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Domain: zdnet.com.au
Stories and comments across the archive that link to zdnet.com.au.
Stories · 353
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Hollywood Looks to BitTorrent for Distribution
daria42 writes "Vinton Cerf, who wrote the original TCP/IP protocol and is currently chairman of ICANN, said this week he had recently discussed BitTorrent with at least two interested movie producers. 'I know personally for a fact that various members of the movie industry are really getting interested in how to use the Internet--even BitTorrent--as a distributed method for distributing content,' Cerf said. 'I've spoken with several movie producers in the last month.'" -
Survey Reveals Americans Support Blog Censorship
renai42 writes "A new survey has revealed that Americans overwhelmingly support strong censorship for blogs, even though a substantial amount have never actually been to one. Eighty percent of the 2,500 respondents did not believe that bloggers should be allowed to publish home addresses and other personal information about private citizens. However, more than one-third of respondents had never heard of blogs before participating in the survey, and only around 30 percent of participants had actually visited a blog themselves." -
Major Aussie ISP Disconnecting Trojaned PCs
daria42 writes "Australia's largest ISP, Telstra BigPond, has started disconnecting customers that it suspects have excess traffic-causing trojans installed on their PCs. The trojans have been flooding BigPond's DNS servers and causing extremely slow DNS requests for around a month now. Despite nightly additions of DNS servers, BigPond appears to be unable to cope with the extra traffic on its network." Note that the article says the disconnections are temporary and accompanied by communication with the affected customers, not just a big yanking-of-carpet. -
IBM Calls for Patent Reform
daria42 writes "IBM has called for tighter regulation of patents and a review of intellectual property ownership issues in collaborative software development. The company is one of the largest patent-holders in the United States. IBM executive Jim Stallings said examining patents for prior art should not only be the job of the patent office but that the wider community should be involved. Stallings also called on the industry to stop what he calls "bad behaviour" by companies who either seek patents for unoriginal work or collect and hoard patents." -
Linux Distro turns PCs into Night-time Clusters
renai42 writes "An Australian security firm is about to launch a clustered Linux distribution based on openMosix that aims to utilise the unused nightly processing power of corporate desktops. Dubbed CHAOS, the distro is able to remotely boot a computer and run it on Linux without affecting the local hard disk. CHAOS is designed to provide dumb node power to a cluster run by existing full-featured clustering distributions such as Quantian and ClusterKnoppix." -
Wikipedia Planning a DVD Version
daria42 writes "The Wikipedia Foundation hopes to sell an English version of Wikipedia on CD-ROM and DVD before the end of the year. A boxed set of the German language version of Wikipedia has been available since last year. An updated version of the German Wikipedia was launched on Amazon.de this week, and the e-commerce site has received 8,000 pre-orders, according to Wikipedia Foundation president Jimmy Wales. Wales said it was easier to put the German version of Wikipedia onto CD as there are significantly less pages than there are for the English language version. He said that English Wikipedia would 'barely fit on 2 DVDs.'" -
Aussie TV Networks Fight BitTorrent
An anonymous reader writes "It seems impatient TV viewers have discovered BitTorrent in Australia mainly because the networks there are so slow; programs are at times behind by up to 8 months! According to an independent study, it takes an average of four months to watch the latest episodes of top-rated shows like Lost and Desperate Housewives. There are now calls for TV networks to consider offering episodes for download at a small cost." -
Hitachi Predicts 3D Hard Disks by Year's End
daria42 writes "Hitachi has announced that its perpendicular, or 3D, hard disks should be out by the end of 2005." From the article: "Today, hard drives record and store data in a longitudinal fashion, with the read/write heads scanning over a horizontal plane. In perpendicular recording, data bits are aligned vertically, allowing for more data to be squeezed into a finite area. Put another way, data will go from being stored on a two-dimensional XY grid to living in a three-dimensional XYZ space." -
Record Low Turnout in Debian Leadership Election
daria42 writes "A record low voter turnout - highlighted by the fact that two-thirds of the candidates have not yet cast their ballot - is marring the Debian Project's ongoing elections for the Debian Project Leader position. Project secretary Manoj Srivastava said yesterday: "At the time of writing, half an hour into the second week of the vote, we have the lowest participation ever in a Debian project leader election seen so far"." -
Large Prize Offered For Writing Mac Virus
Mordant writes "Some experienced Mac developers are offering a $25K prize to the first person to successfully infect two 'naked' Internet-connected Macs running stock Apple software. The best part is that if any Symantec employee succeeds in infecting the Macs, the prize goes up to $50K (Symantec has been fanning the flames of totally bogus "Macs aren't more secure, it's just that Windows is a bigger target" technical-equivalence propaganda)!" Update: 03/26 20:24 GMT by Z : Well, that was quick. Jack Campbell has cancelled the contest, after he "...was contacted by a large number of Mac users, and Mac software professionals who shared their thinking with me about the contest." -
