Alaska Airlines is the latest carrier to launch in-flight Wi-Fi, offering passengers on a specially equipped Boeing 737 a service that uses satellites instead of cellular towers to connect the plane to the Internet.

Like other airlines, Alaska won't let passengers talk over VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) while in flight. They are invited to surf the Web, send and receive e-mail and instant messages, access games and multimedia content and use corporate VPNs (virtual private networks). Users can access the network with any Wi-Fi device, including phones and portable media players. They will get an opening Web page with news, music, shopping and links to services on the airline's homepage.

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A former San Jose network administrator is facing 12 years in prison after pleading guilty to hacking, ID theft, burglary and drug charges.

According to the Santa Clara District Attorney's office, Andrew Madrid, 34, used his IT experience to pull off a variety of crimes between September 2006 and March 2008.

"This was one of the most sophisticated computer crimes our office has prosecuted," said Ben Field, Santa Clara's deputy district attorney. "There's computer intrusion in the first place, there's the introduction of spyware, there's the theft of proprietary data from a computer network and sometimes the destruction of proprietary data from a computer network."

So much Internet, so many wireless ways to get it: A battle is intensifying over which methods will dominate, and the outcome could determine how people surf the Web for years to come.

One method for cable-free navigation - connecting through a cellular phone network - got a boost two weeks ago when a group of companies and the GSM Association, an industry lobby, promised to spend $1 billion to market a new initiative to make laptop computers wireless-ready without using Wi-Fi technology.

The latest graphics cards have been used to break Wi-Fi encryption far quicker than was previously possible. Some security consultants are already suggesting the development blows Wi-Fi security out of the water and that corporations ought to apply tighter VPN controls, or abandon wireless networks altogether, in response.

Russian firm ElcomSoft has applied GPU acceleration technology to its password recovery tool to allow PCs or servers running supported NVIDIA video cards to break Wi-Fi encryption up to 100 times faster than is possible by using conventional microprocessors. Recovery times for Wi-Fi keys are increased by a factor between 10 to 15 in the use of Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery in combination with a regular laptop featuring NVIDIA GeForce 8800M or 9800M series GPUs.

The cost of talking on the go is coming down, thanks to an increasing number of options for using Internet calling services on cellphones as an alternative to traditional cellular service plans.

Nokia is one of the biggest makers of cellphones that include chips for using Wi-Fi, the short-range wireless technology. Some high-profile devices are equipped with the technology, including Apple's iPhone and some BlackBerry models from Research In Motion. The soon-to-be-released G1 Google phone from HTC and T-Mobile also sports a Wi-Fi chip.