The Great firewall of China?

Having already placed heavy restrictions on Net use, the Chinese government has gone one step further with plans to build its own separate Internet, according to the government's Xinhua News Agency. The Chinese Internet would be "safer, faster, and handle greater volumes of information", it was announced at a ceremony in Beijing, where a number of companies signed an agreement to form the China C-Net Strategic Alliance. However, as the government recently cracked down on 'subversive' content, making Chinese news sites carry only approved material, terms such as 'safer' are probably in the government's interest, rather than the moral welfare of the Chinese. ...more

Lixxus claims to be the UK's first pay-as-you-go broadband service

A company called Lixxus has launched what it claims is the UK's first pay-as-you-go broadband service. Rather than a fixed monthly fee, Lixxus charges its users based on the amount of data they download, with prices starting from absolutely nothing, incrementally rising 5p a megabyte to 300MB and by 0.00225p beyond, to ?25 for unlimited use of a 512Kbps line (and to ?35 for a 1Mbps line). ...more

Fuji shrinks Post-It note sized digicams

Fuji have announced two diminutive digicams. The FinePix F440 Zoom and F450 Zoom boast four and five megapixel CCDs respectively and a decent 3.4x optical zoom. ...more

The 'cost conscious' get faster

AMD has upped the speed of the Duron, its processor for the 'mainstream' desktop market. Now clocking 1.3GHz, the new Duron - optimised for Windows XP and supporting Double Data Rate (DDR) memory - is priced at $118 in 1,000-unit quantities The release follows that of the Athlon 2000+, which hit the 'virtual' 2GHz mark hot on the heels of Intel pushing out its 2. ...more

Web services to be as ONE

Sun has announced its strategy for integrating Web services across a computing infrastructure that ranges from handheld devices, through home computers, to high-powered servers. Sun ONE is its name. Think "Open Net Environment". ...more