The How Fast Is The NBN website is an accurate simulation of the difference in speed between 25Mbps and 1000Mbps. It’s worth mentioning though that it is a ‘perfect world’ simulation which assumes unlimited bandwidth in the general network infrastructure. Right now we simply don’t have the national infrastructure to support such high speed connections.

That raises the question of why we would spend all this money on something we can’t fully utilise.

The reality is that technology has been a fast moving beast for the past 30 years or so and it doesn’t show any signs of slowing down. So to create a national broadband network that for the most part only leverages the technology that is already available today is, at the very least, incredibly short sighted.

The suggestion that ’25 megs is going to be more than enough for the average household’ is right up there with Bill Gates suggestion in the 80′s that ’630k RAM ought to be enough for anyone’. Obviously Bill didn’t foresee that in 30 years time the average computer would need 6,350 times that amount of RAM (4GB)!

As I mentioned yesterday, the two most basic issues I see with fibre to the node are that some nodes will have 20 houses attached and some may have 200 houses attached. Unless there is some sort of dynamic bandwidth wizardry, people in larger neighbourhoods may find that their speed is considerably lower than 25Mbps during peak times. Then there’s the copper wire. The further you get from the node, the slower it is going to be. Copper is also susceptible to degradation, moisture and line noise. Back in the dialup days we often had things like electric fences causing issues because they put a ‘tick’ sound through the wire.

The other problem of course is that, if we go with FTTN now, then in ten or twenty years time we’re going to be complaining about how crappy our broadband speeds are and the government of the day is going to have to replace all of the old copper lines anyway.

As an ISP business, we made the decision back in the early 00′s to ditch the 50 or so copper lines we had and replace them with a single fibre cable. We had some lines that would have issues from time to time due to things like moisture, so fibre made a lot of sense as it completely removed that variable. It also guaranteed our clients the top dialup speed if their own line was good – something we simply couldn’t do on copper. During those dialup years we had quite a few customers who had issues with their own copper lines for the same reasons – degradation and moisture.

You can read more about why fibre to the node (FTTN) is a bad thing HERE.

This latest one is quite well formatted – has good english and the Telstra logo. The link leads to a page on ‘cephtex.com’ though so don’t get tricked into giving your information away!

This frustration is over thanks to HotSpot Printing. The latest innovation in mobile printing, HotSpot Printing gives you the freedom and flexibility you’ve been looking for since printers became commonplace office fixtures.

What can you do with HotSpots?

When you use HotSpot Printing, you can print emails, documents, or web content in a flash. As long as you have a laptop, mobile phone, or handheld device that is internet-enabled or access to email, you can print your documents easily.

You don’t need to install additional software; you just need the email or web address of the HotSpot printer. In order to print, you forward email messages and attachments to the printer’s email address or upload them to the secure URL. You will find a secure code in your email so you can release the print job, and bingo – your document is printing.

Who is best suited for HotSpots?

Any office environment can benefit from HotSpot Printing. If you’re a mobile worker and find yourself struggling to get all your documents printed at the hotel or at your office before trips, you don’t need to worry about finding a “home printer” in between trips or, even worse, bringing one with you! Instead, just access your documents in the cloud and print them when you get there.

For IT professionals, HotSpot Printing comes as a huge relief. You won’t be constantly authorizing print jobs or giving guests temporary network passwords. Instead, you can let the printer take care of it all for you; all you have to do is ensure that visitors know the email address or web address assigned to the printer.

Security-conscious companies will benefit from this technology. This system allows access to the documents being printed only to the individual who submitted the print job, so you don’t have to worry about who has clearance to see the printer. Records are automatically deleted once the print job is complete, and the print job transfer uses SSL communication.

HotSpot Printing is an innovative solution to the problems that mobile workers, visitors, and security protocols can create when it comes to printers. The secure code that releases the print job ensures that only the people who need to see a document will, and your contractors or guests won’t have to install printer drivers or wait for IT authorization to print important documents.

To match the fast pace of business today, take advantage of the freedom HotSpot Printing offers you and your business. Your users can spend less time worrying about print jobs and more time worrying about their own jobs, thanks to this simple printing solution.

I’m not sure when the change was made but the way it works now is the parcel is left somewhere on your property (next to the front door in my case) unless the sender has paid an additional fee to require a signature at the delivery point. On the Australia Post website it clearly states:

Over the past 12 months or so I’ve received around a dozen parcels via Aust Post and in every case no attempt was made to deliver it personally. The parcels have been left at my front door, in clear view from the footpath which is only around 2 metres away. It would take just a few seconds for someone to jump the one metre fence, grab the parcel and continue on their way.

After doing some searching I’ve very quickly found a discussion that has been ongoing since 2009 about this very subject. Interestingly, the original complaints were generally about Australia Post not attempting to deliver – but it used to be that they would put the card in your letter box. Now it seems that they can’t be bothered taking parcels back to the post office and they can’t be bothered knocking on doors and delivering so they simply drop (or in some cases, throw) the parcel at your door.

Here are some links to the discussion:

Part 1:  http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1286809

Part 2: http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1563330&p=-1&#bottom

What are your thoughts? Have you had any bad experiences?

We’re also monitoring spam messages and adding filtering rules each week to automatically delete messages that are very obviously spam messages. This includes the various ‘bodily enhancement’ products and drugs, unsolicited job offers and bogus lotteries.

