Tag archive: Sydney

Microsoft has reason to be weary of tablets. Ten years ago, the company made a big bet on them and lost. Then Apple came along last year and completely reinvented the category, making tablets all the rage overnight. Speaking rather honestly at a lunch in Sydney, Australia earlier today, Microsoft's global chief research and strategy office, Craig Mundie questioned whether the fevered excitement over tablets will last. The Sydney Morning… Read More

There is such a thing as being too popular, it seems. In Sydney, Australia, a young girl named Jess was forced to cancel her 16th birthday party after her Facebook invitation went viral and nearly 200,000 people signed up to come to her house, according to the Daily Telegraph. Planned as an open party for her friends, schoolmates, and their the Facebook invitation was open for everyone “as long as it doesn't get out of hand,”… Read More

The International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the organization that oversees the creation and management of top-level domains like .com, .org, and the myriad of international and special purpose domains like .tv and .mobi, has appointed Rob Beckstrom as its new CEO. The announcement came at the conclusion of ICANN's 35th international meeting in Sydney, Australia, and follows Paul Twomey's announcement… Read More

Social networking giant MySpace has announced its latest belt-tightening moves in an effort to make the company more nimble and improve its bottom line: MySpace will be reducing its international staff by about two thirds—from 450 people to just 150—and plans to close at least four of its offices outside the United States. According to the company, about half of MySpace's user base comes from outside the United States.… Read More

Wikileaks is known for blowing the whistle on all sorts of things. But just after publishing what it claims is a list of sites banned by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) it went offline and hasn’t yet returned. The list contains sites that Australians are not allowed to access, according to Wikileaks, but the Australian communications minister has said the list is a fake, the Guardian reports, and that whoever… Read More

The Australian government faces a rebellion by the country’s ISPs over its plan to filter Net content and block 10,000 sites. Initial trials of the system were due to begin before Christmas, but Telstra, the country’s largest ISP, has said it will not participate, as has Internode, while others have said they will only support a smaller system that blocks access to a 1300-strong list of sites hosting illegal content,… Read More

With no PR flacks, no quotable CEO, and no money to spend on frilly promotions, Linux has always been the operating system underdog, with a modest reputation to say the least, and in some cases, complete obscurity to non-techies. But that hasn’t stopped one of the Linux kernel’s original authors, Linus Torwalds, from occasionally stepping up as the impromptu frontman for the OS, sticking up for his creation and taking a few jabs… Read More

You’d think of Sony’s PS3 as being good for gaming. But not many would associate it with cracking passwords.  Yet that’s what security researcher Nick Breese. He’s used a PS3 to radically speed up password cracking, using the game console to crack eight-character passwords believed to be“strong” in just hours, rather than the days it would have taken on a computer, according to a report in the Sydney… Read More

Last weekend’s Live Earth concerts might have been criticized for their green credentials, but there’s one way they were a huge winner. The nine concerts, inspired by former Vice President Al Gore, held in cities spanning the globe, drew a record 10 million video streams.   Designed to raise awareness of climate change and global warming, concerts were held in New York, London, Sydney, Tokyo, Shanghai, Rio de Janeiro,… Read More

The High Court of Australia ruled today that modifying Playstation gaming consoles to play overseas games (or copies of games) does not violate Australian copyright law. The ruling may cap a four-year legal dispute between electronics and media giant Sony and Australian Eddy Stevens, who defeated the regional coding obstacles in Australian-made PAL Playstation console games so they could play (often cheaper) overseas versions of games, or… Read More

An Australian court has ruled that the peer-to-peer file sharing network Kazaa authorized copyright infringement by knowingly permitting infringing material to traverse its system, and, furthermore, encouraged such infringement because it was in Sharman's financial interest. The suit was brought by Australian record companies and units of international record companies such as Universal Music, Sony, and EMI. Kazaa is currently… Read More

From the press release: Encased in a slim stainless steel body, the Nokia 8800 subtly glides open to reveal a number of distinctive details, each meticulously considered and researched to complement the prestige and quality of the device. To heighten the experience, the Nokia 8800 features exclusive audio accompaniment, including all ringtones and alerts, by award-winning composer Ryuichi Sakamoto. This attention to detail continues… Read More

Vonage today announced the activation of 200,000 total lines on its network, doubling its subscriber-base in less than six months since reaching the 100,000 line mark.     “Again, Vonage has set the benchmark, proving its value proposition to a marketplace starved for full-featured, cost-effective alternatives to the incumbent local exchange carriers,” said Jeffrey A. Citron, chairman and CEO of Vonage Holdings… Read More

At Russian site www.allofmp3.com you can buy your music by the megabyte, at the price of $5 per 500MB and you can select the encoding and quality of the music from options such as MP3, MPEG4-AAC, OGG, MPC, and WMA. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, “Computers at allofmp3.com encode them on the fly and spit out the files, at an impressively fast rate. It will even email you when they're ready, or you can use their… Read More

Vonage, the leading provider of broadband phone service, today announced the availability of service in Canada. Canadian residents looking for Vonage's cost saving flat-rate full-featured phone service can sign-up at www.vonage.ca. For the first time, Vonage will begin shipping the Motorola VT 1005v device outside the United States. Canadian customers will also be billed in Canadian dollars and will be able to choose local phone… Read More