online access

Hulu may go from offering free online access to TV shows, movies and clips to a fee-based model, according to an executive from News Corp. Hulu is a joint venture between News Corp., NBC Universal, and Disney.

Over time, paying for some of the content on Hulu is a logical thing, said News Corp. Chief Digital Officer Jonathan Miller during an Internet Week event earlier this week. Miller, who was formerly at AOL, prefaced his comments by saying he won't attend his first Hulu board meeting until Monday, June 8, so his opinions are his own.

Recently, some of us around the 360 DI team have spent some serious quality time with the  international advocacy-movement building experts at Purpose Campaigns.  Inspired by one of his Australian quotable quotes, I asked co-founder Jeremy Heimans to answer a few questions for the Fresh Influence blog.

Six months after Google settled copyright issues with the Authors Guild, a group with 8,000 authors, and the Association of American Publishers, which has more than 300,000 member organizations, the U.S. Department of Justice is probing the settlement. DOJ lawyers are considering whether the settlement is anticompetitive, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times reported.

A Virginia scientist who sold U.S. rocket technology to China and bribed Chinese officials to obtain a lucrative contract for his company was sentenced Tuesday to more than four years in federal prison.

Quan-Sheng Shu, 68, pleaded guilty in November to two counts of violating the federal Arms Control Act and one count of bribery. U.S. District Judge Henry Coke Morgan Jr. sentenced Shu to 51 months on each count, to be served concurrently.

Google has rarely included scanned documents in its search results because it had no way to determine the nature of the content, but that's about to change. The search engine giant says it will use optical character recognition (OCR) software to make it possible for Web surfers to search any Web-hosted document stored in the PDF file format developed by Adobe Systems.

Google is using the technology to convert scanned documents into equivalent text files that can be searched, indexed and returned as responses to Google search queries, noted Evin Levey, a Google product manager.

Google is settling its long battle with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers (AAP). The groups have been embroiled in copyright litigation with Google over its Book Search product for two years.

Under the agreement, Google will make payments totaling $125 million.

The beta version of Office Live Workspace has one million users just six months after launch, Microsoft announced Wednesday as it released some minor improvements to the service.

"It takes companies years to attract a strong customer base such as this," boasted Microsoft Office product manager Kirk Gregersen. The rapid pace of adoption is a sign of a pent-up market for online access to documents, Gregersen said. Users are "looking for ways to resolve the complexities of their work, school and home projects through a range of choices," he said.

The absolute protection of Social Security numbers is critical in today's world of human resource and employee benefit administration, including the handling of 401(k) plans.

Such security concerns exists whether plan administration is done in-house or it is outsourced. In our Internet world, identity theft is a huge and growing problem. Computer systems of some of the largest organizations in the country, including a well known national 401(k) provider and even our country's intelligence agencies, have been hacked and information has been compromised.

According to the China Internet Network Information Center, more than 253 million people in China are now online. By contrast, Nielsen Online reports more than 220 million Americans have Internet access at home and/or work, and 73 percent of those were active in May.

"This is the first time the number has drastically surpassed the United States, becoming the world's number one," the nation's official net monitoring body said in a statement quoted by BBC News. However, western researchers say some caution is advisable when it comes to weighing statistics about Internet use in China.