You may like to read this blog post from the West Australian and also read Google’s view on the subject.

You may also wish to express your views at Getup: http://www.getup.org.au/campaign/SaveTheNet&id=892

Following on from the leaking of the site blacklist, the inclusion of legal sites on the list, and the scaling back of the size of the banned list to be used for the trial, this is another demonstration of the lack of forethought and clear goals for this policy.

The news has been roundly condemned by Coalition and Green party members.

Read the full story here

Making the announcement today, Mr Rudd described the $43 billion fibre-to-the-home scheme as the single largest infrastructure project in the country’s history and said it would create 25,000 jobs a year during construction, with 37,000 in the busiest year of construction.

“It is the most ambitious, far-reaching, and long-term nation-building infrastructure project ever undertaken by an Australian government,” said Mr. Rudd.

The network will connect 90 per cent of homes to a network with speeds of up to 100 megabits per second, with the remainder connected at 12 megabits a second.

The Government would hold a majority share in the company, which will also be part-owned by the private sector, and will invest $43 billion into the project over eight years.

The Government will then gradually sell off it’s share of the company five years after the project is completed.

Mr Rudd said the company would inject a “new competitive force” into the telecommunications market.

“Today we draw a line under a decade of policy area and neglect,” he said.

“This solves once and for all the core problem created when the previous prime minister privatised Telstra a decade ago without ever resolving the conflict of a private monopoly owning the network infrastructure and dominating the retail market.”

Mr Rudd said the broadband tender process was being scrapped because none of the submitted bids offered value for money to the taxpayer, but said anyone was open to invest in the new company.

Telstra was dropped from the bidding process last December after the Government rejected its proposal.

In a report provided to the New York Times, a team from the Munk Centre for International Studies in Toronto said at least 1,295 computers in 103 countries had been breached in less than two years by the spy system, which has been dubbed “GhostNet”.

Embassies, foreign ministries, government offices and the Dalai Lama’s Tibetan exile centres in India, Brussels, London and New York were among those infiltrated, said the researchers, who have detected computer espionage in the past.

The researchers came to the conclusion that computers based almost exclusively in China were responsible for the intrusions, although they stopped short of saying the Chinese Government was involved in the system, which they said was still active.

“We’re a bit more careful about it, knowing the nuance of what happens in the subterranean realms,” said Ronald Deibert, a member of the research group – “This could well be the CIA or the Russians. It’s a murky realm that we’re lifting the lid on.”

A spokesman for the Chinese Consulate in New York dismissed the idea China was involved. “These are old stories and they are nonsense,” the spokesman, Wenqi Gao, told the Times. “The Chinese Government is opposed to and strictly forbids any cybercrime.”

The researchers began investigating after a request from the office of the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, to examine its computers for signs of malicious software, or malware.

The network they found possessed remarkable “Big Brother-style” capabilities, allowing it, among other things, to turn on the camera and audio-recording functions of infected computers for potential in-room monitoring, the report said.

The system was focused on the governments of South Asian and Southeast Asian nations and the Dalai Lama, while computers at the Indian Embassy in Washington were infiltrated and a NATO computer was also being monitored.

The laptops in question are basic but rugged little beasts, designed specifically for the program, and something like 500,000 have been distributed around the world already. Currently just a few thousand will be avaialble for distribution in Australia but the program will be reviewed after this initial launch phase.

OLPC laptops have a basic 433MHz AMD Geode processor, 256MB of memory and 1GB of flash storage (plus an SD port for adding more). They come wireless ready, and run a version of Fedora with a GUI called Sugar, plus a range of open source Apps.

The machine has no moving parts and it is designed to be robust enough for hot and dusty climates and easily repaired in the field. There are three USB ports, audio jacks, stereo speakers and microphone, a VGA camera, a waterproof membrane keyboard and a clever LCD screen that is perfectly readable in bright sunlight.

