Foxtel has announced the pricing plans about their new HD service, Foxtel HD+.

Those who wish to convert to the new service will need to pay a hefty $200 fee, with an additional monthly fee for the new iQ2 set-top box.

Access to the HD channels are only available to those who subscribe to ‘My Sport’, ‘Escape’, ‘Playtime’ or ‘World’ packages; with HD Sport, containing Fox Sports HD and ESPN HD, and HD Explore, containing BBC HD, Discovery HD and National Geographic HD, will both cost $9.95 a month - with HD movies from the Foxtel Box Office costing $6.95.

However, buying both packages will cost $6.95 a month.

A new Platinum option, dubbed the "Platinum HD" package will cost $130.95 a month, including the iQ2 service. No date has been set for the service to commence.

After a few days we reported that CondèNast bought Ars Technica, it has also bought back the defunct developer site Webmonkey and the original online magazine HotWired from Lycos USA, who bought the web components of Wired Magazine and sold Wired.com in 2006.

Webmonkey was closed by the previous owner of Lycos, Terra Networks, in 2004 and has been relaunched as a wiki.

HotWired has nothing publicly disclosed on its future.

The last property that was part of Wired before the breakup and not sold is HotBot, one of the early search engines and is still up.

Bebo, the social networking site bought by AOL for $850 million (which just closed today), is reported to not renew its current advertising contract, which ends in September 2009, with Yahoo.

The current deal with Yahoo will only cover Australia, Ireland and the United Kingdom, with the other localized versions of Bebo to carry AOL’s Platfrom ad network. The loss of the deal will also see Yahoo not having a bid ad contract with any big social network, with Google having MySpace and its own, Orkut, and Microsoft having Facebook.

AOL has also announced that Bebo, AIM, ICQ and many of its community platforms will form a new uit dubbed the "People Networks". Joanna Shields, who is president of Bebo, will head the new unit as president and corporate EVP.

Microsoft has said that it is now back in talks with Yahoo that would see a brand new deal that would not involve a buyout.

In a statement released today, it has said that it was considering a new deal after the software giant walked away earlier this month from its US$47.5 billion bid to bid the web company.

"In light of developments since the withdrawal of the Microsoft proposal to acquire Yahoo, Microsoft announced that it is continuing to explore and pursue its alternatives to improve and expand its online services and advertising business," it said in the statement.

Since the buyout bid talks broke down, billionaire investor Carl Icahn has launched a proxy fight with the board to oust them and replaced with members including Mark Cuban.