures while the company waited for the economy to improve.

Google said it had resumed hiring, after paring its payroll last quarter -- a rarity for the fast-growing company.

-- David Sarno

Microsoft says lost Sidekick data will be restored to users
October 15, 2009 at 12:32 pm

A 2007 Microsoft/T-Mobile Sidekick. Credit: Krisopher Avila / Flickr

The unusual case of the missing Sidekick data may be nearing its conclusion.

Microsoft Corp. announced this morning that most or all users of its Sidekick mobile device might indeed see their lost data again. The announcement came after a week of worry that users' contacts, notes, photos and other virtual property may have been lost for good when company servers failed.

"We plan to begin restoring users' personal data as soon as possible," wrote Roz Ho, Microsoft's corporate vice president of Premium Mobile Experiences, adding that the company now believed the outage affected a minority of Sidekick users.

"We have determined that the outage was caused by a system failure that created data loss in the core database and the backup," Ho explained in a statement. "We rebuilt the system component by component, recovering data along the way. This careful process has taken a significant amount of time, but was necessary to preserve the integrity of the data."

Ho said Microsoft would offer another update on the data restoration by Saturday.

If indeed the data are restored, Microsoft may dull the negative echoes of the episode, which initially looked to be one of the worst incidents of online data loss in memory, with many of the device's reported 1 million users suffering a complete wipe of many months of irreplaceable information. At least two lawsuits have been filed against Microsoft and Sidekick carrier T-Mobile.

In an e-mail Wednesday evening, Microsoft sought to show that the problem was isolated to servers run by its Danger Inc. subsidiary, which it said was not part of its main "cloud" infrastructure. "Other and future Microsoft mobile products and services are entirely based on Microsoft technologies and Microsoft's cloud service platform," the company said.

-- David Sarno