SYDNEY (AFP) – Australia Sunday defended its plan to block some Internet content, such as that featuring child sex abuse or advocating terrorism, after a media rights watchdog warned it may hurt free speech.

The Paris-based Reporters Without Borders (RSF) on Friday listed Australia, along with South Korea, Turkey and Russia, as countries "under surveillance" in its "Internet Enemies" report.

While Australia does not rank alongside Iran or North Korea in terms of censorship, its proposal to place a mandatory filter on the web to remove illegal and extreme material has raised concerns, RSF said.

CARACAS (Reuters) – Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez, who is criticized by media freedom groups, called on Saturday for regulation of the Internet and singled out a website that he said falsely reported the murder of one of his ministers.

"The Internet cannot be something open where anything is said and done. Every country has to apply its own rules and norms," Chavez said. He cited German Chancellor Angel Merkel as having expressed a similar sentiment recently.

Chavez is angry with Venezuelan political opinion and gossip website Noticierodigital, which he said had falsely written that Diosdado Cabello, a senior minister and close aide, had been assassinated. The president said the story remained on the site for two days.

AUSTIN, Texas--Privacy is not dead in the era of online social networking. It just needs careful curation.

That was the message Saturday from Danah Boyd, a social-media expert who works for Microsoft Research and who was Saturday's keynote speaker at the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) festival here.

SXSW's Saturday keynote speaker Danah Boyd.

(Credit: Danah Boyd)

Boyd is one of the original social-media researchers, having spent years studying the dynamics of how systems like MySpace and Facebook impact teens and youth culture, and how that culture is impacting such services. But she also has demonstrated over the years a keen sense of how people across all age groups use social networks, and her talk touched on many different communities.

If you're a systems engineer who wonders whether you've chosen the right profession, I bring you good news.

Please take a deep breath, stand up, and be prepared to leap so high, you will touch the sky. Then you will, perhaps, want to touch the Skyy. For a survey has declared that systems engineer is the best job in America.

Focus.com, perhaps spurred on by the grumbling that can be heard from so many places of work in the world, performed this most important of tasks.

The site first looked at more than 7,000 jobs. It then poured its eyes over numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. It selected jobs that would grow by 10 percent or more in the next decade, according to these statistics. Oh, and it had to be a job that required at least a bachelor's degree.

CNET's Caroline McCarthy in the driver's seat of a Chevy Volt test vehicle at SXSWi.

(Credit: CNET)

AUSTIN, Texas--Analysts reported on Saturday that Apple sold 120,000 units of the iPad, an untested device that the vast majority of consumers have never seen or touched. Can you tap into that same gadget mania to sell an electric car?

General Motors thinks so. The company's Chevy division is a sponsor of the South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSWi), which it's using as a test platform for all sorts of edgy social-media marketing projects, but perhaps more importantly, it's previewing its forthcoming Chevy Volt plug-in electric car. The skeleton framework of a Volt was set up outside the Austin Convention Center, and Chevy had cleverly sponsored gadget-recharging stations around the venue for attendees to juice up their phones and laptops.

You're standing on a street corner and remember that you need to pick up a video game for your sister's birthday. On your smartphone, you search Google and tap on the "in stock nearby" link next to the blue dots that show up for some of the search results. Google then shows you which local retailers have the game in stock.

That buying omniscience, where your mobile device can tell you whether what you want is nearby, was announced Thursday by the search giant.

iPhone, Palm, Android

The blue dots in the search results link to participating retailers, which currently include Best Buy, Sears, Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn, and West Elm. The "in stock nearby" link connects to the seller's page, where the retailer near you notes whether the given item is "in stock" or has "limited availability." The distance from your current location is also indicated if you have enabled My Location or manually specified your location.

Apparently we aren't the only species to prefer the crisp, smooth picture of an HDTV compared to that from one of those old CRT sets of yesteryear.

A study of octopus behavior (which first surfaced in December 2008 but was revisited in an article by the Journal of Experimental Biology on Friday) shows the mollusks react to high-definition videos where they used to be nonresponsive to movies on a SD set.

Renata Pronk and colleagues from Macquarie University, Australia, decided to see if using and LCD display and HD video would fix the long-time problem.

Google, seemingly torn between Chinese censorship and Chinese opportunity, is now '99.9 percent' certain that it will shut down its Chinese search engine, Google.cn.

According to a Financial Times source 'familiar with the company's thinking,' the search giant, having reached an apparent impasse with the Chinese government officials, has drafted detailed plans to close the Chinese search business, though it remains optimistic about finding a way to maintain its overall operations in China.

For Google, which, amid an investigation into alleged Chinese hacking of prominent U.S. Web properties, expressed in January that it no longer intends to run a censored search engine in China, staying in China after shuttering Google.cn could involve enabling its Chinese sales, software development, and research operations to remain intact.

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) – Apple fans flocked online Friday to be among the first to order iPad tablet computers slated to begin shipping in the United States on April 3.

Apple was offering free shipping on pre-orders but limited buyers to no more than two iPads each in a sign that supplies will be tight when the iconic company's latest creation hits the market.

Apple chief executive Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad in San Francisco on January 27, billing it as a "revolutionary" device that will carve out a home between smartphones and laptop computers.

On Wednesday at the GDC, LucasArts unveiled its plans for The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition. The game will be distributed for the Mac by Aspyr, and sold through the GameAgent online store for $10.

The Special Edition includes two versions of the game. The first version is the original game released in 1990. The second version is what an Aspyr representative called an “enhancedâ€

The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition is for Intel Macs only and requires OS 10.5 (Leopard) or 10.6 (Snow Leopard). Aspyr says that Macs with integrated Intel graphics are not supported.