Knoppix Used in Internet Banking Solution
renai42 writes "Australian company Cybersource says it's currently talking to two domestic banks about providing Knoppix-based bootable CDs to consumers to ensure Internet banking security. The company says at least one bank will probably use the CDs in at least one sector of its operations. Cybersource envisages that banks will re-brand its product and provide the CDs alongside other marketing material." -
Microsoft's European License Dissected
An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet has published a step-by-step explanation of Microsoft's proposed server interoperability license, which was just rejected by the European Commission. The EC said the license excluded open-source vendors and charged unjustifiably high royalty fees -- all bad for business." -
Yahoo Pledges Full Firefox Support
homerj79 writes "News.com.com is reporting that Yahoo! has pledged full support of Firefox across its entire site. Despite its search bar for Firefox, which was launched in February, users still had to revert back to IE for certain features of Yahoo, like customizing your Yahoo Messenger avatar via the web. A specific date has not been set, but the company did say it would not launch any new services until all existing one supported Firefox." Update: 03/18 18:24 GMT by Z : GraffitiKnight (among many others) wrote in to mention that the claim has been retracted by the Yahoo! central office. -
Tracking GPL Violators
An anonymous reader writes "Earlier this week, open source developer Harald Welte made headlines when he personally served warning letters to 13 technology companies for alleged GPL violations. Now in a ZDNet interview, Welte explains the challenges behind tracking down these violators and how he persuades them to comply." -
Debian Leaders: We Need to Release More Often
daria42 writes "The lack of a new stable release of Debian GNU/Linux since July 2002 is fuelling the campaigns of many candidates for the project's Debian Project Leader role, with many pushing for a shorter and more stable release cycle to stop Linux users heading for greener and more updated pastures." -
Microsoft Lifts Curtain on Indigo Software
daria42 writes "Microsoft has released an early version of Indigo on the Microsoft Developer Network. Indigo is a new communications system intended to let Windows programs more easily connect to other software. Indigo was one of the three original "pillars" of Longhorn, however under the new plan it will be re-tooled to work with Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, in addition to Longhorn." -
EDS: Linux is Insecure, Unscalable
daria42 writes "Large enterprises should not use Linux because it is not secure enough, has scalability problems and could fork into many different flavours, according to the Agility Alliance, which includes IT heavyweights EDS, Oracle, Cisco, Microsoft, Sun, Dell and EMC." -
Novell To Ship Xen in Next Version of Suse
daria42 writes "The next version of SuSE, to be shipped in mid-April, will ship with the Xen virtualization software, letting users run multiple versions of the operating system simultaneously, the company said on Thursday. The article says that Red Hat has also begun adding Xen support to Fedora." -
Music Piracy Unit Raids ISP in BitTorrent Assault
renai42 writes "Australia's music industry piracy investigations unit has raided an Internet service provider in Perth, Australia in what it says is the first Australian assault on the use of BitTorrent technology for copyright infringement. Outgoing Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI) general manager, Michael Speck, said the raid was launched this afternoon at the offices of Swiftel Communications." -
Torvalds Switches to a Mac
renai42 writes "Linux creator Linus Torvalds said this afternoon that he's now running an Apple Macintosh as his main desktop, mainly for work reasons, although partly simply because he's a self-described "technology whore" and got the machine for free." And yes, he is running Linux on it ;) -
Tracking a Specific Machine Anywhere On The Net
An anonymous reader writes "An article on ZDNet Australia tells of a new technique developed at CAIDA that involves using the individual machine's clock skew to fingerprint it anywhere on the net." Possible uses of the technique include "tracking, with some probability, a physical device as it connects to the Internet from different access points, counting the number of devices behind a NAT even when the devices use constant or random IP identifications, remotely probing a block of addresses to determine if the addresses correspond to virtual hosts (for example, as part of a virtual honeynet), and unanonymising anonymised network traces." -
Mitnick: Security Not about Technology
renai42 writes "Companies eager to tighten up their information security perimeters should focus not on technology but on teaching their employees how to say 'no', ex-hacker done good Kevin Mitnick told a full house at Toshiba's MobileXchange conference in Melbourne yesterday. 'We can't expect our employees to be human lie detectors,' Mitnick said. 'One of the most difficult challenges in corporate cultures is getting people to modify their politeness norms.'" -
Trouble Brewing at the W3C?
