Websites with a .xxx suffix are still being considered by the Global Internet Oversight Agency, new reports have shown. Talks are still taking place to discuss what the potential benefits of introducing the new domains could bring to the internet.

The introduction of .xxx addresses could help better police the internet, allowing parents to easily identify pornographic websites associated with the suffix. However, while it may seem an attractive option for parents and porn sties alike to have such any easily identifiable domain, any migration to the new addresses would be a voluntary act by the adult sites.

Also, some religious groups have slammed the potential move. They see the grouping of adult sites under the .xxx umbrella as legitimising porn sites rather than protecting the interests of vulnerable surfers.

The ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) have entered into a 70-day consultation process to discuss the proposals. However, ICANN CEO Rod Beckstorm said that there was "a lot of complex issues" surrounding the .xxx domains, with three previous attempts to introduce the domain in the past having been rejected.

Inventive Labs have just announced the launch of Monocle, a free browser-based e-reader that's just as impressive on a mobile browser as it is a desktop PC.

Open-sourced under the MIT licence, anyone with some basic HTML knowledge and access to a few EPUB files can embed a book on their website. The reading experience can then be customised to be as simple or fully featured as you want, with page turning swipe controls or fully-fleged bookmark and chapter search functions.

"We're concerned that the current ebook landscape is dominated by large companies trying to lock publishers, authors and readers into their devices and distribution models", Monocle's Jospeh Perason said. "We suspect this might be good for those companies, but no good for everyone else. There's a need to open up these fields to smaller players, and to give the consumer -- the person who loves to read books and to 'have' books -- better choices."

Click here to find out more about Monocle, or here to try it out with a copy of James Joyce's "Dubliners" for yourself.

Sadly, it's not often Tech Digest find many positive stories to cover about Myspace any more. However, while the social network struggles to re-align itself in the wake of Facebook's massive successes, we were pleasantly surprised to find a cool new radio app available from developers We Are Hunted for those still using the site.

Hunted Radio is a crowd sourcing music app that collates the most listened to tracks on Myspace in the last minute. More a tool for finding new music than for prolonged listening sessions, it only gives you one minute previews of each song so as to quickly show you as many popular artists as possible. If you like what you hear, you can click an artist picture to be sent to their Myspace homepage for further info and full length tracks, or add them to a list of favourites for future reference.

Myspace users have pretty eclectic taste from the sounds of things, with not a big named artist in sight from our brief testing session with the app.

Hunted Radio is definitely worth a try, so click here to get started.

Also, anyone else thinking that Spotify, with it's massive user base and huge library of songs, could do with a similar function? It could be like the Twitter of music.

SynergeTech Solutions have just released a Google Analytics Mobile app for Windows Mobile phones. The app lets you review your website's latest trends on the go, straight from your mobile.

Google Analytics Mobile can:

- Support accounts with multiple website profiles.
- Maintain a secure connection directly with the Google Analytics servers.
- Easily add your own custom reports using any Google Analytics data - Adsense, ECommerce, Events, Campaigns, Traffic Sources, and more.
- View data as a table or a chart/graph.
- Set any date range - or include all the data

It may not be the most exciting of apps, but it's one many are sure to find useful, especially with Windows 7 series phones just over the horizon.

The app is available now. For more information and purchase details, click here.

WordPress, a massively popular blogging and hosting platform suffered severe problems yesterday, causing some 10.2 million blogs to go offline for almost two hours. It has been estimated that 5.5 million page views were wiped, the worst outage WordPress has encountered in over 4 years.

Matt Mullenweg, WordPress founder, apologised profusely on the WordPress blog, and gave an explanation as to the crash.

"An unscheduled change to a core router by one of our datacenter providers messed up our network in a way we haven't experienced before, and broke the site." He noted, stating that this problem also brought down backup procedures for the site.

"I hope it will be much longer than four years before we face a problem like this again." Mullenweg concluded.

Thankfully, no data was lost in the outage, and all blogs seem to have resumed a normal service. However, imagine if the problem had caused a data wipe? Over 10 million blogs worth of data could have been lost. It just goes to act as a reminder of how fragile the online world can sometimes be.

Feeling both saucy AND entrepreneurial? Then you'll be pleased to hear that the Sex.com URL is up for sale, with the bidding starting at a measly $1 million.

