This month, outgoing Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin will try to galvanize FCC members to act on a free mobile Internet service that is also pornography free, a proposal that has languished for most of the year.

That's according to a brief report in the Wall Street Journal, by Journalista Amy Schatz.

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T-Mobile has a hit in its new Android-based G1 smartphone, says our Gearhead blogger, Mark Gibbs. In fact, the G1 has proven so strong, he's decided to stick with T-Mobile and surrender his former iPhone yearning.

Gibbs has an assessment of the G1 today on his blog. The G1 is the first commercial implementation of the Linux-based Android mobile phone operating system, from the Open Handset Alliance.

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President-elect Barack Obama wants to keep his BlackBerry even after taking office.

He made that clear in a video clip this morning on ABC's Good Morning America, from an upcoming interview with Barbara Walters (It's online, with Walters' question at 4:35).

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Virgin America hosted a group of Web celebrities aboard a special demonstration flight last weekend to show off its inflight Wi-Fi Internet access service.

It's an astonishing change: instead of boarding a flight that automatically cuts you off for hours from all communications (except for those equipped with outrageously expensive inflight voice phones), you now have full, broadband Internet connectivity, even a VPN link to your corporate network. Your plane seat just became your office desk chair.

[So do you crave airborne Internet? Take our poll.]

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Opera today release version 4.2 of its Opera Mini Web browser, designed specifically for mobile phone platforms. The Norwegian company also unveiled the first beta version of Mini 4.2 for the Android mobile phone operating system.

The beta can be downloaded to T-Mobile's G1 smartphone, the first and so far only commercial Android product. It's the first

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Just weeks after being issued a web navigation patent, a Texas company is using it to sue Apple, charging that the mobile Safari browser on the iPhone infringes the patent.

The suit was filed today by EMG Technology LLC. In the court document, the company's offices are listed as being in Tyler Texas, but its principle place of business in Los Angeles, Calif.

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The idea that the still ill-defined "social networking" phenomenon may become and even bigger mobile phenomenon has just got some new support.

Research in Motion and MySpace report that the MySpace for BlackBerry application has been downloaded 400,000 times in its first week of availability, setting first-week download records for both companies.

The smartphone software went live on November 13. It integrates the main parts of MySpace's social networking with the BlackBerry push-based messaging platform and UI.

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The nation's first 4G network is focused on data not voice, according to a senior executive with Sprint's Xohm business, now to be merged with Clearwire to build out a nationwide mobile WiMAX network. And the exec reiterated the pledge that Clearwire will give unlimited and unfettered data access to its subscribers...for as long as possible.

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Our Cool Tools Editor, Keith Shaw isn't going to surrender his Apple iPhone 3G, but he says the brand new Blackberry Storm, on sale now, has a lot to recommend it.

You can read his review of Research in Motion's newest device and offer your own impressions, including your continued hosannas or flames for the iPhone.

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Google is about to unveil a voice search capability, but it's appearing first on the Apple iPhone instead of T-Mobiles G1, which is the first commercial implementation of the Google-sponsored Android smartphone platform.

The free application apparently has been approved by Apple and bloggers speculated that it might be available over the weekend. But apparently, it's not available quite yet.

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You've probably heard the news that Wi-Fi Protected Access has been hacked.

Well, not exactly. The Temporal Key Integrity protocol (TKIP), the encryption scheme used in WPA, has been hacked, under certain apparently very specific conditions.

If you're using the Advanced Encryption System (AES)instead of TKIP for encryption, with WPA2 or WPA-Enterprise, then you don't have to worry about this hack.

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The behavior of 802.11n networking gear is the focus of our latests Network World Clear Choice Tests, a major achievement by David Newman. Using VeriWave's WLAN testing platform, Newman subjected 8 access points from each of four WLAN vendors to a large-scale, public, stress test designed to show their behavior and performance under varying loads.

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We recently visited BBN Technologies, the storied Cambridge, Mass. R&D outfit, where a lot of smart people get to work on some really cool stuff, a lot of it generated by U.S. Department of Defense interests, priorities, and of course money.

One emerging area in wireless networking is the concept of "content-based networking," says Jason Redi, principal scientist with BBN's Network Technologies group. "You might ask 'show me the maps near where I am' without having to know where those specific files actually are," he says.

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We've been covering Sprint's Baltimore launch of its Xohm mobile WiMAX network, offering 3-5Mbps uplink bandwidth, and about 1.5-2.6Mbps on the downlink.

Sprint says this is the dawn of 4G: broadband, multi-gigabit wireless wherever you are. Or at least wherever you can get network coverage. But most of us already pay for cellular, for a landline phone, for cable TV, for Internet access (which could be less than what Xohm is offering).

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We just hosted an online chat with wireless consultant Craig Mathias, principal of Farpoint Group, and a regular blogger and Clear Choice Test whiz for "Network World."

The chat covered questions on range of stuff, including stopping rogue access points, improving connection speeds, and multivendor support issues. You can find the transcript online.

Craig's blog, Nearpoints, also is featured at our Wireless Tech Center.

Now that the Palin Hotmail Hack has had its 15-minutes or so of notoriety we can revisit something much more interesting, and important: the Obama campaign's use of social networking and mobility to smother critics.

