China tightens news media restrictions on internet
 
China on Sunday imposed more restrictions intended to limit the news and other information available to internet users, and it sharply restricted the scope of content permitted on web sites.

The New York Times reports (26 September)that the rules are part of a broader effort to roll back what the Communist Party views as a threatening trend toward liberalisation in the news media. Taken together, the measures amount to a stepped-up effort to police the internet, which has become a dominant source of news and information for millions of urban Chinese, comments the NYT.

Major search engines and portals like Sina.com and Sohu.com, used by millions of Chinese each day, must stop posting their own commentary articles and instead make available only opinion pieces generated by government-controlled newspapers and news agencies, the regulations stipulate, reports the nedwspaper.

According to the NYT., the rules also state that private individuals or groups must register as "news organisations" before they can operate e-mail distribution lists that spread news or commentary. Few individuals or private organisations are likely to be allowed to register as news organisations, meaning they can no longer legally distribute information by e-mail.

Existing online news sites, like those run by newspapers or magazines, must "give priority" to news and commentary pieces distributed by the leading national and provincial news organs.

The newspaper says that this restriction on the ability of web sites to republish articles produced by the huge array of news organisations that do not fall under direct government control seems intended to ensure that the Propaganda Department has time to filter content generated by local publications before it can be widely disseminated on the internet.

According to the NYT., although Chinese authorities have already effectively unlimited powers to control the gathering and publication of news, the Propaganda Department has sometimes struggled to censor information about delicate developments before it circulates on the internet.

About 100 million Chinese now have access to the internet, rerpoprts the newspaper, commenting that although the government closely monitors domestic content and blocks what officials consider to be subversive web sites from overseas, savvy users can obtain domestic and overseas information that never appears in China's traditional news media.

The newspaper says that experts who follow the internet say one of the most significant changes is the ban on self-generated opinion and commentary articles that accompany the standard state-issued news bulletins on major portal sites.

Sun Microsystems is hoping to steal market share from the Microsoft Corporation with the release on Tuesday of a new version of its business software collection, StarOffice, with improved compatibility with Microsoft Office.

The New York Times reports (26 September) that StarOffice 8, which includes a spreadsheet, word processor, database and presentation software, allows users to import and export Microsoft Office files and to use Office macros, the tiny chunks of code that automate specific tasks.

The newspaper says that improving StarOffice's ability to work with Microsoft software is considered critical to expanding Sun's reach within companies that already use Microsoft products.

The release, which is the first upgrade to StarOffice in about two years, comes 18 months after the two companies announced a development partnership as well as an agreement not to sue each other over patent disputes. But Sun executives said most of the new compatibility features were in development at the request of some of Sun's largest customers even before Sun reached an accord with Microsoft, the NYT reports.

The NYT reports that the retail price of StarOffice 8 is US$99.95, though the program can be downloaded for US$69.95. For corporate customers, Sun offers a per-user price of US$35. The company is also expanding StarOffice's sales through retailers.

According to the newspaper, StarOffice is the first commercial suite to support the OpenDocument format, an increasingly popular open-source approach to sharing files among computers, which is not supported by Microsoft. The format is being adopted by governments and other agencies attracted to the lower costs and independence of open-source programs.

Microsoft plans to double its staff strength at its Indian centres in Hyderabad and Bangalore by March 2006, a top company official said late on Saturday.

Reuters reports in The New York Times (25 September) that the company said it aimed to ramp up the strength at the India Development Center (in Hyderabad) by another 1,000 professionals.

The Reuters report in the NYT says that the Hyderabad campus in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh is the software maker's largest campus outside the United States and provides product development and support services. The 28-acre (11 hectare) campus, which opened last November, also houses a global delivery centre and is part of a three-year, US$400 million investment plan for India announced in 2002.

Microsoft also plans to double the headcount to around 1,000 staff members at its technology centre in India's premier software hub of Bangalore, the company said.

Reuters says that India's US$17.2-billion software services industry employs about 1 million people. Exports of software and business services are forecast to grow 30 to 32 percent in the year to March 2006, powered by the country's low-cost, IT-savvy and English-speaking workforce.

Deutsche Telekom (DT) - which owns cellco T-Mobile - could be prepared to pay up to £18bn for UK telco O2, according to The Business.

The Register says (26 September) that market whispers have become increasingly louder over recent weeks, reports the Sunday newspaper. And it quotes Andrew O'Neill, an analyst at Bernstein Investment Research and Management who said: "The question is not if Deutsche Telekom will make a bid for O2 - but when."

According to The Register, despite this renewed interest surrounding O2, some industry watchers remain unconvinced claiming that any tie-up between the two mobile operators could raise regulatory difficulties.

The Register says that earlier this summer O2 was reportedly the subject of an 20 billion euro takeover bid from Dutch operator KPN and DT. However, that joint bid for O2 was scrunched up and thrown in the bin after DT and KPN failed to agree terms.

Motorola has brought forward the release of its would-be Blackberry-beating smart phone, CEO Ed Zander revealed on Friday.

The Register reports (26 September) that when the mobile phone company launched its Q smart phone in July, it said the QWERTY keyboard-equipped device would ship Q1 2006.

According to Zander, speaking to reporters at a Churchill Club event held at the Computer History Museum on Friday, the released was actually pegged to January 2006, but that's now been moved ahead to December 2005.

The Register says that the improvement could amount to just a few days, but it's a whole quarter as far as Wall Street is concerned.

