IGF - Major changes ahead for domain name system

The chairman of ICANN has given the biggest indication yet of a major change ahead for the domain name system. Vint Cerf told the open session of the inaugural Internet Governance Forum that he accepts that it will be necessary to expand the range of characters that can be used in domain name so that individuals and organisations can include characters from their own languages in their websites' URLs. 'There is a strong interest in the existing and nascent Internet community to have the ability to register domain names written in the characters used in their preferred languages,' he told the audience in Athens, Greece, before adding that, 'therein lies a huge technical challenge. ...more

Mobiles to get cloth screen

Just when you've thought you've heard it all another technological developments bounds into view to astound and amaze. A news article in the Daily Mail reports that scientists are developing a special cloth that doubles as a view screen. The cloth contains wires and phosphor so that it glows when an electrical current is passed through it. ...more

UK games chart: Colin McRae's driving game rallies back

Superhero movie spin-off The Incredibles swaps places with FIFA 2005, moving up from four to three - this is the main change at the top of this week's ELSPA UK games chart. Need For Speed: Underground 2 (now in its tenth week in the charts) and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (in its thirteenth week) show their staying power and stay at the top of the file for another week. And Konami's Pro Evolution Soccer 4 completes the top five. ...more

QuarkXpress patches performance

Quark has released an update to its QuarkXpress desktop publishing application that addresses a number of issues in version 7 and provides several performance enhancements. The update provides substantial improvements to the performance of actions involving text selection, such as scrolling, spell checking and Find/Change, general layout manipulation where images have clipping paths and flattening of layouts that use transparency. Resolved issues include: slow printing, PDF export and EPS saving where layouts include tables that use opacity, numerous or highly blurred drop shadows and drop shadows over lines of text; slow text editing, especially in multi-column text boxes; slow zooming and scrolling when displaying a clipping path with a large number of points and in layouts with a large quantity of selected text; incorrect resolution when printing low-resolution drop shadows when they occurred over high-resolution images; failure to apply clipping-path runarounds when printing to non-PostScript printers; failure to apply the Accents for All Caps preference setting; incorrect spelling of Ukraine by the spelling checker; and several cosmetic issues relating to control placement, text truncation and stylistic inconsistencies. ...more

Oops, I did it again

Just under 600 laptops have been 'lost' by the Ministry of Defence it has been revealed after questioning by an MP. Five hundred and ninety four laptops have disappeared from the MoD out of a total of 1354 lost government laptops since 1996. The second most forgetful department is Works and Pensions, losing 419, followed by International Development, with 115. ...more