"The controversial Digital Economy Bill has been passed into law during the wash-up period, which sees outstanding legislation rushed through before a general election. The most controversial aspects of the bill - which could see persistent illegal file-sharers disconnected from the web and copyright holders given the power to block access to websites hosting illegal content - survived the process."

"The LLVM Machine Code sub-project of LLVM was created to solve a number of problems in the realm of assembly, disassembly, object file format handling, and a number of other related areas that CPU instruction-set level tools work in. It is a sub-project of LLVM which provides it with a number of advantages over other compilers that do not have tightly integrated assembly-level tools. This blog post talks about how the MC project evolved, describes a few different aspects of it , talks about the improvements/capabilities it brings to LLVM, and finishes off with the current status of the project."

I really wonder how I missed this one. While I'm sure most of you have already been playing this, I only discovered it a few days ago and have been hooked ever since. It's called Digital: A Love Story, and it's an interactive story set in 1988, written/created by Christine Love. The interface of the game is the Amiga Workbench, and you progress through the story by reading, replying, and hacking BBSs using your modem.

A developer from the Qumranet team, developers of the KVM virtual machine and Spice Protocol has written about the team's experience in porting the RHEV-M software from C# to Java as a means of making the application cross platform and open sourcing it. The team considered several options including Mono which they discarded as too immature for the job, and Grasshopper technology was discarded as an option since the goal was to open source it and eventually settled on a semi-automated workflow using Java. Red Hat is well on its way towards the goal of making a cross-platform and open source management tool for managing virtual machines in the servers and desktops.

"Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 have something for every developer. The new editor, now using Windows Presentation Foundation, supports concepts such as the use of multiple monitors. This enables a developer to have one monitor with code, another with the user interface designer, and yet another with database structure. Developers have integrated access to SharePoint functionality into the Visual Studio integrated development environment. Windows Azure tools make it easy to quickly develop, debug, test and deploy cloud applications from within the familiar Visual Studio environment."

Happy birthday to you... Happy birthday to you... Happy birthday dear copyright law... Yeah, it's April 10, the birthday of copyright (thanks, Arnoud). In 1710, 300 years ago, England enacted the very first copyright law, cutely named the Statute of Anne, after then-reigning Queen Anne. When reading about those early days of copyright, one can't help but hope we will return to those days - the Statute of Anne has little to nothing to do with modern copyright.

"Apple's current - and in our opinion, objectionable - position is now close to the complete opposite of its initial stance. From promoting openness and standards, the company is now pushing for an ever more locked-down and restricted platform. It's bad for competition, it's bad for developers, and it's bad for consumers. I hope that there will be enough of a backlash that the company is forced to reconsider, but with the draw of all those millions of iPhone (and now, iPad) customers, I fear that Apple's developers will, perhaps with some reluctance, just accept the restriction and do whatever Cupertino demands."

This, people, is a big one. Remember all the articles we had on Theora, H264, and which codec is better suited for HTML5 video? Well, it seems that Google has officially decided to put some serious weight behind... Theora. What they're doing is a baby step, but one specific aspect of that baby step is very important: Google is openly stating that Theora is free of patents.

It almost got lost in all the iPhone OS 4.0 stuff, but Apple made a major contribution to the WebKit project yesterday. It's called WebKit 2, and it adds multiprocess browsing to the WebKit API; it may look similar to what Chromium does, but the difference is that Chromium's process boundary is not actually part of WebKit.

"To be clear about this article's intent, it's not to bash Microsoft, or Windows. Because to be fair, despite using Linux 95% of the time while I'm on the PC, I can find more faults with it than Windows. So, this article's goal is to highlight some of the major pluses of Linux, and also showcase where Windows could improve in the future, should Microsoft take heed of the suggestions."

John Gruber has found out that cross-compilers are no longer allowed in iPhone OS 4.0. "My reading of this new language is that cross-compilers, such as the Flash-to-iPhone compiler in Adobe's upcoming Flash Professional CS5 release, are prohibited. This also bans apps compiled using MonoTouch - a tool that compiles C# and .NET apps to the iPhone. It's unclear what this means for tools like Titanium and PhoneGap, which let developers write JavaScript code that runs in WebKit inside a native iPhone app wrapper. They might be OK."

"While Adobe has been getting most of the press recently for their Flash 10.1 RC, Microsoft has quietly announced their plans to release the final version of Silverlight 4.0 as early as next week. This major update will provide more fundamental changes than prior iterations, including Google Chrome support, better performance (up to 200% over Silverlight 3), improved security with digital signing and sandboxing, and greater control for developers."

Today, Apple held a special press event at its campus in Cupertino during which it revealed and demonstrated the new features that are going into the fourth version of the iPhone operating system. The company focussed on 7 'tentpole' features, the most prominent of which is... Multitasking.

Yes, this is turning into a series - welcome to episode 3 (1, 2). Apple has been granted a patent on Cover Flow. This is a design patent, not a utility one; in other words, not the implementation is patented, but the look. "Think of it as covering the distinctive shape of a Coke bottle and not how it works and you'll get it," Engadget explains. This means that anyone implementing something that looks even remotely similar is in danger of getting sued by Apple. Compiz, Songbird, you're boned.