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Comment Re:What? (Score 5, Interesting) 128

by Gavin Rogers (#38469370) Attached to: Major Australian Retailer Accused of Selling Infected Hard Drives

Selling used stuff as new aside for a second

Umm. No.

The media blowup is being fuelled by "I bought a hard disk and it had hard core porn on it!" sensationalism but seem to be ignoring this deeper issue -
Dick Smith Electronics, Harvey Norman, JB-HiFi and the rest have been getting away with it for years but the fact is selling used goods (no matter how good a condition it's in) as new is illegal.

They can ask the same price for it if the return is in great condition but they can't just seal it back up and pop it back on the shelf next to the new unopened boxes.

Comment Key role in standardisation? (Score 2, Insightful) 64

by Gavin Rogers (#34802018) Attached to: US Revamps NIST's Standard-Setting Efforts

From TFA, "Since World War II, the United States has played a key role in international standardization"

Umm. Played a key role in international standardisation? This is a country - the only major industrialised nation in the entire world - that so far refuses to embrace the metric system. Key role, indeed.
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?"

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