Technology

Optus will open its long-awaited, $150 million DSL broadband network to new customers from Saturday, offering downloads speeds of up to 20Mbps

Apple has introduced an iPod software update that lets users set maximum volume limits on the device

Microsoft plans to release a special compatibility patch that will temporarily undo some upcoming changes to Internet Explorer

Intel wants to make laptops more accessible to users and would like to make devices more akin to their desktop counterparts. With the company’s new Interchangeability Initiative, components including the optical drive, LCD screen, battery, power adapter and keyboard would all be upgradeable and can be swapped between notebooks. Hard drives are already for the most part interchangeable as long as you decide on PATA or SATA — via digg

eBay helped to shut down a Russian Web site last week that was offering to sell stolen customer account information for as little as $5 each. Armed with an eBay customer’s login and password, a fraudster could post items for sale, collect payments, and then never deliver the goods. The site was also offering to sell a handful of PayPal accounts

Fujitsu expects to begin shipping a 200GB hard drive suitable for use in laptop computers in the third quarter of this year. Based on that schedule the drive could be available in computers for end-users within the year. That’s earlier than Fujitsu predicted last year when it said such drives wouldn’t be available until 2007

A team of German and Japanese scientists have collaborated to shatter the world record for data transmission speed. By transmitting a data signal at 2.56 terabits per second over a 160-kilometer link (equivalent to 2,560,000,000,000 bits per second or the contents of 60 DVDs) the researchers bettered the old record of 1.28 terabits per second held by a Japanese group. By comparison, the fastest high-speed links currently carry data at a maximum 40Gb/s, or around 50 times slower

Microsoft is for the first time encouraging people to give public feedback on Internet Explorer, with the creation of a bug database for the next version of its browser, IE 7 beta

del.icio.us now supports private bookmarks. To try it out, go to settings and click on private saving to activate; you’ll then see the new option whenever you save a page — via digg

Reports from Redmond are that Microsoft Employees are not happy with the double delay of Windows and Office being pushed back into 2007. EETimes is reporting that some Microsoft employees are calling for the termination of several top managers Including Brian Valentine, Jim Allchin, and Steve Ballmer for the delay debacle. The report references a blog by Who da’Punk, an anonymous Microsoft employee who asks, where’s the accountability for failure? So far the blog entry has generated over 350 comments from Microsoft insiders and outsiders

Interpol has called on politicians to help law enforcement officers bring cybercriminals to justice by making it easier for evidence to be transferred between countries

With up to 60% of the code in the new consumer version of Vista set to be rewritten as the company scrambles to fix internal problems, Microsoft has announced a delay of Windows Vista, that will mean PCs with the new operating system won’t go on sale in Australia until January.

StopBadware.org, a corporate-backed watchdog group that monitors software for deceptive and abusive practices, named Kazaa and three other applications as violators of its guidelines

Australian libraries are likely to continue resisting calls from Google to have their collections digitised and made available for search until the Web giant settles disputes with bodies representing copyright holders in the United States

Samsung has developed a 32GB Solid State Disk based on NAND flash memory technology that the company claims might eventually replace conventional hard drives in laptops

PayPal, the online payment company owned by eBay, appears to be gearing up to let customers send money or order and pay for products by text message from a mobile phone

A federal judged issued a ruling Friday in the spat between Google and the Department of Justice over a government request that the company turn over search-query data. US District Court Judge James Ware’s decision mandates that Google turn over 50,000 random URLs from its database. Google, which had cited user privacy as its chief argument for its refusal to comply with the subpoena, has praised the ruling because of its requirement to release only a limited set of data