NEW restrictions on online chatrooms, websites and mobile phone content will be introduced within a month to stop children viewing unsuitable material.

From January 20 new laws will be in effect, imposing tougher rules for companies that sell entertainment-related content on subscription internet sites and mobile phones.

It is the first time content service providers will have to check that people accessing MA15-plus content are aged over 15 years and those accessing R18-plus and X18-plus content are over 18.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) will be able to force content providers to take down offensive material and issue notices for live content to be stopped and links to the content deleted.

GodTube.com, the website which set the record as the #1 fastest growing website in the U.S. according to ComScore during its first official launch month, brought the Bible into the digital age with the launch of the first Virtual Video Bible and the world’s first Virtual Video Prayer Wall, offering the 2.1 billion Christians around the world a whole new way to experience their faith this Christmas season.

Coined “Bible 2.0,” the world’s first online interactive Virtual Video Bible provides an interactive way to experience the Bible through videos, photos and real life experiences uploaded by millions. The Virtual Video Bible offers the entire text of the Bible — from Genesis to Revelation — brought to life by accompanying videos for every chapter. Line by line, the Bible comes to life using GodTube.com’s 800,000 hours of video, which range from music videos to comedy to sermons and to a wide array of user-generated content. When a user scrolls over a verse or passage in the Virtual Video Bible, videos, pictures and comments related to that specific scripture appear on-screen. With more than 10 million people logging onto GodTube.com, the Virtual Video Bible offers the world’s largest Bible experience.

Intel Corporation announced its latest entry into the solid-state drive market with the Intel Z-P140 PATA Solid-State Drive (SSD), one of the tiniest in the industry aimed at handheld mobile devices. Smaller than a penny and weighing less than a drop of water, these 2 Gigabyte (GB) and 4GB ultra-small devices are fast, low-power and rugged, with the right size, capacity and performance for mobile Internet devices, digital entertainment and embedded products.

SSDs use flash memory to store operating systems and computing data, emulating hard drives. The Intel Z-P140 PATA SSD has an industry standard parallel-ATA (PATA) interface and is optimized to enhance Intel-based computers, and will be an optional part of Intel’s Menlow platform for mobile Internet devices debuting in 2008.

The Intel Z-P140 is the smallest SSD in its class, making it attractive to designers and manufacturers of mobile and ultra-mobile devices. Comparatively, the Intel Z-P140 is 400 times smaller in volume than a 1.8-inch hard disk drive (HDD), and at .6 grams is 75 times lighter. It is also a much more durable alternative to HDDs.

A new patent application filed by Microsoft describes methods for “enforcing” advertisements in downloaded media. Traditionally, ads accompany streaming content and, by extension, restrict that content to a browser. But technology that could bring ads to downloaded content would open up new opportunities for digital distribution services, advertisers, and consumers, and could give DRM a whole new leg to stand on.

Microsoft’s patent application, titled Enforcing Advertising Playback For Downloaded Media Content, describes systems that are based both on tokens and DRM which would prohibit playing a media file unless its accompanying advertising is viewed. The technology is designed to prohibit fast-forwarding, editing, or otherwise circumventing the advertisements, though it is unclear exactly where the ads would be placed. Internet users have repeatedly announced their distaste for pre-roll ads in streaming content and video games, but users of NBC’s Hulu service reportedly don’t mind its TV-like interstitial ads.

Mozilla Labs launched a new online service called Weave yesterday. The idea behind Weave is that all your personal information such as bookmarks, passwords and are synced to your Mozilla account via Firefox.

As Mozilla Labs GM Chris Beard describes in this post, the goals of Weave are to:

* provide a basic set of optional Mozilla-hosted online services
* ensure that it is easy for people to set up their own services with freely available open standards-based tools
* provide users with the ability to fully control and customize their online experience, including whether and how their data should be shared with their family, their friends, and third-parties
* respect individual privacy (e.g. client-side encryption by default with the ability to delegate access rights)
* leverage existing open standards and propose new ones as needed
* build a extensible architecture like Firefox