"Starting in early 2011, visitors to NYTimes.com will get a certain number of articles free every month before being asked to pay a flat fee for unlimited access. Subscribers to the newspaper's print edition will receive full access to the site.
But executives of The New York Times Company said they could not yet answer fundamental questions about the plan, like how much it would cost or what the limit would be on free reading. They stressed that the amount of free access could change with time, in response to economic conditions and reader demand."
There has been much speculation about the NYT's plans in recent weeks.
Arthur Sulzberger Jr, the company chairman and publisher of the newspaper, said: "This announcement allows us to begin the thought process that's going to answer so many of the questions that we all care about. We can't get this halfway right or three-quarters of the way right. We have to get this really, really right."
Janet L Robinson, the company's president and chief executive, added: ""There's no prize for getting it quick. There's more of a prize for getting it right."
Plans for charging for online content have been become more pressing for newspapers as the twin forces of economic recession and declining print revenue have gripped the industry.
Rupert Murdoch gave the debate even more urgency by revealing that News Corp plans to charge for online content.
The NYT report adds: "Two specialised papers charge already: the Wall Street Journal, which makes certain articles accessible only to subscribers, and the Financial Times, which allows non-paying readers to see up to 10 articles a month, a system close to what is planned by the Times."
This system of online charging has been attacked by critics such as Jeff Jarvis, who runs the website BuzzMachine.com and is a Guardian columnist, because it penalises the most loyal readers.
Sony has delayed the launch of its motion-sensitive rival to Nintendo's highly successful Wiigames console by six months and it will not now hit the shops until the autumn.
But it does mean that by the festive season, video gamers will have the choice of three different devices, all of which will use motion-sensitive control, giving players a far more interactive experience.
The news is an obvious setback for Sony, which was plagued by delays when it launched the PlayStation 3 three years ago. It also comes after the company last week admitted that the launch of hotly anticipated racing game Gran Turismo 5 has had to be delayed yet again. It has been more than five years since the last instalment of the popular franchise.
But the company stressed that the decision to delay the launch of its new controller was not linked to any particular hardware or design fault. Instead the company wants to ensure that there are enough games available that can use the new controller before launching it on the market.
The success of the Nintendo Wii, launched in 2006, has revolutionised the games market. Allowing players to ditch their joysticks and traditional button-heavy controllers in favour of a wand they can wave at their TV screens has helped widen the appeal of video games, taking consoles out of the teenage bedrooms and back into the living room.
Sony unveiled its answer to the Wii, a motion-sensitive controller for the Playstation 3, at the E3 electronics show in Los Angeles last summer. It uses a television-top camera to track a wireless controller held by the player. Sony claims it can track actions with "sub-millimeter accuracy".
Microsoft's Project Natal, however, is more ambitious and does not require players to hold a controller at all। Microsoft maintains it can track a player's movements in three dimensions. It can also recognise faces and react to voice prompts, greatly expanding the range of actions which software developers can use in their games.
Here we go. Perhaps piqued by BBC Tech correspondent Rory Cellan Jones saying that Apple was leaving it late to issue invitations to its event on Wednesday week at the Yerba Buena Arts Center in San Francisco to launch its tablet, Apple has issued invitations to an event at Yerba Buena Arts Center in San Francisco on Wednesday week to see... "its latest creation".
Seeing the invite, the snark is already quite high (a new version of MacPaint! suggested some) but we can see certain things here.
The New York Times - which is due to introduce a paywall - is widely expected to be one of the partner organisations that will be represented on stage next week:
"sources speculate that [NYT chairman Arthur J] Sulzberger will strike a content partnership for the new device, which could dovetail with the paid strategy".
First, you can be sure that it is going to be a tablet. After all this time, it looks like Apple has finally figured out how you can do something with a tablet/slate (more the latter - as in a device without a keyboard, not even a slide-out one).
It's interesting that this is fully eight-and-some-change years after Microsoft reckoned it had cracked it: who can forget Bill Gates announcing at Comdex in November 2001 that "I'm already using a Tablet as my everyday computer. It's a PC that is virtually without limits -- and within five years I predict it will be the most popular form of PC sold in America." (Look, it's the computing equivalent of Andrew Neil in Private Eye, OK?)
But what's happened in those intervening eight years is that all sorts of new computing ideas have come along - particularly multi-touch, which you're familiar with from the iPhone. But actually Apple was trying it on a "safari pad" - a sort of web tablet - before the iPhone, according to a New York Times piece from 2007: "Mr. Jobs seized on the multitouch technology after Apple product designers proposed it as a 'safari pad,' a portable Web surfing appliance. Instead, he saw the technology as something that could be used for a similar purpose in a cellphone."
