A bargain-hunting investment consortium named Manhattan Software Bidco has offered around $443 million plus options in a takeover bid for Australia’s leading accounting software brand, MYOB
Google’s reach into the world’s libraries looks more assured following a deal struck recently. The agreement with the Authors Guild and Association of American Publishers will resolve a number of lawsuits from the last three years. Google will establish a non-profit Book Rights Registry to ensure copyrighted works receive compensation via subscription services or ad revenue. The registry and settlements will cost Google $125m) However, the deal still needs approval from a US district court to resolve the pending lawsuits. If approved, the agreement will provide much wider access to out-of-print books and a great many in-print, in-copyright works
SanDisk has stepped up its efforts to convince corporates that USB sticks are a secure medium, adding built-in antivirus capability to its latest Cruzer drive. Any files copied or saved to the latest Cruzer Enterprise will automatically be scanned by a McAfee heuristics and antivirus engine that loads every time the drive is used. If it detects infected files being copied from a PC, all further transfers will be disallowed form that machine, stopping their spread
The Federal Government is planning to make internet censorship compulsory for all Australians and could ban controversial websites on euthanasia or anorexia. Australia’s level of net censorship will put it in the same league as countries including China, Cuba, Iran and North Korea, and the Government will not let users opt out of the proposed national internet filter when it is introduced. Broadband, Communications and Digital Economy Minister Stephen Conroy admitted the Federal Government’s $44.2 million internet censorship plan would now include two tiers – one level of mandatory filtering for all Australians and an optional level that will provide a clean feed
, censoring adult material. Despite planning to hold live trials
before the end of the year, Senator Conroy said it was not known what content the mandatory filter would bar, with euthanasia or pro-anorexia sites on the chopping block
The framed photograph will inevitably fade and yellow over time, but the digital photo file may be unreadable to future computers — an unintended consequence of our rapidly digitising world that may ultimately lead to a digital dark age, says Jerome P McDonough, assistant professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. According to McDonough, the issue of a looming digital dark age originates from the mass of data spawned by our ever-growing information economy — at last count, 369 exabytes worth of data, including electronic records, tax files, e-mail, music and photos, for starters. (An exabyte is 1 quintillion bytes; a quintillion is the number 1 followed by 18 zeroes.) The concern for archivists and information scientists like McDonough is that, with ever-shifting platforms and file formats, much of the data we produce today could eventually fall into a black hole of inaccessibility
The Tribler BitTorrent client, a project run by researchers from several European universities and Harvard, is the first to incorporate decentralised search capabilities. With Tribler, users can now find .torrent files that are hosted among other peers, instead of on a centralised site such as The Pirate Bay or Mininova
US newspaper the Christian Science Monitor is to cease production as a daily title after 100 years, becoming the highest profile national title in the US to scale back on its print operation to combat rising costs and falling print sales. CSM announced yesterday that it will move all breaking news to a 24/7 web operation from April next year, though it will continue in print in the form of a new Sunday magazine. John Yemma, the CSM editor, said the new model would allow the publication to retain its eight international bureaux and still save money
Google has quietly dispatched a team of experts from the US on a fact-finding mission to decide whether it should establish a data centre in Australia. In the past few weeks the team of about five Google US employees had been involved in high-level discussions with local data centre providers
The ABC is working closely with the internet industry to overcome service limitations holding back its newly launched internet broadcasting service iView. Ian Carroll director of the ABC’s innovation group said that iView was being held back by limited download quotas available to Australian users. They were frightened of incurring crippling excess download charges if they used the service
Belgian ISP Scarlet scored an important victory in the first major European test of copyright law. The interim decision forcing them to block transfers of copyrighted materials via P2P has been reversed, because the judge agreed with Scarlet that the measures the Belgian RIAA proposed to implement proved to be ineffective. A final decision is expected next year — via Slashdot
Leading Internet companies, long criticised by human-rights groups for their business dealings in China, agreed Tuesday to new guidelines that seek to limit what data they should share with authorities worldwide and when they should do so. The guidelines call for Google, Yahoo and Microsoft to try to reduce the scope of government requests that appear to conflict with free speech and other human rights principles. They also require participating companies to seek requests in writing, along with the names and titles of the authorising officer
Family First Senator Steve Fielding wants hardcore pornography and fetish material blocked under the Government’s plans to filter the internet, sparking renewed fears the censorship could be expanded well beyond illegal material
. The Opposition said it would take a lot of convincing
for it to support the controversial mandatory ISP filtering policy, so the Government would need the support of Senator Fielding as well as the Greens and Senator Nick Xenophon to pass the legislation
Engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, are reporting a new way of creating computer chips that could revitalise optical lithography, a patterning technique that dominates modern integrated circuits manufacturing. By combining metal lenses that focus light through the excitation of electrons — or plasmons — on the lens’ surface with a flying head
that resembles the stylus on the arm of an old-fashioned LP turntable and is similar to those used in hard disk drives, the researchers were able to create line patterns only 80 nanometers wide at speeds up to 12 metres per second, with the potential for higher resolution detail in the near future
The Internet’s key oversight agency issued preliminary guidelines for the introduction of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of alternatives to .com
in the first sweeping changes to the network’s 25-year-old address system. But individuals should forget about claiming a personal domain name suffix for themselves or their families. The application fee, scheduled to be disclosed Friday, is expected to approach $200,000 — partially refundable only in limited circumstances — to help cover the potential $20 million cost of crafting the guidelines and reviewing applications
The latest request from the Pentagon jars the senses. They are looking for contractors to provide a Multi-Robot Pursuit System
that will let packs of robots search for and detect a non-cooperative human
The Federal Government is attempting to silence critics of its controversial plan to censor the internet, which experts say will break the internet while doing little to stop people from accessing illegal material such as child pornography. ISPs and the government’s own tests have found that presently available filters are not capable of adequately distinguishing between legal and illegal content and can degrade internet speeds by up to 86 per cent. Documents obtained by us show the office of the Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, tried to bully ISP staff into suppressing their criticisms of the plan
A US firm has unveiled plans to build a massive one-billion-dollar charging network to power electric cars in Australia as it seeks cleaner and cheaper options to petrol. Better Place, which has built plug-in stations for electric vehicles in Israel and Denmark, has joined forces with Australian power company AGL and finance group Macquarie Capital to create an Australian network. Under the agreement, Macquarie will raise one billion dollars to build electric-vehicle networks in the country’s largest cities — Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane — while AGL will power the system with renewable energy
One day before T-Mobile G1 goes on sale and one year after the first Android announcement, Google open sources Android. Android is not the first open source mobile OS, but it claims to be the first free, open source, and fully customisable mobile platform. Android offers a full stack: an operating system, middleware, and key mobile applications. It also contains a rich set of APIs that allows third-party developers to develop great applications
Owners of MacBooks with multi-touch trackpads can try out an experimental Firefox 3.1 build that supports finger gestures-swiping left and right for back and forward, pinch zooming, and twisting between tabs, amongst others. The gestures may or may not make it into the final 3.1 release, but at least one developer finds the tab-switching twist a big convenience — via lifehacker
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