Mary Lou Jepsen is yet another inventor with a more far-reaching effect than she’d ever anticipated. Her design for a cheap computer to be given to poor children has evolved into the ubiquitous netbook.

For most of the world, the iPhone is a cutting edge gadget. To the Japanese it doesn’t even rank as “ho hum”. Their regard for it is so low, they give the phones away for free if you’ll sign a contract.

The Australian plan to censor the internet for the entire nation has apparently halted. Though the Communications Minister is going ahead with “trials” involving some of the smaller Australian ISPs, the plan is not expected to be implemented.

Five of the eight counts of patent infringement have to do with proprietary software, the other three are related to TomTom’s implementation of the Linux kernel. Microsoft claims Linux and other open-source programs violate more than 200 of its patents, leaving a lot of companies vulnerable to suit.

Now that phones are nearing the computing capacity of a laptop, Nokia is considering expanding its line from phones to laptops.

The contest pits hackers against five smart phone operating systems with each successful exploit paying $10,000. A second contest has hackers trying to break a variety of browsers on Windows and Mac OS X platforms for $5,000.

Proprietary software is part of many systems, but people are objecting to the proprietary nature of the Kindle reader. The problem that started with music – you have to buy a second copy of the album to play it on tape or CD – has now hit the book-reading world. If you buy your Jasper Fforde for Kindle, you can’t read it on Sony’s reader.

Agendus has issued updates for a number of devices, so, if you use Agendus with your handheld check the “what’s new” page for information on your product.

Marvell has now come up with a way for people to lose their computers. Their new wall-wart computer has a 1.2 GHz CPU and draws only 5 watts of power.

If you have $3000 to spend on building your own reader, E Ink now offers a kit allowing you to re-program your reader as required.