Monday, 20 October 2008 11:19 AM
Original article taken from
Sydney Morning Herald.
AUSTRALIA'S insatiable appetite for up-to-the-minute TV viewing from the United States and Britain is costing networks hundreds of millions of dollars due to an explosion in online piracy.
Per capita, we have become the most prolific downloaders of television contraband from the internet, a new report by the Australian Institute of Criminology found.
The incidence of Australian piracy has trebled in eight years. Only British households watch more pirated programs.
The report, Intellectual Property Crime And Enforcement In Australia, noted the industry now loses about $45 million annually due to illegally copied content. But this rises to nearly $200 million when tax losses and secondary revenues such as advertising are factored in.
Faster, cheaper broadband connections and new software making downloading easier are behind the boom, the researchers found.
But it has also been driven by an impatient demand for must-see US and British shows, which has prompted Seven, Nine and Ten to fast-track episodes of popular programs.
As a result of illegal downloading , numerous hit programs - including The Mentalist, Californication, Supernatural, NCIS, House, The Amazing Race and Heroes - are now aired within days of their release overseas.
Australian networks are also giving internet-savvy viewers the opportunity to legally download programs from their own websites. Fans of the cancelled series McLeod's Daughters can download the show from Nine's site. Ten provides downloads including Neighbours and Good News Week.
A Channel Seven spokesman said: "Television is successful because it reflects consumer demands and fast-tracking of some programs from the United States to counter any impact from downloading is one strategy.
"Our key strategy is one of creating and producing programs you can only see on Seven, such as Sunrise, Dancing With The Stars and Packed To The Rafters."
Overseas programs that are not fast-tracked are being left in the dust. The finale of Dr Who series four ran locally last month on the ABC as one of its best-rating shows but for downloaders the episode was old hat six months ago.
The Cartoon Network last week announced its November 22 launch of the long-awaited Star Wars franchise animation, Clone Wars, but it is already available on the internet.
Even hit TV shows scheduled for US prime-time broadcast can be copied in New York and ready to download in Sydney before they legitimately go to air in LA three hours later, because of the cross-country time difference.
Leading internet monitor Envisional said users with the right software can leave their home PCs to scan and download the latest available releases.
The study concluded more than one in five Australians have watched or purchased a pirated film or TV show.
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Thursday, 2 October 2008 2:05 PM
Original article located at: The Official Google Blog
At Google, we have a saying: "launch early and iterate." While this
approach is usually limited to our engineers, it apparently applies to
our mailroom as well! As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit
"send" a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source
browser, Google Chrome. As we believe in access to information for
everyone, we've now made the comic publicly available -- you can find
it
here. We will be launching the beta version of Google Chrome tomorrow in more than 100 countries.
So
why are we launching Google Chrome? Because we believe we can add value
for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web.
All
of us at Google spend much of our time working inside a browser. We
search, chat, email and collaborate in a browser. And in our spare
time, we shop, bank, read news and keep in touch with friends -- all
using a browser. Because we spend so much time online, we began
seriously thinking about what kind of browser could exist if we started
from scratch and built on the best elements out there. We realized that
the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive
applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What
we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for
web pages and applications, and that's what we set out to build.
On
the surface, we designed a browser window that is streamlined and
simple. To most people, it isn't the browser that matters. It's only a
tool to run the important stuff -- the pages, sites and applications
that make up the web. Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome
is clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want
to go.
Under the hood, we were able to build the foundation of a
browser that runs today's complex web applications much better. By
keeping each tab in an isolated "sandbox", we were able to prevent one
tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue
sites. We improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also
built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next
generation of web applications that aren't even possible in today's
browsers.
This is just the beginning -- Google Chrome is far
from done. We're releasing this beta for Windows to start the broader
discussion and hear from you as quickly as possible. We're hard at work
building versions for Mac and Linux too, and will continue to make it
even faster and more robust.
We owe a great debt to many open
source projects, and we're committed to continuing on their path. We've
used components from Apple's WebKit and Mozilla's Firefox, among others
-- and in that spirit, we are making all of our code open source as
well. We hope to collaborate with the entire community to help drive
the web forward.
The web gets better with more options and
innovation. Google Chrome is another option, and we hope it contributes
to making the web even better.
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