Game of denial

       The Malaysian government announced then denied it intends to set up filters to block undesirable Internet content like its northern neighbour; on Friday morning, Information Minister Rais Yatim told newsmen he planned to put in filters to block all that "undesirable content";the following Thursday, after talking with Prime Minister, Najib Razak, Mr Yatim announced that existing laws were plenty strong enough to find and to prosecute actual sedition, fraud and child pornography, and he cancelled the country's calls for bids to supply an Internet filter system. China announced that it no longer planned to demand that all personal computers must have the flawed and official censorware program Green Dam ; Li Yizhong, minister of industry and information technology,said only schools and Internet cafes would be compelled to install the software; he actually said with a straight face it was only "to protect the children".
       A week after fixing 18 security holes in Mac OS X,Apple Inc issued a security patch for the Bind Internet server standard, which allowed remote hackers to crash servers; Apple also issued a passel of security patches for the hackerfriendly Safari browser, Apple and Windows editions, including a nasty bug whereby a hacker could get Safari to list his malicious website as a Top Site.
       Number 1 operating system peddlers Microsoft of America and No 1 yuppiephone tinkers Nokia of Finland announced a joint venture to port Microsoft Office to Nokia phones under the Symbian operating system; it's hard to imagine why anyone would want an office suite on a 2-inch screen, but apparently Nokia executives have convinced Microsoft they need the system to stomp and kick the nice BlackBerry maker Research In Motion .Microsoft announced that Office 2010 for the Apple Mac was on schedule,sort of, and should be ready for sale for the New Year's Eve shopping season next year ; well, that's 2010, right?A judge in Texas told Microsoft tostop selling editions of Word that use custom XML tagging technology; Microsoft lost a patent lawsuit over the XML format to the nice I4i firm, but it will appeal the ruling and won't stop selling Word for a day.Microsoft showed some photos of its new Zune HD, the music player that will certainly crush the Apple iPod; in a huge, shock surprise, the Zune prices will be held under iPod prices; it will have a web browser and the ability to copy high-def video to an HDTV (dock not included).
       A British politician who would be prime minister wants to fine every person sharing a file illegally on the Internet to be find ฃ50,000, or 2.8 million baht in real money; Business Secretary Lord Mandelson of the Labour Party said he was "persuaded by the argument for tough laws" against all that piracy that's going on by seven million of his countrymen - after a dinner at the Greek island of Corfu, paid entirely by his close entertainment buddy David Geffen and the Rothschild bank.US President Barack Obama and his government ordered government-run Internet sites to resume dealing cookies to surfers, spurring major privacy concerns from serious civil liberties groups including the Electronic Privacy Information Center and Electronic Frontier Foundation; the groups also blamed private companies, principally Google ,for forcing government sites to use cookies in exchange for permission for the government to use its sites, such as posting videos on YouTube ; Vivek Kundra, the government's chief information officer, explained that the new policy is to improve customer service,but he was in such a hurry he forgot to explain what advantages the government was getting out of suddenly resuming its tracking of users.
       Sara Morishige Williams, wife of Twitter CEO Evan Williams, provided graphic examples of "too much information"when she tweeted the birth of her child,minute by minute to 14,000 followers;things we didn't really have to know included "My water broke. It wasn't like Charlotte in Sex and the City . Now,timing contractions on an iPhone app"and "The Contraction Tracker was fun until the contractions got painful";thankfully her husband tweeted nothing.
       The World Trade Organisation told China it had to stop censoring films,DVDs and books by funnelling all imports through state agencies; ruling on a suit brought by the United States, the WTO ordered China to open market access; the US claimed that by controlling such imports, China was increasing the demand for pirated goods.
       In a report by OECD, the "developed"countries named and shamed the countries with the world's highest mobile phone charges: Canada, Spain and the United States, in that order; the lowest charges among the 30-member OECD were in Finland, with Holland and Sweden a tad higher.Toshiba moved to the dark side; after years spent inventing and championing the losing HD DVD format for high-density disks,Toshiba became a gracious loser and started making Blu-Ray players, now the standard but not yet fabulously popular.