The only questions outstanding now are:
(1) how much will it cost in the UK if it's $1,000 or so in the US? Best guess: £1,000.
(2) what's it going to be called? Some of my money is on iPad - have a look at iPad.com, which changed hands in April last year but is peculiarly quiet and belongs to the mysterious "Enero 6 Corporation" (who? although as a point against iPad, it seems to be written in Microsoft's ASP scripting language), but the rest is on iSlate - given that islate.com presently shows up as being parked with Markmonitor.com, which all Apple-owned domains turn out to be once they're made live. Then again, the iBook name is available again
So: what's your prediction for how - if at all - the iSlate/iPad is going to rock the world? And what will it get right that the since-2001 tablets and slates haven't?
The British government and armed forces are to continue their widespread use of the version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser that was attacked by Chinese hackers who broke into Google's corporate network – even though both the French and German governments have advised people to stop using it.
The Cabinet Office, which oversees the deployment of computers in government, said today that "it doesn't think the issue [of being open to hacking] would be resolved any better by going elsewhere".
But over the weekend the German government advised citizens to stop using any version of Internet Explorer because of the possibility of attacks against it which could compromise the user's computer without their knowledge – and lead to the theft of data or incursions into corporate networks.
Today, the French government followed suit, issuing an advisory suggesting that all versions of Internet Explorer, which is included with Windows, are vulnerable to the attack that was used against Google, Adobe and an estimated 30 other western companies, by hackers originating in China.
Google said the attacks were used to steal intellectual property and compromise email accounts, and identified Internet Explorer as the weak point that was exploited.
The specific version of the browser known to be vulnerable to the attack mounted on Google is Internet Explorer 6 (IE6), which was first released in 2000 and is standard on Windows XP, which was released in 2001. Despite its age and known weakness to hacking, IE6 is still the most widely used browser in the world, ahead of newer, more secure versions and rivals' alternatives such as the free Firefox, Opera or Safari browsers.
IE6 is extensively used by the British government, including UK armed forces: in response to parliamentary questions asked last year by Labour MP and former Cabinet Office minister Tom Watson, the Ministry of Defence, which has 300,000 desktops worldwide (including ships), said it was sticking with IE6, "and at the current time does not have a requirement to move to an updated version".
Watson said today: "The government's own advice to businesses and consumers, through its Get Safe Online site that it helps to fund, is to not use IE6. So other than the fact that they aren't taking their own advice, it's preposterous that they wouldn't take this threat seriously. With the added security threat, all departments should certainly ditch IE6 and upgrade."
Microsoft sought to play down the risks of the vulnerability in a blog posting on Sunday, saying that "we are only seeing very limited number of targeted attacks against a small subset of corporations. The attacks that we have seen to date, including public proof-of-concept exploit code, are only effective against Internet Explorer 6."
However both the French and German government advisories say that there are weaknesses on newer versions of Internet Explorer on all versions of Windows, including the recently released Windows 7.
According to technophiles, experts, and that whispering voice in your head, 2010 will be the year that augmented reality makes a breakthrough. In case you don't know, "augmented reality" is the rather quotidian title given to a smart, gizmo-specific type of software that takes a live camera feed from the real world and superimposes stuff on to it in real time.
Being a gadget designed for people who'd rather look at a screen than the real world, the iPhone inevitably plays host to several examples of this sort of thing. Download the relevant app, hold your iPhone aloft and gawp in astonishment as it magically displays live footage of the actual world directly in front of you – just like the real thing but smaller, and with snazzy direction signs floating over it. You might see a magic hand pointing in the direction of the nearest Starbucks, for instance – a magic hand that repositions itself as you move around. It's incredibly useful, assuming you'd prefer to cause an almighty logjam by shuffling slowly along the pavement while staring into your palm than stop and ask a fellow human being for directions.
The Nintendo DSi has a built-in camera with a "fun mode" that can recognise the shape of a human face, and superimpose pig snouts or googly eyeballs and the like over your friends' visages when you point it at them. You can then push a button and save these images for posterity.
For a while, it's genuinely amusing ("Look! It's dad with a pair of zany computerised bunny ears sprouting from the top his head. Ha ha ha!"), until you realise there are only about six different options, two of which involve amusing glasses. If you could customise the options, you could make it automatically beam a Hitler moustache on to everyone in sight, which would improve baby photos a hundredfold – but you can't customise the options, probably for precisely that reason. You could print the picture out and draw the Hitler moustache on yourself with a marker pen, but that wouldn't be very 2010.
