The British Library builds an everyday email archive

The The British Library has asked the UK public to forward it their emails, to help create what the library claims will be the world's first municipal email archive. British Library Curator of Socio-linguistics and Education Jonnie Robinson said that the prevalence of email as a form of correspondence led the library to decide it should capture a wide-ranging sample of this 21st century phenomenon. 'It's a fantastic way to preserve British culture,' Robinson told Reuters. ...more

PageMaker 7 unveiled

Back in the 1980s PageMaker was the groundbreaking DTP package from Aldus. Since then it has been eclipsed by QuarkXPress, acquired by Adobe and written off many times, particularly when Adobe introduced InDesign to go head-to-head with Quark. But, apparently against all odds, it has survived and maintained a large user base. ...more

Feds bust biggest ever piracy operation

Three men from California have been charged with involvement in the biggest CD counterfeiting operation ever discovered in the US. The men - Ye Teng Wen, Hao He and Yaobin Zhai - have been indicted by a grand jury with conspiring to pirate some 325,000 CDs of music, films and software. The indictments follows the arrests of five people and searches of thirteen locations in California and Texas on 6 October 2005 as part of 'Operation Remaster', which aimed to break up a huge piracy ring. ...more

Internet auction goes to the chair

Some people are attracted to the macabre so it comes as no surprise that 44 people decided to bid for an electric chair in a recent eBay auction. The chair is said to have been used to execute 125 Tennessee prisoners between 1916 and 1960 and drew a winning bid of over $25,100 (about ?17,000) from Ripley Entertainment, a company famous for the Believe It Or Not museum chain. But the purchase has courted controversy over whether the chair is the genuine article. ...more

New Rapport chip promises pin sharp streaming video on a mobile phone

Californian start up Rapport Inc has demonstrated a new chip that could transform mobile communications. Together with IBM, the company has developed a design that features 1,024 eight-bit processing elements together with a PowerPC core on a single, low-cost chip. It is being previewed at the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose. ...more