How on earth could anyone pay $4 million for a web site. The original budget of $600k was on the high side, but $4 mil blows my mind…
TAXPAYERS have been stung for more than $4 million, after a project to rebuild the website of communications and IT minister Richard Alston suffered a massive blowout from its initial budget of $600,000.
Australian IT brings us news that Telstra is trialing new equipment to bring ADSL service to RIM exchanges.
TELSTRA is closer to rolling out its answer to the RIM problem, after supplier Alcatel announced commercial availability of two multiplexers that allow the carrier to offer ADSL services.
Theres hope for ADSL at home yet!
Adelaide is about to be covered by a new network called StreetWise, a WiFi service which will cover virtually the entire city.
Virtually the whole city will be covered by the outdoor Wi-Fi network. “We think of it as more of a cold spot model,” says Paul Daly, the company’s director of strategic relationships. “There are going to be isolated areas where there’s not coverage, rather than the other way around.”
Sounds interesting, but I’d be happy just to have ADSL service available on the Morphett Vale exchange.
In a recent thread on LinuxSA Matthew Western asked what we all thought of TCPA (Trusted Computing Platform Architecture)…
this is a complete crock. surely intel/AMD etc are going to make non TCPA stuff? anybody else on here thinks this stinks? any thoughts about if it will get off the ground or not?
To which I duly replied…
This could go one of two ways…
Either it will be a bit like the Pentium 3 processor serial number thing, which at the time it was introduced was basically promoted as being the last word in identification and security. “Buy a P3 and all will be secure because of this magic serial number thingy” was the basic marketing message. However I don’t know of any applications which ever actually used the P3 serial number for security, do you? TCPA could go the same way, “a good idea at the time, but no one actually uses it for real work”.
However, given that TCPA architecture seems to involve the BIOS refusing to boot an unknown bootloader, etc. It would seem that if your PC is TCPA compliant, then you have no choice but to use the supplied TCPA compliant OS (ie. Windows) on your PC, and given Microsoft’s current position on DRM, etc once you’ve booted windows I doubt you’ll have a choice to turn your TCPA “protection” off. Which makes the second scenario somewhat more likely…
It will most likely be handled like the “legacy free PC’s”, and most other major changes I’ve seen in the industry. In this scenario, both TCPA compliant, and “good old fasioned” PC’s will be built for a period of (years?) time. I guess this means that if you want to avoid TCPA, then you can choose to buy a PC without if for a while. Eventually you won’t have a choice, but hopefully by then Linux would run on TCPA PC’s and we can continue using the OS that we know and love. Personally I don’t like the idea of TCPA, but given Microsoft’s track record on DRM, etc Windows users probably won’t have a choice but to use it.
There is a third option I guess… If Linux/BSD, etc was able to gain a large share of the new PC market in the next 18 months or so, and refused to support TCPA, it could become viable for PC manufacturers to produce TCPA compliant hardware for windows users and “good old fasioned” hardware for Linux/BSD, etc users. Of course theres possible interoperability issues there because TCPA is involved at the network level as well if I remember correctly.
The Open Web Application Security Project presents its list of Top 10 security flaws in web applications. This is all good info, but some specific “don’t do this” examples in your language of preference (ie. PHP, Perl, ASP, etc) would help make it a bit clearer. Good reading none the less.
SecurityFocus has an excelent article on DDoS Mitigation Techniques. Worth a read for anyone in network operations.
Scoble explains the difference between the different 802.11x standards.
It took me a bit of digging to figure this stuff all out, but it really is quite simple. There are three 802.11b standards
Nicholas C Weaver writes about Warhol Worms: The Potential for Very Fast Internet Plagues. The author proposes a few ways of accelerating the spread of “active” worms like Code Red, etc. Interesting stuff, hopefully we won’t see one spread this fast.
Given the problems caused by Code Red and the fact that it spread over the course of 24+ hours, I’d hate to see what something which is designed to spread in 15 minutes does.
Ausyralian IT questions the uptake of Web services, but still concludes they’re “the next big thing”.
New research contradicts recent technology vendor claims that web services are “real” and being deployed by as many as half of Australia’s large companies.
The real number stands at less than 50, according to research by analyst S2 Intelligence.
CNet asks Is $200 the magic number for PCs? But misses the point… 800MHz is currently more than enough grunt for most people running office type apps, email and web browsing. Most business type apps would also run happily on that sort of machine as well.
At $200 a peice, you could equip an office with a pile of brand new workstations pretty cheaply, then invest a bit of money in a good server to support them. You’ve got an IT infrastructure that does the job, dirt cheap.
