CONSUMERS will be forced to pay up to $400 to continue watching television under a plan to convert all viewing to digital technology.

The industry estimates more than 14.5 million TVs would have to be converted to digital reception over the next five years under a recommendation by a federal parliamentary committee to turn off the traditional analog service.

To stimulate conversion to digital the cross-party committee recommends lifting bans on networks broadcasting multiple, free-to-air channels by 2008. This opens the prospect of up to 30 free-to-air channels being available to viewers. To get access to the higher-quality, wide-screen services, consumers would need to buy set top boxes ranging in price from $80 for a basic model to about $400 for a better-quality, high-definition receiver.

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Source: SMH

Beta Refresh is Now avaiable to selected beta testers. Build 0562 is now available to download from Microsoft Connect

Changes include:
- New UI design
- New contact list design (no more hover behavior)
- A return of the old status icons
- A Sharing Folders status and progress bar
- The Sharing Folders activity log is now in a separate window
- New Voice platform
- Improved reliability
- Improved stability
- Improved performance
- Improved login performance

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has warned that people should not download Google Desktop because it “greatly increases the risk to consumer privacy”.

A spokesEFF said that if the toolbar chooses to use it, the new “Search Across Computers” feature stores copies of the user’s Word documents, PDFs, spreadsheets and other text-based documents on Google’s own servers.

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Source: The Inquirer via Flexbeta

SHOCKING new figures show UK perverts are trying to access child porn websites 35,000 times a day.

Figures from internet provider BT show online paedophiles attempted to view four million illegal child pornography sites in the past four months alone.

There are fears the overall number could be much higher, as BT accounts for around just a third of the internet market.

Bids to visit banned child porn sites have more than tripled since screening was introduced by BT in June 2004. The Cleanfeed programme, which prevents users from accessing sites blacklisted by the Internet Watch Foundation, initially registered 10,000 attempts by BT’s 3.1 million domestic users each day.

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Source: The Sun via Flexbeta

Nero is a flexible, reliable, and easy-to-use application designed to write both data and CD audio to CD-R and CD-RW discs. It supports ISO 9660 images as well as ISO mode 1 and XA mode 2, and allows for on-the-fly disc recording in addition to overburning (if supported by hardware). Nero also supports multisession and mixed-mode recording, HFS, ISO/HFS hybrid, UDF, PSX, OFAS (optimal file access speed), track-at-once (TAO) and disc-at-once (DAO) writing, digital audio extraction, and more. In addition, Nero can dynamically disable automatic-insert notification, offers support for multiple languages, and works with all major models of CD-R and CD-RW drives.

Download: Nero v7.0.5.4 | Mirror (Shareware)
View: Release Notes | Nero Homepage
Source: MSFN

According to this news post, industry leaders are plotting to highjack the world wide web and setup subscrition fees to stream media and do other activities. The news post reads, “all of us–from content providers to individual users–would pay more to surf online, stream videos or even send e-mail. Industry planners are mulling new subscription plans that would further limit the online experience, establishing “platinum,” “gold” and “silver” levels of Internet access that would set limits on the number of downloads, media streams or even e-mail messages that could be sent or received.”

Source: The Nation via Flexbeta

Security researcher Tom Ferris says he has discovered a security vulnerability in the Beta 2 Preview release of Internet Explorer 7. The bug lies in the urlmon.dll file and causes the browser to crash when it encounters a URL with the “file://” protocol followed by a long string of dashes.

Ferris previously discovered security flaws in Firefox, IE6 and QuickTime. He notes that arbitrary code could be executed on a machine running Microsoft’s newest beta browser, but his proof-of-concept code simply crashes the application. The issue has been reported to Microsoft and Ferris says it is only of medium severity.

Source: BetaNews via MSFN

A BOFFIN at Cambridge University says that the Voice over IP system used by Skype is a brilliant tool if you want to carry out denial-of-service attacks.

Jon Crowcroft claims Zombie networks could be controlled by messages hidden in VoIP traffic generated by programs such as Skype.

Currently DoS attacks are shut down by tracing control messages sent by chat and instant messaging programs. But if a hacker were to use a VoIP overlay as a control tool for attacks, it would be much harder to find the zombie computers, he said.

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Source: The Inquirer via Flexbeta

The ‘preliminary’ due date for the next collection of fixes and patches for Microsoft’s desktop operating system is as more than a year later than many company watchers were expecting. Microsoft has gone public with a tentative date for its third service pack for Windows XP. And that date – the latter half of 2007 – is considerably later than many company watchers were expecting.

Source: OSNews via MSFN

South Korea’s Ministry of Information and Communications hopes to introduce a series of internet-connected household robots this October. The bots, according to the Ministry, will be able to perform such household tasks as cleaning, monitoring homes, reading to children, and ordering pizza via the Internet.

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Source: Engadgent via Flexbeta