Good news for those who thought Congress might do away with warrantless wiretapping - it's here to stay!

The House on Friday approved a bill that will provide immunity for telecommunications companies that cooperated with the government's warrantless wiretapping program provided those companies can prove to a federal court that they did so at the direction of the White House .

The measure, which re-authorizes the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) until 2012, was approved by a vote of 293 to 129 after months of back and forth between Democrats, Republicans, and the Bush administration.

It now moves to the Senate, where it is expected to be approved.

At issue is a warrantless surveillance program that helps the government more easily eavesdrop on suspected terrorists.

More details after the jump

Several days after Comcast announced increased broadband speed tiers, Verizon Communications said Wednesday that will increase the speed of its FiOS high-speed Internet service in 10 states.

The revamped service will provide download speeds of up to 50 megabits per second and upload speeds of 20 Mbps (50/20), according to Verizon.

Residents in parts of California, Delaware, Indiana, Maryland, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia and Washington will have the option to upgrade to 50/20 Mbps from their current 30/15 or 15/15 Mbps service.

Verizon this week will launch a new service designed to draw in wireless customers without landlines to its Internet and TV services. The Flex Double Play bundle will offer a discount to Verizon Wireless customers without wireline phone service who purchase broadband or FiOS TV from Verizon Communications.

A Verizon spokesman confirmed that this national service was the in the works, and said he expected more details to be released later this week.

Comcast said Thursday that it will increase the upload speeds of two tiers of service, providing a faster way for customers to upload files.

The upload performance of the Performance and Performance Plus tiers will increase at no additional cost. Comcast will nearly triple the upload speed of its 6 Mbits/s / 384 Kbits/s Performance tier to 6 Mbps / 1 Mbps and more than double the upload speed of its 8 Mbps / 768 Kbps Performance Plus tier to 8 Mbps / 2 Mbps, the company said.

Comcast also employs a technology called PowerBoost, where customers can see their download speeds increase during periods of little traffic. At PowerBoost speeds, the Performance download speed will jump to 12 Mbps, while the Performance Plus tier will increase to 16 Mbps. No word on how the 16 Mbps "Blast" tier was affected.

Comcast notes that the company is currently in DOCSIS 3.0 trials, and is trialing 50 Mbps services in the Twin Cities, with hopes to bring 100 Mbps and even 150 Mbps services to customers in the future. But with Comcast also exploring ways to meter Internet bandwidth, are faster speeds just a trap for the unwary consumer?

When I got the press materials, I knew I had to check out the KylinTV. This is a first-of-its-kind offering that puts current Chinese TV programming in your living room no matter where you are on the globe. It's all delivered via the Web, but here's the sweet part--you don't need a computer to access the content. Everything happens in the KylinTV box, all you need to do is supply a broadband connection and a TV.

I opened the package and found something that looked remarkably similar to a cable TV box, a bright yellow set-top box with a remote control. A broadband Internet connection is required as the input to the set-top box, and the output goes directly to a television. Any cable modem, Verizon FIOS, or DSL line that can provide a link faster than 750 Kbps will do.

USA Today is reporting that the city of Los Angeles is suing Time Warner Cable for abusing its customers with bad service, fraudulent price hikes, and deceptive advertising.

I for one will be living vicariously through City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo, who's planning to stick it to TWC for "tens of millions of dollars" in fines, according to USAT. Just two months ago I waited at home all day (a weekday, mind you) for a TWC guy to show up for his morning appointment, only to be told during my third follow-up call at 6:30 pm that the appointment would be pushed to the next day and there was nothing I could do about it. I complained until I got a $70 credit; if I lived in LA, the lawsuit would be seeking $2,500 for me ($5,000 if I were disabled or a senior citizen).