An anonymous reader writes "A breakaway faction of the World Wide Web consortium (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." -
Corporate Email Clients Reviewed
An anonymous reader writes "Some companies seem to take the easy way out by depending solely on Microsoft for their email needs. To all IT managers who want to breathe easier, however, there are about eight alternatives in the market today, including Barca, Calypso, Eudora, Lotus Notes, Pegasus, Pine, The Bat and Mozilla Thunderbird--all featured in this review." -
Symantec Antivirus May Execute Virus Code
An anonymous reader writes "Symantec has admitted that a serious vulnerability exists in the way its scanning engine handles Ultimate Packer for Executables. According to a ZDNet article, this means the scanner would execute the malicious program instead of catching it. Tim Hartman, senior technical director for Symantec Asia Pacific, said: "A vulnerability is not a vulnerability till somebody discovers it but because this is now known, somebody could craft an e-mail, mass mailer or a virus that takes advantage of it. It affects our firewalls, antispam, all the retail products and the enterprise products as well"" Symantec recommends you immediately patch your software. -
Planet Linux Australia Highlights dev Blogs
An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet Australia is reporting that Linux Australia has launched a new website devoted to aggregating the blogs of prominent Australian Linux and open source developers. One of the bloggers that the site is Rusty Russell, who currently works for IBM's Linux Technology Center in Canberra." -
Planet Linux Australia Highlights dev Blogs
An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet Australia is reporting that Linux Australia has launched a new website devoted to aggregating the blogs of prominent Australian Linux and open source developers. One of the bloggers that the site is Rusty Russell, who currently works for IBM's Linux Technology Center in Canberra." -
Sun Hints At Open-Source Database Offering
An anonymous reader points out a ZDNet story which begins "Sun Microsystems has raised the possibility that it might offer customers its own database, a move that could trigger displeasure at Oracle but curry favor with open-source advocates," writing "Last week, during a meeting with financial analysts, Chief Executive Scott McNealy showed a slide that placed the words 'Sun DB' next to a list of existing database products. McNealy offered no details besides 'stay tuned.'" -
Gosling Claims Huge Security Hole in .NET
renai42 writes "Java creator James Gosling this week called Microsoft's decision to support C and C++ in the common language runtime in .NET one of the 'biggest and most offensive mistakes that they could have made.' Gosling further commented that by including the two languages into Microsoft's software development platform, the company 'has left open a security hole large enough to drive many, many large trucks through.'" Note that this isn't a particular vulnerability, just a system of typing that makes it easy to introduce vulnerabilities, which last time I checked, all C programmers deal with. -
Five Years of Ballmer -- the Effect on Microsoft
An anonymous reader writes "In the five years since Bill Gates surprised the technology world by announcing he would give up his title as chief executive at Microsoft to Steve Ballmer, the company has changed significantly. Ballmer is largely credited for tripling the company's cash balance, with sales growing from less than $23 billion in 2000 to $36.8 billion last year. Critics claim that today, we see a much 'gentler' side of Microsoft and Ballmer seems to have received an "A" in Wall Street's eyes." -
Mitch Kapor Warns Against Firefox Gloating
An anonymous reader writes "Mitch Kapor, Lotus co-founder and president and chair of the Open Source Applications Foundation, says open-source advocates should be relatively cautious and avoid making claims and predictions despite the huge success of Firefox. He also briefly touches on Chandler in a ZDNet interview. Chandler is OSAF's personal information manager which will offer e-mail, calendaring, address and task management. The goal for Chandler, Kapor says, is to make it as successful and popular as Firefox." -
Security Researcher Faces Jail For Finding Bugs
An anonymous reader writes "French security researcher Guillaume Tena, who is working at Harvard University, faces 4 months in prison after being sued by Tegam for reverse engineering its Viguard antivirus software and publishing exploit codes for a number of vulnerabilities. According to a ZDNet article, he could also be sued by Tegam for 900,000 euros in damages. More details are available (in french) on Guillaume's website and on the K-OTik's website." -
Desktop Search Tools Will Help Virus Writers
An anonymous reader writes "With desktop search tools all the rage, ZDNet is reporting that virus writers could take advantage of the technology to produce more efficient malware. "Any software that can index and capture data on a users PC will be subject to virus and Trojan exploits. It is just a matter of time," said an analyst at Frost & Sullivan. " -
11 Anti-spam Products Tested
An anonymous reader writes "When we achieve world peace, that's when we'll get the perfect anti-spam solution. In the meantime, ZDNet has a comprehensive review of eleven of the latest anti-spam products including solutions from BitDefender, Clearswift, CA eTrust, GFI, IronPort, MailGuard, McAfee, MessageLabs, NetIQ, Network Box and Symantec Brightmail." -
Google Revises Usenet Search
michaelmalak writes "Wednesday night, Google Groups announced in a thread the rollout of their revised 20-year Usenet archive search engine. Among the various 'improvements': ability to search by date has been eliminated, as has the ability to deep link to a single post. See the announcement thread for others' reaction." An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet has published some interesting insights into what makes Google tick. In this lengthy article, Google's vice-president of engineering, Urs Hölzle delves into the nuts and bolts behind Google's operations, what back-up mechanisms and hardware setup is in place and even some interesting homegrown technology like the Google File System (GFS)." -
Coming soon: Google TV?
