Many people have been following the story on the Australian Government's plan to put in a Filtering Firewall similar to the one that China currently employs.

This plan has to be about as unpopular as they get, even Child Advocacy agencies do not think it is a good idea while many Australian ISPs are fighting it.

Now it seems the people are showing their displeasure, in the form os 80,000+ signatures on a petition and $30,000 + dollars in donations to one of the main organizations fighting the plan called GetUp.

YouTube has been providing the world with videos of just about everything for so long that it has just about become its own verb like Google.

But the videos have never really been high quality but more of the "webcam" style shots heavy on the pixels with an extra side of grain.

Now it looks like YouTube might finally be taking the wrapper off of its long awaited HD Video selection. According to an article over at Techcrunch.com the words "Watch in HD" are starting to appear below some videos.

Apple has been flexing it legal muscle recently. It has not been enough that they have tried to write code to lock iPods to iTunes but now it seems they are going to stomp out anyone that posts a work around.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Apple has threatened the operator of website bluwiki.com with dire consequences if he did not remove a method for getting around the locked up iTunesDB file on the iPod and iPhone.

"When a lawyer calls you up and implicitly threatens litigation that would bankrupt your little project you obviously have no choice but to comply," Sam Odio, operator of bluwiki.com

It is that time of the morning, the Apple news, I have found a few interesting stories this morning on Apple antics. The first is a rather ridiculous one.

It seems that President-Elect Barack "Gotta Have My Blackberry" Obama was seen in a gym using a Microsoft Zune player. The reporter (*Cough*) who saw this posted it up in blog and was pounced upon by the Mac fans out there.

One of my favorite comments was:

A guy called Theo Valich (you'll know him from TG Daily and INQ, etc) has started his own blog and seems to be doing pretty well, just breaking the 50,000 page view mark.

More importantly, his latest blog post discusses the upcoming launch of NVIDIA's new and improved GeForce GTX 260 graphics card based on a 55nm manufacturing die process. Included are pictures from a Chinese website of the new GTX 260 with the new GPU.

Theo goes on with a lot of speculation including that since the new GTX 260 makes use of 14 memory chips, it can support up to 1.5GB of memory. He also goes onto to speculate that the GTX 295 (dual GTX 260 part) could end up coming with a massive 3GB of memory - all speculation remember, anything could happen.

There's a lot of popular well known mods used to glamour up the look of a PC enclosure such as adding side windows, lighting, uv cabling etc. and sometimes you'll even see people go the full hog, converting old VHS recorders or boom boxes, radios etc. into PCs.

But what you certainly don't see every day (and I believe this is a first of its kind), is this number :-

In up-class style Akasa has just come forward with the introduction of its Elite series HDD enclosure line-up. The most stand-out feature across this line of external HDD enclosures is the soft leather finish which is further complimented by an aluminum body with brushed aluminum fascia panels and polished edges.

Two enclosures are on offer; catering to both types of HDD sizes, there's the 2.5-inch AK-IC009-BK and 3.5-inch AK-IC010-BK, measuring 136x80x16mm and 187x123x33mm respectively. Both units have connectivity for USB and eSATA.

In news that is both funny and sad Nintendo's Animal Crossings City Folk for the Wii has popped up, not for its game play but for something far more troubling.

Based off of the DS game of the same name Nintendo recently shipped out a few copies (14 to be exact) to the press to check out. One thing they wanted to spotlight was the feature that allows you to share content and characters between DS and the Wii consoles.

Unfortunately this feature was abused by someone as the copies sent to the press contained a Sheep Character that repeatedly uses the "N" word while you are in conversation with him.

Sometimes I am shocked at the US Government and its people (I am a US Citizen). On the one hand people scream that Bush is evil and doing improper things with the Patriot Act etc., and on the other they let RIAA do whatever they want including invade privacy, ignore state and federal laws and judicial procedures.

People are suing a few US Telcom companies over what they say was an illegal transfer of customer data and information back in September 2001 right after the 9-11 attacks (claiming they violated Federal Wire Tapping Laws). But President Bush is fighting back asking the Courts to grant retroactive immunity to these telecoms.

Read more at TGDaily

I am all for the protection of someone's intellectual property but when the overpaid artist, executives, and lawyers go after people for ridiculous amounts of money while they grow fat it simply turns my stomach.

Today I read another miss-deed from the US RIAA (but a principal partner in RIAA is Sony, a Japanese company). It seems RIAA was not happy with trying to bury a sinlge out of work grandmother with stupid judgments they have now gone after a 19 year old girl with pancreatitis and severe depression.

I bet they are breaking open the Champaign on this one. It is a new low.