Microsoft has opened its much-anticipated Live Mesh technology preview up to Australian users for the first time.

The technology, when completed, will provide a way for people to synchronise information across a ‘mesh’ of devices, including desktop and notebook PC, Mac and smartphone.

Details of Mac and mobile phone synchronisation capabilities are yet to be announced.

Aussies with a Windows Live ID can now use their log-in to participate in the technology preview, which was previously only open to U.S. residents, according to Harvey Sanchez, online services lead for Microsoft Australia.

“We’ve been receiving great feedback on Live Mesh from the beta community,” Sanchez told iTnews.

“People are still coming to terms with what Live Mesh is, because it can be a lot of things. It can synchronise access to files and folders, be used for Terminal Services or as a development platform.”

After logging into the mesh.com site, users are presented with the Live Desktop, which provides a 5GB space to store folders and files, and an interface to add and manage devices in your personal ‘mesh’.

Users have to install the Live Mesh software on each device they want to mesh. It currently supports computers running the Vista and XP SP2 operating systems.

“Users like the unified effort around device synchronisation, and the ability to have storage on the cloud but access it in offline mode as well,” explained Sanchez.

“Support for multiple devices and platforms is on our roadmap. We want to create a fully integrated heterogeneous environment.”

Device synchronisation is one of the main differences between Live Mesh and existing Live services like Skydrive.

“Both Live Mesh and Skydrive offer cloud storage, but if I make changes to a document and resave it, the changes are [automatically] reflected in the mesh, whereas with Skydrive you have to upload the changes manually,” said Sanchez.

Another interesting application is the use of Live Mesh by developers as a way to collaborate and share code.

“Because it’s a collaborative platform, it allows people to share folders and documents, synchronise any changes to them and to effectively work in groups,” explained Sanchez.

More announcements and technical details are expected to be announced at Microsoft Australia’s Tech.Ed 2008, which occurs September 3-5, Sanchez added.

Microsoft is also said to be working closely with systems integrators, content providers and OEMs to build up a Live Mesh ecosystem.

“We’re trying to engage with the community locally,” said Sanchez.

Mozilla has released a prototype of a new application that aims to consolidate all messages a user can receive over a computer into one reader package.

Dubbed Snowl, the application intends to treat all messages as the same and let the user get emails, RSS feeds, IM and Twitter messages and even aerts from social networking sites in one reader.

“It doesn’t matter where messages originate,” said the organization in its labs blog.

“They’re alike, whether they come from traditional email servers, RSS/Atom feeds, web discussion forums, social networks, or other sources.”

A prototype has already been released that picks up RSS/Atom feeds and Twitter messages and has a choice of two interfaces for viewing them.

The group wants to add in more functions as time goes on and is asking users for their feedback.

In the week-long countdown to the Olympics, online fraudsters have stepped up their efforts to swindle sports fans out of thousands of dollars, while human rights advocates cried foul over online Chinese censorship.

At the beginning of the week, the New South Wales Trading Office opened up a hotline for Aussies who had been tricked by online Olympic-themed scams. The hotline received over 30 calls in just a few hours, reporting tens of thousands of dollars lost from online hoaxes.

The majority of the complaints arose from the fake Olympic ticketing site, beijingtickets.com. Other big scams were targeted at sports organisations and athlete representatives who received official-looking press releases that contain a Trojan.

Security vendor MessageLabs say the content of the releases may have been lifted straight from the International Olympic Committee website. On Friday, security experts warned of phony ‘Olympic news updates’ or messages from Visa, and cautioned users to ‘think before you click’.

Human rights groups like Amnesty have been calling out their own warnings about the Olympics, this time regarding Internet censorship by the Chinese government. While Amnesty’s website was unblocked, the group still maintained the government had broken its vow to allow media freedom during the games.

Amnesty has been touring around Australia during the 90-day countdown to the Olympics to campaign against Chinese censorship. It hopes to convince Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Google to stop cooperating with the Chinese government’s attempts to censor its citizens.

The three media giants did reportedly sign a code of conduct to allow for freedom of expression and privacy in countries where the government censors its people, though that code will not be finished until later this year.

To help Chinese citizens bypass the Great Firewall, a group called the Global Internet Freedom Consortium (GIFC) provided them with five tools to access any website they choose.

Google Australia is distributing the most local Olympics searches but is being trumped by Windows Live and Yahoo! in paid traffic, Hitwise Australia says.

A Hitwise Search Portfolio of 100 leading search variations on the word ‘Olympics’ revealed that Google Australia is distributing over 75 percent of “clicks”, according to Hitwise Asia Pacific research analyst, Sandra Hanchard.