Meanwhile, I snapped the above picture of my apartment building's lobby yesterday, where Verizon had set up a refreshment table and was giving presentations on the wonders of FiOS. My building has had FiOS Internet for over a year now, but the FiOS cable franchise was just approved in New York City, and Verizon is plying us with bottled water and fresh fruit to get us to switch to the full FiOS service. What a message to send: Verizon feeds customers while TWC gets sued by theirs.

[via MediaBistro]

Why build a home network? Ten years ago, the only answer to that question would be, "Because I'm an incurable geek." But with so many products and services out today for home networks the question now is "Why wouldn't you want to?"

A home network will let you share high-speed Internet access with any computer in the house—the spouse's, the kids', and even visiting Grandma's MacBook are within reach. A network lets you control what the kids are doing on the Web, share data and multimedia files across all your computers, automate backups for all those computers and even use Webcams to see what that new puppy is doing in the living room while you're at work. With a network, the bedroom computer upstairs can print to the color printer in the downstairs study and the media PC in the living room can show a movie on the PC-connected TV in the master bedroom.

All this is accomplished simply by hooking your Windows PCs together and adding on network-oriented products makes the network even more useful. Find out how to hook up your home in our step-by-step Home Networking guide.

T-Mobile has finally stumbled into the world of high-speed data transfer today: The company is rolling out a 3G network in New York City. The last of the major American networks to make the leap, T-Mobile's network bump is focused more on improving call quality than on resource-heavy activities such as Web browsing. The new network uses UMTS and HSDPA systems.

According to T-Mobile, 3G coverage will be rolled out across the country throughout 2008. "By year's end, T-Mobile expects its high-speed data network will be available in those cities where a majority of its subscribers currently use data services," said the company in a release issued today.

At present, the carrier offers four 3G phones: the Nokia 6263, Nokia 3555, Samsung T639, and Samsung T819. But, as Sascha Segan points out at PCMag.com, none of the four have true Web browsers and all rely on UTMS, rather than the higher speed HSDPA.

More from T-Mobile's release: "In the coming months, T-Mobile plans to offer its first HSDPA device, along with new and compelling data-centric, all-in-one devices that help make the most of T-Mobile's high-speed data network."

Your geek cachet can only increase if you've got a satellite dish attached to your laptop. It helps if the dish in question is actually useful--for instance, when it's an antenna to help you get a signal even when you're a few thousand feet from the nearest Wi-Fi.

Hawking Technologies knows this and has offered a Hi-Gain USB-based Wireless-G Dish Antennas for a couple of years. Now, the 802.11n version has arrived to provide faster speed and more distance, and equal geekiness.

As we wrote about earlier, the FCC is hosting a hearing on network management at Stanford Law School this afternoon. After a brief break to listen in to the Google earning's call, I jumped back on the webcast to catch the tail end of the first panel on network management and consumer expectations, where the commissioners grilled more than a half dozen experts.

Below are some highlights from the rather spirited debate:

FCC CHAIRMAN KEVIN MARTIN: How should we be looking at network management practices, with reports of consumers being cut off, calls for different tiers of service, etc?

Larry Lessig, IP expert and Stanford Law professor:

"It's going to be extraordinarily difficult."

He proposes getting to a point when current network management practices are "not a good business model" for ISPs.

Tiered service "is inevitable right now and I would not oppose it."

"The most amazing thing about this story is that you can't get the facts straight." The FCC is a government agency, and Comcast "is consistently misrepresenting to you what is happening here. It is rocket science, but it's not" something that very capable experts cannot explain.

This is "really an indictment on the trust of this particular company. The most important thing is to address the question of truthfulness."

He acknowledged that perhaps Comcast is such a big company that the various departments are not communicating, and stopped short of accusing the company of fraud, but "you would eliminate confusion if you had serious penalties."

REPUBLICAN COMMISSIONER DEBORAH TATE: She suggests that much of the content on file-sharing sites is illegal, and the FCC's "principles only apply to lawful content."

