Google wants feds to fight Web censors
Once relatively indifferent to government affairs, Google is seeking help inside the Beltway to fight the rise of Web censorship worldwide. The online search giant is taking a novel approach to the problem by asking U.S. trade officials to treat Internet restrictions as international trade barriers, similar to other hurdles to global commerce, such as tariffs. Google sees the dramatic increase in government Net censorship, particularly in Asia and the Middle East, as a potential threat to its advertising-driven business model, and wants government officials to consider the issue in economic, rather than just political, terms. While human rights activists are pleased with Google's efforts to fight censorship, they harshly criticized the company early last year for agreeing to censor its website in China, which has the second-largest number of Internet users in the world. The company defends its actions, saying the Chinese government made it a condition of allowing Chinese users access to Google Web pages. China has an Internet firewall that slows or disrupts Chinese users from accessing foreign uncensored websites. Censorship online has risen dramatically the past five years, belying the hype of the late 1990s, which portrayed the Internet as largely impervious to government interference. A study released last month by the OpenNet Initiative found that 25 of 41 countries surveyed engage in Internet censorship. That's a dramatic increase from the two or three countries guilty of the practice in 2002. China, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, India, Singapore and Thailand, among others, are increasingly blocking or filtering Web pages.

Apple hits 14% of notebook shipments
14% of all notebook computers sold in the US last month were Apples. Coincidentally, that's also a 14% rise over the previous month. This means that more people like Apple than did before, and will no doubt come as some consolation to Jobs' mob for the fact that they're still in fourth place in the US notebook market, behind HP, Gateway and Toshiba, none of whom are known for well-designed products in quite the same way that Apple is. However, given the year-on-year growth of the fruity firm's notebooks, the day might not be long in the coming that Apple hits three, two or even one. That 14% for May is up 65% over the same time last year, and another 65% growth would put it at almost 20%. Desktop sales didn't budge month on month, staying at 10%. With notebooks now doing everything that 90per cent of consumers want at 90% of desktop speed, most consumers are valuing portability over the extra 10%. 100% of the computers in the Ferret household are Apple, with 50% of the games consoles being Microsoft and the other 50% Nintendo. 50% of the Apple computers are broken right now and in the middle of re-installing, busting the myth that 75% of Apple machines go for 90% of their life expectancy with only a 10% failure rate.

DVD ripping to be rendered impossible?
Buying a DVD and then copying it for use on your PSP, iPod or laptop could soon become impossible, if the DVD Copy Control Association gets its way. The association wants to amend the licence underpinning the use of its DVD copy-protection technology, CSS (Content Scrambling System). This would, if successful, oblige you to have the original disc in your DVD drive every time you watched it. The proposed amendment states: "DVD products, alone or in combination with other DVD products, shall not be designed to descramble scrambled CSS data when the DVD disc containing such CSS data and associated CSS keys is not physically present in the DVD player or DVD drive (as applicable), and a DVD product shall not be designed to make or direct the making of a persistent copy of CSS data that has been descrambled from such DVD disc by such DVD product." The amendment would force, say, DVD playback software from displaying ripped content. It would also imply the use of software built into PCs and optical drives to prevent ripping software from saving an unscrambled copy of a disc's contents for later playback on a device without a DVD drive, such as a PSP or an iPod.

Boingo offers monthly flat-rate service
As Wi-Fi hot spots proliferate, it has become possible to open a laptop and connect to the Internet in just about any major airport as well as in thousands of hotels, restaurants, cafes and bars. Yet logging on can sometimes be onerous, and pricing is likely to be expensive and opaque. This has created an opportunity for what are called aggregators, companies that bring together the Wi-Fi networks of many different operators and allow clients to connect in the same manner and at the same price whether they are at a cafe in Los Angeles, an airport in Milan or a hotel in Bangkok. But while a standardized system can make logging on easier, costs have remained high. Boingo Wireless, one of the biggest aggregators with more than 100,000 hot spots, introduced what it says is the first worldwide flat-rate plan for Wi-Fi hot spots. For a monthly fee of 29 euros, or $39, subscribers can use any of the company's affiliated hot spots for as long as they want. No particular software is needed, though Boingo recommends that clients download GoBoingo, a program that alerts users when they are in range of a Boingo hot spot. The number of hot spots accessible to the public rose 17% in New York last year. Hot spots rose 37% in Paris and 27% in London. Boingo directly runs wireless networks at 13 of the largest North American airports, including the three in the New York area and the two in Chicago.

Plaxo Is Staying in Touch
Plaxo which stumbled in the last few years amid privacy concerns, is launching an overhauled service to reinvent itself and compete better with Internet networking companies such as Facebook & LinkedIn The new service also could help the still-unprofitable Plaxo -- which is backed by Silicon Valley investors such as Sequoia Capital and Ram Shriram, an early backer of Google -- become more attractive to potential acquirers, people close to the company say. Companies such as Yahoo and America Online discussed acquiring Plaxo in the past, but no deal was finalized, these people say. Plaxo's new product still helps people keep up-to-date their online contacts, such as the phone numbers, addresses and email addresses of friends and colleagues. But it is now more oriented toward "social-networking," or interacting with friends online, and includes several new features. Plaxo's revamped product is, like the old software, free in its basic form. A premium service with added features costs $49.95 a year.

Authorities have about 14,000 sets of human remains
American medical examiners and coroners held at least 14,000 sets of unidentified human remains as of 2004 — more than twice the number of John Doe cases acknowledged by the FBI, the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics says. In a report says the backlog of unidentified remains — murder and accident victims and missing or homeless people who die of natural causes — grows by about 1,000 each year. DNA technology could make it possible for grieving families "to have some closure" and for "those responsible (to) meet justice." The missing link has been a good inventory of remains The John Doe census is the first such survey undertaken by the federal government. The true number of remains probably is far higher than the 14,000 the agency located. In Louisiana alone, there are incomplete or missing records from every coroner or medical examiner, he said. Louisiana's coroners and medical examiners have been challenged since Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The FBI's National Crime Information Center, the only other national registry of unidentified remains, has collected information on about 6,200 John Doe cases. Reporting to the FBI's crime center is voluntary, and the FBI has not claimed that the list is exhaustive.

UBS to offshore 750 jobs to India and Poland
Investment bank UBS is to offshore around 750 jobs to India and Poland over the next year because of a shortage of local skills. UBS already has its own knowledge and business process outsourcing centre in Hyderabad in India, which employs around 950 people for research, analytics and transaction and data processing. The UBS Indian Service Center opened in June last year and will now ramp up to 1,500 employees by the end of 2007. UBS confirmed there have been a "limited number" of redundancies as part of the strategy, with most of the affected staff redeployed into other roles. In addition to the Hyderabad facility UBS has secured space to build a nearshore centre in Krakow, Poland, which will become operational next year. The facility will accommodate around 250 employees.

Vodafone deploys WiMax in Malta
Vodafone is deploying a WiMax-based network on the island of Malta, in what is seen as a testbed for wider deployment. The company announced the Malta network — its first WiMax rollout. Offering download speeds of up to 1Mbps, the service follows an "intensive trial period" of the long-range, high-bandwidth wireless technology. The rollout, in the 3.5GHz frequency, is based on Airspan Networks' HiperMax base stations, which are designed for high-density deployments. Although customers will only be able to access the service from a fixed location, Airspan's equipment is software-upgradeable to the mobile variant of WiMax. Airspan is committed to making it a success and showing that WiMax can support a deployment model that provides a credible service bundle of broadband, fixed telephony and mobile. But Vodafone played down the significance of the rollout, suggesting that it only formed part of the operator's strategy.

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