Mangrove Mountain Computer Club

A news report in Forbes says that China has blocked Google with its great firewall, now the world waits to see if Australia’s Minister for Censorship, Senator Stephen Conroy, will do the same following his outrageous attacks on Google.

Australia’s glorious Minister for Broaband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Stephen Conroy, has been in the news for months over his nefarious plans to censor the Internet in Australia under the guise of protecting users from content normally refused classification in other mediums.

As noted in my previous article on the subject, “Captain Conroy, Internet Enforcer, slams Google”, the erstwhile and presumably otherwise well-meaning but still meddling Senator has slammed Google in a yesterday’s ABC radio debate on Internet filtering in Australia.

The Minister tried to paint Google as a company that has had its own issues with privacy and not doing evil, which are certainly valid points, and even iTWire’s own James Riley has written an article on Google being “the world’s biggest filter”, but Google’s stance on Internet censorship is plain: it says no.

Read the full article here.

Microsoft is rising to the challenge of Google Docs, offering free Office applications on the web as it releases Office 2010. New paid versions of the ubiquitous office suite will be available to businesses in May and consumers in June, but its Office Web Apps component is already available in beta through Microsoft Office Live.

Anyone with a Windows Live account can create, modify or share Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents for free. They do not need Microsoft software installed on their machines.

Gartner predicts web-based office suites will grow at 34 per cent annually through to 2013 to satisfy market demand. Google recently purchased DocVerse, a company that enables Microsoft applications in the cloud. It raises the question: with so many free web-based office software options available, why pay for a new version of the proprietary suite?

More details here

Google’s Android will quickly overtake Apple’s iPhone market share. It may seem like an outlandish prediction given the fact that Apple has sold over 65 million iPhones/iPod touches and hundreds of millions of people use iTunes, but we’ve seen this movie before and we know how it ends. I’m referring to the original Macintosh operating system which was superior in nearly every way but lost the PC war to Microsoft’s Windows. Apple’s insistence on control will lock out the rest of the business world turning them into competitors whose innovation, marketing and more consumer-friendly features will benefit their chief rival.  More info…

Apple has filed a lawsuit against mobile devices maker HTC. The suit claims infringement of 20 patents related to the iPhone’s user interface, underlying architecture, and hardware.

In the release, Steve Jobs says, “We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We’ve decided to do something about it…We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.”

Taiwan-based HTC was the first company to manufacture a cell phone based on Google’s Android operating system, which has emerged as a significant competitor to the iPhone, AP reports. It’s also making the Nexus One phone that Google is selling directly to consumers.

It looks like the Nexus One, and other HTC phones, may have hit too close to home for Steve Jobs. More info…

USB 3.0, also known as SuperSpeed USB, provides the bandwidth to transfer data at close to ten times the speed of USB 2.0 and is now becoming available in the market. The theoretical improvement in data transfer speeds provided by USB 3.0 is dramatic.

USB 3.0 is backward compatibility with USB 2.0 although you need a new cable and new host adapter or one of the new motherboards that support USB 3.0 to achieve USB 3.0 speeds, but you can still use the device on a USB 2.0 port and achieve typical USB 2.0 performance.

More information…