iPod inspires music mag relaunch

Music magazine Q is relaunching this month, with the iPod and digital downloads taking centre stage. The magazine is hoping to reverse a circulation that has fallen 20 per cent in two years by establishing itself as the guide for the iPod generation. 'People swapped vinyl for CDS and we think that shift is about to happen again, transferring CD for digital,' editor Paul Rees, told The Guardian. ...more

Silicon Valley touches down in Oxford

Silicon Valley came to Oxford University yesterday, for the sixth time in this annual event, and two clear themes arose: the advisability for would-be entrepreneurs to Go West and plug themselves into the Silicon Valley network, and the threat posed by Google to the traditional funding strategies for online start-ups. Among the West Coast attendees at the Said Business School were successful start-up founders, such as Reid Hoffman, CEO and founder of Linked in and formerly of PayPal, and Alex Walsh CEO and founder of Photobucket, technologists such as Chris Sacca, Google's Head of Special Initiatives, and venture capitalists, such as Allen Morgan, MD of Mayfield, one of Silicon Valley's oldest VC firms. In a series of panel discussions, master classes and 'Garage Innovation' sessions, MBA students and UK start-up kingpins mixed with some of the West Coast's finest. ...more

Photographic miniatures

Panasonic has announced a tiny multi-function digital camera and printer. The camera, the SV-AV10 can take 640x480 stills and MPEG4 movies at 320x240. It also functions as a voice recorder and has an audio player built-in that can play back AAC (advanced audio coding) formatted music on an SD card. ...more

P2P legal victory for Grokster and StreamCast

A US federal appeals court has ruled that the makers of peer-to-peer file sharing software cannot be held responsible for the illegal swapping of copyrighted material by people using their products. The San Francisco court upheld a ruling made in April 2003 which said that Grokster and StreamCast, maker of Morpheus, are not violating copyright laws just by making the software available. A ruling on Sharman Network, maker of Kazaa, will be made later. ...more

Boy hacker goes to jail

An American teenager has been sentenced to six months in jail after being found guilty of hacking into NASA and Pentagon computers. The story sounds like the 1983 classic film "Wargames", but for this sixteen-year-old boy, who can't be named for legal reasons, it was neither film nor fiction. The hacker, known only as "cOmrade", admitted hacking into computers that support the international space station and intercepting 3,300 emails and passwords from the Pentagon computer system. ...more