It's been a chequered history for Sex.com, the subject of both a decade long legal battle and numerous books. ESCOM currently hold the site (which has stagnated into a news, horoscopes and shops portal), but have been forced to a foreclosure "for default in the payment of debt and performance of obligations owed" following their reported $14 million acquisition of Sex.com in 2006.

To qualify to bid at the site's auction, buyers "must appear at the auction with a certified bank check in the amount of $1,000,000." No cheapskates allowed this time around it seems.

To the lucky auction winner: why not think about picking up a Panasonic 3D camera? A domain like that AND the extra dimension...just think of the possibilities!

Myspace CEO Owen Van Natta has stepped down from his position after just one year at the trailing social network.

Brought in by Myspace owners News Corp to revitalise the service four years after their $580 million purchase in 2005, Van Natta's attempts to make Myspace more music-orientated did little to quell the fierce competition from Facebook.

News Corp have replaced him with Mike Jones and Jason Hirschhorn as co-presidents, who also joined MySpace back in April 2009 with Van Natta.

"Owen took on an incredible challenge in working to refocus and revitalize MySpace, and the business has shown very positive signs recently as a result of his dedicated work," said News Corp Digital Media CEO Jon Miller

"However, in talking to Owen about his priorities both personally and professionally going forward, we both agreed that it was best for him to step down at this time. I want to thank Owen for all of his efforts."

I'd say that that roughly translates from Newspeak into English as "Facebook is still number one, Google Buzz is moving in on the scene, we're losing ground and Van Natta wasn't cutting the mustard", wouldn't you?

Via: Tech Crunch

Here's an interesting new feature from Guardian.co.uk. They've this week introduced their Zeitgeist page, a collage of popular content from their site organised by "social signals".

Each article to be featured on the Zeitgeist page is first judged by the websites linking to it, how often it has been posted on social networking sites, and the other pages that readers have visited before and after reaching the Guardian site. The stories that attract the most attention by midnight each day are then organised into colour-coded blocks as a visual guide to what the hottest trending stories are.

"This is an alternative way of exploring things on the Guardian site which are currently getting attention from our readers. Front pages and section fronts, curated by editors, are traditionally a great way of seeing what's important - in terms of news agenda, recency or big themes. Zeitgeist provides an alternative, emerging, community-curated view on what's currently interesting on our site," Meg Pickard and Dan Catt, who have been working on the project, told Journalism.co.uk.

The page is still in the early development stages, but it's looking promising already. Check it out here.

After months of planning, the UK government have today launched their Data.gov.uk website, making reams of non-personal information available to developers in order to help create apps.

3,000 data sets have been made available, ranging from broad topics such as agricultural stats, right down to as specific a subject as "Suicide and Open Verdict Deaths in the U.K. Regular Armed Forces".

Spearheaded by web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, apps already developed during the beta stage include Planning Alerts, telling users if someone plans to build nearby their house, and Fill That Hole, informing users of pot holes and other road hazards across the UK.

"We're very aware that there are more people like you outside of government who have the skills and abilities to make wonderful things out of public data", a message on the site reads. "These are our first steps in building a collaborative relationship with you."

If used wisely (and not abused by those looking to further veil phishing scams) then the data could have some great apps made with it. For instance, an app to quickly find an NHS dentist when a sudden toothache kicks in, or to track Ofsted reports on local schools when moving house.

Maybe even an app that tracks cabinet members personal expenses! ...What? It's been done already? Oh...

Any more ideas, Tech Digest readers? Tweet them here, or leave a comment below.

Fancy a quick flutter on the footie? Thanks to Betfair's recent debut on the Yahoo! TV Widget engine, gamblers can place bets from the comfort of their armchair.

But what does this mean for the traditional high-street based bookie? Is it making it all too easy for addicts to engage their gambling vice? And, most importantly, who's going to win the League?!

We had a quick chat with Betfair TV CEO Simon Miller to find out.

Betfair has become one of, if not the biggest betting exchange on the web. What do you attribute to its popularity?

We are by a country mile the biggest betting exchange in the world. It's really down to the fact that we offer 20% better odds across the board compared to a traditional bookmaker. We take the risk out of bookmaking by acting as an exchange whereas a traditional bookmaker will take a view and a stance on each different betting market. Betfair customers bet against each other and choose their own odds. Betfair doesn't take a view on who is going to win, we simply earn a commission from the Betfair customer who happens to win. I think it is that that has lead to our popularity.

