First of all the copper network is not going to be sold. What is going to happen is that Telstra will move all their customers over to the NBN then pull the copper out, i.e. remove any possibility of a fall back plan for the customer concerned. Everything else in the network will be rented from Telstra. In the end this will be a mix and perhaps mess of fiber and left over copper. Pay TV customers will be affected be they Optus or Telstra. If you are using the Internet over a pay TV cable then you can expect that to have to be moved to the NBN option when they reach your area.
There is some disinformation from both sides. The Telstra network was not built using public funds but the proceeds of a government owned enterprise. It is also unlikely that there will be any secret filtering happening. First of all the government hasn’t been that secretive about their desire to limit access to some materials and to do so without anyone knowing would require a complete redesign of the network. In fact the NBN layer will not offer any “Internet services” of any kind. Of course to do so will also require new laws and usually someone notices when this happens.
So if you have a Windows 7 machine running Aero and are using Yahoo Mail you will have noticed that when you try to move a mail message and the drop down of your directories appears it is so transparent that finding the right directory is almost impossible if you have the wrong background. Turn Aero off and all is made clear. This highlights how new technologies can cause problems for those who have not considered the ramifications of transparent windows and drop down menus. Yahoo certainly didn’t.
If you need more evidence of why the Cloud may not be the place to be, or at least to keep all your data then consider this story. It has been reported that thousands of Australian websites have irretrievably lost their data and email files following a malicious security hack on Australian domain registrar and web host Distribute.IT. The company has been trying to get data back and accounts restored but with little success. The incident has been described as “the largest IT disruption that has ever happened in Australia” and the LulzSec group has been blamed though another alternative could be the lone hacker “Pseudonym of Evil from efnet”. The hack has been described as an industrial espionage attack as it went way past the usual prank attacks that hackers are known for. The attackers wiped servers and all backup data including key backups and snapshots that would allow data recovery. 4800 Domains and accounts were affected. This may destroy Distribute.IT as a business.
Industry News
Firefox 5 is out. It has not been all that long since version four was released and this upgrade is not as ‘big’ as the last one. It does appear to be very stable and quicker than the last version. Included in this upgrade is a better Do Not Track system that allows you to control how your browser usage is being tracked. Check out Options, Privacy to see how simple it has become. The Android version is the first on that platform to provide these features.
Version 5 is smaller and faster beating out both Opera and Chrome on the SunSpider JavaScript tests. The amount of RAM being used is also reduced. Open Web elements are widely supported including improved standards support for HTML5, XHR, MathML, SMIL and canvas. CSS animations are also supported. All in all there are supposed to be over 1000 improvements.
So where does spyware end and official software that spies on others begin? There is a new app for your iPhone. You load a Windows keylogger onto say your kids or spouse’s Windows machine then using an ITunes app monitor what they are doing, on the Windows machine. According to the author of the app it is all about catching cheating partners and protecting the children. For some this is nothing more than a thinly veiled privacy breaker. Apple has and will stop any apps that monitor Apple users but they seem to be perfectly content to allow you to monitor Android, Blackberry and now Windows devices and machines. Remember that this is in no way hypocritical it is Apple after all. The new product does not monitor the iPhone either it just uses it as the data collector.
There have been a rash of Technet suspensions recently. Technet is Microsoft’s subscription product that contains all; kinds of neat operating systems, tools and applications for development purposes by a named user. You can do this at work or at home and lately MS has been cutting off access without warning and in some cases without the individual concerned having done anything wrong, though some have. The Technet staff can often be very unhelpful when trying to resolve such issues and it appears that the numbers have been in the thousands lately. One reason has been to “protect the security of your account” whatever that might mean. There has been some suspicious activity on a number of Technet accounts lately and MS is keeping quiet about what this really means.
In more hacking news NATO is warning clients to their e-Bookshop service that hackers have likely stolen the customer database. While it has nothing secret the shop has been closed and customers warned of the breach and to change their Web passwords if they use anything similar elsewhere. The group this time seems to be unknown but NATO has plenty of enemies. LulzSec also released some documents they pinched from the Arizona Police. LulzSec also recently announced that the group would be disbanding which will be good news to authorities all over the planet.
In more Apple news the giant has been buying up the entire world’s thin battery supplies. Apple bas booked up most of the available lithium-polymer battery capacity in the IT market, according to DigiTimes at least who has been watching the Taiwanese markets. There are a lot more vendors than just Apple making the ultrathin devices these days but Apple got in early and booked up the supplies. This has left the others trying to source alternatives but supplies are scarce.
So what exactly is a 4G telephone system? This is a question also being asked by the US legislature and they are targeting network operators to provide a clear indication of what this is and if they meet the standard or not. 1G was analog so that’s easy. 2G is also easy since they were the first digital networks to appear. When you get the 3G things become more hazy. For example EDGE is called 3G by some and 2G by others. Many operators call HSPA 4G when it is clearly in the 3G world. WiMAX and LTE are 4G but some claim they don’t represent a clear speed advantage to be in the category. Still LTE is recognized by most to be in the 4G world. At the very least expected speeds should be part of a 4G definition but that may be hard to get out of your providers.
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