Zen Monthly Newsletter

Zen Internet launches two new broadband products today - Zen 8000 Active and Zen 8000 Pro - to replace the Home 500, 1000 and 2000 services. Priced at £24.99 and £34.99 per month respectively, the new products offer radically faster broadband speeds (up to 8Mbps) at no extra cost. Trials have shown that it is not commercially viable to offer completely unlimited usage with download speeds of up to 8Mbps, of course, which does mean the introduction of some usage allowance for the first time. Following today's launch, Zen customers currently enjoying Home 500, Home 1000 and Home 2000 will continue to receive the same services, and needn't do anything if they don't want to change, but they have the option of moving up to one of the new products with no transfer fee - whenever they feel the need for more speed.

At the 'ISP Oscars' - The Internet Services Providers’ Association awards - Zen Internet picked up the award for Best Business ISP and collected extra gongs for providing the best uncontended broadband, and as the UK's best heavy business broadband provider. During a lively ceremony hosted by comedian Dominic Holland, there was some light hearted banter with the audience, and a group of hopefuls from Tesco were told they could go home because they hadn't won anything. A representative for the UK Presidency of the European Union even managed to stay cheerful receiving the Internet Villain Award for pushing tougher data retention laws that would force ISPs to keep details of customers' communications for up to two years.

Current TV is a new cable and satellite channel available throughout the US and online in the UK. It uses access to Google Zeitgeist information - up to the minute aggregated search query results - to create TV news stories. The resulting programme, Google Current, airs every half hour on Current TV and provides a look at "what the world is searching for".

Speculation ranging from "It's an iPod killer" to "Odds on for Blackberry killer" has been bouncing around the forums for weeks about what's under the covers at Microsoft's origamiproject.com project, where all will be revealed tomorrow. Or maybe later, depending on how you read the entrails at the Web site. The consensus is that some kind of remote wireless device with a folding 'origami' screen will be rolled out to clash with new-product announcements due from Apple next week.

The music industry is making millions from sales of mobile phone ring tones. But you don't have to pay for music that you already own. Instead, go to Mobile17, an Internet service that lets you submit your own iTunes or MP3 songs. Mobile17 will automatically compress the music into a ring tone that works on most wireless phones. And it's free.

Security researchers fear that the Mac's growing success and the Unix roots of Mac OS X are leading attackers and virus writers to take more interest in the platform.

You may hear Apple Macintosh computer users extolling the virtues of Dashboard, a clever feature that lets them run 'widgets', handy pop-ups that display weather, news headlines, a calculator, and other gadgetry. It's prompted Yahoo! to come up with free software that will run nifty widgets on Windows PCs. Download the Yahoo! Widget Engine, and you'll have thousands of their mini helpers to choose from.

"Fun With Troubleshooting: How to muck up your PC - and get it back to normal" is this month's invitation from PC World columnist Steve Bass. He's not altogether serious - there are no instructions on how to complete the first part of the challenge - but some links to genuinely helpful tips and multiple support resources lie just beneath the first-level humour.

The City of London, one of the busiest financial and insurance centres in the world, is to get fully comprehensive wireless coverage. The aim is to create the biggest wireless zone in Europe. A WiFi network will be installed across a scattergun pattern of hotspots using lamp posts and street signs that will allow 350,000 City workers and visitors with WiFi-enabled devices to access the Internet from virtually anywhere within the capital's famous Square Mile.

Bathrooms are going digital, with DVDs, shower TV and music, including the iSplash wireless ZipConnect splashproof speaker system that keeps your iPod dry while sending tunes to a showerhead speaker - and interactive toilets with 22-button consoles like those imported from Japan by Google over two years ago.

Yahoo! and AOL plan to introduce a service that would charge senders a fee to route their e-mail directly to a user's mailbox without being checked by junk mail and anti-spam filters. Charges would be up to one cent per e-mail. "We were hearing not only from members but also e-mail partners that they wanted a different way of delivering e-mail that would stand out in the inbox and would guarantee them delivery," said AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham, adding that the company is likely to start offering the service later this month. Yahoo! confirmed that it will begin offering a similar service, but had no date set for the launch. The facility, provided by Goodmail, is aimed at online retailers and other companies that send large amounts of e-mail. In exchange for a payment and a promise to target only people who have agreed to receive their messages, senders would be assured that their e-mails won't be diverted to spam folders or have images or Web addresses filtered out. Bulk mail senders receive reports showing how many e-mails were received successfully. AOL said that credit report company Experian had already signed up.