This excellent scheme is making the laptops available via a donation scheme. Basically, a donation of $399USD will set aside one laptop for use in a remote community PLUS another laptop will be given to you. You can of course, then also opt to donate ‘your’ laptop so that the program benefits from 2 machines.

All in all, this seems like an excellent way to give kids out in the bush or in other remote communities a helping hand and a bit of access to IT equipment and ideas that they may otherwise not get.

OLPC Australia can be found at: http://olpc-australia.org.au/

TestFreaks screenshot

TestFreaks is a useful one-stop shop that aggregates expert & user reviews, forum posts, images and technical material about a huge range of computing and entertainment items.

As well as pulling all of this information together, the site also provides aggregated ‘scores’ such as the ’Freak’ score based on a combination of factors such as age of product, age of review, review source etc.

Usage

Product categories can be browsed, with various sort and filter options available to help narrow down product searches.

Selecting a product will pull together and present a wide range of information for you, including links to technical manuals and video reviews. Expert & User reviews and product related forum threads can be viewed all from the one place - with the handy option of showing local reviews only if required.

Products can be selected for comparison against each other, and the site also provides price information based on a number of price feeds.

The site also provides a handy ‘community’ type tool where people can submit and answer questions relating to various categoires.

Opinion

It has to be said that the Aussie version of TestFreaks currently has a fairly small range of categories, but you only have to take a look at the main TestFreaks site to see the huge range they have covered there – so we should expect to see steady growth in the range of products covered in the com.au site.
 
The site is currently in beta-mode and is undergoing regular improvements as a result of user feedback, but the interface is very friendly, clean and easy to use.

Well worth a bookmark for any gadget  and hardware freaks out there (both the com and com.au versions).

TestFreaks

review post by IT Resource

A fix is expected overnight.

It appears that customers who had transactions on their accounts between 22nd and 24th November are most likely to be affected, with funds missing from accounts, even though they showed on earlier statements.

Commonwealth bank has stated that any fees incurred as a result of the error will be refunded, and has asked any affected customers left without cash to visit a local branch.

The lawsuit was filed by EMG Technology LLC on Monday in the US District Court in Tyler, Texas. EMG was founded by Mr Gottfurcht and is based in Los Angeles.

The lawsuit alleges that technology the iPhone uses to navigate and display websites specifically designed for small phone screens infringes on a patent obtained in October which was assigned to EMG.

Apple has declined to comment on the lawsuit.

The tool will allow administrators and developers to review SQL for possible errors or problems which could harm query performance, an area of functionality which has been noticeable by it’s absence up until now.

Early tests on the system have reportedly seen considerable performance increases among beta testers,. A MySQL spokesman said “”Internally we have seen a 30 per cent improvement. It helps people find problematic code in minutes, and eliminates [that] code during the development process”.

In order to use the new tool, customers will need to have a Gold or higher level subscription to MySQL, although it will come at no extra cost. Hopefully it will just be a matter of time before service availability drips down to the general user population.

Manageability

• Windows 7 will extend the reach of what Group Policy can manage, and how settings are applied to specific users or computers, including non-GP aware components.
• Windows 7 will introduce DirectAccess, a capability that allows IT to manage and update internet-connected remote PCs, even when they are off the corporate network, while giving mobile users seamless secure connectivity while on the road without having to open a VPN connection.
• The new Powershell v2 and its graphical editor will help automate repetitive tasks with minimal scripting expertise required.

Security and Compliance

• Windows 7 will provide customisable User Account Control (UAC) that allows IT to “tune” the UAC feature based on their environment.
• For data protection, Windows 7 introduces BitLocker To Go, extending encryption to removable drives. This feature gives greater control over information leaving the corporation, as well as protecting lost or stolen USB drives.
• Windows 7 will also allow greater control of access to specific applications by specific users

Deployment

In Windows 7, system image creation and deployment is enhanced with advances such as Dynamic Driver provisioning, the Deployment Image Service and Management tool, Multicast Multiple Stream Transfer, and improvements to user state migration.