Australian legislators call for Internet censorship

Australian legislators have called for all Internet content to be filtered by ISPs before it is relayed to their customers. Sixty-two members of the ruling coalition have signed a letter calling for a restriction on pornographic, violent and other 'inappropriate' material. Internet users would have to opt in, by applying to their ISP, to receive the blocked content. ...more

British government gets serious about open source

The UK government is preparing to take a major step towards a policy of adopting Open Source Software wherever possible. Whilst not ruling out the use of proprietory software entirely, the plan seeks to get the best value for the taxpayers' money whilst reducing the risk to lock-in to one vendor and supporting open standards. These conclusions are part of a draft document published by the Office of the e-Envoy entitled Open Source Software for use within the UK government. ...more

TDK spins CD-R/RW into triple performance

Forget DVD-RAM, the future is the humble CD, as TDK has gone into a joint venture with Calimetrics Inc to produce a new technology that will triple the capacity and write speed of CD-R/RW drives. The technology should enable write speeds of 36 and a storage capacity of up to 2Gb on special MutiLevel recording (ML) discs, as well as allowing you to write 700Mb to a standard CD-R/RW at 12-speed. The new ML CD-R/RW drives will only differ from standard drives in that they use new integrated circuits and will not therefore be much more expensive. ...more

Sony slices 400 jobs off UK operations

Hot on the heels of yesterday's announcement that Sony was rethinking its European production plans due to a weak euro, its plant in south Wales is to shed 400 jobs despite assurances that there are no plans for closures. Blame is put at the feet of the strong pound and weak Euro, diminishing profits converted to Japanese yen. Sony also added that fuel costs and business taxes were further squeezing profitability. ...more

BT Openworld and Yahoo team up

BT Openworld has announced that it has signed a deal with Yahoo! UK to provide a raft of new services on its connection packages. The new service to be called BT Yahoo! Broadband and BT Yahoo! Internet, will include the rather wordy names of BT Yahoo! Anytime, BT Yahoo! SurfTime and BT Yahoo! Pay-as-you-go. BT Openworld says the broadband service will launch in September and the dialup service from November. ...more