Life & Technology

I’ve been waiting years to say it, and finally I can – Australia is the recipient of an international internet award. Well, more specifically, an Australian is the recipient. Hhmmm, to be even more to the point, our Federal Minister of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Stephen Conroy is the winner, and it’s probably an award he could do without.

Britain’s Internet Industry Awards, the ISPA’s, handed Conroy the award, with stiff competition that included the French president Nicolas Sarkozy and the European parliament.

The criteria for winning the award was for “recognis[ing] individuals or organisations that have upset the Internet industry and hampered its development.”

And with Senator Conroy and the current government supporting a form of internet filtering, even with huge opposition from not only the tech industry but everyday Aussies, it’s no surprise that he won.

People who have only give the debate a cursory glance are probably wondering what all the fuss is about. Surely, the idea of blocking child pornography and illegal file sharing sites is not a bad thing. On the face of it, you’d be right. It’s a great thing. These types of sites are a blight on the Internet and deserve to be deleted from the web once and for all, or at least blocked so nobody can access them.

But that isn’t the problem. There are two issues here – Conroy wants to create blacklist that blocks undesirable content, but he wants to keep it secret. Why? What gives him the right? We don’t work for him, he works for us, and in this case what is wrong with transparency?

But by far the most annoying thing for most people, from a purely functional point of view, is that there are quite a few experts who believe it will slow down the Internet, and that aside, the filtering process itself might be easy to get around.

This debate if far from over, but the Minister can at least pat himself on the back knowing he has gotten Australia on the international internet map, even if it is for all the wrong reasons.

Clip courtesy of the Nine Network Australia

Harry Potter fever is about to break out big time with the release of the movie Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. What better time to talk about the new Harry Potter Game, plus there’s a new all-in-one computer, and a website that’ll try and improve your golf.

Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince For Wii.

This new game from EA allows games to relive the action of the movie….from the Hogwarts Express to the dramatic revelation of the Half-Blood Prince. The Wii Remote and Nunchuck become your broomstick playing Quidditch, while the remote by itself can be used as a wand to battle the forces of darkness

Gamers can take on night-time missions while the castle sleeps and they can call on Nearly Headless Nick for clues and tips to help you complete your challenges. It retails for $79.

BenQ N Screen Nettop 21.5-inch

This is an all in one computer that has the hard drive built into the back of it. Although this is not new technology, it is pretty cost-effective at only $999.It takes up less desk space, too.

It has 160GB of storage and 1GB of memory. It is aimed specifically at the child/senior citizen market, and has bigger fonts for kids and senior citizens (can be adjusted manually if you wish to make it smaller).

It is available from Officeworks

Customise your own golf club

There is a website that helps you customise your own golf club. The customisation tool was developed by 25-year-old Australian Brad Lindenber. User go online and fill in a form about what type of club you want to use, your gender, your height, how fast you swing. It processes the information and tells you what is the ideal club for you to use and is said to have more than 50 million combinations.

Clubs cost between $49-$239 for clubs, from $99 for a putter. www.lindgolf.com

Found it very interesting this week that Google is now looking at getting into the operating system market, albeit for netbooks only at this stage.

A couple of issues piqued my interest. It’s great that Google are going to provide competition for the Windows platform, which in its many guises has caused problems over the years. The latest version, Windows 7, has been hyped as the best to come, but we’ve heard that before.

The Google OS will be open-source and probably free. Open source could be a problem in that too many people might have too much input, but the free aspect is certainly worth looking into. Unfortunately, free also means that to make money Google might have to use advertisements, or collect information on users and onsell it for marketing purposes.

With between 70-90 percent of the operating system market (depending on whose figures you use), Microsoft will not take this lying down. They will shout out about their system having more to offer and patches and updates etc, but when something is free, people cannot help but come on board.

Said to be available from next year, it be interesting to see how the company that has a virtual browser monopoly in Western countries can make a buck from the OS.

It has been noted that it will only be a lightweight OS – in other words you can use it to surf the net, word processing and sending and getting email etc, so won’t have the functionality of Windows….yet.

I look forward to see how it all pans out.