An anonymous reader writes "Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are quietly developing new search tools for digital video, reports ZDNet. Google's effort, until now secret, is arguably the most ambitious of the three, the report states. It quotes sources familiar with the plan saying the search giant is courting broadcasters and cable networks with a new technology that would do for television what it has already done for the Internet: sort through and reveal needles of video clips from within the haystack archives of major network TV shows." -
Richard Clarke on Cyberterrorism and Iraq
An anonymous reader writes "Richard Clarke, former counter terrorism advisor to the US National Security Council, has revealed that before invading Iraq, the U.S. government used the Internet to communicate directly with Iraqi soldiers by sending them personalised messages saying, "We're about to invade. We're going to overwhelm you and if you resist us we're going to kill you. But we don't want to do that. So really the best thing for you to do when we invade is to go home." He said the soldiers got the message and most of them went home. Clarke, who many will remember for publicly criticizing the Bush administration, also emphasized the importance of cybersecurity. "Just because it doesn't create a lot of body bags, doesn't mean it's not important. It's vitally important for our economies," Clarke said." -
Firefox News Roundup
Spaceman40 sent in this ZDNet story. PeterPumpkin collects way too many links to Firefox stories: "According to SpreadFirefox.com , there were almost 3 million downloads of Firefox 1.0 in the 5 days since launch, which comes to over 500,000 downloads per day. There are news bites coming out about Firefox everywhere you could possibly imagine. According to a report on MozillaZine, Denmark's largest television channel, TV2, reported on the release of Mozilla Firefox 1.0. PC-WELT, the German equivalent of PC-World, is distributing their own customised version of Firefox to customers." Thomas Hawk writes "Rather than go outside for the past 48 hours, Scott Granneman prefers to burrow in his den and come up with one of the first definitive lists of Firefox links. Good geeking Scott. And way to overcompensate." -
Australian Government Agency Moves Towards Linux
An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet Australia is reporting that Centrelink, the Australian government agency responsible for distributing social security payments, is investigating Novell's Open Enterprise Server as a method of consolidating huge chunks of its network. Centrelink's national manager is quoted as saying: "We have to look at remote access, virus protection, security. Linux has those capabilities but we have to assure our more senior executives that these boxes have the same level of security and protection as the commercial products"" -
Firefox Lead Engineer On Origins, Security, And More
An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet has an interesting interview with Ben Goodger, the lead engineer for Firefox. When asked to comment on critics' claim that Firefox has a better security reputation than IE because it doesn't have enough market share to attract trouble, Goodger responded with a one-two punch. "Firefox is better designed in a number of ways -- we have no "mode" that allows untrusted content to be executed automatically, for example -- no "safe zone. Another reason -- market share does not predict security. Apache has more market share than has Microsoft IIS, which has more holes than Apache." On Longhorn, he believes it will be a tough sell for Microsoft because of backward compatibility issues." -
MPAA Blames Linux Australia Notice on Human Error
rjch writes "According to ZDNet Australia, the MPAA is blaming their recent takedown notice to Linux Australia as 'human error'. 'MPAA spokesman Matt Grossman denied the MPAA's system, which sends out 100,000 notices of claimed infringement on an annual basis was flawed. He said the organisation was not doing blind keyword matching against Internet content and sending out automatic infringement notices without checks, as Linux Australia had previously claimed.' When asked why this slipped through their checks, Grossman told Builder AU 'the answer is a simple human error unfortunately. Everyone has a bad day'. Grossman further denied the MPAA was sending out unsolicited e-mails." -
MPAA Blames Linux Australia Notice on Human Error
rjch writes "According to ZDNet Australia, the MPAA is blaming their recent takedown notice to Linux Australia as 'human error'. 'MPAA spokesman Matt Grossman denied the MPAA's system, which sends out 100,000 notices of claimed infringement on an annual basis was flawed. He said the organisation was not doing blind keyword matching against Internet content and sending out automatic infringement notices without checks, as Linux Australia had previously claimed.' When asked why this slipped through their checks, Grossman told Builder AU 'the answer is a simple human error unfortunately. Everyone has a bad day'. Grossman further denied the MPAA was sending out unsolicited e-mails." -
