With the official launch just around the corner, details on various iPhone 4 plans are surfacing left, right and centre from all the big providers including Telstra, Optus, Vodaphone and 3.

Telstra were first out the gate to share details of its plans for both the iPhone 4 and the new entry-level 3GS 8GB. There are going to be three plans on offer for these phones, beginning at $49 a month.

The $49 per month plan gives you 200MB of data and $400 worth of talk and text. If you link it to a 24 month contract, you can get the 3GS 8GB on this plan with no upfront charges, whilst the iPhone 4 16GB will set you back $149 up front on this plan and the 32GB model costing $299 up front.

The Library of Congress made a few sweeping changes to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which it has the power to make changes to every three years. Among the major announcements: iPhone jailbreaking is now covered under "fair use," DRM circumvention is now allowable in certain situations, and e-books are now allowed to be read aloud by computers.

The iPhone jailbreaking announcement came as the biggest shocker to most. The Register of Copyrights, who handles the DMCA changes for the Library of Congress, concluded that jailbreaking affected "fewer than 50 bytes of code out of more than 8 million bytes, or approximately 1/160,000 of the copyrighted work as a whole. Where the alleged infringement consists of the making of an unauthorized derivative work, and the only modifications are so de minimis, the fact that iPhone users are using almost the entire iPhone firmware for the purpose for which it was provided to them by Apple."

In a drive to keep the Nexus One and Desire phones on the shelves, HTC has officially verified in a Press Release that "later this summer" these two devices will be receiving Super LCD screens instead of the AMOLED screens that are the culprit for so many high end devices being out of stock.

With the North American release of the Desire coming in August, it seems this was the only way to keep up with expected demand. Peter Chou, the CEO of HTC, stated that "the SLCD displays provide consumers with a comparable visual experience to HTC's current 3.7 inch displays with some additional benefits including battery performance."

The full Press Release: (Courtesy of Engadget)

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 conclusion of the event, there will be a panel discussion with Kate Lundy, Joe Hockey, Mr Doug Orr, several media, school students and videos submitted via YouTube.

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 them 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.

RIM was one of the loudest against Apple, stating "One thing is for certain, RIM's customers don't need to use a case for their BlackBerry smartphone to maintain proper connectivity. Apple clearly made certain design decisions and it should take responsibility for these decisions rather than trying to draw RIM and others into a situation that relates specifically to Apple."