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Microsoft

Submission + - Researchers test WiFi access from moving vehicles (networkworld.com)

Submitted by Julie188
Julie188 writes: Researchers from Microsoft and the University of Massachusetts have been working on a technology that would let mobile phones and other 3G devices automatically switch to public WiFi even while the device is traveling in a vehicle. The technology is dubbed Wiffler and earlier this year its creators took it for a test drive with some interesting results. Although the researchers determined that a reliable public WiFi hotspot would be available to their test vehicles only 11% of the time, the Wiffler protocol was able to offload almost 50% of the data from 3G to WiFi.

Submission + - Verizon Wireless to issue $90 Million in refunds (tekgoblin.com)

Submitted by tekgoblin
tekgoblin writes: Verizon Wireless had somehow been charging customers extra money on their bills for data that they actually hadn't been using. Approximately 15 million customers were affected by the erroneous billing error. According to BGR the FCC had been pressuring Verizon to resp0nd to the hundreds of complaints that had been piling up. So Verizon's answer was to refund all of the overcharged money as soon as possible.

Comment No polticial free speech... (Score 3, Informative) 160

by Gavin Rogers (#33012544) Attached to: Australian Enterprises Block Sex Party's Political Site
Australia may rank 16th on the Press Freedom Index, But unfortunately Australia doesn't have US 1st Amendment-like protection for political free speech. (The High Court has ruled that it's heavily implied in the constitution, but it's not absolutely stated). There's no "You can't block that, it's political free speech!" kind of laws.

Comment Re:Interesting... (Score 3, Interesting) 584

by Gavin Rogers (#32638506) Attached to: What US Health Care Needs

This is pretty much what happens right now in Australia.

All income taxpayers pay the Medicare levy. A large payment base means there's enough in the nation-wide pool to cover pensioners, unemployed, etc who can't afford to pay-in.

Private health insurers then come in and make a killing on gap insurance and covering things Australian Medicare doesn't - like dental.
Microsoft

Submission + - Pirated XP superior to the real thing (apcmag.com)

Submitted by
KrispyXP
KrispyXP writes: "One of the annoyances with installing a fresh copy of Windows XP these days is that the driver set is six years out of date, and there's been a LOT of new hardware emerge since then. It's one thing to install the latest graphics driver, but it's another to have to set up everything from the chipset to the storage drivers. Now, a pirated distribution of XP has done what Microsoft hasn't: it has brought XP's driver base completely up-to-date, as well as cutting out all the crap Microsoft ships with XP that nobody wants."

Software Company Sues Popular Australian Forum 121

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i'd-like-to-sue-a-bar-where-someone-was-mean-to-me dept.
Pugzly writes "In a recent announcement on the Whirlpool front page, it appears that accounting software maker 2clix is suing the founder of the forums as the founder "allowed statements 'relating to the Plaintiff and its software product that are both false and malicious' to be published on the Whirlpool forums."
Wireless Networking

Submission + - SPAM: Does 802.11n spell the 'end of Ethernet'?

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: Is the advent of the 802.11n wireless standard the "end of Ethernet"...at least in terms of client access to the LAN? That's the provocative title, and thesis, of a new report in which the author began looking into the question when he heard a growing number of clients asking whether it was time to discontinue wired LAN deployments for connecting clients. Would 11n, the next generation high-throughput Wi-Fi, make the RJ45 connector in the office wall as obsolete as gaslights [spam URL stripped]
The Internet

Submission + - How to clear my name? 3

Submitted by VoiceofDoom
VoiceofDoom writes: A while ago I parted company with a client over their refusal to pay for the IT support service that I had been providing for them. I wrote them off as a bad debt and asked that they remove my name and details from all their IT systems, since I no longer wanted to have anything to do with them, and wasn't interested in their marketing emails.

A quick check of Google for my name recently, revealed that the company has falsified a testimonial from me, glowing with praise for their services. Now my name and email address are plastered all over their site, and they have ignored repeated requests from me that they remove both my personal details and the fake testimonial.

As they haven't infringed on trademarks or copyright, I am not really sure what recourse is available to me to get this personal info and made-up testimonial removed from their website. Can any law-savvy Slashdotters help? FYI — both I and the offending company are UK-based.
Censorship

Submission + - whirlpool.net.au Founder Sued by 2Clix

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: news.com.au is reporting that the founder of the popular Australian broadband news and discussion site whirlpool.net.au, Simon Wright, is being sued by an accounting software firm 2Clix Australia. The claim centres around negative posts made in the discussion forum about 2Clix's accounting package. 2Clix is claiming that a number of the posts "relating to the Plaintiff and its software were false and malicious". A scanned copy of the Statement of Claim is available at whirlpool.net.au/img/article/2clix/soc.pdf.

