The public trial of the Google browser will be available in 43 languages in 100 countries, Sundar Pichai, Google’s vice president of product management said at a news conference at the company’s Mountain View, California headquarters. Google Chrome relies on Apple’s WebKit software for rendering web pages, he said. It also has taken advantage of features of community-developed browser Firefox from Mozilla.

The free browser, called “Chrome,” is supposed to be available for downloading Tuesday in more than 100 countries for computers running on Microsoft’s Windows operating system. Google said it’s still working on versions compatible with Apple’s Mac computer and the Linux operating system.

KDE 4.1, released last month, brought a great number of improvements to the popular desktop environment. It’s the best desktop I’ve ever used — but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be better. Here are 10 features that would be great additions to a future KDE release that I hope the developers will consider.

The patent’s listed ‘inventors’ are Timothy Sellers, Heather Grantham and Joshua Dersch. However, Page Up and Page Down keyboard buttons have been in existence for at least quarter of a century, as evidenced by this image of a 1981 IBM PC keyboard.

Data is increasingly flowing around the United States, which may have intelligence — and conceivably military — consequences. Some Internet technologists and privacy advocates say that the actions of US intelligence agencies and other government policies may be hastening the shift toward Canada and Europe.

For years, al-Qaida and other terror groups have set up shop in the Internet. Those who track them have covertly followed. The companies SITE and IntelCenter have penetrated even deeper into the terror Web than most intelligence agencies.

The perils of music riddled with Digital Rights Management (DRM) software that we’ve been buying for years are now starting to come to light. With vinyl or CD you knew where you stood: you bought the music and, accidents aside, it would still play in ten years’ time. In the digital download age, however, that can’t be taken for granted.

A staggering 88 percent of IT administrators admitted they would take corporate secrets, if they were suddenly made redundant. The target information included CEO passwords, customer databases, research and development plans, financial reports, M&A plans and the company’s list of privileged passwords.

For everyday users, the semantic desktop will allow enhanced searching of the type that has already been introduced by applications like Beagle, but with more user control than any existing program. For more sophisticated users, such as academic researchers, while Nepomuk will not actual do data-mining itself, it will assist such processes.

Held at the Desmond Tutu Center in New York, the End User Collaboration Summit will give “sophisticated” end users an opportunity to “learn and interact with leaders from within the Linux community, including the highest level maintainers and developers,” says the non-profit Linux Foundation, which will host the event.