After months of speculation by us and by everyone; an industry insider has confirmed to CNET.com.au that Optus would be selling the iPhone, with sales and service commencing in the last week of June.

However, unlike the others in Europe and in the United States, it is not exclusive contract - meaning that there would be more than one carrier.

Optus is set to make plans to announce the service at Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s conference on the 9th of June, where it is rumoured that Steve Jobs will launch the next generation of the iPhone.

While the source did not confirm if the 3G version will be coming in Australia, they did say that they were expecting the new ones.

This brings further speculation to which of the other carriers will also sell the iPhone, with the first operating on the EDGE network. In Australia, Telstra is the only carrier with that technology. But, the new 3G technology could open the doors of the other carriers, who all have a 3G service.

But the specifications may exclude Telstra as it would need to support the 850MHz frequency, and not only the 2100MHz - which is more common in Australia, Europe and parts of Asia.

The PC manufacturing giant Dell has turned to the Wesfarmers’ owned Officeworks to help unseat HP in a bitter market share war between the two in Australia.

After months of wooing the retail ‘gods’, Officeworks would offer Dell computers, laptops, printers and flat panel displays.

The PCs would be priced between $999 and $1,800. It would start next week.

Previously being operating in a direct model, offering its products online, and operating some kiosks in some countries, including Australia; last year saw the executives do the unthinkable and adopt an in-store model.

It has teamed up with Wal-Mart and Best Buy in the US, Carrefour in Europe, Gome Electrical in China, among others to sell computers in their stores.

In a move that signals the "next phase", as APC says, Intel has slashed the price of the Q6700 Core 2 Duo Quad processor in half, with the other chips in its line reduced by 30 percent. The Q6700 now sells for US$266, or around AU$280; from the original price of US$530, or AU$558.50.

In total, it has reduced the pricing of 14 processors in what now the industry watchers are seeing it as a move to put pressure on its rival, AMD.

The new price cut will be good news for many gamers, who were ogling on the powerful quad-core machines, but the price may have been steep to make the plunge. Even better, the PC manufacturers have reduced their prices for their high-end gaming computers.

Dell is offering the XPS 420 for $2128, but the price cut would push it down to the sub-$2000 category. This means you can get a quad-core processor, 500GB of storage, 2GB of RAM and and a 20-inch flat screen monitor for under $2000. (This is not an advertisement).

Also taking a price cut is the Xeon server processors, with the X3230 slicing 50 percent of its price to become US$266. These price cuts are mainly focused on those using Intel’s 65-nanometer process, with the company moving to the newer 45-nanometer production process and will push the old stock for the new stock.

HP has said that it had released some USB sticks for their Proliant server brand which may contain malware that could allow an attacker to take over an infected system.

The USBs affect a numerous amount of models of the Proliant line and are only contained in the 256MB and 1GB USB models. The malware has been identified as W32.Fakerecy and W32.SillyFDC. These two worms spread by copying themselves to removable or mapped drives and only affect Windows 95 - XP and Windows NT.

HP is recommending that to find out that if the drive is infected that you should insert it on a computer with an anti-virus system that is up-to-date.

It is also saying that this only affects a small number of customers. According to ZDNet Australia, there have been no reports. An advisory page can be found on the HP website.

After the collapse of margin lender Opes Prime, more than 25 percent, or 50 companies, of the 180-listed major technology firms have been revealed to be in the books since it went into administration last week.

Exposure, according to The Australian, does not appear to be large but it’s creditors, ANZ and Merrill Lynch, have seized the stocks attacked to those who are well known in the tech and communications sector.

The group includes Destra, internet media start-up; ERG, the supplier of the NSW canned Tcard project; internet service providers iiNet and Chariot and pay television operator Austar.

It is expected that the lower end of the sector will be the hardest hit with the collapse. iiNet and Austar have said that they did not expect Opes to have a material effect on their stocks.

Yesterday, ANZ released a number of companies names that it has now have stocks, or substantial ownership, over 5 percent; and many have struggled with the publicity.

Mooter Media has said that it was not able to trace an owner who holds of about 3.1 million shares that was included in the list.

Powerlan, an IT services and outsourcing company, is the most vulnerable with about 21 percent of its stock owned by ANZ. It has not made any statement yet.