We invite you to participate in our efforts by submitting any spam messages you receive via our spam report page. Just browse to http://www.cbl.com.au/spam-message-submission/ and paste the contents of the message. If we can add a filter that will detect the message you have posted then we will do just that.

1. Password Strength Is Your First Line Of Defense

Possibly one of the main causes of hacking and identity theft is the use of simple passwords. A password is your first line of defence against someone accessing your private information or data. If you use a persons name, a birthdate or a telephone number then you are making it fairly easy for a hacker to figure out your password. The fastest method to determine simple passwords is with a brute force attack.

Basically the hacker runs a script that goes sequentially through the alphabet, the numbers 0-9 and other symbols. This is automated, so time is on the hackers side, especially if you have a simple password. The important point is that the greater the length of the password and the more complex it is in its use of lower case, upper case, numbers and other symbols such as punctuation characters, the longer it takes a brute force attack to reveal it.

This presents the problem of complex passwords being difficult or impossible to remember.

There is a secure solution that allows you to have extremely complex passwords without having to remember them or write them down. It is called Roboform and is a software application that has plugins for Internet Explorer, Firefox and Google Chrome. As an IT consultant and application developer I have many of my own passwords stored in Roboform as well as approximately 1200 other logins for various customer sites, servers and online services. Roboform allows you to set passwords like this one – @$Xk7W^1uTvr – that I created with the Roboform password generator. And at only $19.95 per year it’s one of the most cost effective ways of greatly improving your online security.

For businesses there is Roboform Enterprise which has additional features including the ability to allow your employees to log in to services such as online banking without them ever seeing or knowing the password.

2. Make Sure Your Anti-Virus Is Updated Regularly

I wish  had a dollar for every computer I’ve ever worked on that had an anti-virus installed but the anti-virus data files were out of date. Many people don’t realise that in order to keep your computer safe from viruses you need to allow it to update its data files every day. Thousands of new viruses are created each year and most ant-virus vendors update their data files as they become aware of the new viruses. If you aren’t keeping yours up to date then it’s about as useful as last years football fixtures!

Of course if you don’t have an anti-virus program installed on your computer you are exposing your computer to thousands of potential sources of virus infection. The most insidious viruses are the ones you don’t see. These are known as ‘trojans’ and they stay silently in the background, sending information back to hackers. The worst of these are programs known as ‘key loggers’. They send every keystroke you make back to a hacker, including any login details you might type in.

Roboform, which I mentioned in the first tip actually defeats key loggers as it fills in your usernames and passwords without making any keystrokes on your keyboard.

3. Be Paranoid About Email Attachments

The next entry point that hackers can use to access your computer and/or data is via an email attachment. Some of these emails are very easy to identify due to the poor English and lack of punctuation etc but as time goes by, some hackers are becoming very clever in the way that they present their emails. The aim is to entice you to open the attachment which contains a virus.

A technique that has been used just recently is to accuse you of spamming and say that the evidence is in the attached file. Some go as far as threatening legal action if you don’t stop. That presents a very compelling reason to open the email and I’m sure it is very effective.

The solution is to be quite paranoid about email attachments. If it’s not from someone you know then don’t open the attachment. If it looks legitimate then telephone the sender. If it is important, the sender will include their full contact details including identification of their company or organisation and a telephone number.

4. Use A Secure Password Manager

I mentioned Roboform earlier. Roboform is a secure password manager and I honestly think it is as important as your Anti-Virus program. The main problem with passwords is that it’s too difficult to remember complicated passwords and too easy for hackers to crack simple passwords. That’s where Roboform really shines. It stores your login information and passwords in an encrypted state so that they can’t be accessed without your ‘master’ password. In order for anyone to get access to your login details and passwords they would need to have access to your computer and get past the master password that you set to protect that information. Roboform also provides an online service which allows you to synchronise your passwords between your computers and handheld devices. Roboform uses very strong security and encryption and their software and services have never been hacked or exploited.

I guess there could still be a problem for some people – how to have a strong master password that is easy to remember. It’s fine to have all your important details stored securely, but it’s only as secure as your master password. I like to use a mix of punctuation, upper and lower case and numbers in my passwords. An example might be something like B4114rat.2011 – which is basically ballarat2011 with a capital B, a period and ‘alla’ written in numbers like ‘4114’. I wouldn’t have much difficulty remembering that password and it is quite strong, particularly if a hacker was sitting at my computer or laptop trying to work it out.

5. Use A Little Bit Of Common Sense

Of all the tips this is probably the most important. A little bit of common sense goes a long way when dealing with the many different scams, viruses, phishing emails etc. Common sense should tell you that banks are the biggest target for fraudulent emails that attempt to get your login details, so your bank is NEVER going to send you an email asking you to ‘login for security update’ or anything along those lines. Common sense should also tell you that the poorest countries in the world (e.g. Nigeria, Congo, Cote D’ivoure) are not teeming with individuals who want you to assist them to ‘move’ millions of dollars. Similarly, companies like Microsoft do NOT collect millions of email addresses and then run a lottery.

If it looks crazy or too good to be true then it more than likely is a scam. And all it takes is a quick search on Google to find out. Paste a line from the email message into Google or search for something like ‘Microsoft Lottery’ or ‘nigerian transfer’ and you will very quickly find out if the email you are looking at is a widely distributed scam.

The bottom line is that a little bit of due diligence can save you a lot of time, money and stress.

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