They're being bought by the second worst ISP in Australia: http://www.itnews.com.au/News/401960,iinet-board-seriously-concerned-about-culture-post-tpg-buy.aspx, http://www.afr.com/technology/iinet-shareholders-hit-out-at-board-over-tpg-m2-takeover-battle-20150507-ggvyow.

They've already destroyed several large players in the infrastructure space (PIPE Networks for example, AAPT is in progress), and now one of the highest ranked customer service ISPs (if not the highest) is about to be consumed in a primarily cash-based deal, leaving the original team with no control or say in the combined company.

There's little chance of TPG allowing anything to continue that costs more than the bare minimum. Where you previously had people who knew their stuff proactively supporting many-thousand-$-per-month corporate fibre WANs and the like, you now get a bored dude from the Philippines working through a residential ADSL support flowchart, he wouldn't know a VLAN if it was trunked right up his bum.

iiNet/Internode/Westnet/etc are the last service-oriented consumer ISP in the marketplace. Their legal defence of their common-carrier status and their continued protection of customers is just one example. It would be a shame if they were absorbed by a company that is their exact opposite.

(What's the worst ISP though? I reserve that title for Dodo).

All true to a degree, however in AU at least, there's a couple of caveats.

First, all physical endpoints must be identifiable. There are some exceptions, but the ACMA carrier licensing regulations around voice and data mean that in 99% of instances, much of the data you're describing must already be logged and made available when presented with a warrant. Much of the infrastructure is already in place. For example, it is illegal to activate a mobile SIM without providing ID (drivers' license information). Your phone number is bound to your SIM identity so when you're making calls, it doesn't matter what the cell infrastructure or backhaul is doing, the CID and IPND data is traceable through all the carriers involved. All services hooking into the PSTN are required to provide valid endpoint location and responsible person data, even IP voice.

Secondly, with data, the vast majority of Internet connections in Australia are either PPP or mobile. Most residential services (e.g. DSL, NBN, residential fibre) are delivered as PPPoE/A, directly linking an authenticated username with all its account details to an IP history. Actions taken by that IP are easily cross-matched without worrying about matching physical circuits. HFC cable, EoC, fibre ethernet or other L2 tails are uncommon for residential internet and when in place, service providers are still required to supply similar means of match-up to comply with ACMA requirements. Mobile broadband acts similarly, the accounting systems make tracking easy.

All of this stuff is already in place. All the ISPs I'm aware of are very particular about traffic accounting and logging beyond even what is required by current law. The laws being proposed (as far as I can tell) increase the storage time and expand beyond the scope of the accounting data required now, almost to the point where you're going to be logging netflows, archiving proxy/DNS logs and hanging on to them for a couple of years - huge amounts of data. Unfortunately, all doable, all scalable off the back of existing diagnostic and accounting systems. I've been involved in scoping some of this myself for my employer.

It'll be expensive, which is what ISPs and CSPs are griping about loudest right now, but there's no crippling technical limitations, no matter how much I wish there was.

It seems you're unfamiliar with the performance of 365 cloud storage.

Short answer: your connection will not be the bottleneck.

It's even more fun trying to migrate terabytes of data back out of the MS cloud.

Speaking for myself, it's a market I care quite strongly about (having a Mac and being a fan of Dropbox). It's also a market that's used to paying for decent features.

iCloud doesn't work well on anything but my single Mac. Barely tried Google Drive or OneDrive, but their clients were just terrible each time I have. Dropbox works very well on the 3 workstation OSes and 2 phone OSes I use day-to-day.

Reinforcing your point, I find my MBP to be an excellent dev box, with all the bells, whistles and software vendor support I could want. Bonus points for being lightweight and high performance with a great battery life, especially compared to the regular (HP, Toshiba, LG) "high performance" employer-issue dev laptops which seem to be either slow or not very portable.

And Australia's had it for years too. When I ordered it, I had to make sure my phone was the international version with NFC support, because the US model doesn't have it.

My Australian education would recall that water structure is constantly changing, and that no "memory" lasts more than a few nanoseconds. No structure has been observed in any form for a longer period than this, or any kind of cyclical/regenerative states based on non-reacting impurities or solutes in the water.