However; one of Jumbuck, an instant messaging specialist, directors have launched a legal bid to stop the shares of the company from ANZ. Paul Choiselat’s private investment bank, Beconwood Securities, have on an injunction to stop the sell of what remains of the 3.5 million shares to Opes for a $1.3 million loan.

The matter will be heard in the Federal Court in Melbourne on Thursday.

Technology problems are to blame according to the Associated Press as the United States government will be forced to go back to the old times on counting the 300 million people living in the nation with paper and pencil.

The new change will see as much as $3 billion added to the overall cost, pushing it to now more than $14 billion.

Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez was scheduled to tell a House subcommittee about the new plans, which will see the use of handheld computers to collect information scraped from millions of Americans who do not return the forms mailed out by the government.

The project to develop the computers have been plagued by schedule, performance and cost issues.

The 2010 census was expected to be the first high-tech count in the nation’s history, with the Census Bureau awarding a contract to purchase 500,000 computers at the cost of $600 million. The new computers proved too complex for some workers when a trial was done in North Carolina and the computers were not initially programmed to transmit larges amounts of data.

The officials have been blamed for not spelling out the technical requirements and specifications to the contractor, Harris Corporation - based in Florida

Boing Boing is reporting that Slysoft, the makers of the famous DVD-copying software AnyDVD HD, has managed to crack the new anti-copying system used on Blu-Ray disks.

Known as BD+, it was thought to be uncrackable and was one of the reasons cited by many pundits for its victory over HD-DVD in the format wars. BD+ allowed the movie studios to include applications on the disks with some can downgrade or not play parts of the disk.

“Admittedly, we are not really so fast with this because actually we had intended to publish this release already in December as promised. However, it was decided for strategic reasons to wait a bit for the outcome of the “format war” between HD DVD and Blu-ray. On top of
that, we first wanted to see our assumptions confirmed about the in the meantime released BD+ titles regarding the BD+ Virtual Machine. We are rather proud to have brought back to earth the highly-praised and previously “unbreakable” BD+. However, we must also admit that the Blu-ray titles released up to now have not fully exploited the possibilities of BD+,” Peer van Heuen, the head of High-Definition technologies, said in a press release.

“Future releases will undoubtedly have a modified and more polished BD+ protection, but we are well prepared for this and await the coming developments rather relaxed.”

Now that Vista SP1 is out of the way (but creating more havoc), all eyes have now moved on to the new service pack for Windows XP, SP3. This will be, according to Neowin, the last package of updates for the popular operating system.

One source inside Microsoft is saying that it will roll out the service pack next Monday.

However, the BitTorrent search engine Mininova has listed a 568.73 MB file that is supposed to be a “Windows XP Professional SP3 5503″ file. It has 112 seeds and 417 leeches, at time of writing, and has been downloaded by 2083 users since it’s listing on Tuesday.

In the description notes, Microsoft will release it on March 24; but according to Neowin, the 5503 passed all WGA (Windows Genuine Advantage) checks and was able to download updates that previous SP3 builds could not.

A Microsoft spokesperson has decline to comment

Just days after it was released, Vista SP1 has created more problems for more users of the successor of Windows XP, which came out in 2001.

Users are finding that it is suffering from speed and compatibility issues, even Microsoft executives are complaining about it after emails were made public during a US court case about it’s “Vista Capable” guide.

The service pack was to improve the performance and security of the expensive and plagued operating system, but eventually did the opposite, creating more headaches - to the already added headaches of Vista.

Technology websites are showing users hatred of the latest service pack, with some could not install the update at all.

The SP1 website has said that it would not work if the computer uses some devices by Intel, Symantec or RealTek AC. It also tells them
they have to resolve these issues before they upgrade.

It is also not compatible with certain applications, mostly security applications like ZoneAlarm Security Suite and BitDefender Antivirus.

But those who installed the update noticed only minor improvements in speed; with the Extreme Tech website testing it on the graphic-intensive game Crysis, and ntoing that it was slightly faster than XP but fell behind XP if it was on a high-resoultion setup.

Team member Brandon LeBlanc has issued an apology on the Windows Vista Team Blog.

“I apologize to all who are experiencing issues with Windows Vista SP1,” he wrote.