Photo: Kainet/Flickr (Creative Commons)
BUDGET 2012: The budget has revealed the cost of cancelling the $36 billion National Broadband Network would see a $1.8 billion black hole - something that the Coalition needs to accommodate in its budgets if it does go through and scrap the entire project.
Photo: Kainet/Flickr (Creative Commons)
The Australian Government reportedly stopped Chinese mobile equipment maker Huawei Technologies from bidding to become a major supplier to the National Broadband Network, over fears of cyber attacks from China and its CEO’s links to the army.
Reporters Without Borders have released their list of countries that they consider to be “Internet Enemies” as part of its World Day Against Cyber-Censorship on March 12. However, while some countries – like China – are expected to be on the list; France and Australia have made the list under “Countries under Surveillance”.
See all of that gibberish? That is Wikipedia’s WHOIS record – which tells you who owns the domain, when does it expire and where it is hosted, etc. But this serves as proof for one thing – Wikipedia and all of its sister sites are no longer registered with GoDaddy.
If you haven’t noticed already, your internet may be down or working very slowly. This is due to a nationwide outage that Telstra is currently having – the cause is still unknown but services are slowly returning. The outage began at around 1.50PM Sydney time today and Telstra customers where without internet access for 45 minutes.
UPDATED: Seven Group Holdings (the people who own, obviously, Channel Seven) has sold its ownership of 4G mobile internet provider vividwireless to Optus in a deal worth $230 million. Optus has confirmed that the deal will kickstart their 4G plans, with the deal appearing to be a spectrum buy.
The UK Cabinet Office has warned that internet services may be slower during the 17 days, and that users could even experience drop outs and data rationing because of an unusual amount of traffic during “peak time”.
NBN Illustration about the two satellites (Image: NBN Co/via @JuliaGillard)
Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Communications Minister Senator Stephen Conroy have announced that NBN Co has reached an agreement to buy two satellites to allow fast broadband service to rural and remote parts of the service.
So, last Sunday was a pretty windy and humid day. The 33-degree day saw a number of homes blacked out, and (as usual) problems on our public transport network. Well, turns out, it also managed to shut down BigPond connectivity for 3 days – and still ongoing.
The video floated around on, ironically, Google’s YouTube, because of a leak from an internal sales conference last July, but now Microsoft has posted the scare-mongering crap on their official YouTube, Facebook and Twitter accounts. It’s Microsoft truly exploiting the fear caused by Google actually telling customers that they’re changing their privacy policy. And in my opinion, I’d much rather Google tell me in an easy way what they’re doing, which is what they’ve done, instead of just changing it and making me accept it in a harder-to-read slab of text, something Microsoft would probably do.
Exetel founder John Linton has passed away from an “intensive stroke” after having lunch yesterday. The news was communicated by the company on his blog by his son James Linton, adding that the company plans to continue.
If you’ve been locked out of Google+, like me, because of age then today is your lucky day! Bradley Horowitz, Google+ VP, has announced, via Google+, that the new age restriction is 13+.
Will.I.Am in a recent MegaUpload YouTube video.
If you’ve been trying to get onto MegaUpload or any of their subsidiaries, you might want to look elsewhere. Kim Dotcom (yes, that’s his real name) has been arrested in Auckland, New Zealand after the United States Justice Department filed charges against the company, calling it an “international organized criminal enterprise allegedly responsible for massive worldwide online piracy.” Along with Dotcom, three other MegaUpload executives have been arrested at the request of the US Government. DOJ also described the other three executives as “at large.”
Dropbox, the current leader in cloud file syncing, may finally have a worthy competitor in the form of insync, a new file syncing service which uses your pre-existing Google storage to keep you constantly hooked to the cloud.
Namecheap has criticised GoDaddy for attempting to delay transfers of domains to its former customers unhappy with their vocal (and now former) support of the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).