The BBC’s online services will be made available free of charge at thousands of Wi-Fi hotspots around the UK. The corporation has agreed to a deal with Wi-Fi firm The Cloud, which operates 7,500 hotspots around the country.

The news Web site, program sites, and downloads of TV shows via the iPlayer can be accessed freely.

Verizon Wireless’ CPNI (Customer Proprietary Network Information): our call records, essentially, is on the auction block. What numbers we called, how often, how long we spent on the phone, and how much it cost us. (It does not include our own names, numbers, or addresses.) Verizon wants to share this data with third parties, and of course they need our permission: “you have a right, and we have a duty, under federal and state law, to protect the confidentiality of your CPNI.”

But that duty only goes so far: “Unless you provide us [Verizon Wireless] with notice that you wish to opt out within 30 days of receiving this letter, we will assume that you give the Verizon Companies the right to share your CPNI with the authorized companies as described above.”

PocketMusic has just received an upgrade. What’s new in v5.0? Expect new skins, enhanced Bluetooth support, optimizations for one-handed control, a new and improved equalizer, a new alarm system, enhanced network connectivity, and that all-important Windows Mobile 6 support.

One month after launch, the enhanced AccuWeather.com Astronomy Center has introduced an extensive collection of astronomy-related widgets, addressing the needs of beginners, experts, and everyone in-between. In the initial phase, the site offers five new widgets but is open to submissions and expects to add new applications. All downloads are simple, free, and available through the AccuWeather.com Astronomy Center.

Starting 10/15, T-Mobile began offering the MOTO RAZR2 V8 in a dark navy vacuumized metal finish. With a premium design and innovative technology, the MOTO RAZR2 V8 features a built-in music player with morphing touch screen external controls which provide vibrating feedback in response to finger taps.

Additionally, the robust external speaker, Stereo Bluetooth and 2GB of internal memory all make for a premium music experience. The MOTO RAZR2 V8 comes pre-loaded with music by Interpol, The Starting Line, and Red Jumpsuit Apparatus and customers can enjoy a 30-day free trial to Napster. The RAZR2 V8 will be available for $249.99 with a two-year service agreement.

The BBC must deliver an online TV catch-up service that lets users of all computers download programmes, the corporation’s regulators have said. It comes after the BBC said a download service for Mac and Linux users was not 100% definite and would depend on cost.

A spokesman for the BBC Trust said it had approved the iPlayer on the condition of “platform neutrality”, including a download service. The BBC said it “had not ruled out” a download system for non-Windows PCs.

A 13-year-old coder that goes by the name AriX has released an application called iJailBreak that allows users to install third-party applications on the iPod touch. The application was just updated to version 0.2.1, which fixed several bugs.

According to the developer, the only user interaction required is for you to restart the iPod Touch. The software works on Intel-based Macs running Mac OS X Tiger–a PowerPC version is in the works. iJailBreak is available for free download from Google Code.

Start-up Agito Networks can cut company’s mobile bills with a system that hands voice calls over quickly and accurately between company Wi-Fi and the cellular networks, the company claimed.

Agito’s system uses RF-location to tell when a user is approaching predefined points at the limit of the company’s Wi-Fi coverage. A client on the handset cooperates with the company’s RoamAnywhere router, which integrates with the company’s IP PBXs, so phone calls can be handed over between the Wi-Fi and cellular networks.

The handover takes less than one second, which is much quicker than competitors, according to Pejman Roshan, Agito Networks’ vice president of marketing. “Some solutions centralise call control decisions in the appliance – we take a different approach, distributing processing to the clients.” This is quicker and also more scalable, he explained, since each handset can handle its own calls.

The eStarling 2.0 Wi-Fi isn’t just a way of displaying your digital pictures, it’s a great way to keep in touch with your family and friends by letting them share their photographs too.

With full Web-based access you can connect the Photo Frame to your local Wi-Fi network and display pictures via email, or from an online photo archive source such as Flickr or Photobucket.

H.D. Moore has released instructions on writing a critical exploit that leverages a bug in how Apple’s iPhone handles TIFF image files and, to enable the writing of exploits, has put out a new version of his Weasel debugger that can handle the peculiarities of the phone’s ARM processors. At this point, the exploit can only take over phones that have been tinkered with, but Moore is promising to post instructions on how to exploit unmodified iPhones soon.

The vulnerability in question is in libtiff, the iPhone’s library for reading and writing TIFF files. From the get-go, Apple shipped the iPhone with a vulnerable version of libtiff and didn’t bother to fix it in the recent 1.1.1 update–“fortunately for the iPhone development community,” Moore noted in an Oct. 11 posting that was the first of his two-part series on cracking the iPhone. The vulnerability can be exploited through the phone’s MobileSafari Web browser.