'Government should legalise private CD copying' - report

A think tank has asked the UK government to change a 300-year-old law that would allow private copying of music and films for personal use. The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) says that such a move would shield those who transfer their CDs onto their iPods and other MP3 players from prosecution. In its report, Public Innovation: Intellectual property in a digital age the IPPR urges the Government to create a legal 'private right to copy' that would allow people to make copies of CDs, or DVDs for their own use. ...more

LaCie announces faster back-ups

LaCie has announced a new AIT tape drive capable of backing-up or archiving 200Gb of compressed data onto one tape. The AIT3 drives have twice the capacity of existing AIT2 drives and double the transfer rate, reaching a maximum of 24Mb per second. The drives are back-compatible with AIT1 and AIT2 media, so no existing back-ups will be redundant. ...more

Google asks users to tweak translations

Google is hoping to iron out translation hiccups by throwing the weight of its massive userbase at the problem. While many translation tools, such as Babelfish and Google's translate.google. ...more

Dell takes the Windows out of n-Series PCs

Dell is to begin shipping Precision and OptiPlex corporate desktops with an 'n' addendum - signifying the absence of Microsoft's Windows operating system, or any other. Instead the machines come without any OS pre-installed. And to get around Microsoft licensing terms that require PCs to ship with an operating system, a copy of FreeDOS is included in the box. ...more

US keeps control of the Internet

The United States has won the battle to keep control of the Internet. A last minute detail allowed the US to retain control of the domain name system through the non-profit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) headquartered in California. In return, the US has agreed to begin talks about potentially relinquishing some control and the long-term governance of the DNS. ...more