And that customer to customer based betting service carries over to the new TV widget?

Yes, it's built directly from the exchange API; we're using the same odds, the same security, the same registration, the same payment and so on.

How does it differ from your web browser service?

There is one important difference and that is that the web is obviously a platform that allows for quite an intense relationship with the user. On the Betfair website you can both "back" and "lay" (meaning to either favour a team in a result, or feel that the opponent will either win or hold them to a tie - Ed.) , a reasonably complex process that works perfectly well on the website. But we think that television, as a causal entertainment experience, is very much a "back" only service. People are not coming on to use their television platform as a sophisticated trading system.

How long was spent testing and developing the user interface? Was the focus of the design to make it as simple as possible for the casual user?

Absolutely. We've paired everything right the way down to the absolute minimum. We spent five or six months learning the technology, building the system and to QA it through Yahoo! and manufacturers. For example, on the web there is about 40 different ways you can bet on any single football match; yellow cards, red cards, the number of corners etc. But adding that level of choice onto a television menu doesn't make any sense. Instead we offer 4 different ways to bet on TV that cover the vast majority of the revenue. We think we're offering the customers the things that they most want to bet on, and balancing that with an interface that makes it easy and quick to find that bet, particularly giving the constraints of being ten feet away and using a remote control.

Right now then it's only football that is covered by the new service?

At the moment it is only football. In the next 6 months we plan to develop a multi-sport widget. And again, rather than offering all the thousands of events that Betfair online features, we will pair that down to about five different sports. We'll also have a sixth slot for "specials" like X-Factor results for the final, and other tele-visual related events such as Strictly Come Dancing.

Do you expect the habits of TV gamblers to be much different from your web users?

I think it will be. I think that the television-betting mentality is far more casual, far more entertainment based. I imagine people will tune in, watch a match on a Sunday afternoon and make it a little more interesting by putting ten quid on it. We've set the maximum stake for now at £25, also offering a £2 bet, a £5 bet and a £10 bet, again the reason being our focus on casual customers. The more serious betters will stay on the web.

What measures are in place to ensure user's details are secured?

We use the same methods as on the web to register and pay, referring them to our website. Data entry for now on a remote control is not so good. We will have a registration and payment Widget in our road-map, but online the security in place is of a banking level, possibly higher. We hold masses of money and client funds so we need that level of security. Also in our business, ensuring that no-one under the age of 18 can access our service is absolutely crucial to our reputation, apart from just being the law. The television service raises an interesting question; "What about my kids? Can my kids get on there?" It's an interesting point but there are measures in place. Not only is a username and password required, but if there has been no activity for 30 minutes, or you shutdown the application environment, that information has to be re-entered. Again, we're trying to balance ease of use with a prudent approach to security. The living room, a communal area itself, offers a level of protection; your 14 year old would find it easier to get onto your laptop which you've accidentally left open with your betting account logged in and create mischief than do it in plain sight in the public space of the living room. However, a degree of individual responsibility is of course involved.

Some people will argue that the ease with which people can place bets through the TV service helps facilitate irresponsible gambling? How would you respond to that?

Firstly we will take the same attitude towards responsible gambling that we take on all platforms and take it very seriously. If we see patterns of behaviours which are seemingly problematic we have very well regimented processes in place. The fact that the vice is there whichever platform you choose to use means that all we are really facilitating is an easier and more convenient mechanism to bet on. We are taking a very prudent approach from a targeting perspective by restricting the stake levels to £25. Problem gambling is all about the moment when people lose control. I think we've got a lot of controls built into the very nature of the product to handle that, as well as the publicness of the living room which itself discourages problem gambling.

With online betting, poker and casinos so mainstream nowadays, do you see the internet and internet connected TV's eventually killing off the traditional bookies?

No I don't. I think that the traditional bookmaker has a place. There will be certain customers who will simply prefer that. We've become an important company in this space, employing a lot of people, developing amazing technology, providing what we think is a very good service. Clearly that has attracted a lot of customers. Internet connected televisions will simply be another platform. There will be some people who will say " I don't want to go to an internet site, I prefer to go to my bookmaker", who will now perhaps say, "This television thing, that kind of fits with how my life works". But do I think that the internet and internet connected televisions will be the final nail in the bookies coffin? No I don't think so.

