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American Airlines is giving passengers Wi-Fi access in the sky. The airline will expand on its trial flight with Aircell, a provider of airborne communications.

American will move from the trial phase by installing Aircell's Gogo Inflight Internet on 300 domestic aircraft over the next two years, the company said Tuesday.

Thousands of passengers traveling on more than a dozen of American's Boeing 767-200 airplanes have had access to the in-flight Internet service on nonstop flights between New York's JFK and San Francisco, Los Angeles and Miami.

"Our trial over the past six months offered customers the choice to remain connected to work, home or elsewhere when flying on American Airlines," said Dan Garton, American's executive vice president of marketing. "And it also gave us the ability to study customers' willingness to take advantage of high-speed, onboard connectivity and to gauge how the service performed technically in a variety of settings over an extended period of time."

"Customer feedback was extremely positive and, as a result, we will be working with American to bring Gogo to domestic MD-80 aircraft and B737 aircraft as quickly as possible," said John Happ, executive vice president of airlines at Aircell. "We are pleased that the results were positive and that we have decided to move forward."

Live Access

Aircell's Gogo service, which uses three antennas installed outside the airplane to connect to Aircell's mobile broadband network, allows passengers to surf the Web, check e-mail, send instant messages, and also gives passengers access to a corporate virtual private network.

Once the plane reaches 10,000 feet, passengers get the okay to turn on Wi-Fi devices, including PDAs, smartphones and laptops. Cell-phone and Voice over Internet Protocol services are not provided.

"In-flight Internet is extremely important to travelers, evidenced by American's decision to expand Gogo service beyond their existing Gogo-equipped aircraft," Happ...

As the clock counts down to April 1, the Conficker hysteria is only growing worse. CBS's perennial 60 Minutes television broadcast ran with the headline The Internet is Infected on Sunday night.

Lesley Stahl went on to report to millions of viewers that malicious computer hackers have been creating more weapons that they plant on the Internet -- and the problem is growing. She called Conficker one of the most dangerous threats ever, infecting about 10 million computers worldwide.

Conficker earned its reputation. The worm, also known as Downadup, first appeared in late November, exploiting a vulnerability in Microsoft Windows to spread unhindered on local area networks. Its goal so far has been to install rogue software on infected computers.

Microsoft issued a patch for the vulnerability, but users who haven't installed it are open to infection as the worm spreads through portable USB flash drives. Malware authors are expected to set the wheels in motion to launch the next variant of Conficker on Wednesday.

Honeynet Project Responds

"As you know, bad things are going to happen on April 1st: People will be sending out e-mails to their friends, telling silly jokes and putting MTAs (mail transfer agents) under a higher load," said Lance Spitzer, CEO of the Honeynet Project, an international nonprofit research organization that aims to improve Internet security.

"Besides that (but not quite that bad), Conficker will activate its domain-name-generation routine to contact command-and-control servers," he said. "We have been researching this piece of malware recently, with a focus on how to detect Conficker-infected machines."

The Honeynet Pot Project has just released a paper called Know Your Enemy: Containing Conficker. The paper presents several potential methods to contain Conficker, taking advantage of the way the worm patches infected systems, which the group said could be used to remotely detect a compromised system. The...

Intel expects its new line of Xeon processors for servers and workstations to serve as the catalyst to interconnect 15 billion devices worldwide by 2015. Intel also predicts that its latest 45nm chips will create opportunities to push the limits of science and technology.

Based on Intel's Nehalem microarchitecture, the new Xeon 5500 processors have showcased groundbreaking advances in performance, virtualization and workload management, according to Intel Senior Vice President Patrick Gelsinger. "As the Internet expands toward our vision of 15 billion connected devices by 2015, the Xeon 5500 will also be a foundational technology for the transformation of Internet infrastructure," he said.

The industry is currently aligned on a cloud-computing vision in which applications are served from optimized hardware -- making them available on demand and scalable, Gelsinger noted. "Executing to this vision requires underlying technology that incorporates the adaptability, capability, and intelligence of our newest Xeon processor," he said.

A Big Play

More than 230 systems based on the Xeon 5500 processor are already in the works at more than 70 system manufacturers around the world, including Cisco, Dell, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Sun Microsystems, and others. One reason is that Intel is making "a big play" when it comes to processor power consumption, said Matthew Wilkins, a principal analyst at iSuppli.

"Successive generations of microprocessors are now delivering more performance and consuming less energy," Wilkins said. "If your organization runs a data center or server farm with hundreds, even thousands, of systems or microprocessors, moving to newer, more efficient microprocessors can deliver cost savings through a reduction of power consumption."

The Xeon 5500 integrates automated energy-efficiency enhancements that provide users with greater control of energy expenditures. For example, achieving a processor idle power level of only 10 watts will enable a 50 percent reduction in system idle power compared to the previous chip...