The Australian recording industry today welcomed significant new measures proposed by the Federal Government to assist in the ongoing fight against music piracy including plans to give the courts greater powers for enforcement.

The Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) CEO, Mr Stephen Peach said, “These measures will be an important step in helping to protect the livelihoods of all those who work to make a living out of making music. It sends a strong message that downloading music from pirate sites and trading in counterfeit CDs is against the law.”

The Government has also announced a legislative exemption to allow people to make a copy of a sound recording in certain limited circumstances onto iPods and other MP3 players.

Mr Peach said, “We are pleased that the Government has taken into account the recording industry’s concerns by narrowly defining the scope of this proposed format shifting exemption. While there is more detail to come, the Government has made it clear that making copies of sound recordings to pass on to others continues to be a breach of copyright law.
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Laptop prices have hit rock bottom in Australia with manufacturers pitching some branded models as low as $800 in a bid to win over new customers.

Plummeting prices and the desire for increased mobility are helping to tempt not only first-time computer buyers but also more seasoned customers looking to upgrade desktops or invest in a second machine, say retailers.

One of the cheapest laptops currently on the market is an Acer Aspire notebook priced in some outlets at around $890 with an additional $100 cashback from the manufacturer thrown in.

According to researcher IDC, competition in the low-cost sector of the laptop market is “furious” with the likes of Toshiba, HP and Dell all diving into Acer’s wake with some of lowest priced machines ever.

Andy Woo, PC analyst, at Gartner said laptop prices first began to slide below $1000 mid last year. “This is the first time we actually saw a notebook for around $900 to $950. Since then prices have dropped another 10 per cent,” he said.
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Will social networking sites such as MySpace and LiveJournal one day help governments keep better tabs on us? According to a report in New Scientist, The Pentagon’s National Security Agency is helping to fund research to explore this very question as it seeks new ways of harvesting information from the internet.

The NSA is responsible for surveillance and code breaking operations intended to protect national security in the US, and is now believed to be seeking new ways to monitor activities of its citizens.

Last month it was widely reported that the organisation had been performing “social network analysis” of telephone records in the US in order to detect patterns of terrorist activity.

Experts believe that such surveillance will not end with landline phone records, given the proliferation of mobile phones, e-mail and instant messaging networks.
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“The Windows Genuine Advantage Validation Tool enables you to verify that your copy of Microsoft Windows is genuine.” …and cause headaches.

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Source: FlexBeta

Windows Live Messenger will be made available to the public in 8 days, Friday 16th June 2006. The successor to MSN Messenger 7.5, Windows Live Messenger is the first edition of the MSN Messenger brand to be released under the new ‘Windows Live’ moniker.

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Source: Bink.nu

Microsoft Corp. acknowledged Wednesday that it needs to better inform users that its tool for determining whether a computer is running a pirated copy of Windows also quietly checks in daily with the software maker. The company said the undisclosed daily check is a safety measure designed to allow the tool, called Windows Genuine Advantage, to quickly shut down in case of a malfunction. For example, if the company suddenly started seeing a rash of reports that Windows copies were pirated, it might want to shut down the program to make sure it wasn’t delivering false results.

“It’s kind of a safety switch,” said David Lazar, who directs the Windows Genuine Advantage program. Lazar said the company added the safety measure because the piracy check, despite widespread distribution, is still a pilot program. He said the company was worried that it might have an unforeseen emergency that would require the program to terminate quickly.

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Source: Yahoo! News via MSFN

All the Microsoft servers worldwide (Singapore, Redmond, California Server Farm, Dublin, and India) have been prepped for the distribution of the beta 2 of Windows Vista. At this current moment the links provided may not be “live” as of yet but keep trying as these are the official links! There is still no world for the public release of Windows Server “Longhorn” as of yet.
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Support for Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 1 (SP1) and Service Pack 1a (SP1a) ends on October 10, 2006. Microsoft will end support on this date. This also includes security updates for these service packs. Microsoft is providing final notifications to customers regarding the end of support for these products.
Microsoft is ending support for these products as part of the Microsoft Support Lifecycle Service Pack support policy. We recommend that customers who are still running Windows XP SP1 or SP1a upgrade to Windows XP Service Pack 2 as soon as possible.

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Source: Microsoft via Flexbeta

Today, Phillips has announced a new Blu-ray optical drive and media, providing up to 50GB of storage on a single disc. This is a considerable amount more than current dual-layer DVDs that can fit up to 8.5GB.

The two speed “triple writer” drive is also capable of burning DVDs and CDs, so only one drive is necessary in a machine. The drive will be shipping in August, while writable media (BD-R) will be available from July. Re-writable media, or BD-RE, will be available around September.

Initial media will only be single layer and will fit up to 25GB, compared to the 50GB of the dual layer discs, which won’t be available until Christmas. At 1x speed, it will take roughly 135 minutes to burn 25GB, or close to 70 minutes when at 2x.

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Source: Trusted Reviews via Neowin

So, maybe you weren’t quite ready to set you lap on fire with that JoyTech LCD portable Xbox 360 setup — we understand. Might we recommend a slightly more portable way to get your old school Xbox out and about? Hacker extraordinare “Dave” has managed to squeeze that beast into a custom case, along with a battery, screen, and front mounted controls. We can’t say we’ve discovered our new commuting companion, but for sheer leet-ocity, this really takes the cake. We aren’t spying a drive bay anywhere on here, so we’re guessing this is one those modded Xboxen all the kids are talking about these days. There’s even an Ethernet jack for subway LAN parties and other frivolities. Has Ben Heckendorn met his match?

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Source: Engadget via Flexbeta