"BT, Sky, TalkTalk and Virgin will be asked to offer customers the option to block adult content during subscription According to new measures to be announced by Prime Minister David Cameron, online pornography watchers will have to place a special request with their Internet Service providers (ISPs) to watch pornographic or sexualised content online. The prime minister is holding a summit at No.10 today with 30 media and retail executives, including broadcasters, magazine editors, trade bodies and advertisers, said the Daily Mail. Cameron is expected to announce the crackdown after Mothers Union charity chief executive Reg Bailey submitted a report on the matter after six months of study." The fact that this can happen in Great Britain just goes to show how brittle concepts like freedom of speech really are. Where people in the Arab world fight for the kinds of freedom we have, we in the west just hand them over to extremists. Un-frakking-believable. Any British folk in here? How on earth did you guys let this happen?

Within the last few days we read the news about Apple's Siri AI personal assistant, and about a brain implant that lets monkeys control virtual limps & feel virtual objects. I believe that if someone is to also combine a few more technologies (e.g. high-res eyeware, appropriate operating system changes), we will be looking at the next user interface revolution, after the inventions of the computer mouse and touch interfaces.

"Oracle has pulled the rug out from under Intel's Itanium processor by yanking support of its database, middleware, and application software on future Poulson and Kittson Itaniums. It looks as though Larry Ellison wants to take on IBM in microprocessors for data center systems, man to man, head to head. 'I remember when we first bought Sun, a lot of people said we were going to get out of the hardware business," Oracle's co-founder and CEO said opening up his keynote at the OpenWorld customer and partner and conference on Sunday night, when he also announced the new Exalytics in-memory BI appliance. 'I guess we didn't get that memo,' Ellison quipped, pointing out that Apple is doing a 'pretty good job' designing its own hardware and software and making it work well with its own services. And that Oracle is not only committed to making its server, storage, and networking business work, but having taken Sun's hardware as a means of getting its hands on Solaris and Java, Oracle is actually enthusiastic about creating its own stack."

On its website, Apple has just confirmed that its co-founder and former CEO, Steve Jobs, has passed away at age 56. After bringing the company back from the brink of bankruptcy and turning it into one of the world's most succesful technology companies, Jobs lost the battle with pancreatic cancer.

"Sources tell us that Nokia is developing a Linux-based replacement for its S40 phones, called Meltemi. The news was leaked, accurately, by the Wall Street Journal last week. Now we can confirm it. The thinking is that a Linux-based replacement for S40 will allow developers to tap into proven development tools - and Qt. The April memo referred to Meltemi as a platform for 'rich Featurephones' and stated that development will be centered in Ulm, Germany. There's no U-turn, however. Meltemi had been long-been touted as a richer successor to S40. Windows phones will occupy the budget smartphone segment, not Linux."

I'm down with the flu at the moment, so I wasn't really looking forward to doing a detailed write-up of all the awesome stuff Apple was going to show off today. So, Tim Cook, thanks for talking about nothing for almost two hours straight. The only mildly interesting thing is a slightly specbumped iPhone 4, dubbed the iPhone 4S, which has a faster processor and graphics chip, better camera, and a few other improvements here and there to bring it in line with Android phones launched earlier this year. Sadly, Apple insists on the teeny tiny 3.5" screen, which is too small even for my girly fingers (I'm not kidding, I have to buy gloves in women's clothing stores). For the rest, it was a long rundown of iOS5 features we already knew, and improvements to voice recognition - which is something WP7, Android, and every other self-respecting mobile operating system does already anyway. They do claim it will sport a more natural feel to it, but only time will tell how well it'll work outside of pre-recorded and widely tested on-stage demos.