The Bush administration on Tuesday will try to convince a federal judge to let stand a law granting retroactive legal immunity to the nation’s telecoms, which are accused of transmitting Americans’ private communications to the National Security Agency without warrants. At issue in the high-stakes showdown are the nearly four dozen lawsuits filed by civil liberties groups and class action attorneys against AT&T, Verizon, MCI, Sprint and other carriers who allegedly cooperated with the Bush administration’s domestic surveillance program in the years following the 11 Spetember terror attacks. The lawsuits claim the cooperation violated federal wiretapping laws and the Constitution
Adelaide Metro has given its blessing to Google to launch an online transport application that helps commuters find their way around the city. Google Transit feeds off bus, tram and train timetables to help commuters plan journeys and plot routes in Adelaide
Vodafone and Dell have partnered to launch Australia’s first $0 3G netbook bundle next month. Netbooks are mainly used to connect to the internet and have smaller form factors and less applications compared with laptops. Similar to the ubiquitous mobile phone sales model where customers pay for a hardware and service bundle in monthly instalments, the Vodafone and Dell partnership will offer the Inspiron Mini 9 at no cost upfront with 5GB of data for $69.95 per month over a two-year contract
Google is expected to launch the New Zealand version of its Street View mapping application tomorrow. The free software lets Internet users take a virtual walk
down city streets and view photos of the scene from any angle on their computer screens
Bloggers across Mumbai fed live updates of the action after Islamist gunmen attacked the heart of the Indian financial capital, highlighting the emergence of citizen journalists in news coverage. Some, including a blogger named Vinu, were furiously uploading photos of damage from the attacks that killed at least 101 people and injured at least 314. Scores of foreigners, including Westerners, were trapped in luxury hotels. Images of the attacks also surfaced on the photo-sharing Web site Flickr. Some bloggers provided running descriptions and commentaries from near the action, while others vented emotions
An Estonian ISP that temporarily hosted the command-and-control servers for the Srizbi botnet, responsible for a large portion of the world’s spam, has cut off those servers, according to computer security analysts. Starline Web Services, based in Estonia’s capital Tallinn, had hosted four domain names identified as the control points for Srizbi, according to researchers from computer security firm FireEye
Facebook’s leaders are smiling as the company announced an antispam victory. The popular social-networking Web site was awarded more than $873 million in damages against a Canadian spammer
The Australian subsidiary of the non-profit One Laptop per Child (OLPC) organisation today said it would commence a local “Give 1, Get 1” program on November 30 that would deliver the machines to both geeks and disadvantaged children. The initiative will provide a XO laptop to a child in remote Australia or the Pacific Islands for each laptop purchased. The cost of a laptop is US$399 (plus shipping and GST). The devices can be ordered online
An analysis of ISP filtering schemes in Europe has shown that none have adopted mandatory filtering — a claim Senator Conroy has used to justify such a scheme in Australia. With the limited exceptions of Germany and Italy, mandatory ISP level filtering is not a feature of any of the countries reviewed,
Tom Edwards and Gareth Griffith wrote in a special research note published by the NSW Parliamentary Library Service
iiNet’s managing director Michael Malone yesterday vowed to fight the action filed against it in federal court by film and television giants, which alleged iiNet had failed to prevent customers from downloading pirated content
The Australian film and television industry has launched a major legal action against one of Australia’s largest internet service providers for allegedly allowing its users to download pirated movies and TV shows. The action against iiNet was filed in the Federal Court today by Village Roadshow, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, 20th Century Fox, Disney and the Seven Network. Mark White, iiNet’s chief operating officer, said the company did not support piracy in any form but it could not disconnect customers just because the movie industry claimed they engaged in illegal downloading
The era that defined Wall Street is finally, officially over. Michael Lewis, who chronicled its excess in Liar’s Poker, returns to his old haunt to figure out what went wrong
The State of Washington has filed suit [PDF] against a Redmond-based search engine optimization and Web services outfit that has done business under the names Visible.net, Captures.com and WebMarketingSource.com. In essence, the state attorney general contends that these entities have ripped off their mostly mom-and-pop clientele through a pattern of unfulfilled performance promises and financial shenanigans. While the clients may be on the smaller end of the spectrum, they have been forking over real money, with initial startup charges ranging from $3,750 to $9,750, plus a monthly fee of $40 to $100
Michael Malone, managing director iiNet, said he would sign up to be involved in the ridiculous
trials, which are scheduled to commence by 24 December this year. Optus and Telstra both said they were reviewing the Government’s documentation and would then decide whether to take part. But Malone’s main purpose was to provide the Government with hard numbers
demonstrating how stupid it is
— specifically that the filtering system would not work, would be patently simple to bypass, would not filter peer-to-peer traffic and would significantly degrade network speeds. They’re not listening to the experts, they’re not listening to the industry, they’re not listening to consumers, so perhaps some hard numbers will actually help, he said. Every time a kid manages to get through this filter, we’ll be publicising it and every time it blocks legitimate content, we’ll be publicising it.
Malone concluded: This is the worst Communications Minister we’ve had in the 15 years since the [internet] industry has existed
Britain’s code-cracking and computing heritage has won a lifeline in the form of a donation from English Heritage. The grant of £330,000 will be used to undertake urgent roof works at Bletchley Park — where Allied codebreakers worked in World War II. Discussions are also in progress on a further three-year, £600,000 funding programme for the historic site
Motorcyclists and scooter riders can park in Sydney’s CBD and inner-city suburbs for nothing from today, in a 12-month trial designed to encourage people to leave their cars at home
Google and Telstra subsidiary Sensis has signed a deal to integrate the data from its Yellow Pages business listings into Google Maps Australia
The leaders of three of Australia’s largest internet service providers — Telstra Media’s Justin Milne, iiNet’s Michael Malone and Internode’s Simon Hackett — have, in video interviews with ZDNet.com.au over the past few months, detailed technical, legal and ethical reasons why ISP-level filtering won’t work. Critics of the policy also say that users will have no way to know what’s being filtered — via Slashdot
A small consumer electronics maker in Melbourne, which specialises in undercutting the big brands, has become the first in Australia to announce plans to launch a mobile phone based on Google’s Android platform. Ruslan Kogan, 25 — who has been selling cut-priced Kogan-branded TV sets, GPS systems, DVD players and other gadgets over the internet from his base in Elsternwick for the past 2½ years — says he will sell the phone from 15 December for $199
The tax details of thousands of people have gone missing, the Australian Taxation Office admitted. The ATO said that the CD was not encrypted and victims were only notified three weeks later. The disk contained the name, address and super fund tax file numbers for 3122 trustees and was being couriered to the ATO, but failed to reach the department. The Tax Office was notified about the missing CD on 3 October but only sent out letters to the victims on 24 October, offering to re-issue the tax file numbers for their super funds
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