Communications Technology

The Federal Court has extended an injunction preventing three Australian distributors from selling a world-first hack that allows Sony PlayStation 3 owners to run pirated games on the console.

The Australian online retailers OzModChips.com, Quantronics.com.au and Modsupplier.com, which sell the hardware hacks for all of the major games consoles, have been blocked by the Federal Court from selling the PS Jailbreak, described as the “world’s first PS3 mod chip”.

The case was first brought against the distributors last Friday and the injunction has been further extended until this Friday. It was initially in place until today, where the court was to hear Sony seek a permanent ban on the device.

Lawyers for Sony, Blake Dawson, were instructed not to comment to media on the case today.

A Modsupplier.com employee said he was instructed to offer “no comment” to media, whereas OzModChips.com instructed that an email support ticket be sent to its manager. Quantronics.com.au’s telephone number was engaged when a call for comment was attempted.

The judge who first heard the matter, Justice Dodds-Streeton, will again hear it this Friday. Justice Kenny heard it today and ordered that the orders that were previously made by Justice Dodds-Streeton be continued until Friday, when the case would go back before that judge.

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Google can sift through more than a trillion web links in a matter of seconds, but can the internet search leader help people wade through their overflowing email?

That’s the challenge Google will try to tackle with the introduction of a tool called “Priority Inbox” in its Gmail service.

The feature relies on formulas devised by Google engineers to automatically figure out and highlight which incoming messages are likely to be the most important to each Gmail user.

Users who opt to turn on the Priority Inbox will see their messages separated into three categories. “Important and unread” emails will be at the top followed by messages that have been previously stamped with a star by an account holder. Everything else appears at the bottom.

Switching back to the standard view of the inbox can be done with a click on a link along the left side of the web page.

Google’s email analysis is based on a variety of factors, including a person’s most frequent contacts and how many other people are getting the same message. The content of the email also is factored into the equation.

Although it might unnerve some people, the notion of Google’s computers scanning through the content of individual emails isn’t new. Google has been doing it for years to determine what kinds of ads to show to the right of emails and to block junk email commonly known as “spam”.

With more than 100 daily emails pouring into some inboxes now, people now need help to identify “the bacon and baloney” along with the spam, said Keith Coleman, Gmail’s product director.

Google helped create the information clutter six years ago when it introduced its free Gmail service with a then-unheard of 1 gigabyte of storage per account. Other email services quickly expanded their capacity limits to remain competitive, and now most inboxes can store multiple gigabytes of information.

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Telstra doubled the speeds of its Next G network but delayed its announcement for a week after the election campaign, fearing it may “influence the debate” between the independents who are deciding who will govern the country.

The telecommunications company yesterday launched a 42 megabits per second (Mbps) USB wireless modem capable of typical user speeds of between 1.1 and 20 Mbps in selected areas. Upload speeds vary from anywhere between 0.3 and 3 Mbps.

The previous modems were capable of 21 Mbps peak speeds, half that of the new modems. Real-world download speeds were between 0.5 Mbps and 8 Mbps.

To put this into some perspective, the new wireless modem, if operating at full real-world speeds, allows users to download a 3 megabyte song three times faster. It will now download in 1.2 seconds instead of 3 using the new modem. For movies, which are of a greater file size, it will be much more noticeable.

Broadband was a key policy difference between the parties during the election campaign and it is also shaping up as one of the concerns of the country MPs who are deciding who will form the next government. Telstra’s speed bump could be interpreted by some as supporting the Coalition’s claims that existing wireless networks could be substitutes for Labor’s more expensive fibre-to-the-home proposal.

“We just didn’t want to feel like we were influencing the [telecommunications] debate,” Telstra spokesman Craig Middleton said of the announcement timing, which was delayed from 25 August.

The dual-carrier technology used will cover approximately 50 per cent of the population at launch. It allows networks to send and receive wireless data using two channels simultaneously

If elected, the Labor government plans to spend $43 billion on a nationwide fibre network supporting speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second, whereas the Coalition would spend $6 billion on a mishmash of technologies that would include upgrading existing copper networks and more wireless to support 12 megabits per second peak baseline speeds.

Opposition leader Tony Abbott has said in the past that Australians shouldn’t assume wireless technologies won’t ever be comparable to fixed-line technology. Telstra’s upgrade shows that wireless broadband is creeping up to the 100 Mbps minimum speeds promised by Labor’s national broadband network.

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