Google’s official blog tells us that Google has acquired Writely, a collaborative word processor. To be clear, Writely is still in beta, and it’s far from perfect. Upholding our great user experience means everything to us, so we’re not accepting new registrations until we’ve moved Writely to Google’s software architecture. If you’re interested in giving us a try, we hope you’ll get on the waitlist so we can let you know when you’ll be able to try out Writely
Google is preparing to offer online storage to web users, creating a mirror image of data stored on consumer hard drives, according to company documents that were mistakenly released on the web
La La, a new online music service aims to offer CDs for $US1 by letting members trade used physical discs, in a new twist on online song swapping
SMS 007, a Java application developed by Czech company CircleTech, can encrypt SMS messages on mobiles. The encryption used ensures that wiretapping entities cannot get to the plaintext version of the message. Data stored by the programme is also protected by encryption, so stealing the phone and examining it for data is useless
Fairfax has agreed to buy New Zealand internet auction site Trade Me for NZ$700 million dollars
A church was blocking the only high speed signal in town, so Kevin Lavallée decided he needed to go higher. This is the story of one man’s quest to build a 60-foot reception tower in his yard and retire his modem once and for all
French consumers are not entitled to make personal copies of DVDs, even if they do not distribute them, France’s highest court said Wednesday in a victory for film companies like Vivendi Universal
The US Senate has passed a renewal of the Patriot act, 89-10, after two extensions caused by months of negotiations. The only thing standing in the way of a full renewal is a House vote, expected to pass next week. The renewal comes with some privacy protections attached, however, some worry they are only cosmetic
The Tax Office’s $500 million IT Change Program is based on a decades-old Cobol design, raising questions about future flexibility even before the project is rolled out
A special Australian committee on copyright and DRM has published its findings, and has recommended a drastic scaling-back of the protections given to DRM in most countries — via Boing Boing
Perth’s Edith Cowan University will seek to use its new mesh wireless network to cut down its fleet of mobile phones by replacing them with wireless handsets enabled for Voice over IP
Sony Ericsson has announced several new phones, including two that carry Sony’s Cyber-shot brand and come with 3.2-megapixel cameras that are integrated with Google’s Blogger application
The Mobile Antivirus Researchers Association is reporting what it says is the first virus that can pass from a PC to a mobile device and then erase files. The proof-of concept virus is not yet threatening users
Anti-virus companies are warning of new malicious software that can infect any mobile phone capable of running Java applications, not just feature-rich smart phones
Schools have warned they will have to turn off the internet if a move by the nation’s copyright collection society forces them to pay a fee every time a teacher instructs students to browse a web site. Teachers said students in rural areas would bear the brunt of cuts if the Copyright Agency was successful in adding internet browsing charges to the $31 million in photocopying fees it rakes in from schools. The agency calculates the total due by randomly sampling schools each year for materials they copy, and extrapolating the results
The contents of 800 Australian libraries have gone online, with the launch of a new free service by the National Library in Canberra. Libraries Australia has been used by professional librarians for 25 years. The National Library’s Fran Wilson says from today that will extend to everyone
Google has announced their pilot program to digitise the entire video content of the National Archives and make it globally accessible for free on Google Video. The history of the world should be universally accessible and this is definitely a great step towards making sure that our history is not lost, and that everyone has equal and easy access towards such information. Google has provided some sample videos from the National Archives, such as the 1969 moon landing
Yahoo Music chief Dave Goldberg raised eyebrows Thursday at the Music 2.0 conference in Los Angeles with a proposal rarely heard from executives at large digital music services: Record labels should try selling music online without copy protection
A Trading Standards officer in a town in the UK contacted the Mozilla Foundation to assure it that she’d caught the pirates who were copying Firefox without permission. When it was explained that the software was free, the officer lost it — I can’t believe that your company would allow people to make money from something that you allow people to have free access to. Is this really the case? If Mozilla permit the sale of copied versions of its software, it makes it virtually impossible for us, from a practical point of view, to enforce UK anti-piracy legislation, as it is difficult for us to give general advice to businesses over what is/is not permitted
— via Boing Boing
An Amish teen was accused and cited for wiretapping a neighbour’s phone line to call relatives in another state. The Amish tend to frown upon this sort of thing — via digg
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