Digital Ether

The Australian government is sinking a large amount of money into updaing our old national network. (http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/04/aussies-announc/). Last year the OECD listed worldwide broadband Internet statistics (http://www.oecd.org/document/54/0,3343,en_2649_34225_38690102_1_1_1_1,00.html).  Although the Australian newspaper answered with Broadband ratings lifted, having a go at the OECD report.  However, I think it’s long over due

An excellent write-up on copyright in Cory Doctorow: Why I Copyfight

And a website been sued for copyright violations. Join the Copyfight!

A cool way of changing the look of your computer.

http://www.gelaskins.com/

Now there appears to be a convergence of computing operating systems, software, and networking, as Google continues to spread into other areas of IT traditional controlled by other companies like Microsoft (ie Google Docs vs MS Office) and Adobe (Illustrator vs Google Sketch-up)

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/

The main difficulty I see with this is the delay that the network Lag (or Latency) would create, thereby making the system more time-consuming to use.

http://tinyurl.com/ – Making long URLs usable! More than 300 million of them. Over 2 billion hits/month.

http://bit.ly/ – Share, shorten, and track your links

At the moment, there is a push by the Australian Government to control the Internet information into Australia with the Clean feed.  This is been opposed by the Electronic Frontiers Australia with the No Clean Feed.  This is a matter where you need to become informed before you are not allowed to any-more!

“Information wants to be free“

Having just started to read Orwell’s 1984, I find this article on Slashdot.org interesting to say the least;

Amazon Offers To Return Pulled Orwell Ebooks

But I do wonder if people would notice the editing for their histories?

In recent news (Amazon: Google Books deal an ‘unprecedented’ copyright hack) Google is trying to publish out-of-print (or orphaned) books online without the explicit say so of the author or the publisher.   The Google Book Settlement gives details of what Google is offering to publishers and authors.

And to make things more interesting the Open Book Alliance whose members include Amazon, Yahoo and Microsoft (Microsoft, Yahoo Join Google Books Opposition), is opposing Open Book Alliance to oppose Google Book deal. But this battle has been going on for some time Who Owns Online Books? Google captures an entire industry?

The Wall Street Journal, Google’s Book Settlement Is a Ripoff for Authors (Why allow a single publisher to throw out a functioning copyright system?), which points out the breaking of the current Copyright System.

But slashdot, has a somewhat more level view of what’s going on;

What does it mean if Google succeeds?

• What happens is an out-of-print book comes back into print?
• Is it theft if the book only exists in Google’s eBook service, but does not have the permission of the author to publish?
• What about censored book, or books against the public good?
• Is it safe to let Google have that much control over the information we use?

There are a million other questions that are dying to be asked, but I’ll leave that up to you.

CBS Embeds a Video Playing Ad in a Print Magazine.

“Unlike the wholly unsatisfying debut of the e-ink cover in Esquire magazine last year, this works.”

An interesting platform game where you play the evil entity trying to take over the world.  Although it’s been done a few time before, this is a new and somewhat cute variation. The pace is a little lagging, but it looks good.

http://www.nitrome.com/games/parasite/