Russian security developer Kaspersky Labs is boosting its local presence and anti-virus guru Eugene Kaspersky is here to announce the opening of a Melbourne office. Alexey Gromyko, formerly Kaspersky’s Australia-New Zealand manager, has been appointed head of the company’s Oceania business, operating out of Melbourne
The nightly builds of Firefox 3.1 have added a significant improvement to the session restore dialogue you normally see after a crashed browsing session. The upshot: Rather than displaying a modal dialog that requires you to restore your old session or start from scratch, Firefox will display an about:sessionrestore tab in which you can selectively disable any tab or window from the previous session before you continue with the restore. If you suspect any web site of causing your crash, the option to disable it from the session restore is a real boon
Dozens of country internet users have been disconnected because of a dispute between a service provider and its wholesale reseller. Customers of LiSP and GoBush Broadband lost internet services late last week
Authorities said Tuesday they have shut down one of the largest spam operations in the world, a vast network involving countries from New Zealand to China and the United States
A project to develop small solar panels that can be woven into people’s clothing to generate electricity is among the research initiatives to have won funding from the federal government
Quantenna Communications, expects to announce three chipsets that boost Wi-Fi signals with a small footprint. The chips are being designed to solve the problem of uneven Wi-Fi coverage that results when signals are forced to travel through walls, weakening their strength. The design also tries to avoid interference from other devices operating in the 2.4 or 5 Ghz bands with a dual-band chip and MIMO technology. The firm is offering a chipset for the 2.4 Ghz band, one for 5 Ghz, as well as a dual-band chipset
OpenOffice has released version 3 of its eponymous open-source alternative to Microsoft Office, which includes a native version for Mac OSX
Postage costs on eBay sometimes beggar belief (and lead to the suspicion that vendors are trying to use postage to bolster their own profits). In that context, a new move by eBay to restrict the amount of flat-rate postage that can be charged in some categories is welcome news for buyers, though it might not do much to please sellers who’ve already had a messy 2008 when it comes to eBay policy. The limits, which will come into effect from early November, apply to CDs ($5), DVDs ($8) and books ($6). Those are still somewhat higher than the likely standard postage costs in many cases, but at least the new policy sets a ceiling
AC/DC will release its new album Black Ice
worldwide on 20 October, in physical format only since the band doesn’t sell its music online. However, the upcoming album has already been digitised by pirates, as it leaked to BitTorrent five days ago. In that time it has taken the trackers by storm, racking up a staggering 400,000 downloads
Perfect secrecy has come a step closer with the launch of the world’s first computer network protected by unbreakable quantum encryption at a scientific conference in Vienna. The network connects six locations across Vienna and in the nearby town of St Poelten, using 200 km of standard commercial fibre optic cables. Quantum cryptography is completely different from the kinds of security schemes used on computer networks today. These are typically based on complex mathematical procedures which are extremely hard for outsiders to crack but not impossible given sufficient computing resources or time. But quantum systems use the laws of quantum theory, which have been shown to be inherently unbreakable
If you pay any attention to the endless debates over intellectual property policy in the United States, you’ll hear two numbers invoked over and over again, like the stuttering chorus of some Philip Glass opera: 750,000 and $200 to $250 billion. The first is the number of US jobs supposedly lost to intellectual property theft; the second is the annual dollar cost of IP infringement to the US economy. These statistics are brandished like a talisman each time Congress is asked to step up enforcement to protect the ever-beleaguered U.S. content industry. And both, as far as an extended investigation by Ars Technica has been able to determine, are utterly bogus
Vodafone Australia’s $500 million 3G network upgrade has been delayed after the company’s equipment supplier, Ericsson, called for more time to finish the build. The carrier had set a self-imposed deadline of Christmas to complete the work
A computer drive with the private details of a huge proportion of Armed Forces personnel is missing. The portable drive contains the names, addresses, passport numbers, dates of birth and driving licence details of around 100,000 serving personnel across the Army, Royal Navy and RAF, plus their next-of-kin details. It also has data on 600,000 potential services applicants and the names of their referees
The World Bank Group’s computer network — one of the largest repositories of sensitive data about the economies of every nation — has been raided repeatedly by outsiders for more than a year. It is still not known how much information was stolen. But sources inside the bank confirm that servers in the institution’s highly-restricted treasury unit were deeply penetrated with spy software last April. Invaders also had full access to the rest of the bank’s network for nearly a month in June and July
Google is adding RSS to search result pages allows you to plug the feed into a newsreader and get notified of new listings automatically. The update to search results pages should happen soon
according to a Google spokesperson
Google is adding click-to-buy links to its YouTube video-sharing site. The new feature will let customers purchase songs and video games they like while watching videos on the site
An ambitious project is under way in Wales to build one of the most advanced and secure data centres in Europe. Next Generation Data (NGD) is investing £200 million (US$346 million) to modify a 750,000 square-foot (69,677 square meters) factory built by LG more than a decade ago near Newport, Wales, intended for fabricating microchips but abandoned after the Asian financial crisis
Australia and its immediate neighbours are home to a third of the world’s languages, most of which could disappear without trace. A national archive project is capturing what it can, and making the resource available online to researchers and regional cultural centres. The Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC) project has been recognised with the Victorian eResearch Strategic Initiative (VeRSI) Award in humanities and social sciences. The project team will receive a server worth over $26,000 thanks to the prize’s sponsor, Dell
Vodafone Australia is planning an aggressive expansion into regional centres despite the global financial crisis and expects to exceed Telstra’s footprint. The plans would give Vodafone a retail presence of more than 400 stores, about 100 more than Telstra. Vodafone intends to bolster its chain of dealer stores run by owner-operators instead of franchisees
Want to buy enough information about a stranger’s credit card to steal their money? All it takes is one email and a transfer of funds through Western Union. The Herald found it was remarkably easy to unearth the online locations where hackers conduct a global trade in stolen credit card information. If you want the data from a standard Australian credit card, it will cost you just $US1.50 ($1.80). Rather rob from a gold card holder? That’ll be $2.50, thanks
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