Is it a guaranteed delivery facility for must-have e-mail or a back door pass for yet more spam that you don't want to see? The new Goodmail service may have been embraced by AOL and Yahoo! but many users are getting ready to give it the cold shoulder. They're wrong, says security analyst Larry Seltzer, arguing that there's nothing wrong with something that will "get a sender's mail through to the user without impediments from anti-spam infrastructure". He explains, "Misinformation abounds... it's an anti-spam solution for senders, not for recipients". Ah, well, that's ok then.

Spamcop, the organisation that provides a free anti-spam service to trace e-mails and track down the hosts of spam-promoted Web sites, has identified several Gmail (Google) servers as points of origin, which has persuaded some mail service providers to block all e-mail from Gmail addresses. Google is protesting innocence, saying that the ban was triggered because it witholds senders' IP addresses, which SpamCop uses to define the sources of spam. Commentators believe it's another example of Google taking 'user confidentiality' too far. The company recently found itself at loggerheads with the US Government, which asked for all searches relating to child porn to be sent to Federal authorities - something Hotmail and Yahoo! have both complied with, but Google is resisting.

Amazon tried cutting itself a slice of eBay's massive Exchange & Mart-style online trading store business with its 'Marketplace' offering. Now it's Google's turn. Previously known as Google Wallet, and an extension of an existing but little-used Google Base sub-set, the new service will be offered to Google Account holders to provide "a convenient and secure way to purchase Google Base items by credit card. For sellers, this feature integrates transaction processing with Google Base item management". Unexciting as that sounds, especially compared to CNN's declaration that it will be Google's "PayPal Killer", even a reserved Forbes headline is proclaiming "Large Opportunities Seen For Google Payments".

You don't have to go eBay shopping to save money on PSP games. There are racks of free 'homebrew' titles for Sony’s PlayStation Portable that are available for download. You'll need some special homebrew software before you sample any of the titles.

If it's your birthday today (Happy Birthday!) and you were born in 1980, you were just three years old when Apple introduced the Macintosh and you're 24 years and 4 months younger than Bill Gates. Enter your date of birth to find out more, or print a customised card for someone else's birthday, at the Age Gauge.

Good writers hardly ever resort to using exclamation marks - unless they're searching for something on Yahoo! The search engine's Open Shortcuts feature uses expletive punctuation to take visitors directly to favourite spots on the Net. If you want to find a DVD recorder on eBay, for example, you type "!ebay DVD recorder" as the search term (without the quotes) and Yahoo! will drop you straight into eBay's current crop of machines for sale. Type "!wiki" and you'll arrive at the online open source encyclopedia's front page without having to remember its awkward http://en.wikipedia.orgaddress. Yahoo! has a host of ready-made Open Shortcuts, and you can create your own.

An unfixed bug in the USB driver of Windows XP SP 2 causes a notebook's battery to drain faster than usual when there is a device connected to its USB port. In a statement issued by its public relations firm, Microsoft said there is no easy solution on the horizon.

Don't leave comments in your code that say things like "Don't even look at the mess below" - an actual example from case files collected by Peter Coffee, who offers malpractice action avoidance tactics to developers facing "The Perils of Turning Pro".

The creators of Kosmix, a new search engine with a claimed better approach to Web search than Google, say they worked with Google's co-founders when they studied at Stanford University together and always intended to come up with a better engine than their fellow students were inventing. In the meantime, they kept themselves busy founding Junglee.com, later sold to Amazon for $187 million. Kosmix aims to avoid the typical "about 50,000,000 results" that Google users are offered and instead will categorise the Web so that searches stay within pre-defined areas and get to the most relevant sites much faster. In its beta form, Kosmix demonstrates its capabilities by concentrating on health topics.