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Killing a country code

The internet may be among the first media to spread news about a conflict, but in other ways it catches up with war - and its aftermath - very slowly.

This month, some five years after the country was officially disbanded, ".yu" - the top level domain representing the former Yugoslavia - was officially retired.

For the past four years the federation of Serbia and Montenegro, which was formed from the remnants of Yugoslavia after more than a decade of conflict, has been designated by ".cs"

When Montenegro declared its independence from Serbia last year, however, both countries expressed a desire to have their own domains, and .yu's relevance was diminished even further.

(Montenegro's domain is now ".me"; Serbia's is ".rs".)

On September 11th the decision was taken by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which runs the domain name system, that .yu should finally be laid to rest.

A free online Wall Street Journal? Murdoch likes the idea

That didn't take long. Having splashed out $5.6 billion to buy The Wall Street Journal last month, Rupert Murdoch is already talking about making the online version of the newspaper free of charge. According to Reuters, Mr Murdoch views a free online Wall Street Journal as potentially more lucrative than its current subscription model. Mr Murdoch rejects the view that ditching the $99-per-year subscription in favour of a fully ad-supported site would harm the most successful online publishing business model in existence.

The switch to freely available online content would help boost readership and revenue globally, Mr Murdoch told attendees of a Goldman Sachs media conference in New York yesterday. "Will you lose $50 million to $100 million in revenue? I don't think so," Mr Murdoch said, according to Reuters. "If the site is good, you'll get much more."

While he still hasn't made a final decision on the matter, it's becoming abundantly clear that paying for news is a model that is nearing obsolescence. And, it's a move I predicted here even before Mr Murdoch clinched the deal. The New York Times beat Mr Murdoch to the punch earlier this week, scrapping, as suspected, the subscription-based TimesSelect service. The Financial Times too seems to be fazing out its paid-for offerings, with more and more breaking news available free of charge.

The move is not without risk. Relying solely on online advertising could backfire if the market were to suddenly implode, or, more likely, Google swallowed up all the ads. But for now, the aim of online publishing is to attract the world's largest audience, and steadily increase your ad rates. That may be the only way to keep Google at bay.

First Robot Air Attack Squadron ready for launch

Unmanned drone aircraft are no longer the stuff of science fiction and the US Air Force’s remotely-controlled Predator reconnaissance aircraft has been an increasingly familiar sight in combat zones since it was first deployed in 1995.

Now, though, the Predator has a bigger, more heavily armed brother about to take to the skies above Afghanistan

The MQ-9 Reaper is the size of a jet fighter, powered by a turboprop engine, able to fly at 300 mph and with a service ceiling of 50,000 feet. It is equipped with infra-red, laser and radar targeting, and can carry up to fourteen Hellfire anti-tank missiles. "The name Reaper captures the lethal nature of this new weapon system," Gen. T. Michael Moseley, Air Force chief of staff, when he announced the name last September.

The Reaper can remain in the air fully armed for 14 hours, patrolling an area and waiting for targets to be identified, while the two-man flight team sits at a video console some 7,000 miles away in Nevada

The drones are delivered in four-plane systems with command and control infrastructure at a cost of around $69m.

American ground troops can stream live video from the aircraft direct to their laptops in real time, giving them an unprecedented ability to reconnoitre enemy positions without breaking cover. " They want more and more of it," said Maj. Chris Snodgrass, commander of the Predator squadron at Balad air base in Iraq

Sixty Reapers and 160 Predators are to be organised into military aviation’s first UAV wing, the 432nd, which will be formally established on May 1. The exact numbers to be deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan will remain classified. The RAF will also take delivery of a four Reaper package for use in Afghanistan later this year, but these are expected to be the unarmed reconnaissance variant.

The "Great Firewall of China" is not so great after all

China's all-seeing, all-knowing "Great Firewall" is once again failing to live up to its iron-tight billing. American researchers have been monitoring the elaborate filters that block the many words and phrases that the People's Republic of China deems objectionable, and has found that a fair number -- as high as 28 per cent -- are actually getting through. And, in moments of peak usage, the filtering was even more erratic. How do they know this?

Hoping to boost slumping CD sales, music industry introduces the "ringle"

It's called a "ringle", the music industry's latest gimmick to boost slumping in-store sales, particularly among the download-happy customer segment. As Billboard reports, the ringle is a CD that contains a combination of songs -- a single and possibly two other tracks -- along with a downloadable ring tone. Got it now? Single plus ring tone, and you get "ringle". Genius.

Study: mobile voice charges to fall, but our bills will climb

Thanks to EU heat and old fashioned competition, mobile voice charges are expected to keep falling over the next three years, leading to lower average revenue per customer from voice calls for mobile operators, a new study from tech consultants at Analysys predicts. But it's not all good news for price-conscious mobile users. New services such as mobile internet will be too tempting for consumers to pass up, raising overall average bills for Western Europeans by 10.2 per cent between now and 2012, Analysys says.

Rumour vs reality: the iPod touch is born

After all the hype and expectation, Apple's sixth-generation iPod is finally among us. Some of the rumours proved true, others less so:

Widescreen: check
Touchscreen: check
Wi-fi enabled: check
Web browser: check
120GB memory: no, far from it. The maximum is 16GB (but the iPod classic has been boosted to 160GB)
Internet radio: no

The new iPod is also the most tangible evidence to date of the tech industry's big c-word, convergence. Easily be mistaken for the iPhone, the iPod touch also shares many of its features. It's not hard to see these two product lines merging in the not-too-distant future.

Memory remains the weak point of both devices, preventing either from taking the place of the original iPod line, but that is likely to change. The first iPod arrived in October 2001 with a capacity of 5GB, which had been quadrupled nine months later.

Did China hack the Pentagon?

Did the Chinese succeed in hacking the Pentagon? This is the big question hovering around the tech world today following a report in the Financial Times quoting "senior US officials" as saying the Chinese military was behind an extensive hack attack in June on the Department of Defence computer network. It's fairly clear the attack was not the work of script kiddies or gangster fraudsters. The attackers succeeded in disabling part of the network that serves the office of Robert Gates, the Defence Secretary. At the time, Mr Gates downplayed the attack, saying the Pentagon gets attacked all the time. He also revealed he's not very tech savvy, not a comforting revelation for defence hawks.

A rare victory in the spam wars as PDF spam falters

Some promising news on the spam front that no doubt none of you had noticed: spammers evidently have all but given up on the once highly effective gimmick of sending their love cures and get-rich-quick missives via PDF. According to security specialists at Sophos, spam messages sent as a PDF attachment has dropped off the charts in recent weeks. PDF spam had accounted for as much as 30 per cent of all spam at its height earlier this month. Now, it is nearly zero, Sophos reports.