Author: Duncan Geere
UK Government to tax every British broadband connection £20 for copyright enforcement
A £20 charge could be levied on every broadband connection in Britain, to pay for an agency that will provide data about serial copyright-breakers to music and film companies, if plans due to be announced today by the Government in its ‘Digital Britain’ green paper come to fruition.
Today, Lord Carter of Barnes will propose the creation of a quango which will be paid for by a levy on ISPs, who’ll almost certainly pass the cost on to their subscribers. Also in the white paper is a proposition that every house has a right to 2Mb/s broadband.
Vladimir Putin lays the smack down on Michael Dell
File this one under “lol”. Last night at the World Economic Forum on Davos, Switzerland, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin gave a 40 minute keynote speech about a variety of topics. In the ‘questions’ section afterwards, Dell chairman Michael Dell said nice things about Russia’s scientific prowess, and then asked how his company could help Russia expand its IT infrastructure.
Putin’s response?
“We don’t need your help. We are not invalids. We don’t have limited mental capacity.”
Ouch. Video over the jump, the smackdown begins right at the start.
Acer smartphone confirmed, to be launched on Feb 16
Rumour that Acer is to launch a smartphone has been spreading across the net for a while, but it’s just become official. Acer will launch its phone on February 16 at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. It probably won’t look anything like our artists’ impression to the right, complete with PC ports on the side.
What we do know is that Acer designed it with the help of E-TEN – a smartphone company that Acer acquired last year, and that it’ll run Windows Mobile. Which is a shame – it’d be nice to see an Android beast. Pricing, availability, specs and all sorts of other details will likely be announced on Feb 16, and when they are, we’ll tell you them.
(via BGR)
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Fennec, aka Firefox Mobile, hits phones next week
There’s a lot of people out there, particularly users of Windows Mobile devices, waiting patiently for Firefox Mobile. As Microsoft continues to alienate its users by refusing to allow them to upgrade mobile IE without buying a new phone, a free, open source alternative’s going to look very attractive.
Well, if you’re in that camp, then you don’t have too long to wait. Internal Mozilla documentation suggests that Fennec should see an outing next week, initially on the HTC Touch Pro. There’s touchscreen and non-touchscreen versions, and it’s expected to appear on other Windows Mobile devices over the forthcoming months. I’m looking forward to an S60 version.
Fennec (via ShinyShiny)
Related posts: Mobile Internet Explorer 6 not available as an upgrade | Mozilla releases first alpha of Firefox for mobiles aka Fennec
Canon lets Japanese employees go home early twice a week to make babies
Japan’s birthrate is 1.34, according to the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, and that’s too low. It needs to be 2.0 for the population to maintain itself. As a result, 22% of the population is 65 or older – the highest proportion in the world. All this is primarily due to the country’s common 12-hour workday, which doesn’t exactly assist procreation.
Well, to try and rectify the balance, Keidanren, a business group of 1300 major international corporations, has asked its members to let workers go home early to “spend time with their families”, meaning ‘have lots and lots of dirty sex’.
Canon’s part of the group and will be letting its employees go home early at 5.30pm twice a week for that very reason. As well as helping the country’s demographic problems, it also means that the company spends less on overtime payments, and employees are happier. Everyone wins.
(via Crunchgear)
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Apple isn't a fan of boobs or booty
Both “boobs” and “booty” have been banned from being used in marketing text for an application called “Wobble”, which allows users to add ‘wobble points’, around which any picture they like will wobble. If that confused you, check the promotional video for the app, but be warned, it’s probably mildly NSFW.
Back in December, an application called iBoobs was banned from the App store, and now ‘Wobble’ is under threat too. When the developer complained about the censorship, Apple told him “Wobble and Apple had an agreement that we needed to comply with”.
Apple are rather tetchy about the tone of the app store. For a long time, burp and fart apps weren’t allowed (though they’re now ridiculously popular), and full-on porn has never been allowed. Where does the line get drawn, though? Share your opinion in the comments.
(via TechCrunch, image courtesy of “Jiggles” app)
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Samsung W7900 "Show" – a projectorphone with OLED display and digital TV tuner
If you’re a fan of media consumption on the move, then you’ve likely got some sort of big screen PMP like an Archos 7. If you’re not invested in a particular device yet, though, then you could do worse than consider the Samsung W7900, aka the Show, which comes packed with a 3.2″ 240×400 OLED display, 5-megapixel camera, 3G, HSDPA, and most notably, a 10 lumen 480 x 320 projector, that’ll project upto a 50″ diagonal.
It also has a digital TV tuner so you’ll be able to watch telly on a (dark) bus, and all that is crammed into a body just 4.4″ x 2.2″ x 0.7″ thick. Impressive! Although it’ll initially only be available in Asia, here’s hoping that it’ll make it over this side of the world at some point over the next year.
(via PopSci, who have a great hands-on video)
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GMail gets offline access
Picture the scenario – you’re at home, and your internet connection’s gone down. You want to ring the providers, but all the info is in your GMail, and you can’t get to it, because you’ve got no internet connection! What do you do? You stop panicking, because you’re turned on offline access for GMail.
It’s a new feature for the popular webmail client that’ll allow users to keep a local cache of their messages so that if your internet connection drops for some reason, then you’ll still have complete access. It’ll also work in situations with no connection at all – on a plane, for example, or a bus.
To activate offline access, go to the Labs section of your GMail. It should be in the list there. If it’s not yet (it’s not for me) then give it a few hours and it should show up. Once activated, click the “Offline 0.1” link in the upper righthand corner to set everything up.
(via Official GMail Blog)
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British Film Council launches FindAnyFilm.com: first thoughts
Film fans, this story’s for you. The British Film Council has spent £1 million on developing a new website called FindAnyFilm. It’s been seven months in development, and aims to combine cinema listings with links to buy DVDs or downloads, or watch films online.
The implementation is very simple – just put in the name of a film, actor/actress, genre, or the name of a cinema, and you’ll be presented with a list of relevant results. It’s well-implemented, though I ran into a few launch-day bugs, like not being able to display a map of where a specific cinema was. I’m sure that kind of thing will be fixed by the end of the week.
Study shows that virtual worlds can influence real-world decisions
A group of scientists at Cambridge University has conducted a study that shows that associations in videogames transfer directly to the real world. A group of volunteers played a (rather basic, from the look of it) cycling game, where they would be given a slurp of fruit juice if a cyclist from their team passed them, but a slurp of salty tea if a rival cyclist passed them.
A few days later, the participants were invited back and given the choice of two chairs in the waiting room, one with the logo of their team, and one with the logo of the rival team. Three quarters of participants picked the chair with their team’s logo, despite most people claiming not to notice the design.
