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When Adele Rothman bought her 16-year-old son a car in 2003, she made sure to pick one that had OnStar, the onboard communications and safety system. What the Scarsdale, N.Y., resident didn't know was that the OnStar system in the car was already doomed to die. The federal government decided in 2002 to let cellular carriers shut down analog cell phone networks, used by Rothman's Saab and about 500,000 other OnStar-equipped cars, after Feb. 18, 2008.

The cast for the federal spectrum auction in January has now been assembled. On Tuesday night, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) released a list of 266 applicants who want to bid. The auction will offer frequencies that had been used for analog transmission by TV stations, which are now moving to digital. The applicants include Google, Cablevision, Cox, Qualcomm, Alltel, Chevron, US Cellular, as well as Paul Allen's Vulcan Inc., regional carriers such as Leap Wireless and MetroPCS, the startup Frontier Wireless, and a Guam-backed phone company headed by Roy Disney, Walt's brother. There's also the tiny, Middletown, Rhode Island-based...

Best Buy said today it has stopped selling analog televisions and pulled all remaining stock from its shelves, signaling the end of an era as consumers increasingly move toward digital products with flat-panel and high-definition screens.

WASHINGTON -- Legislation requiring U.S. broadcasters to abandon their analog spectrum, opening up the "beachfront" spectrum to next-generation wireless services and emergency response agencies, is headed to U.S. President George Bush to be signed into law. Late Wednesday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a large budget reconciliation bill that included a deadline of February 17, 2009, for broadcasters to stop broadcasting analog signals and move to digital television (DTV). The House approval came after the U.S. Senate in December amended other parts of the House-approved budget reconciliation bill conference report. The final bill includes up to $1.5 billion in...

US analogue TV switch-off in 2009 The US Congress has approved plans to force broadcasters to switch off their analogue television signals by 2009. Setting a date of 17 February 2009 was called a "great technical revolution" by Republican politician Joe Barton, a main advocate for the change. Congress has allocated $1.5bn (£844m) to ensure Americans can convert their TV sets to receive digital signals. The analogue television switch-off in the UK is set to take place gradually from 2008-2012. The US measures, which were part of budget legislation, were passed in December, but Democrats in the Senate forced technical...

MANHASSET, N.Y. — Leading PC and consumer electronics companies announced they are developing a specification for a next-generation PC digital display interface that is also compatible with high-definition TV signals. Penned the Unified Display Interface (UDI), the standard is expected to replace the aging VGA analog standard and provide guidelines to ensure compatibility with the DVI standard. UDI will be also be compatible with HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface), the standard digital interface for High Definition TVs (HDTVs) and advanced CE displays. UDI will be able to use High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) technology widely deployed in HDMI-compatible products today....

Enough has come out about the failure of the 9/11 Commission to include critical information about Mohammed Atta and other 9/11 attackers, to suggest a new Commission to investigate the original Commission. The cure may not be that drastic, but it is that important. In short, a special Army intelligence operation known as “Able Danger” identified Atta and four of his accomplices, and identified Al-Qaeda cells in Hamburg and Brooklyn and elsewhere, a year before the 9/11 attacks. They offered then to share that information with law enforcement agencies including the FBI. Those offers were cut off by Clinton Administration...

FCC moves up TV tuner mandate WASHINGTON-Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), former chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee and frequent critic of the TV broadcast lobby, will introduce a bill next Tuesday that will set the hard date for the completion of the digital TV transition at Jan. 1, 2009. McCain's move will pre-empt the current chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), who said earlier this week that he is preparing a similar bill, but did not give a timeframe for introducing his bill. continued below The McCain bill will be similar to legislation known as the...

Technology is changing the huge global market for record collectors. As music dealers like those immortalised in the book High Fidelity disappear, will vinyl and CD rarities survive the download revolution? Second-hand record shops are becoming almost as rare a sighting in the UK as a first edition Beatles EP. The days of shuffling into grubby backstreet stores in search of that obscure Pink Fairies seven-inch are on their way out as dealers succumb to the march of online auction sites and MP3s. CURRENT RARITIES U2's Trabant car: £6,000 Queen 12" single: £10,000 Withdrawn Nirvana CD: £500 Led Zeppelin seven-inch:...

[News]Hollywood Wants to Plug the "Analog Hole" The Big Picture The people who tried to take away your VCR are at it again. Hollywood has always dreamed of a "well-mannered marketplace" where the only technologies that you can buy are those that do not disrupt its business. Acting through legislators who dance to Hollywood's tune, the movie studios are racing to lock away the flexible, general-purpose technology that has given us a century of unparalelled prosperity and innovation. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) filed the "Content Protection Status Report" with the Senate Judiciary Committee last month, laying out...