Enter voice-browsing

Opera's browser can read Web pages and e-mails aloud in English and on Windows 2000 or XP, writes Deepak Mankar.

As the year draws to a close, I'm reading - and enjoying - Gurcharan Das's India Unbound. It deals with the post-Independence history of India, economic as well as political. Well written and well reasoned, it seems to me to be a personal account by a 'classical liberal' of the trials and tribulations of a newly free nation in a hurry to move from poverty to prosperity. I'm enjoying it especially because I've witnessed the events that the book covers. There's a good article about the book and its author at The Guardian website: guardian.co.uk. Das's website is here: ccsindia.org.

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WELCOME 2005. Pay more for domain names, though

"The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the international organization that oversees domain names, is moving forward with a 75 cent annual fee for .net domains starting next year and is expected to expand the levy to other generic suffixes such as .com and .biz in the future," reports Declan McCullagh, Staff Writer, CNET News.com, in Net domain costs on the rise? If you're in the mood to shoot the bearer of the bad news, please restrain yourself. Go to techrepublic.com and see what he has to say. For instance: "A small but growing number of critics, however, charge the proposal amounts to a surreptitious tax that will allow ICANN to expand its budget with minimal oversight and divert the money to projects of dubious merit. When the fee takes effect with .net, domain name owners will pay an additional $4 million a year, a figure that would leap to more than $34 million if the fee is extended to .com and other popular top-level domains. That's far more than ICANN's annual budget."