eBay to charge VAT

eBay will begin charging VAT to EU-based sellers from July. VAT will be charged at the local rates according to the country of the seller, even if there is no localised eBay site for that country. The tax will be charged on seller fees levied by eBay, such as insertion, feature, final value and subscription fees, from 8am on 1 July in line with EU directives that will come into force. ...more

Intel announces high capacity MP3 player

The Intel Pocket Concert Audio Player is equipped with 128MB of memory for storing digital audio in the form of MP3 and Windows Media Audio (WMA). The huge amount of memory is twice that which appears with most of its rivals, except for those that make use of Iomega Pocket Zip memory, which holds up to 80MB of data. Intel claims that the player's memory is sufficient for it to store up to 4 hours of music at 96Kbps, or around 20 hours of speech. ...more

RIAA wrongly sues 66-year-old

Less than a fortnight after the US record industry received acres of bad press for suing a 12-year-old, it has withdrawn a lawsuit against a 66-year-old woman who has never downloaded a song in her life. What's more, Sarah Seabury Ward has a Mac, which can't even run the Kazaa software she is accused of using. The lawsuit against Ward is one of 261 the RIAA has filed in an attempt to clamp down on the illegal sharing of music files over the Internet. ...more

Sony widens the view

Sony plans to debut two new TFT monitors in mid-October, including a 23in model. The P series monitors, the P82 and P232W, are driven by a 200Mhz graphics chip. Sony claims fast and responsive screens with high contrast (400:1) and strong luminescence (300cd/m?). ...more

Terratec sound out the Webcam

Previously known for its sound cards, Terratec is to launch a new Webcam in early November, called the TerraCAM 2move. The unit can be used as a Webcam attached to a PC via USB, or taken out in the field (thanks to its own power supply) and is able to capture still images in 24bit colour up to a resolution of 640x480 and store 26 of them (more at lower resolutions) on its internal 64Mbit SDRAM (8Mb) memory. It can also capture up to 10 seconds of video at 352x288. ...more