Internet crooks looking to capture login details of Yahoo! accounts are changing tactics, according to a 26 September report in The Register.

The Register says that phishing attacks that attempt to capture a user's Yahoo! ID and password by tricking the gullible into handing over their credentials to fake sign-in pages have been around for months if not years. Recently, though, these phishing sites have begun using alternative Yahoo! Sign In pages, such as Yahoo! Photos, net security firm Websense reports.

The report in The Register says that users typically receive an email or instant message that claims to be from a friend wanting to show off photos of a recent event, such as a vacation or a birthday party. The message contains a link to a phishing site, which records the user's Yahoo! ID and password, and then forwards the Yahoo! ID and password on to the real Yahoo! Photos site. What started off at a crude attack has evolved with the introduction of a more subtle form of social engineering, the publication says.

Rupert Murdoch has a fight on his hands to get control of InterMix - the company behind blog host MySpace - after Murdoch's NewsCorp offered $580 million or US$12 a share to buy it in July.

The Register reports (26 September) that (Brad Greenspan, founder and former boss of Intermix, has launched a rival bid for his old firm. He owns ten per cent of the company already and is offering shareholders US$13.50 a share. He has launched a pseudo-grassroots campaign website, complete with video, at www.FreeMySpace.com.

The bidders are asking for the shareholders meeting to be delayed so investors can evaluate the offer.

According to The Register, Greenspan has an appetite for controversy. After leaving InterMix he accused various senior managers and shareholders of insider dealing. The Register says he accuses them of selling US$25m of stock knowing that the firm was about to face action from the New York Attorney General.

Scientists and engineers in the United States and Japan plan to test the world's highest-resolution videoconferencing system on Monday evening over a 9,000-mile optical network linking the University of California, San Diego, with Keio University in Tokyo.

The New York Times reports (26 September) that the demonstration will allow those attending the iGrid 2005 scientific computing conference to watch an exchange between Yuichiro Anzai, the president of Keio, and Marye Anne Fox, the chancellor of the San Diego campus, on a theatre display with four times the image resolution of today's HDTV technology.

The newspaper says that the technology will use American and Japanese fibre networks that stretch from Tokyo to Chicago, and the data will be relayed to San Diego via an optical network connection in Seattle at speeds of a billion bits per second.

The high-speed network will feed the data to a state-of-the-art Sony video projector that displays so-called 4K digital video, with images that are about 4,000 pixels across. When it is uncompressed at the receiving end, the video stream contains more than six billion bits per second.

According to the NYT., Hollywood is on the verge of introducing an earlier generation of 2K digital video to theatres in the United States and Japan. But some in the industry believe that the 4K standard, which is still in the prototype stage, will be necessary to give theatre viewers a significantly different experience from 35-millimeter film, today's standard cinema format, and to compete with HDTV screens in homes.

UK ISP, Tiscali, has apologised after a data security breach left the name, address, contact information and product order of random customers displayed to other subscribers of the service on Friday.

The Register reports (26 September) that the Tiscali sent out an email to its customers to accompany the launch of new broadband products offering them the opportunity to re-grade their current service package.

The publicaton says that clicking on a link in the email took subscribers to the re-grade login page on Tiscali's website. But after subscribers logged into their accounts they were presented with someone else's details.

According to The Register, subsequent attempts to login produced someone else's details each time. Tiscali told The Register that "there was a scripting error with the site, which we took offline and fixed. The service has now been restored."

The Microsoft Corporation will unveil today its own system for selling web advertising as it struggles to compete with Google and Yahoo in the expanding Web search business, according to a reportin Ther new York Times (26 September).

The newspaper says that the Microsoft system, to be used by MSN, is meant to improve on those of Microsoft's rivals by allowing marketers to aim ads on Web search pages to users based on their sex, age or location.

The move, says the NYT., is part of Microsoft's broad response to the threat from Google, which is using its powerful advertising sales network to support an expanding range of free software products and Internet services. Last week, Microsoft announced a broad reorganisation that placed MSN in the same group as its Windows operating system, indicating that it saw software delivered over the internet - and possibly paid for through advertising - as central to its future.

But to offer such advertising-supported services, Microsoft needs to control its own system for selling targeted advertising. Until now, the ads on MSN's search service have been sold by Yahoo.

The newspaper says that Microsoft's entry into this business is getting an unusually warm reception from the advertising agencies that specialise in search marketing.

Microsoft hopes its new advertising system will match many of the features of Google's system, which is generally seen as more advanced than Yahoo's, and add a few innovations. The most significant advancement in the MSN technology is its ability to direct ads to viewers according to demographic characteristics, as well as by the day and time the ad is shown, reports the NYT.

DoubleClick, maker of the popular e-mail marketing service DARTmail, released statistics in August showing that consumers were opening direct-marketing e-mail messages less often than last year, but were more likely to end up buying products if they clicked on the links in such messages.

The New York Times reports (26 September) that the data, gathered from several billion messages, compared the second quarter of 2005 with the same period in 2004.

The newspaper says that DoubleClick offers a few possible explanations for this discrepancy. First, consumers may be more selective, clicking on e-mailed links only when they are in the market for the products advertised. This means that fewer e-mail messages are being opened, but each opened message is finding a readier target.

DoubleClick said recipients now will open the advertising messages "when they actually have a reason to act."

The service also told the NYT that technology may also be lowering the open rate. Spam filters may be deleting messages before their recipients even see them. And some e-mail programs can prevent messages from downloading images when viewed, blocking the mechanism DoubleClick uses to register when a message is opened.