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According to Geoff Huston, Chief Scientist of the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), the internet is going to run out of available IP addresses much faster than most people (incl. ISPs) realise.

The underlying protocol, IPv4 has a limit of about 4 Billion IP addresses. However, due to everything from computers to mobile phones to the latest high-tech refridgerators and air conditioners snapping up an IP address, the boundary is being neared with only about 232 million addresses left. Geoff Huston says he has worked out all the figures and at the rate of addresses being taken up, IPv4 address availability will reach the end of the line in about 340 days.

The answer? IPv6 which is capable of providing trillions of addresses for every person on the planet. However, ISPs and websites have been reluctant to move over to the new protocol as all devices connecting via that protocol would need to be either reconfigured or upgraded with new firmware, or in some cases, replaced altogether.

The results of a BitTorrent specific study have been published this week by researchers at the University of Ballarat which claim that only 10% of torrents available on the net are legit, whilst the remainder all breach copyright. They used Torrentz.com to make this analysis; a search engine that combines results from all the most popular BitTorrent sites such as Demonoid, TorrentBay, BitReactor etc.

I'm surprised that 10% of the results they obtained pointed to legal downloads, considering Torrentz.com links only to illegal torrent downloading sources......

Of course, the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) were quick to lap up the results of this report and have published it in full (in PDF format) on their website.

With intent to help connect Australians with political information and to encourage more participation online, Google is launching its "Google Election 2010" initiative on the 28th of this month which involves Federal politicians, Google engineers, the Australian Electoral Commission, students from local secondary schools, journalists and submitted YouTube videos with questions and/or comments.

The launch event will kick off with a welcome address by Karim Temsamani whom is the Managing Director for Google Australia and NZ. Following that, Google's election initiatives will be officially launched by Google Australia's Engineering Director, Alan Noble. From there will be an address by Kate Lundy, Senator for the ACT and member of the Australian Labor Party then it's onward to speeches by Joe Hockey, MP and Shadow Treasurer of the Aus Liberal Party and Mr Doug Orr, State Manager for NSW division of the Aus Electoral Commission.

In an ever-expanding fight to keep your eyes on the road where they belong instead of on your mobile device, the iPhone app Text'nDrive has been made available at the App Store. The free version, which has been specifically tested with Gmail, AOL, Hotmail, and MobileMe, will read up to the first 45 words of an email to you. For $20 USD you can get the full version that pumps the word limit up to 500 and even allows you to dictate a reply.

According to CEO Daniel Robichaud,Text'nDrive is an "innovative solution which we hope will entice more responsible driving habits and ultimately make the roads safer for everyone." SMS functionality is reported to be under development, and the company is actively taking user feedback to improve the product. Text N'Drive is also available for Blackberry and is "coming soon" to Android.

Qantus has decided to go ahead with its new next-gen check-in system and will be trialing it next week in Perth.

This system comprises technologies from 15 differing vendors and will involve 100,000 of Qantus' platinum, gold, silver and bronze Frequent Flyers. The system's development has been in place for two years now and includes helps from vendors such as IBM, New Media Innovations, Unisys, Fujitsu, Telstra and several others to make it all come together.

The project was first announced as far back as November of 2009 by Qantus CEO Alan Joyce in which he stated its aim would be to speed up the check-in process and reduce congestion at the terminal. New loyalty cards will be given to platinum, gold, silver and bronze frequent flyers with a smart chip built-in which is designed to act as a boarding pass when scanned through new check-in kiosks that are being deployed for the trial.

BMW, one of the leaders in technological car gadgetory are bringing aboard select production vehicles another advancement to help distract drivers some more from the critical responsibilities of road awareness down under.

BMW will be the first car maker to bring vehicles to Australian roads with an in-car web surfing option. BMW simply refer to it as BMW Internet; it's designed to work via the iDrive interface and utilizes a 3G network equipped smart phone for its connection point. So it's not quite as advanced as you may have first thought with self-linked internet, but I'm sure in the not too distant future they will tick that box.

The system is also designed not to be operational when the car is in motion, but we all know how quickly someone will find a way around that.

Apple's huge press event on Friday did more than announce free cases for all iPhone 4 users; it also lit a fire under several companies as Apple CEO Steve Jobs said that many modern phones suffer from "death grip" signal loss. He used examples such as the

BlackBerry Bold 9700, HTC Droid Eris, and a Samsung Omnia II during the conference and the top brass at several of the companies aren't taking Jobs' words lightly.

July 30 is the big day many are holding out for in the land of Oz with Apple launching its iPhone 4 then. But perhaps the sales numbers won't be quite as big as they would have been if the whirlwind of reports about signal issues (dubbed antennagate) weren't floating around.

However, Jobs had this to say upon opening a press conference on Friday morning. "We're not perfect. We know that, you know that and phones aren't perfect either, but we want to make all of our users happy. If you don't know that about Apple, you don't know Apple.

When we fall short, we try harder ... if a user is having a problem, it's our problem."

In defence of the signal woes, Jobs demonstrated that when holding other types of phones such as RIM's Blackberry Bold 9700, HTC's Droid Eris and Samsung's Omnia 2 in the same way as the iPhone 4, each phone lost signal in a comparative way.

He also went on to say that the issue was amplified materialistically due to an incorrect algorithm that was used to calculate the number of bars indicating signal strength, showing a larger drop in strength than was actually the case.

It's not hard to understand in today's world of technology why many services of yesteryear have become redundant and forced people and corporations to go the way of the internet highway. In many ways this is for the better for all parties involved, but there are a lot of cases where the ease of accessibility and usefulness of internet based services is a big black cloud hanging over many business owners heads.

One such example applies to owners of video rental stores. With such advents as Foxtel IQ, fetchTV, Telstra's T-Box etc. giving a vastly growing number of movies on demand, this is one of the main reasons why you see Blockbuster and Video Ezy stores shutting down that were once upon a time booming with activity. It's all too easy to jump on the net and pay for a movie download or stream these days, too. The convenience of such means less people taking trips to their local video rental store.

Yesterday it was reported by many outlets, including yours truly, that the eFuse technology will brick your Droid X if the phone finds anything modded or hacked in the software. The guys at Engadget decided to do a little more digging and got a response from Motorola. Motorola states that eFuse will not kill your phone; it will simply go into recovery mode until approved software is reinstalled. It seems the modders out there will still have a rough time tinkering with the Droid X, but the results don't seem to be as bad as initially reported.