But while current examples of augmented reality might sound a tad underwhelming, the future possibilities are limitless. The moment they find a way of compressing the technology into a pair of lightweight spectacles, and the floating signs and bunny ears are layered directly over reality itself, the floodgates are open and you might as well tear your existing eyes out and flush them down the bin.
My goggles would visually transform homeless people
Years ago, I had an idea for a futuristic pair of goggles that visually transformed homeless people into lovable animated cartoon characters. Instead of being confronted by the conscience-pricking sight of an abandoned heroin addict shivering themselves to sleep in a shop doorway, the rich city-dweller wearing the goggles would see Daffy Duck snoozing dreamily in a hammock. London would be transformed into something out of Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
What's more, the goggles could be adapted to suit whichever level of poverty you wanted to ignore: by simply twisting a dial, you could replace not just the homeless but anyone who receives benefits, or wears cheap clothes, or has a regional accent, or watches ITV, and so on, right up the scale until it had obliterated all but the most grandiose royals.
At the time this seemed like a sick, far-off fantasy. By 2013, it'll be just another customisable application you can download to your iBlinkers for 49p, alongside one that turns your friends into supermodels and your enemies into dormice.
And don't go thinking augmented reality is going to be content with augmenting what you see. It's a short jump from augmented vision (your beergut's vanished and you've got a nice tan), to augmented audio (constant reactive background music that makes your entire life sound more like a movie), to augmented odour (break wind and it smells like a casserole), and augmented touch (what concrete bench? It feels like a beanbag). Eventually, painful sensations such as extreme temperature and acute physical discomfort could be remixed into something more palatable. With skilful use of technology, dying in a blazing fireball could be rendered roughly half as traumatic as, say, slightly snagging a toenail while pulling off a sock.
Some people will say there's something sinister and wrong about all of this. They'll claim it's better to look at actual people and breathe actual air. But then they've never lived in Reading. And anyway, even if they're right, we'll all ignore them anyway, because the software will automatically filter them out the moment they open their mouths.
In other words, over the coming years we're all going to be willingly submitting to the Matrix, injecting our eyes and ears with digital hallucinogens until there's no point even bothering to change our pants any more. Frightening? No. In fact, I'll scarcely notice.
Yahoo and Adobe appear to be among the companies that suffered the sort of cyberattack that led Google to threaten to withdraw from China. In its original announcement, Google said that "at least 20 other large companies from a wide range of businesses – including the internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors – have been similarly targeted".
However, Google did not name any names, and it did not actually say that the attacks were made by people acting on the behalf of the Chinese government.
Most large companies "face cyber attacks of varying degrees on a regular basis," as Google said, but so far none of them seem to have come forward.
Adobe said in a blog post that it was investigating a "coordinated attack against corporate network systems managed by Adobe and other companies", and the timing suggests it could well be related to the attacks on Google.
Bloomberg reported that Yahoo "was targeted by a Chinese attack similar to the one that affected Google Inc, according to a person familiar with the matter", but this has not been confirmed. The company said: "Yahoo does not generally disclose that type of information, but we take security very seriously and we take appropriate action in the event of any kind of breach."
The Washington Post, reporting a "vast espionage campaign", claimed that "at least 34 companies – including Yahoo, Symantec, Adobe, Northrop Grumman and Dow Chemical – were attacked, according to congressional and industry sources."
The attacks seem to have been performed by "spear phishing" – that is, targeting company employees with infected email attachments. According to a widely-reported statement by Eli Jellenc, head of international cyber intelligence at Verisign-owned iDefense: "The attack bears significant resemblance to a July 2009 attack in which attackers launched targeted email campaigns against approximately 100 IT-focused companies."
This type of attack has been part of the computer scene for several years, and Chinese involvement has often been suspected. It would be surprising if Google had not been attacked before. In this case, it's not the attack but the response that is unusual.
Acer has a prime competitor in the ultra-affordable Netbook market, and that's MSI. The just-announced MSI Wind U135 doesn't add much that's new to the Netbook equation, swapping out the previous Atom N270 processor for a next-generation battery life-extending N450 Nicknamed Pine Trail The Wind U135 comes with a 160GB or 250GB hard drive 1GB of RAM Comes in charcoal, silver, ruby, or sapphire, aka black, silver, red, or blue, with a film-printed shiny coating Starting at $309.99