What if you threw a hearing and your guests of honor never showed up? The FCC will soon find out. The commission is holding public inquiry into the management practices of broadband networks, and while they reached out to a number of providers, according to opening statements by FCC chairman, Kevin Martin, hardly a broadband provider was to be seen.

"We [invited] the carriers to participate in this event, several weeks ago, [including] Comcast, who declined, Time Warner Cable, CableLabs and AT&T," said Martin. "[The FCC] reached out again to Comcast and Pando [after the companies' jointly announced they would work on a P2P Bill of Rights] and they declined, so I just want to make sure that we did try to make this as open and transparent as possible."

I met with Iogear today; the company was showcasing a handful of new and upcoming additions to their product line. The one that caught my attention the most out of the spread was the Powerline Audio System.The audio accessory utilizes the titular technology to transmit audio signals over a home network.

Powerline technology has been available in consumer products for some time now but has never really caught on, due initially to limited transfer speeds. The technology has since been eclipsed in homes by far more popular wireless technologies such as Bluetooth and the various 802.11 incarnations, though Iogear assured me that Powerline transfer speeds have since improved greatly.

Essentially, Powerline transmits information over your existing electric lines. The Powerline Audio Station Receiver incorporates an iPod dock and audio input. Plug the receiver into an outlet in one room and the speakers into another, anywhere in your house or apartment, up to 990 feet away (it should be on the same circuit breaker). The Audio Station transmits audio signals to up to four receivers.

Sounds pretty sweet to me. We should be getting on in for review soon.

IT and enterprise solution provider EMC Corporation today finalized an agreement to acquire consumer and SMB storage device manufacturer Iomega for approximately $213 million.

"Iomega will play a key role in EMC's strategy to expand our information storage and management capabilities deeper into the high-growth consumer and small business markets," EMC president, chairman, and CEO, Joe Tucci said in a statement. "In addition to industry-leading products and a household consumer brand, Iomega brings to EMC a deep knowledge of and established business practices for servicing consumers and small businesses. Iomega and EMC represent a powerful combination that ultimately will benefit these customers through the protection, security and simplified management of their rapidly growing information."

The acquisition, which is set to be completed in Q2 2008, will put Iomega's existing business at the center of EMC's new consumer/SMB divition, set to be led by Iomega's CEO, Jonathan Huberman.

Networking hardware manufacturer Buffalo today announced the launch of their new LinkStation Mini, a "palm-sized" 1.1 pound network attached storage (NAS) device.

The 1TB Mini features a dual drive configuration offering data redundancy via RAID 1. The device also offers an included DLNA server provided by TwonkyVision that lets users stream media files through compatible players.

The LinkStation Mini ships with Buffalo's proprietary Web Access feature, letting users access content on the drive from anywhere, using a standard Web browser, while the Remote Power feature makes it possible to turn on the device from afar using the Navigator software bundled with the unit.

Also included are an extra USB port for additional hard drives or printers, 0/100/1000Mbps auto sensing Ethernet port, Two 5,400RPM 2.5 inch notebook drives, and Support for RAID 0 and RAID 1.

The LinkStation Mini will be available in May for $699. A 500GB version of the drive will be offered shortly thereafter.

Though Google made a big fuss about participating in the 700 MHz spectrum auction, Verizon and AT&T were the big winners, according to results released Thursday.

Verizon shelled out $9.4 billion for 109 licenses in the A, B and C blocks. Its c-block purchases are most noteworthy since that spectrum must be open to all applications and devices. That doesn't seem to be a problem for Verizon, which hosted an open development conference in Manhattan on Tuesday.

AT&T, meanwhile, spent $6.6 billion for 227 licenses in the b-block.

Though Google pushed hard for the c-block open access requirements, analysts did not believe the search engine giant was actually going to buy anything due to costly build-out requirements. They were correct, as Google placed a $4.7 billion bid for the c-block--which met the reserve price and triggered open access--but stopped bidding after that, allowing Verizon to come in a scoop up the spectrum.