Anonymous blasts government sites for the second day

Hackers continued to bombard the Australian Parliament House website with traffic for a second straight day as part of Operation Titstorm.

A spokesman for the Attorney-General's department confirmed the attack "continued to affect the availability of the Parliament House website.

"Visitors to this site are receiving an error message stating that the service is unavailable," the spokesman said.

Google to build fibre-to-the-home-network in the U.S.

Search giant Google plans to build a super high-speed broadband network for up to half a million people around the United States in order to experiment with the possibilities of a network running at 100 times current speeds.

The company has long argued that it can sell more Web ads -- the way it makes money -- by encouraging Internet use. It imagines three-dimensional conferencing and classes, faster movie downloads and new businesses taking advantage of the speeds that are only theoretical for most people now.

Google hits back at Facebook with Buzz

Google today launched Buzz, a social networking module that sits on top of Gmail and allows users of the webmail program to share photographs, links and videos with other Gmail users.

The news comes just days after US-based online analysis firm Hitwise revealed that during 2009, Facebook had become the biggest referrer of news content - beating even Google News.

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Microsoft launches surface, unveils partners and customers


Curtin University has today announced that it intends to deploy Microsoft Surface units, the table-like computing device that responds to multi-user, multi-touch technology.

The announcement was made at a press conference this morning where Microsoft officially launched Microsoft Surface for commercial use in Australia, nearly three years after it was made available in the US.

Kim Wisniewski, systems engineer at Curtin said Microsoft Surface represented "the absolute and fundamental technology for it to explore engagement methods for students.

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Google cold on voluntary YouTube filtering

Google Australia could not give the Government an assurance it would voluntarily remove all refused classification content from YouTube, its policy head said today.

The search giant was responding to comments by Communications Minister Stephen Conroy to a Senate Estimates Committee yesterday that the Government was reaching out to Google to filter out refused classification video content on YouTube.

"YouTube has clear policies about what content is not allowed, for example hate speech and pornography and we enforce these, but we can't give an assurance that we would voluntarily remove all Refused Classification (RC) content from YouTube," Google Australia's head of policy Iarla Flynn said.

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Does Apple's "iPad" live up to all the hype?

While Apple's presentation this morning was heavily focused on Apple's bread and butter, the consumer market, it's clear that they've not given up on the enterprise just yet. The iPad weighs about 700 grams and is slightly smaller than an A4 notebook.

Apple sees this as a device that bridges the gap between the notebook and iPhone. But as yet it's hard to know whether the market really likes actual tablet computers or the idea of tablets.

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The wraps are off as Apple unveils new tablet device

Called the "iPad," the device is Apple's biggest product launch since the iPhone three years ago, and arguably rivals the smartphone as the most anticipated in Apple's history.

After months of feverish speculation on the Internet and among investors, Jobs took the stage at a jam-packed theatre in San Francisco and, with his famed showman's flair, began detailing the device's basic features.

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