One not-so-great outcome of the Federal budget this week was that the fringe benefit exemptions have been tightened on laptops. So the practise of salary sacrificing to get a laptop is on its way out, unless you use it "primarily for work".
If you were thinking of rushing one through before June 30, apparently that's not an option either - the changes have already taken effect. Thanks, Mary, for that tip.

Trying to kick a bad texting habit? Here's some news that should help you say no to SMS: The SMS data rate is four times as expensive as sending data from the Hubble Space Telescope. Ouch.

Here's a twist on the tale of the Windows XP phaseout - Microsoft has confirmed it's going to keep selling XP on certain ultraportable computers, including the ASUS Eee PC, until 2010. Microsoft had already extended the XP phaseout once, to June this year, but it will be sold on the Eee and similar form factor products until 2010. Interesting! [via]

The security of your personal information is so supposedly tenuous on social networking sites that one legal expert has described it as: "like the situation in East Germany - you never know who's spying on who". Wow. It's not Godwin's Law, but I think I can see it from here. Do you think your info is that exposed?

Data portability seems to be the buzzword of the moment. We've already heard that Facebook and MySpace will let users take their profile data to other sites. But if you're a Google-head, you will probably be excited to learn that the Big G has been tipped to announce something similar, called Friend Connect. Tech Crunch has speculated that Friend Connect will be "APIs for Open Social participants to pull profile information from social networks into third party websites."

Web-based image editor Photoshop Express adds Flickr to its list of importable sources. Now you can grab images from your Flickr account, edit them in PS Express, and put them back all prettified without downloading a thing. It's not full-on Photoshop, but still a great web-based editor for your Flickr photos.

Microsoft warns Internet Explorer 6 stragglers users that upgrading to Service Pack 3 with IE7 installed eliminates the ability to uninstall IE7, so wait until after SP3 installs to put it on. (Phew.) [via]

Argh! The Engineers over at Google Australia have launched a treasure hunt for geeks - they'll be releasing four puzzles "drawing from computer science, networking, and low-level UNIX trivia", with prizes for the first people to solve them. The blog post is scant on details but it's enticing - check it out to see the first clue.

Before you head to Aunt Martha's house to do tech support over her dial-up connection, save yourself hours and burn a Service Pack 3 disc before you go. The gHacks blog offers direct links to SP3 burn-ready ISO's and EXE's in several languages. (Here's English.)