How do you see services like your own, and other Yahoo! widget services evolving in the future? What do you think the next step is?

Personally, we'll start with football and build up to a multi-sport widget. We'll also develop casino games. Our ambition is to have an appropriate subset of the full sweep of a gambling portfolio available on television. It's not practical to have 250 different slot selections on a television, it'll be a subset of that. Televisions have the advantage of being 42 inches, or 50 inches or so; whatever size screen it is, it's usually the biggest and best quality screen in the house. The exciting thing is, if this platform is as successful as we think it might be, we can then bring real drama to the way that we present casino games. Putting the level of animation and video quality already seen online into a television widget will make it that much more of an invigorating experience.

To round things up, can you give Tech Digest's readers any good tips? The Grand National or football perhaps?

I've never been asked that question before! I am the world's worst better! You're asking absolutely the wrong person. I happen to be a Newcastle fan so my recommendation would be to back Newcastle for the championship title!

Thanks very much for your time Simon.

It's been a pleasure.

Check out Betfair's online service here.

While illegal MP3 downloads may be giving the internet a bad name, here's a story proving it isn't all theft and piracy in the world of digital music.

Scars on 45, a UK band funded by fans via the Slicethepie website, have just bagged themselves a major label record deal with Atlantic Records.

With Slicethepie, music aficionados take on the A&R role, making money by reviewing tracks, spotting new talent and ensuring the best bands get put forward for financing. Fans can also invest anything from £1 upwards to help a band they think are worthy of hitting the big-time.

And that's just what they did with Scars on 45. Within weeks of signing up to the site, the band had raised £15,000 directly from music fans to record their self-produced debut album. Their track "Beauty's Running Wild" was then featured on hit US show CSI:NY and from there on in it all fell into place.

David Courtier-Dutton, Slicethepie CEO said: 'We are delighted for both the band and their fans who, in this case, have truly been instrumental in their success. We believe that consumer driven filtering has an increasingly influential role to play in the future of the industry enabling talented artists to access an ever widening range of commercial opportunities."

Check the Scars on 45 Myspace page here.

Think you've got an ear for the next saviours of pop? Try your hand at a bit of online A&R at Slicethepie here.

Pirate Bay founders Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij have been fined a further one million Swedish kronor (£87,500) after failing to heed a court order asking that the torrent site be shut down.

EMI Music, Universal Music, Sony BMG and Warner Music took the pair to court last year for encouraging and facilitating the illegal downloading and sharing of copy-protected materials and won .

As ever Neij remained as nonchalant and un-phased as ever. Already being chased for a 50 million kronor (£4.3 million) fine from last year's court case, he said of the news that " a few million more or less doesn't really affect me."

So torrent sites like Pirate Bay; web liberators, the Robin Hoods of the digital age, or just plain thieves? What do you think? Let us know in the comments section below or via Twitter here.

A post on the Google blog titled "A New Approach to China" has revealed Google's plans to stop censoring search results gathered at their .cn domain.

The decision follows a number of attacks on the Gmail accounts of Google users who openly advocate free speech in China. The communist Chinese government is notoriously wary of the internet, and rigorously polices what its citizens may access.

"We have discovered that the accounts of dozens of US-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties," says the blog.

"These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users' computers...

"These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered - combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web - have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China."

Google begrudgingly agreed to censor some search results when it opened Chinese offices in 2006. However, this decision not to censor any search results, whatever the cost, is a bold move that could force Google to leave the communist state.

"We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all," the blog concludes.

Google.cn currently holds 17 % of Chinese search-engine traffic.

YouTube have revealed the most watched videos of 2009, and there is one breakaway leader miles ahead of the competition. Susan Boyle's Britain's Got Talent audition has racked up over 120 million views this year, an absolutely massive amount of hits that totally eclipses runner-up drugged child clip "David After Dentist", itself picking up a huge 37 million views. In third place sits quirky wedding video "JK Wedding Entrance" with 33 million views.

