A North Carolina teacher, who has not been named, is facing dismissal; while four other teachers at the same school all received discipline action after all five were caught posting comments about students. While the four who received discipline action’s comments were described as a “poor judgement and bad taste” by the district spokeswoman Nora Carr, the teacher who is facing dismissal is noted to have made derogatory comments about the students.

One of the teachers was found listed “teaching chitlins in the ghetto of Charlotte” as one of her activities, one posting “I’m feeling p—ed of because I hate my students!” in a Facebook ‘mood box’, and a reporter showed the school district officials photos of teachers in sexually suggestive poses.

“When you’re in a professional position, especially one where you’re interacting with children and parents, you need to be above reproach,” Carr said to the press.

The school in question, Thomasboro Elementary, has most of its students from minorities in low-income homes.

3 Australia will be releasing another phone to Australia that will integrate Skype, but will also include integration with popular IM Windows Live Messenger and social network Facebook in attempt to create a more social-friendly phone. Called the INQ1 – pronounced as “ink one”, the phone is expected to be around by Christmas.

The phone is, according to The Guardian, based around an open platform, meaning that any site wishes to have their social network on the phone, they will be able to do so. The phone will also support Flash Lite, something that the more-powerful Apple iPhone does not have. At the time of writing, the phone has one-touch access to Facebook and Last.FM – with Skype and Windows Live Messenger as IM clients. YouTube and eBay, however, can be accessed via 3’s mobile portal.

The phone features MP3 support, a 2.2-inch QVGA screen with 262K TFT colour, HSDPA support, Bluetooth and a 3.2 megapixel camera. The phone will come in either silver or black, and will have an internal memory capacity of 50MB, but that is expandable to 4GB on an unspecified storage card. According to 3, the battery life for the phone is up to 327 hours standby and 324 minutes of talktime.

The phone will be available under contract from 3 for only $39 per month. Under this, customers get a $310 cap value, 1GB of data, 4,000 minutes of Skype-to-Skype minutes and 10,000 Skype chats – among other things. The phone is also protected by a 2-year warranty. However, if you don’t like contracts; the phone will also be available under Prepaid, costing $179 when you purchase one of the new Prepaid Cap recharge vouchers – which start off at $29.

Showing that he is more tech-savvy than the other Prime Ministers, Kevin Rudd has signed up to Twitter, the popular micro-blogging tool that allows people to “follow” your tweets in real time. But, according to The Age, his profile managed to crash the site after more that 670 people wanted to follow the PM.

Also part of the new Web 2.0 campaign is a brand new site called “Kevin PM”, following the successful campaign on the web by Presidential-elect Barack Obama. “It’s a discussion, it’s a dialogue, it’s hearing back from you about what you think we’re doing right and what you think what we’re doing wrong, or at least what we can do better,” Rudd says in a video about the new site.

The site is, according to Rudd, a successor to Kevin 07 – which also used the internet to campaign during the 2007 Election. Rudd PM will still used the established profiles on Facebook and MySpace, while adding Flickr, Twitter and YouTube to the list.

However, he is not the only government figure to be on Twitter. Malcolm Turnbull launched a profile on Twitter in mid-October, communicating with the public on issues that were asked by those who have a profile on Twitter. You can follow him at @TurnbillMalcolm, while you can follow Rudd at @KevinRuddPM. Also, if you have a Twitter account, make sure you add me at @terencehuynh, or if you want the latest TECHGEEK.com.au news – just follow @techgeek_rss.

Now, if only Rudd axes the internet filter – then we may vote you in again for office.

Apple could have a serious security threat on its current firmware for the iPhone, and possibly the iPod touch (since they basically share the same OS), if a report from MacNN is true. According to their report, a group of iPhone developers have identify a bug that could lead it granting access to third party code.

This bug is found in the Default.png file of applications, which is used to display an app when when it is being loaded on the iPhone. While this is limited to a static version, Apple’s own applications are able to be more “dynamic” as they show items like the date or a preview. According to the group, developers could easily fool the phone to think that it should allow third-party apps to have access to a dynamic Default.png file.

It should be noted that this has not been proved yet, and the next version of the firmware (firmware 2.2) is rumoured to be released on the 21st of November. So don’t get scared yet.

While we were gone, we started seeing these comments (like the one’s above), and we thought it was strange, but not suspicious – but when I keep getting notifications on G-Mail and Outlook about these comments, I decided something was wrong, and there is … it is a new type of the blogger’s worst enemy - comment spam.

And it seems that TECHGEEK.com.au is not alone. Many blogs are getting spammed by this new type of message spam. While we think it is limited to WordPress-powered, we still are finding out if it is also happening to other blogs as well. And don’t bother with using Akismet, since it is so new that it doesn’t recognise it as spam.