A click is said to occur when a user conducts a search, and then clicks on a search engine result to visit a website.

However, while handling lower click volumes, both Windows Live Search and Yahoo! Search Australia are distributing more paid clicks than Google.

Yahoo!7 Sport, ninemsn, and Telstra all received paid traffic off Olympic search terms to their respective websites, Hanchard stated in a blog post .

The official Beijing 2008 (English language) site is the main beneficiary of downstream traffic from Olympic searches so far, receiving more than one in four clicks, according to Hitwise data.

But Hitwise research director for Asia Pacific, Alan Long, claimed the official site will face increasingly ‘stiff competition’ from news sites in 2008.

This will not only affect the volume of users but also the value the site provides to Games sponsors, Long said in a separate post .

“A lot has changed since I was involved with Olympics.com during the Sydney 2000 Games, regarded at the time as the very first digital Games. Then, the official site was the leader in all major markets,” stated Long.

“Now, news and media websites are more sophisticated with multimedia capabilities that make it very difficult for a once-every-four-years site to compete against,” he added.

Advancements in information technology warrant changes in privacy laws, said the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC).

Today it launched a new report that recommends 295 changes to privacy laws and practices for government agencies, businesses, and the private sector.

Despite the fact that the federal Privacy Act was only introduced into law about 20 years ago, the amount of technological changes in recent years mean updates for old polices.

“[The Privacy Act] was introduced before the advent of supercomputers, the Internet, mobile phones, digital cameras, e-commerce, sophisticated surveillance devices and social networking websites- all of which challenges our capacity to safeguard our sensitive, personal information,” said ALRC president David Weisbrot.

The ALRC submitted the report to the Government, who will then consider the recommendations in two different stages over the course a couple of years.

One key recommendation is a statutory cause of action for individuals who believe they have suffered an invasion of privacy, particularly in cases where a person’s home life or private communications have been compromised by unlawful surveillance.

Privacy inquiry commissioner Les McCrimmon said particularly the advent of smaller and higher resolution cameras have solidified the need for stronger privacy laws.

He said on the surface, sites like Google Street View have the potential to infringe on the privacy recommendations, though the precautions Google has taken currently keep it safe from any statutory action.

Other recommendations in the report include data breach notification, regulations to health record privacy, cross border data flows, and education for children and young people about the importance of online security.

The full ALRC report can be found here.

Mobile broadband dongles are becoming so popular that specialist unlockers – such as Nextgen – are starting to offer software which enables them to be used on any suitable 3G network.

This would be very useful for those on Vodafone who want to swap to 3, or vice versa. Nextgen offers to unlock the highly popular Huawei E200 for US$30.

There’s also software on the official Huawei site which can upgrade the E220 to the higher 7.2 Mbit/s speed which Vodafone currently offers in parts of the UK.

There are reports of users getting average speeds of around 2.5Mbit/s peaking at a round 4.3Mbit/s in 7.2 Mbit/s areas.

Indeed, China’s Huawei, is continuing to dominate the world of 3G dongles. It has just reported that sales of 3G and GSM modems increased by 100 per cent in Q1-Q2 2008 compared to the same period last year.

Interestingly, demand for GPRS/EDGE style dongles is still significant. In the first six months of 2008, the company shipped 800,000 units – with half of those going to China and India.

On the 3G front, it has just secured a further 25 new customers bringing its total to 111.

Overall, its products have been placed with over 235 operators in 115 different countries and regions. Its accumulated shipments of over 12 million units put Huawei firmly in the Number One slot, the company claims.

Huawei also continues to promote its cellular infrastructure products which it says can support future standards such as HSPA+ and LTE. Indeed Qualcomm recently claimed to made the first HSPA+ call and achieved throughput speeds of 20 Mbit/s.

Cyber squatters are making a fortune out of the US election.

With both main candidates relying on online campaigns to push out their messages, a huge industry has arisen based on users typing in the wrong address.

Insecurity expert Oliver Friedrichs, director of emerging technologies at Symantec’s security response unit, said that “typo squatting” outfits were buying up rights to Internet addresses with candidates’ names misspelled and using them to malign, mock or steal from contenders.

Symantec found that that 47 out of 160 variations on “www.barackobama.com” were being “typo-squatted.” One squatter’s web page featured a legitimate Obama ad which had been sold through Google.

Some of the sites contained malicious software which was designed to attack supporters of a particular campaign.

The software could target candidates, cause confusion, pop-up ads, or re-direct computers when they try to log on to a candidate’s website.

Mostly however the best way for typo-squatters was to create realistic looking campaign websites and take donations, keeping the cash and using credit card information for further fraud.

Some online donations could even end up in the coffers of the rival with out the victim knowing.