YouTube have also pooled together the fastest rising search terms for 2009. It reads like a pit-stop tour of everything 2009:

January: inauguration
February: christian bale
March: the climb
April: susan boyle
May: pacquiao vs hatton
June: michael jackson thriller
July: michael jackson
August: usain bolt
September: kanye west
October: paranormal activity
November: bad romance
December: tiger woods

For the full breakdown of YouTube's 2009 story, visit the YouTube Blog.

If you don't want to splash out on a netbook, or perhaps just want a simple introduction to the wonders of the web for a loved one, take a quick look at the Chumby widget box.

Connect it up to your Wi-Fi internet connection, and the Chumby will let you browse as many as 1500 internet widgets. It's a simple, intuitive device that makes use of a 3.2 inch touchscreen to let you browse content from Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and a whole host of other sites.

The Chumby also comes with built in 2W speakers, an accelerometer for gaming and two USB ports for accessing a limited range of media files.

You can pickup a Chumby from Firebox priced £139.99, or for more information on the widget box, click here.

Everyone's looked at their own house and had a nosey up and down their own street and around the local shops. But now you can check out Coronation Street on Google Street View.

The 360-degree images of the famous cobbles have taken the Google Street View team months to piece together, but they are now available for you to explore as if you were an actual Corrie character or visitor wanting to find your way to the Kabin or Roy's Rolls.

Coronation Street is the first TV soap to feature on Google Street View. The soap's producers threw open the gates to the set for the special Google car with camera equipment on its roof earlier this year to mark the re-launch of its website. A Corrie spokesman said: "Thanks to Street View, fans will be able to have a good nose around the set in a way that would have been unimaginable almost 50 years ago when the show first aired."

Other winning landmarks which can be seen from today on Google Street View include Angel of the North, the Eden Project and Bamburgh Castle. Loch Ness will also be added as soon as possible next year.

Corrie to be on Google Street View

Google Street View

Myspace have acquired music streaming service Imeem for an undisclosed sum that industry experts estimate is a figure in the region of $8 million.

The service pioneered ad-based music streaming, but the $8 million sum will not go far towards covering the $30 million dollar investment the company initially received.

As a result, up to half of Imeem's workforce now faces unemployment.

The Imeem buyout follows Myspace's acquisition of iLike, another troubled music streaming website. Both iLike and Imeem could not support licensing costs from the major labels on ad-based revenue alone, despite Imeem receiving heavily subsidised licenses from all four majors.

Myspace itself has fallen on hard times, recently conceeding defeat in the social-networking race to Facebook. How it plans on incorporating Imeem and iLike into its Myspace Music service, which the company now claim is its main focus, could decide whether Myspace sinks or swims.

Via: CNet

If you want to get your kids web-aware at an early age, why not introduce them to the KidZui web browser?

KidZui are launching version 5.0 of their browser today, which is set to help parents and children share and discover new experiences through the Internet.

Children can send KidZui approved content to friends and parents with the browser's new "KidConnect" functions. KidZui have trawled the web to find over 2 million websites, games, photographs and videos suitable for children, jointly approved by parents and teachers who already use the service.

ZuiTube has also recently been launched, acting like a kid-friendly YouTube lite.

Parents will also be able to connect with one another through in-built Facebook support, as well as receive weekly emails reporting on their children's web habits.

For more information, visit http://www.kidzui.com/

Got a futuristic idea you need to share that's too barmy for the Dragons Den? Why not leave it on Intel's Tomorrow Mural?

Intel's Tomorrow Mural allows users to post their hopes and visions of the future onto an interactive digital wall, creating a collage of futuristic aspirations from around the globe. Users can upload images and leave comments, and search the mural by specifics such as theme, geographic location and popularity.

Intel want the mural to "encourage people to express their vision of the future in a positive, collaborative and creative way".

So far, space travel and robots dominate the mural. Think you can come up with something a little more creative? Add it to the Tomorrow Mural by clicking here.

You know you've really won over the hearts and minds of a nation when you get to star in your own web game. Either that or someone hates you that much to spend sleepless nights developing one that rips what's left of your flailing credibility to shreds.

Enter "Grimes Against Humanity", starring X-Factor hate magnets John and Edward.

Players must bounce "Jedward" to the top of the voting tables in a bid to win over the cruel destroyer of pop-worlds, Overlord Cowell (inexplicably portrayed by the Mousebreaker-developed game as German).

Click here to try it out.