Apparently, as one blog found out, all the IP addresses are coming from one place – the Netherlands, specifically Amsterdam. If you want to block them, WordPress has a very neat tool that can “blacklist” comment from its IP address or its contents. You can find this under Settings > Discussion. Make sure you block the following IP addresses

• 94.102.60.150
• 94.102.60.151
• 94.102.60.152
• 94.102.60.153

That should stop those little nasty creepers from attacking you.

Gawker Media has decided to make its tech-gossip blog Valleywag a section of its main New York gossip blog Gawker.com, effectively shutting down the site, according to Silicon Alley Insider. The reason, according to CNET News, is that it was an underperforming title. The site will remain the same, just be moving domains.

Gawker Media previously axed 19 jobs in early October, including three staffers from Valleywag, but added new contributors to Gawker, Gizmodo, Jezebel and Kotaku. However, the axing may not stop there; with Nick Denton, the CEO of Gawker Media, hinting that The Consumerist may be on the chopping block as well.

Senator Stephen Conroy has been labeled the worst Communications Minister that Australia has had since the internet was invented by iiNet’s Managing Director Michael Malone. As well, Greens senator Scott Ludlam accused Conroy of misleading the public by claiming the plan was similar to that in Sweden, Canada and neighbour New Zealand.

Even though the response has been negative, the Government is still pressing ahead with its promise of protecting people from obsene and unwanted content, with it calling for expressions of interest from ISPs to participate in live trials of the filter - which are set to commence at Christmas Eve, or December 24, this year.

While both Optus and Telstra have said that they will be reviewing the trials, iiNet will be involved - with a twist. Talking to The Age, Malone has said that iiNet was only participating to show the public that the filter is stupid.

“Every time a kid manages to get through this filter, we’ll be publicising it and every time it blocks legitimate content, we’ll be publicising it,” Malone said. “This is the worst Communications Minister we’ve had in the 15 years since the [internet] industry has existed.”

If you have been wondering what happened to our News Section during Monday and Tuesday, here’s your answer – we aren’t actually there. This is because most of the team will be either studying for exams or have gone camping (like Me). But how did we post things? Well, it is a simple answer – our posts are time stamped to go out on that time.

However, we will be back on Wednesday (night), and going back to normal.

Terence Huynh
Editor-in-Chief

P.S – This post is also time stamped.

It’s nearly the end of the year, and why not start by learning a quick tutorial to build up some technology knowledge. Our not-so-patented works can be found in our “Tips, Tricks & Hacks” section of this blog; but we have chosen the best tutorials to give you a heads up on what did you miss during our very first full year on TECHGEEK.com.au

• How to watch television on the internet – in Australia – While Australia doesn’t have a Hulu or a Netflix, we still have some of our television stations bringing their content on the web.
• HTML for Beginners – For social networking noobs and those who need a recap, here’s how you can make that text in MySpace look fancy, big or small – and ultimately make the design look crap or better.
• 5 Mistakes Microsoft made with Windows Vista – James Davis presents the top 5 reasons and the solutions that Microsoft made with Windows Vista. At least we have Windows 7 to look forward to.
• How to minimize your chances of your Xbox failing – Sean Hyatt brings a nice tip on how to combat that dreaded “Rings of Death” on your Xbox 360.
• Firefox inside Firefox inside Firefox … – Why not bring up this classic tip that makes Firefox opens another Firefox, inside the first Firefox.
• How to get your songs off your iPod – Our most popular tutorial is this one, and was a re-write of our original tutorial dealing with the same thing. However, this one has pretty pictures and is much easier to read.
• about:config? – WTF!! – Learn how to change three things in Firefox 3 with our guide about the most editable page on Firefox, the about:config page.

Enjoy learning with these tips, tricks and hacks from our team – especially James and Sean for writing the third and fourth listed there.

While people may already know this, you can change the screen resolution to prank and annoy your friends to High Contrast Mode, which is supposed to be used to allow you to see icons and text better. While we don’t recommend that you actually do this (to us), we want to show you how to do it – since we are away, and we have nothing better to fill up content.

To do this, you have to press Left Alt + Left Shift + PrintScreen – and it must be the Left Shift! Now, all you have to do is sit there and see your friends fumbling to switch back to the normal resolution.

However, Microsoft has added a option to TURN THIS FEATURE OFF in Vista. Go to the Control Panel, then click on the “Ease of Access” category, then click on the “Ease of Access Center” link. After that, click on “Set Up High Contrast”, then tick off the option “Turn on or off High Contrast when left ALT + Left SHIFT + PRINT SCREEN is pressed”.

By turning this off, you will no longer be the target of this prank. Just make sure to reset your computer in order to change the computer’s settings.