Technology

ISPs and content hosts will be required to report online child porn to the Australian Federal Police from 1 March under amendments to the Criminal Code Act 1995

Just a few weeks after a major power outage took out LiveJournal, almost all of Wikimedia Foundation’s services are offline due to a tripped circuit breaker at a different colocation. Among other services, Wikimedia runs the well-known Wikipedia open encyclopedia. Coincidentally, the foundation is in the middle of a fundraising drive to pay for new servers. They have established an off-site backup of the fundraising page until power returns”

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is coordinating an international operation to trace the source of spam e-mails that aim to defraud Internet users

A breakaway faction of the W3C called WHAT-WG, or the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group — which includes Apple, the Mozilla Foundation and Opera — is threatening to revolt over electronic forms standards. WHAT-WG has announced its intention to submit the draft to the W3C, posing the potentially awkward possibility of the consortium advocating two conflicting avenues for Web forms. The fate of a standard could also determine whether the order form could be accessed in any standards-compliant Web browser, or if it would be available only to users of a particular operating system — an outcome that has browser makers and others worried about the role of Microsoft — via Slashdot

Telstra has resolved its long-running broadband pricing dispute with competition regulators, avoiding potentially massive fines with the promise of a rebate to its competitors

Triode Internet used to owned by a friend, but he recently sold it to a bunch of monkeys who seem completely clueless about running either an ISP or a business.
What few staff they have are treated with contempt by the new owner. The single tech guy is run off his feet and not capable of dealing with requests from tech-savvy clients. And anything that goes wrong is immediately declared to be the fault of the previous owner.

The server my site used to live on had been a bit iffy for quite some time, I knew this. Apparently the monkeys now running Triode didn’t. For months I have had to put up with the server running out of room because they haven’t been maintaining it properly.

A shift to a new server was all well and good. Aside from the small inconvenience of said monkeys being incapable of installing basic perl modules.

Before the server shift, I specifically mentioned the perl modules I would need to run my site. These weren’t arcane modules, they were relatively standard fare for many web sites and necessary for running something like Movabletype. I was assured that they were already installed and running on the the server, as were several other instances of Movabletype. When I tried to install Movabletype on the new server, I discovered that the information given to me by D&M Technologies was a blatant lie. The modules hadn’t been installed and there was no way the software could run without them. I then spent several weeks getting the runaround about the modules being installed tomorrow — tomorrow never came — before I was ignored altogether.

Having a web site down for this length of time with no adequate explanation was not a joyous experience. I had no choice but to find an alternate host to get everything back up and running.

A request for a refund for six months hosting was laughed at and all complaints were palmed off as the fault of the previous owner or the mystical flag of all our other customers are happy, what’s wrong with you was waved. Both of which are complete bollocks. Case in point being that spam skyrocketed when they took over because they refuse to maintain spam filters and all queries I had submitted about this were ignored.

They couldn’t sort out my ISP account properly and when told to leave it alone, went ahead with a change anyway. Billing is appalling late and always incorrect. And yet, this is still claimed to be all the fault of the previous owner, despite the problems only occurring since they took over.

So if you’re looking for a completely incompetent ISP and clueless web host these guys will do right by you. For everyone else, stay well away from any ISP run by D&M Technologies, which includes; Triode Internet, Goanna Internet, Aussie Dial and Aussie ISP. The fact that they tried to seek an exemption from the TIO Scheme says that they can’t be trusted.

I think I’m doing well to be shot of them.

The University of Southampton has launched a new semantic web interface, called mSpace, that it says will make searching for information online, and learning about a subject, much easier. mSpace is a framework that gathers information sources and presents them to the user in a single window. It can potentially be applied to any subject, provided the basic information is available. The researchers say this means users will no longer have to wade through lists of undifferentiated data when researching a subject

Social networking is out and straight invitations are in at Google’s free e-mail service, but the official line is that the shift does not signal an end to Gmail’s beta status

Telstra is blaming network congestion for ongoing problems with its BigPond e-mail service. Network congestion had seen some users getting messages that the service was unavailable. BigPond spokesman Craig Middleton said he was unaware of any specific cause of the network congestion

Sony hopes to dethrone Apple’s iPod as the hottest portable music player with a new product to be released by the end of the year

At his keynote address to the RSA Security Conference, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates announced that a beta version of the next generation of Internet Explorer will be released this northern summer

Workshare Technology offers a free safety net from the potential embarrassment of a public display of hidden and forgotten Microsoft Office comments and changes, called Workshare Trace