TimWeb

As a lot of people are probably already aware iiNet was taken to court by the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) for allegedly allowing its customers to illegally download copyrighted material (e.g. movies, music, etc).

This morning Justice Cowdroy has ruled in favour of iiNet stating that “I find that iiNet simply can’t be seen as approving infringement”. His verdict was that the “copyright (infringement) occured as result of use of BitTorrent, not the Internet” and that “iiNet has no control over (the) Bittorrent system and (is) not responsible for (the) Bittorrent system.”

Common sense and Australia’s Internet Freedom prevails, for now (see mandatory Australia Internet Censoring).

tim.bellette.net is now compatible with the iPhone, iPod Touch, Google Android and Blackberry Storm. If you visit the site from any of the aforementioned devices it will automatically detected that you are connecting from said device and display a mobile friendly version.

Adobe has release version 2.3 of Lightroom which includes a number of bug fixes. Some of the big fixes include a memory leak while processing files with local adjustments, failure to burn to disc on windows machines and undo (ctrl+z) on windows could a series of previous actions to be undone. The upgrade is free for all Lightroom 2.x users, with 1.x users required to purchase an upgrade disc (which if you haven’t already done, is definitely worth it with all the changes since version 1.x).

Update for Windows or Update for Mac.

Internet filtering plan may extend to peer-to-peer traffic, says Stephen Conroy.

THE Federal Government’s controversial internet censorship scheme may extend to filter more online traffic than was first thought, Broadband Minister Stephen Conroy revealed today.

In a post on his department’s blog, Senator Conroy today said technology that could filter data sent directly between computers would be tested as part of the upcoming live filtering trial.

Update 24÷12÷08: Internet filter ‘technically impossible’… lets hope so :-)

Another software/firmware update; The NXE (New Xbox Experience) is finally here — simply by connecting to Live everyone should now have been presented with the NXE update. It’s a major overhaul of the xbox interface with a few much loved additional features such as “Install To Hard Drive”.

Head over to the New Xbox Experience website to find out more, or turn on your xbox and start exploring with your new avatar ;-)

This is a little old now, but there is a firmware update avaliable for the Sony alpha 700. The update is (currently?) only avaliable from the Sony Europe Customer Support site and contains several enhancements including:

• Added 3 shots 2 EV steps for auto exposure bracketing (single & continuous).
• Added the option to turn High ISO NR off.
• Improvements to the image quality in high ISO setting.
• Improvements to the auto white balance and D-Range Optimizer performance.
• Improvements of the reliability for communicating between camera body and vertical grip.

The update is free and easy to install (see download page for more instructions).

I have been quite slack and not updated my site since transferring it to the new server, and back to good old WordPress. Currently I am working on getting my old wordpress template back into a wordpress template (apparently i only saved it in html/psd form) and online, which is why I have not made any posts.

A few requests have come through in regards to the SrewturnWiki syntax highlighter; I will add a new post with details and a download link for the plugin — so yes it is still avaliable. Thanks to everyone who is using it.

News.com.au Directory Listing

Looks like someone accidently turned on directory browsing on news.com.au. After a quick look there was one folder which stood out “v3″ which is a new version of the website which contains a few new features such as the News Visualiser, Dragable Sections (Drag to reorder page), Click to read more and Your State News. Click pictures for screenshots of the new site or check it out at http://www.news.com.au/v3/.

In today’s mx newspaper there is a completely pointless, but laughable, article titled Singles Dish Up The Dirt which talks about A US matchmaking service (It’s Just Lunch) being sued by its clients because they were sent on bad dates. Most of cases seem to be what you would expect from a blind date, i.e. the person turns out not to be who you were lead to believe they are. While some of them are bad, such as a lady being matched up with an alcoholic (surely these people should be screened out of the service?), there was one mention which seems like It’s Just Lunch were deliberately matching people up with the “wrong” kind of partner.

“Dating nightmares included women matched with married men, and a Minnesota woman who requested no Republicans or religious types only to be set up with a Catholic Republicans and and (sic) Seventh Day Adventist”

Powerset Inc, a Silicon Valley company, is developing a new type of search engine which does not function based on the typical Google, Yahoo or Microsoft technique of keywords. Rather it is a natural language search engine, which uses a natural language processing techniques to “read and understand every sentence on the Web”.

Although the company has not released the search engine for use, for public or private testing, they have a Powerset Labs section on their site where invited users can provide feedback on the design of the search engine. Users are also given a peek at technology demonstrations that show off the search engine’s capabilities, which currently for the labs purposes has only indexed Wikipedia pages. At least, that is what they are saying on their blog. You can sign up for the labs at http://labs.powerset.com/, however there is no guarantee that you will get an invite.

There does appear to be a few problems with the site, such as the labs login and extended sign up pages timing out, but I guess these things are expected with a start-up. Especially a start-up which is gathering more and more recognition — Powerset recently presented at TechCrunch40. A video of Powerset presenting at the TechCrunch40 2007 conference can be seen on the TechCrunch20 site.