24207172
submission
daria42 writes:
Thought your Mac was secure running Apple's latest operating system? Think again. Turns out that in some respects Lion is actually less secure than previous version of Mac OS X, due to some permission-tweaking by Apple that has opened up a way for an attacker to crack your password on your Lion box. The flaw was discovered by an Australian researcher who has previously published a guide to cracking Mac OS X passwords. Sounds like Apple had better get a patch out for this pronto.
24120740
submission
daria42 writes:
A long-running Australian court case debating whether Google has done enough to differentiate paid advertisements from normal organic search results has come to an end, with the search giant the victor over the country's competition regulator. The landmark case influenced how Google discloses which search results were advertisements — with the result that it now labels ads as "Ads" rather than as "Sponsored links". In addition, Google now prohibits companies from advertising products or serices with which they are not associated — making it much hard for competitors to artifically take valued positions in Google's rankings.
24116816
submission
daria42 writes:
Spare a thought for the staff of Australia's largest bank, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. Some 6,000 staff at the bank's new head office have been handed new Apple MacBook Airs as their primary work laptop ... but configured by default to boot into Windows XP. Seems like the bank is focused on moving forward ... while at the same time moving speedily backwards. *sigh* Wonder if it's possible to sideload OS X Lion.
24093910
submission
daria42 writes:
Oh dear ... it looks as if Symantec has been exposed for massively exaggerating cybercrime statistics. It appears as if the security vendor included 'indirect' losses such as time lost due to cybercrime outages in its statistics about the financial losses to global cybercrime. This in itself would have probably been OK taken in context, but the company then directly compared its figures with the overall revenue of the global illicit drugs industry — but without including indirect losses from drugs. The result? "You’d think the marketroids were smoking the green stuff themselves when they came up with that comparison," wrote one security journalist.
23475888
submission
daria42 writes:
A US diplomatic cable published by Wikileaks has revealed much of the previously hidden background behind the BitTorrent court case currently playing out in Australia's High Court, including the Motion Picture Association of America’s prime mover role and US Embassy fears the trial could become portrayed as “giant American bullies versus little Aussie battlers”. Oops ... looks like there's a little bit of egg on the movie studios' faces!
23436998
submission
daria42 writes:
It looks like Microsoft might not quite have the free reign over government desktops that it would like to. In Australia, it was revealed this week that the country's Department of Defence has recently conducted a trial involving 100 users of the OpenOffice.org productivity suite, which recently found a home at the Apache Foundation. It's not yet clear whether the department will progress with the trial to a broader rollout, but if it did, it could have significant implications for Microsoft in the Australian government.
23216224
submission
daria42 writes:
The news that HP has discontinued the its TouchPad line of tablets has already had a dramatic impact in Australia, where the TouchPad went on sale just four days ago. The only local retailer for the tablets, Harvey Norman, has just pulled the tablet from shelves, citing a lack of confidence in its ability to support the device going forward. The only question remains: What will HP do with the remaining TouchPad stock it has? Destroy it? Sell it at a steep discount?
23212648
submission
daria42 writes:
Does Apple's arrogance know no bounds? This week it was revealed that the company has still not responded to Australia's Federal Parliament on the issue of why the prices of its products are significantly higher in Australia than they are in the US, five months after the query was first raised by a member of parliament from Australia's governing Labor party. Apple has refused to issue a statement on the matter or even acknowledge the issue. What will it take to get Apple to open up — a national enquiry?
23059622
submission
daria42 writes:
In a move which will escalate the debate over BitTorrent to the highest court in Australia, the country's High Court has agreed to hear the long-running case between one of the country's largest ISPs, iiNet, and a group of film and TV studios represented by a copyright organisation known as AFACT. The case has the potential to determine once and for all whether Australians who download content via BitTorrent can have their Internet connections disconnected upon the request of the studios. It's lawyers at ten paces!
22840822
submission
daria42 writes:
Is Apple trying to fire legal bullets in Australia but shooting blanks instead? Yes, according to Samsung, which was the target of an Apple lawsuit filed this week which saw the Korean electronics giant's Galaxy Tab 10.1 temporarily halted from sale in Australia. “Apple Inc. filed a complaint with the Federal Court of Australia involving a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 variant that Samsung Electronics had no plans of selling in Australia,” Samsung said this afternoon. And the real tablet is still to go on sale. Interesting — looks like Apple might not have won the victory everyone thought it did.
22724310
submission
daria42 writes:
The lawsuit filed by movie and TV studios against Australian Internet service provider iiNet appears to have taken a new twist, with the studios using early judgements in the case to attempt to push other ISPs towards what it has described as a "standardised automated processing system" for BitTorrent copyright infringement notices that would integrate with the ISPs' networks and automatically forward messages to customers when they were sent by the studios. Sound a bit Orwellian?
22663010
submission
daria42 writes:
Anyone who's watched British comedy 'Yes, Minister' will be familiar with the reams of briefing notes, memos and reports which government departments regularly furnish their ministers with, in dedicated ministerial bags or large boxes, often couriered late at night to their residence for reading. However, in at least one state government these physical bags are shortly to become a thing of the past, with the state of Queensland deciding instead to distribute all of the notes via iPad. The only question is, which is more attractive — playing Angry Birds, or reading Sir Humphrey Appleby's latest labyrinthine memorandum?
22557000
submission
daria42 writes:
After almost a decade of debate on the issue, video gamers in Australia are today rejoicing, with almost every state and territory nationally committing to introduce a R18+ video game classification. Some games such as Left 4 Dead 2 have previously had to be modified to remove blood to be sold in Australia, while others such as Mortal Kombat were banned outright. However, within a few months, the new classification will kick in, finally giving Australians unrestricted access to such 'adult' games, and bringing the country into line with the US, UK, Europe and other jurisdictions. The last holdout state, NSW, expects to reach a "reasonable compromise" on the issue soon.
22443272
submission
daria42 writes:
A bunch of researchers have been driving around Sydney, Australia, and scanning for unsecured Wi-Fi networks. You'd think that in this day and age, with all that we've learnt about security, that Wi-Fi security would be almost universal ... but the truth is that about 2.6 percent don't even have basic password protection. Extrapolating a little, that adds up to 10,000 unsecured Wi-Fi networks across Sydney alone. In addition, it's not clear how many of the remainder are using the now-insecure lesser-grade WEP encryption standard, which can be broken through. A hacker's paradise?
22189244
submission
daria42 writes:
As you might have heard, this month Australia gets a new Internet filter, using Interpol's blacklist of 'worst of the worst' child pornography sites. In general, it seems like most people don't object to the idea in principle, but concerns are being raised around the transparency of the scheme, which so far has no civilian oversight, unclear backing legislation and an appeals process which does not exactly inspire confidence. Why is it those who want to implement this kind of filtering never quite address these sort of concerns up-front?
