Chips are up for gambling Aussies

It seems our cousins down under find it hard to fight the lure of cyber casinos. More than 80 per cent of adult Australians gamble, spending twice the amount compared with their American or European peers and losing an average of 3 per cent of their income on games of chance. To combat this rising tide of gambling, the Australian government has decided to ban Internet casinos for a year, with offending sites facing criminal charges and a fine of up to a million Australian dollars (around ?380,000) per day. ...more

Athlon XP processor prices tumble

One day after Intel cuts Celeron processor prices, AMD has moved to slash the cost of the Athlon XP. AMD's mainstream desktop processor has seen price cuts of more than 30 per cent. The Athlon XP 3000+ drops 18 per cent (from $325 down to $265), and the 2800+ and 2700+ drop 20 and 23 per cent respectively, to $180 and $137. ...more

BT plans to squeeze knowledge from the Net

With the start of the WWW2006, the 15th international World Wide Web conference, which this year is being held in Edinburgh, BT has been outlining its R&D efforts for the Semantic Web and how to make it more of a commercial proposition. In a nutshell, the Semantic Web is a World Wide Web Consortium-backed initiative (W3C to give the Web more meaning) that seeks to put more 'meaning' into online data, such that it can be more effectively processed by computers rather having to be interpreted at a basic level by humans. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web no less, is among those pursuing development of the Semantic Web, at Southampton University. ...more

PlusNet shows off fuller subs figures

PlusNet has announced a 77 per cent increase in broadband subscribers, attributing it in part to its policy of traffic management. Put simply, the system prioritises certain types of Internet usage during busy periods. So people who are using the Web or sending and receiving emails take priority over heavy-use activities sush as p2p file sharing and usenet downloads. ...more

Microsoft to fix .wmf Windows flaw

Microsoft says it has come up with a fix for the vulnerability exposed in the graphics rendering engine between Christmas and the New Year. As we reported yesterday a new strain of virus has appeared which means that a specially designed Windows Metafile (wmf) could be used to gain access to a machine and take control. The situation is worsened by the fact that source code for the exploit has been published on the Internet and that the virus changes itself when it replicates, making it harder for it to be detected by traditional signature-based security software. ...more