Telecom New Zealand has announced that its wholesale division will be rolling out super-fast VDSL2 (Very High Speed Digital Subscriber Line 2) technology, allowing it to offer one of the fastest broadband services in the world
A federal court today spanked two telemarketers with some $1.2 million in civil penalties for violating the Federal Trade Commission’s Do Not Call (DNC) Rule. According to the FTC, the companies called consumers whose phone numbers were on the Do Not Call Registry without having obtained their express written agreement or having an established business relationship
with them
Western Digital has gained the honour of releasing the first two-terabyte drives in the market, with units turning up on Australian shelves
Underlying the Rudd Government’s plan to screen the internet is an offensive message: that parents cannot be trusted to mind their children online. Adult supervision should be front and centre of the effort to improve online safety, a responsibility accepted by most parents, grandparents, teachers and carers. But the Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, seems to think differently: filtering content at internet service provider level is central to the Government’s plan to make the internet a safer place for children
. There is no technological substitute for adult supervision and it’s irresponsible and misleading to infer otherwise. Mandating a so-called clean feed
has the potential to create a dangerous false sense of security, leading parents to believe ongoing supervision and vigilance is no longer needed
A New Zealand man has found confidential US military files on an MP3 player he bought in an Oklahoma thrift shop. Chris Ogle, 29, paid $15 for the player and when he plugged it into his computer he found 60 pages of military data. The files contained the names and personal details of US soldiers, including some who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as information about equipment deployed to bases and a mission briefing
Former National Security Agency analyst Russell Tice, who helped expose the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping in December 2005, has now come forward with even more startling allegations. Tice told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann on Wednesday that the programs that spied on Americans were not only much broader than previously acknowledged but specifically targeted journalists
A vicious worm-infection has crashed the New Zealand Ministry of Health’s computer systems but an official says the medicine is working and they are back running. But deputy director general Alan Hesketh said their staff were still not allowed to use the internet
Net neutrality really is the hot topic at the moment. After the FCC slapped Comcast for slowing down BitTorrent users, Canada is now looking into the network management practices of its ISPs. And rightly so, as a CRTC investigation reveals that most of the ISPs in Canada actively slow down customers using P2P applications
Barack Hussein Obama became the 44th president of the United States on Tuesday before a massive crowd reveling in a moment of historical significance, and called on Americans to confront together an economic crisis that he said was caused by our collective failure to make hard choices
Aleksandr Lebedev, a Russian billionaire and former KGB agent, is known as a gadfly in his home country, where he has sometimes dared to criticise Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. But in recent days his mischief-making seems to have spread to Britain, where he has expressed an interest in becoming a newspaper publisher. On Thursday, The Guardian reported that Lebedev was about to seal a deal for a controlling stake in The Evening Standard, a London tabloid owned by the Daily Mail & General Trust, publisher of The Daily Mail
The Ministry of Defence confirmed today that it has suffered virus infections which have shut down a small number
of MoD systems, most notably including admin networks aboard Royal Navy warships. The Navy computers infected are the NavyStar (N*) system, based on a server cabinet and cable-networked PCs on each warship and used for purposes such as storekeeping, email and similar support functions. N* ship nets connect to wider networks by shore connection when vessels are in harbour and using satcomms when at sea
The federal Government can expect to cut millions of dollars in grants from its long-running rural broadband subsidy scheme after it classed Optus’ 3G network as equivalent to service available in metropolitan areas
I’ve finally got around to putting some of my photos from last year’s trip to Japan onto the intarwebs machine.
You can see them on my Flickr page.
The Australian Communications and Media Authority has fined Optus a combined $110,000 for two infringements relating to sending what the authority deemed was SMS spam to mobile phones
A British councillor has come under fire after being caught using an alias to praise his own work on the local newspaper’s website. The Daily Echo in Bournemouth, on the south coast of England, decided to name and shame Ben Grower after he posted comments under several names. He admitted using false names but said it was a legitimate way to put his views across
Motorcycle sales have hit a new record as consumers abandon cars in favour of two-wheeled mode of transport. While car sales slumped last year, figures from the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries show sales of motorbikes and scooters climbed by 3.2 per cent to 134,000
It seems that a recent reply-all storm
at the State Department caused the entire e-mail infrastructure to crash. A notice sent to all State Department employees warned of disciplinary actions which will be taken if users reply-all
to lists with a large amount of users. Apparently, the problem was compounded by not only angry replies asking to be taken off the errant list, but by the e-mail recall function, which generated further e-mail traffic. One has to wonder if capacity planning was performed correctly — should an e-mail system be able to handle this type of traffic, or is it an unreasonable task for even the best system? — via Slashdot
Security vendors Sophos and Kaspersky Lab this week said they would block UK police attempts to hack into people’s computer systems without a warrant. The UK Home Office last week said it was working with the European Parliament on plans to extend police powers to conduct remote searches of computers. UK police already have the power to hack into suspect systems without a warrant, due to an amendment to the Computer Misuse Act, which came into force in 1995
B Ramaling Raju, chairman of Satyam Computer, has resigned after admitting revenue and profits for the Indian outsourcing company were inflated. Satyam’s stock plunged, auditor PriceWaterhouse faces questions and Merrill Lynch dropped advisory services. Satyam provided IT services to Cisco and more than 650 companies. Shares of Indian IT outsourcing company Satyam Computers plunged nearly 80 percent after its chairman admitted he had inflated the company’s revenue by 33 percent and profits by 10 times
Australia’s use of coal and carbon emissions policies are guaranteeing the destruction of much of the life on the planet
, a leading NASA scientist has written in a letter to Barack Obama. The head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Professor James Hansen, has written an open letter to Barack Obama calling for a moratorium on coal-fired power stations and the use of next-generation nuclear power
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