Software piracy becomes much harder to get away with from 6th April 2007

The Federation Against Software Theft (FAST) has welcomed the announcement that trading standards officers will be given new powers to check businesses’ compliance with software licensing laws from 6 April. The new powers will be granted under an amendment to the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The move was a key recommendation in the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property. It’ll mean more surprise raids, and more prosecutions of those who flaunt the regulations.

http://www.fast.org.uk/viewnews.asp?article=3720

John Lovelock, Director General of The Federation, commented:
“It’s time for organisations to get their software compliance with the law addressed. Trading Standards can now come knocking on your door, and you may be the subject of a criminal investigation. Very simply the risk to organisations which misuse software will be greatly increased, and therefore compliance is absolutely essential”.

If you are the owner of a business that is using illegal software you are risking a large fine and / or a prison sentence.

Share your digital pictures with family and friends

 

Ever wanted to share your digital photos with friends and family, but find it too time consuming and clumsy emailing them?

Are you worried about loosing your photos if your computer hard disk fails?

 

Picasa Web Albums is the answer.

You create a free account which gives you one Gigabyte of on-line storage. This enables you to upload your photos into on-line albums. These albums can be public, so that anyone can search and view them, or private so that only people that you send the web link to can view that particular album. This is much quicker and easier than trying to email those photos to friends.

In addition as a bonus you now have a separate copy of your photos stored by google as a backup of your photos in case your hard disk fails.

http://picasa.google.com/intl/en_us/web/learn_more_picasa.html

 

Chris Moody
ASL Computer Services
Specialists in computer support for small businesses and home PC users

Google Calendar

This is a web based on-line calendar. You can enter details of appointments and then view them in daily, weekly, and a number of other formats. But it really starts to get useful when you have a number of people on Google Calendar. You can set up authorisation for specific people to have view / update / or full control of your calendar. You can book meetings with other people and they can accept or reject these appointments. At the click of a button you can overlay calendars on top of each other.

It is a really powerful product, with similar features as Microsoft exchange, but without the associated high costs that go with Exchange.

Worth a look at by all small business owners needing a computer based calendar.

Why not see what it can do by visiting the “Google Calendar tour” website:

 

http://www.google.com/googlecalendar/tour.html