I can only assume Wright is being sued as 2Clix can't identify the individual forum members. An interesting line from the SOC reads "[Wright] did not require proper verification of identity before permitting registration...". No Australian law I'm aware of requires formal verification of ID in this manner. I'm hoping that the legal system actually works for once and this case doesn't go anywhere. As Wright said: a lot hangs in the balance here. Of course if needed we can always post on overseas sites, like Slashdot for instance.

If you are interested you can view the two forums here and here.
Software

Submission + - *nix outlook replacement 4

Submitted by
GordonCopestake
GordonCopestake writes: "I know this has been discussed to death but I have yet to find a solution. I'm looking for a M$ Outlook replacement for a few *nix boxes at work. Now before you all shout "Evolution" at me, the issue is we only have an Exchange server at work... Not a POP3 or IMAP or even HTTP just plain Exchange. I have yet to find a *nix client that can connect to an exchange server USING EXCHANGE! We can't change the server (nor do we really want to) but this one hurdle is holding us back from using *nix in the workplace. We also need a Visio replacment but thats less of an issue, outlook is the biggy. Any pointers?"
Censorship

Submission + - Firm sues forum to silence critics (smh.com.au)

Submitted by izz0
izz0 writes: In a move that could set a nasty precedent for Australian website operators and their users, a software firm is suing a community website over comments published on its message board. The firm, 2Clix, is suing the owner of the popular broadband community site Whirlpool, Simon Wright, for "injurious falsehood", asking for $150,000 in damages and an injunction requiring Whirlpool to remove forum threads highly critical of 2Clix's accounting software. Dale Clapperton, chairman of the online users lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia, said 2Clix was using the law to silence its critics. He said if Wright lost "it might mean the end of criticising companies' products and services online", as "any company will be able to demand that people's criticisms of them be deleted off websites, and if they don't comply they'll sue". Amanda Stickley, a senior law lecturer at the Queensland University of Technology, said if 2Clix won there would be severe consequences for website operators as they would have to be "very vigilant in checking material on the website and remove anything that could cause injury to someone's business reputation". In a statement of claim filed with the Supreme Court of Queensland, 2Clix said the comments, published in two threads between between late last year and July this year, led it to sustain "a severe downturn in monthly sales". It specifically referenced more than 30 comments by Whirlpool users, many strongly advising people to avoid the software at all costs and complaining that advertised features were not actually available in the product. One of the comments cited by 2Clix read: "The software became such a problem that we threw it out recently ... We stuck with it for over two years but in the end the many hundreds of lost hours of work and high stress levels was not worth it." 2Clix claimed the statements were both false and malicious, and said it contacted Whirlpool about the matter this year but Whirlpool refused to take the forum threads down. Wright did not respond to requests for comment, while a 2Clix spokesman this morning declined to comment. But Stickley said it would be very difficult for 2Clix to successfully sue Wright for injurious falsehood over comments made by Whirlpool users. It would have to prove the statements were false, that they were made in malice, that 2Clix actually suffered damage in the form of monetary loss and, critically, that Wright had intended to cause 2Clix monetary loss by allowing the material to remain on the website. "I don't think you could actually prove that for a web operator, that they personally intended the damage because of their malicious intention, especially when it's posted by a third party that they've got no relationship to," Stickley said.
The Internet

Submission + - Legal Case Threatens Internet Freedom of Speech

Submitted by Jumbled
Jumbled writes: An Australian ISP, 2Clix Australia Pty Ltd, has launched a legal case against a respected online forum, Whirlpool Broadband News, attempting to claim damages for negative reviews posted on the forum by users. 2Clix have described reccommendations that broadband customers avoid their service as "false and malicious." Whirlpool's founder, Simon Wright, intends to fight the accusations. He has observed that the case could have huge consequences, potentially threatening the rights of internet users to engage in free discussion. A more detailed report has been published in the Sydney Morning Herald.
Communications

Submission + - Why Apple Won't Become a Phone Company (forbes.com)

Submitted by Baltasar
Baltasar writes: Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs has a problem: He's taken Apple into the phone business with the iPhone. Yet he has to rely on partners such as AT&T and Starbucks to provide the wireless connections he needs to make those phones useful. For a control freak like Jobs, that's not a pleasant situation.

The solution: For a few billion dollars, Apple (nasdaq: AAPL — news — people ) could get into the phone business itself, buying the spectrum it needs to offer not just voice service for all those iPhone users, but to build the broadband wireless links it needs to offer next generation, network-centric computing, communications and entertainment. Little wonder, then, rumors have cropped up that Jobs is eyeing a bid for a prime piece of wireless spectrum due to be auctioned off by the U.S. government this January.

So will he do it? Not a chance. Here's why:

http://www.forbes.com/technology/2007/09/11/apple-iphone-motorola-tech-cx_bc_0911apple.html

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It's a naive, domestic operating system without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.

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