Yahoo Plans Its Own Music Player, Download Service
iPod writes "Since late last year, Yahoo has been developing its own music player software, which will be underpinned by a subscription and download service provided by MusicNet, sources familiar with the plan said. Yahoo is developing its own music player software, backed by MusicNet-provided downloads and subscriptions, that it plans to run alongside the recently purchased Musicmatch." -
Interview with The Sims Creator
An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet has just posted an interview with Will Wright, the creator of The Sims, in conjunction with the launch of The Sims 2. In it, Wright explains that users will be able to bond better and get more emotionally attached thanks to a new 3D engine. He also makes special mention of the 7 Deadly Sims as one of his favorite user-created sites." -
Gates Explains Longhorn Delay, Diet
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has set late 2006 as the deadline for shipping Longhorn, but to make that date, it had to delay the full implementation of WinFS, an ambitious file system geared at letting users search through all of their files at once. In this interview with Bill Gates, he provides a summary of why Microsoft decided to drop WinFS, saying: "WinFS, I'd be the first to say, is very ambitious. Nobody has ever brought together the world of documents, media and structured information in giving you one simple set of verbs that lets you richly find, move around and replicate those things." Meanwhile, MS Watch has published Longhorn head-honcho Jim Allchin's memo on why some Longhorn features had to be axed." -
Broadband Is The Secret To South Korea's Success
An anonymous reader writes "What makes South Korea so special in the world of high-speed Internet access? How can the U.S. and other countries learn from it? What separates South Korea from the rest is a clear agenda and execution process by the government. They wanted to be THE broadband capital of the world so bad, they never swayed from that goal. After the 1997 Asian financial crisis, South Korea was desperate for a savior. The government realized technology was going to restore the country's economic health so the entire country unified to push broadband penetration rates to the extreme." -
Reverse Firewalls As An Anti-Spam Tool
An anonymous reader writes "VeriSign's principal scientist Phillip Hallam-Baker believes one answer to stopping spammers and even crackers is by using reverse firewalls. He says reverse firewalls should be embedded in every cable modem and wireless access point for home users. "A traditional firewall is designed to stop attacks from the outside coming in; a reverse firewall stops an attack going out," Hallam-Baker said. Apparently, a reverse firewall would reduce the value of recruiting your home PC as a member of a botnet because "normal users have no need to send out floods of e-mail, which reverse firewalls can stop, but they do allow a normal flow of e-mail. "" -
Google's Fraud Squad Battles Phantom Clicks
An anonymous reader writes "It's an open secret that low cost workers in India, China and other countries are hired to boost traffic for online ads by clicking on text links, banners etc. Internet marketers facing high advertising fees on search networks like Google are becoming increasingly concerned about this form of online fraud. This problem has reached a critical stage and even Google recognizes that it has been the target of individuals and entities "using some of the most advanced spam techniques for years". A Google spokesperson said the company has "applied what we have learned with search to the click fraud problem and employed a dedicated team and proprietary technology to analyse clicks."" -
Russia, China World's Biggest Spammers
An anonymous reader writes "According to this ZDNet article, The Spamhaus Project has warned that organised cirminal gangs in Russia are supplying U.S.-based spammers with details of compromised PCs that can be manipulated to send junk mail. According to Spamhaus director Steve Linford, the Russian gangs aren't constrained by any anti-spam or cybercrime laws in their home country and have no respect for legislation implemented in other countries. Also, apparently 70 percent of spam is sent from China by American spam outfits who in turn have hosting arrangements with Chinese ISPs." -
Ontario Schools License StarOffice
An anonymous reader writes "Sun Microsystems has signed a contract with the Ontario Ministry of Education in one of the biggest deals yet for its StarOffice software. It covers 72 public and parochial school boards in Ontario. All will be licensed to use StarOffice 7 on all school-owned PCs. Financial details weren't disclosed but Ontario school officials said the cost is 'minimal.'" Reader Apostata adds that the move "will see the application suite used by 2.5 million students. No word on whether it ships with 'Canadian English' pack ;)"