Of course, this is all in relation to room- or body-temperature water, which is quite energetic and liquid. Environmental effects are a bit different. Closer to freezing everything slows down and the molecules start to line up in preparation of forming ice crystals. Usually, I'd hope this doesn't happen in a purification plant in-pipe or a human body. Either scenario is unpleasant.

You may wish to engage in a quick review of:

• Open smart grid protocol
• Power line communication
• Broadband over power lines

And numerous other examples of various subcarriers being successfully overlaid on the 50/60Hz power waveform. When used for data transmission, BPL technologies (while commonly deployed in short-range scenarios due to EMI problems), can deliver hundreds of megabits, up to multiple gigabits of bandwidth over tens of KMs - this was deployed and trialled for wide-coverage broadband delivery in Australia. These capabilities would indicate we already have consumer technology which can work through the noise to transmit and receive such a high-precision signal on a shared medium, and which would not create the chaos described.

I'm not disagreeing with this being highly unlikely as a useful tool for tracking without a lot of infrastructure, but the power networks are in no way clean or perfectly in sync. Phases are locked (or the generators will get yanked into line, potentially disastrously), but beyond mechanical low-frequency synchronisation at the production end, there's a lot of noise and variation. I've personally seen several scenarios, mostly large industrial estates, which vary very significantly in voltage and frequency (both over 20%) depending on time of day and resultant grid load. IT gear doesn't agree with this and requires heavy duty power conditioning.

And I've been getting increasingly nostalgic over WW1&2 shooters (Codename Eagle, BF1942, ET, the original CoD), over the current crop of modern warfare clones. This game might be right up my alley.

Don't have too much time to game these days, but if TF2 or PlanetSide 2 isn't hitting the spot, I might give the new Wolfenstein a try.

I'm not entirely sure what you're angling at VMware with that, but for AWS it makes more sense.

I was under the impression that OpenStack is a management and deployment framework - it will work on top of whatever supported hypervisors are in use (KVM, Xen, VMware, etc). One would assume you won't be exposed to the majority of OpenStack's APIs and direct management systems if you're using a third-party cloud provider.

Unless you're planning your own cloud system or are looking at a deployment on the scale where you would be closely looking at running up some of your own hardware with an IaaS partner for rapid scaling, I don't see any direct benefits to users. Especially for SMEs and non-IT-centric businesses, which are the primary targets for the "outsource everything to the cloud, it's worry free!" propaganda.

Reminds me of : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

I'd have to agree. VMware VI Client (the .NET one) is very well designed and thought out, but I'd add the HP 3PAR Management Console into the list of well-done management tools.

It's been a while since I used NetApp though. NetApp and 3PAR's management toolkits crap all over HP MSA/EVA or the various IBM SAN consoles for usability.

The same is true of comms here in Australia, where in order to obtain a carriers license, equipment must have certain features available for law enforcement purposes according to a set spec defined by the ACMA. There are also various data retention policies.

However, when the government makes drastic and expensive changes to infrastructure requirements for their own desires, there's an expectation that they foot the bill for changes to existing gear. After all, they ARE the customers for these features. Funding it out of government/law enforcement budgets accurately reflects the costs of the enforcement.

Retrofitting configuration on to existing infrastructure can be very expensive compared to rolling out new kit, requiring changes from the management systems all the way to the network gear itself, testing/QA and so on. You're not just fiddling with ACLs or enabling netflows.

But even with that, they were reportedly pretty close to breaking the RAF, when they decided to change tactics and let them rebuild near the end of 1940.

Well lets see. If they try and message you after you've gotten your new droid/winphone/etc, they'll eventually get an error, if the previous conversation hasn't expired (expiry seems to take somewhere between an hour and a day, probably depending on network conditions). If it's expired and you're no longer on iMessage, or if they've had an error and try to send another message, it will go via SMS. Nothing default about it. Except in the case of an unexpired conversation, it's transparent.

If I want to remove a phone permanently from my iMessage account, I go into my iMessage settings, select the number and remove it. It's even easier if you own the device and it's part of your support profile, you can just do it through the Apple website. I own an iPad but my iPhone is employer-issue.

This iMessage stuff has been part of the iOS environment for literally years. This article is hyperventilating over nothing and is worthy only of a weary eye-roll.