The federal Government’s second push to fully privatise Telstra has been quashed by the Senate
Google’s Labs has cooked up two new search offerings, introducing a Personalised Web Search and Web Alerts, as part of the company’s plans to continue to heat up the market
Microsoft plans to introduce a news aggregation service for weblogs and to develop a social networking product
If you’re using Microsoft Office and considering a switch to the free OpenOffice.org, Microsoft would like you to read their Open Office Competitive Guide first, in which they tell you how much better / faster / cheaper MS Office is than OpenOffice. Taran Rampepersad, an IT consultant in Trinidad, believes this Competitive Guide
is nothing but FUD, so he wrote a detailed rebuttal to it
Congress appears to be preparing assaults against peer-to-peer technology on multiple fronts. A draft bill recently circulated among members of the House judiciary committee would make it much easier for the Justice Department to pursue criminal prosecutions against file sharers by lowering the burden of proof and would also would seek penalties of fines and prison time of up to ten years for file sharing. They dubbed the bill Protecting Intellectual Rights Against Theft and Expropriation Act of 2004
, or the Pirate Act
Development One Australia is shipping prebuilt mythtv-based PVRs. These are souped-up TiVo-like boxen built out of commodity hardware with all the features that I want, not just the ones that make the Luddites who run the movie studios comfortable
That’s what Picsel is promising… Picsel Browser runs on BREW V2.1 and beyond, and will allow users to display Flash, video, Microsoft Office, and even Adobe Acrobat files. And Picsel reckons the breakthrough will be for the benefit of network operators
GreyMagic Software has detected a serious security flaw in Yahoo’s Web e-mail service and Microsoft’s Hotmail service, which could allow hackers to run malicious scripts on users’ computers
Jumping electric charges could waft breezes of ionised air through microchips, replacing the bulky, noisy fans that cool down today’s computers. Researchers at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana say their patent-pending technology could be built directly into a computer chip’s heat sink to provide a faster, quieter and lighter cooling system than the alternatives
The European Union on Wednesday issued its ruling in the long-running case against Microsoft, fining the American software giant US$613 million, the heaviest punishment in any European competition case to date. European Competition Commissioner Mario Monti ruled that Microsoft had failed to provide to rivals information that they needed to compete fairly in the market for server software and that the company has been offering Windows on the condition that it come bundled with Windows Media Player, stifling competition
The New Zealand government is about to define a small part of the rights assumed by the fair use
clause in the Copyright Act 1994. Essentially they are going to protect the consumers’ rights to convert media from one format to another for personal use, making it clearly legal to transfer tracks from a commercial CD to a mix-CD, MP3 player, PDA, PC, 8-track, or tuned array of hummingbirds. NZ law already makes it clear that gifting or reselling items includes a transfer all of rights, including copyright, warrantee, and licencing agreements, so providing your original is the genuine article you’re not a criminal
In the latest sign that a standards war is petering out, Toshiba has introduced dual-format DVD recordable drives. Toshiba’s Storage Device Division announced on Monday drives for notebook computers and desktop systems that support the -R/RW
and +R/RW
technologies. The so-called dash
and plus
formats have been at odds when it comes to DVD recording, but more and more manufacturers are building both technologies into their machines to make things simpler for consumers
Joel Zahn has case modded an Underwood No 5 typewriter into a rather spiffy computer. I’m torn between the sacrilege of destroying an Underwood and the coolness of the finished article. Andy France decided that he needed to build a small Windows XP machine and the perfect case would be Windows XP box. To avoid confusion on a dual boot system, he has a toggle switch to boot from a Red Hat Linux box when Linux is needed
New dual-layer DVD-burning drives will be released very soon by Philips and Sony that will double the capacity of DVD drives, making a complete copy of your dual-layer DVDs theoretically possible. It will use dual layer technology that will hold up to 8.5GB, and will cost around $230 for an internal and $330 for external, burning all 8.5GB in approximately 45 minutes
www.apple.com.au/accessibility
Finally, Apple Speaks to the Blind
You can talk to your Mac
The next major-ish release of Mac OSX could feature built-in assistive technologies such as screen readers, spoken items and QuickTime: Closed Captioning just to name a few.
Yeah so what! You say, you can get this software for Windows! You whine. Yeah well it ain’t free with your OS like the mac solution will be! Ha! It’s built into the OS, not some add on! Ha, again!
The You can talk to your Mac article also has an interesting rumour on the one button mouse front. The rumor is that Apple is working on a mouse with an iPod like circular touchwheel, damn nice. Hmmm… that could mean a circular mouse. Could this be the puk mouse revisited and actually good? Only time will tell.
Mark Maughan, an accountant and professional moron, Googled his name and found some alarming, false, misleading and injurious
information about himself and his firm. Therefore, he is now suing Google, Yahoo (which used Google as its search engine at the time), AOL (for using Google to enhance its search results) and Time Warner (because they’re the same company as AOL) for libel. Specifically, his lawyer John Girardi believes that Google’s PageRank algorithm takes known good information and twists its context when displaying search results
Innocents with the temerity to run the William Gibson monikered Black Ice firewall are catching it big-time. Some wicked person hand-coded an amazingly teensy 900-byte Black Ice specific worm that burrows through a flaw in Black Ice and whacks PCs hard enough to ruin them and despoil their contents. Virus guys used to just write viruses. Now they’re bold enough to try to wreck corporations. Life gets a little more Gibsonian ever day — via Beyond the Beyond
Telstra faces a fine of $10 million — rising by $1 million a day — and possible legal action from rivals unless it cuts the price it charges competitors for its wholesale broadband internet service as a matter of urgency
Some people living in some of the most inaccessible areas of India are enjoying an improved postal service — thanks to the combining of e-mail with traditional snail mail
AOL has decided to take a fresh approach to fighting spam and is now blocking the spammer’s web address. The philosophy is, if the customers can’t visit spammers sites, spammers will not be able to make any money
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