This is change you can believe in.

In a 17 September Chicago Tribune story, reporter John McCormick reported about the Obama Action Wire, which is based on the campaign's database of millions of Obama suporters. "Now Obama's presidential campaign is increasingly using the list to beat back media messages it does not like, calling on supporters to flood radio and television stations when those opposed to him run anti-Obama ads or appear on talk shows," according to McCormick.

Days before the story appeared, the Action Wire made itself felt: the campaign "orchestrated a massive stream of complaints on the phone lines of Tribune Co.-owned WGN-AM in Chicago when the radio station hosted author David Freddoso, who has written a controversial book about the Illinois Democrat."

According to the story, the McCain campaign, which like its rival uses the Internet for fund-raising and organizing, has nothing remotely like this.

The Tribune story has the official campaign take on Action Wire: "The Action Wire serves as a means of arming our supporters with the facts to take on those who spread lies about Barack Obama and respond forcefully with the truth, whether it's an author passing off fiction as biography, a Web site spreading baseless conspiracy theories or a TV station airing an ad that makes demonstrably false claims," said Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt.

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MIT researchers and a Massachusetts company are devising a forest fire-sensing network that draws its power from the minute amounts of electricity created by trees.

The idea is to seed large areas of forest with temperature and humidity sensors, linked via a ZigBee 802.15.4 wireless mesh to a satellite node and powered by rechargeable batteries. The batteries can slowly be recharged by the electric current found in a tree.

In a striking analogy one fo the researchers likened this trickle charge to a "dripping faucet [that] can fill a bucket over time." The system produces enough power to allow the sensors to upload data 4 times daily, or in case of a fire, immediately. The mesh passes the signal from node to node until it reaches a U.S. Forest Service remote automated weather station, equipped with a satellite data link. The information then funnels inot a command center in Boise, Idaho.

One challenge the researchers had to overcome was figuring out exactly how trees generated the miniscule voltage. They eliminated several possibilities, including one well-known phenomenon: the simple electrochemical redox reactions, the kind that power potatoe or lemon "batteries" in high school science projects.

The conclusion, reported recently in "Public Library of Science ONE," is that the current is created by a pH imbalance between the tree and the soil it grows in. The tests were run with a potted Ficus benjamina in a Faraday cage.

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The future of the Web is 3-D, not video, according to former "Network Worlder" Ian Lamont, who now oversees editorial content for our sister site, The Industry Standard.

Lamont's blog entry, based on an earlier graduate course paper, was sparked by YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley's recent post about his company's long-term strategy. Hurley argues that video will dominate the Web.

Lamont argues, effectively, that it will not. Instead, an emerging cluster of graphics technologies will enable a highly interactive 3-D Web, which will affect content creation and "consumption" in new ways. He says that video is essentially unchanged after more than half-a-century as a static and linear [the two Great Evils for new media boosters) technology, with its roots in an even older and static and linear technology -- film.

That's certainly true of YouTube, which is essentially a library of film clips, an historical record, though it can be pretty recent history, just hours old.

I think he's right, though I disagree with a number of details. Video, with TV broadcasting, created something that is still powerful and a fundemental part of today's Internet character: the immediate witness to an unfolding story. "Live from New York" or Washington or, today, your own neighborhood, or a fishing village on the Chilean coast. Radio creates that in words; video, and especially live video, adds images.

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So by now, Everyone knows Senator John McCain invented the BlackBerry. Or that he says he did. Or that someone on his campaign says he did, which is practically the same thing. This is politics after all.

The "NY Times" has a pretty thorough account -- including CONTEXT! -- of what unfolded earlier today when McCain economic advisor Douglas Holtz-Eakin was talking to reporters about the senator's ideas on the financial turmoil on Wall Street. According to the Times, the advisor was asked what McCain had done on the commerce committee that would show Americans he understands financial markets.

Holtz-Eakin pointed out first that McCain didn't have jurisdiction over financial markets. Then, according to the Times, he went on: “But he did this," he said, holding up what looked like a BlackBerry. “The telecommunications of the United States, the premier innovation of the past 15 years, comes right through the commerce committee. So you’re looking at the miracle that John McCain helped create. And that’s what he did."

Assuming this is accurate, any fair reading would be that Holtz-Eakin was using his smartphone as a kind of symbol or emblem to summarize the "creative destruction" we've witnessed in telecommunications for a decade and a half. "He did this" refers not to McCain tinkering with a CPU and ROM chips and some fancy software programming, but to his basic orientation toward markets, and probably (presumably) to specific, relevant bills that McCain sponsored or voted for.

I'm not a student of McCain's commerce committee tenure, so I can't say if the aid's claim is really justified.

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Research in Motion captured almost 54% of the U.S. smartphone market for the second quarter of 2008, according to IDC's latest data.

That was a big jump in market share -- almost 10 percentage points -- from the first quarter, and the gain came at the expense of Apple, maker of the iPhone, and Palm, both of which lost market share.

RIM has been on a roll with strong growth in smartphone sales fueling blazing revenue and profits. The company shipped nearly 5.4 million devices in its first fiscal quarter this year.

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