Internet censorship grows around the world

More and more countries are learning how to censor the Internet according to the annual report by Reporters Without Borders. Although the Internet has democratised today's media so that anyone can - in theory - say anything and have their voice heard around the world, dictators and repressive regimes have moved quickly to suppress any dissent. Authoritarian regimes have woken up to the fact that dissidents and others who oppose the workings of the state are very likely to be using modern communications tools such as blogs, email and websites to distribute their messages. ...more

WWDC: Tiger - new features

OS X 10.4 Tiger will introduce Mac uses to around 150 new features, Here we take a look at some of them. Spotlight Drawing in Tiger's new underlying search technology, Spotlight provides a single place to search your files, emails, calendars and contacts. ...more

GUS pays ?1.4m for Breathe

Doomed ISP Breathe.com has been bought by Great Universal Stores (GUS) for ?1.4m. ...more

Six degrees holds true online

Researchers have found that the idea no one person is farther away from another by more than six acquaintances, is equally true using email. The team of researchers at Columbia University discovered that getting an email message to any one of 18 selected target recipients from more than 60,000 participants took on average between five and seven intermediate steps. Team leader Duncan Watts reported that despite the high number of participants there were a large proportion that were well educated and based in the US. ...more

VeriSign in dispute with China over Web addresses

American corporation takes on communist China's government. It's not yet a doomsday scenario, however, as the dispute concerns the Web-based registration of Chinese domain names. It was last week that a test scheme for multilingual domain names was launched, under the auspices of VeriSign, which allows registrations using Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters. ...more