On Saturday, Overclockers founder James Rolfe said that he'd become aware of strange activity. "Unfortunately last night I became aware of a possible security issue on one of our servers and noticed some unusual activity," he said on the site. "I am investigating it in more detail and will be working with the vendor of our forum software and quite possibly the police to determine what has actually occurred."

He said the issue wasn't likely serious, but that users might want to change their forum password.

Whirlpool founder Simon Wright put out a similar message on Sunday. "Unfortunately, Whirlpool has become aware of a security issue with the site that occurred over the weekend. Due to thorough logging procedures, we're confident that we're aware of all malicious actions, and we have used this information to lock down the system and disabled a small number of accounts likely to have been compromised," he said.

He recommended that users change their password. He considered that the incident might be related to the Overclockers problem and said that he was asking Rolfe about the possibility.

Wright seemed exasperated about the response of the community to his post. "Everyone please just calm down, you're treating this as a much bigger deal than what it really is. I can't discuss the issue much now as we're still collating information, but I can assure you that our suggestion that you change your password was only a precaution," he said.

"There's only so much we can tell you right now, and there's only so much we can ever tell you without compromising security in the future. Nobody should doubt that we take the security of Whirlpool (and therefore its data) seriously; but we advise against relying upon it for matters of greater importance."

Whirlpool was the victim of another attack two years ago which also required passwords to be changed. Wright said then that the intruder was identified, the extent of the intrusion documented and legal processes had been started to make sure the intruder wouldn't hit Whirlpool again.

Neither Wright nor Rolfe had responded to ZDNet.com.au queries at the time of writing.

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The 1300-square-metre facility will provide 24/7 services to Telstra's government and enterprise customers across Australia. The centre will start out with 40 staff, and have capacity for 100 staff.

Telstra enterprise and government group managing director, Nerida Caesar, said in a statement that the centre would provide customers with a complete view of the network environment in order to better prepare against and isolate security incidents.

The new centre will be fully integrated with Telstra's existing global operations centre in Melbourne and managed network operations centre in Sydney.

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• Ludlam: Telstra-split Bill unlikely in '09
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The BlackBerry Bold 9700 is available now on the Next G network.
(Credit: Telstra)

Telstra tightens its grip on the smartphone market and is the first to market with the highly anticipated BlackBerry Bold update.

As of today customers will be able to purchase the BlackBerry Bold 9700, nicknamed Onyx by manufacturer Research in Motion (RIM), through Telstra shops for the outright price of AU$999, or for $0 upfront on an AU$85 per month Mobile Plus plan from 1 December.

The Bold 9700 is the successor to last year's Bold 9000, RIM's first smartphone to feature HSDPA connectivity for access to the web and data services. The 9700 features the same specifications as the former, but packed into a smaller, more lightweight package. It also features an optical trackpad below the screen which behaves like a laptop touchpad in certain applications, such as the web browser.

One important distinction for certain Australian customers will be that the newer 9700 does not carry Telstra's Blue Tick — a badge indicating superior coverage and best suited for customers living in remote regional locations. Last year's model was given this distinction by Telstra; however, the Onyx is "recommended for handheld use in metropolitan and major regional areas", as per Telstra's website.

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The strategy sets down war plans for Australian spy and policing agencies to protect Australian internet users in response to the 2008 E-Security Review.

"Our Cyber-Security Strategy details Australian government arrangements to defend economic institutions, critical infrastructure, government agencies, businesses and home users from cyber threats," McClelland said in a statement.

The priorities as set out by McClelland were to better detect, analyse and protect against threats, especially around government and critical infrastructure; partner with business on security; use ICT best practice in government systems; educate Australians on threats — releasing a new identity theft booklet entitled Protecting your Identity; change the legal framework to be more effective at prosecuting cyber crime; and create a skilled "cyber security workforce".

McClelland also announced the creation of a new Computer Emergency Response Team, CERT Australia, which will start initial operations in January 2010 and be fully operational by July. It will contain a number of cyber security activities currently being undertaken by Australian government agencies, including the Australian Government Computer Emergency Readiness Team (GovCERT.au) within the Attorney-General's Department.

"CERT Australia will work with other national CERTs around the world, the IT industry and Australian internet service providers to help network operators to identify and respond to cyber security incidents," McClelland said.

The government was investing $6.2 million over four years on top of current funding for GovCERT.au to bring together the team. CERT Australia is currently negotiating with the University of Queensland for the provision of services. (AusCERT is managed by the university.)

It will also work with the Department of Defence's Cyber Security Operations Centre (CSOC), established as part of the Defence White Paper.

"The Cyber Security Operations Centre provides the Australian Government with cyber situational awareness and the ability to facilitate operational responses to cyber security incidents of national importance," Defence Minister John Faulkner said.

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"An assessment of PayPal Australia revealed deficiencies in the systems PayPal had in place to assess and manage its money laundering and terrorism financing risk," AUSTRAC CEO John Schmidt said in a statement.

The centre's concerns based around PayPal's assessment of how likely it was that new customers, whose account balances were less than $1000, were involved in money laundering or terrorist financing.

The concern was that PayPal wasn't compliant with the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Act 2006, which says that reporting entities should assess the risk of their customers, products and services. Following a declaration issued by AUSTRAC on 3 October, PayPal was required to present the centre with an enforceable undertaking — a written enforceable in a court.

The undertaking, presented yesterday, promised to strengthen PayPal's existing systems and controls to comply with risk assessment requirements. The company will also appoint an independent expert to review its compliance and prepare a plan to remedy deficiencies.

PayPal said that it not only had been running a global anti-money laundering and counter terrorism financing program since its founding 10 years ago, but had also spent US$13 million to enhance it, including changes for Australian requirements, over the last two years. It has introduced additional registration data collection, electronic identity verification for customers and additional reporting to AUSTRAC, to meet requirements and would work with AUSTRAC to meet others, the company said.

"We consider the [legislation] extremely important and take all of our compliance obligations seriously. We are confident we will meet AUSTRAC's requirements," PayPal Australia managing director Frerk-Malte Feller said in a statement.

"Compliance with the Act's risk assessment requirements is crucial in Australia's fight against money laundering and terrorism financing. The acceptance of this undertaking is a clear sign to industry that they must have robust systems and controls in place to manage and mitigate the risks their business may face," AUSTRAC's Schmidt said.

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• PayPal Australia gets new chief
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New virus worse than Rick Astley attack
(Credit: Whirlpool ID, Batman)

If your iPhone has been jailbroken, change your passwords now, advised Paul Ducklin, Sophos Australia's chief of technology.

Ducklin said the writers of this virus included a program call "Duh", which added malicious capabilities not present in last month's ikee release.

"'Duh' is the bot component," said Ducklin. "When an iPhone is first infected it uses Duh to call home, which by chance happens to be a server located in Lithuania. It dobs in your IP numbers — Wi-Fi, 3G — and the name of phone and makes a unique identifier which will identify your phone the next time you connect," he said.

The virus would replace Apple's default root log-in password, "Alpine", which was automatically used for the SSH program that was exploited by ikee. SSH is used to set up network communication capabilities on a jailbroken iPhone.

The new password installed by this virus was "ohshit", which can be used to remove the threat of further remote attacks on an infected device. Ducklin said to clean up the device by searching the file "directory/private/var/mobile/home", type in "passwd" to initiate the command, and change the password. "Otherwise the buggers can get back in anytime they want," said Ducklin.

Fellow information security boffin, and the first researcher to analyse a sample of it, F-Secure's Mikko Hypponen, wrote today: "The worm is not widespread, but it is much more serious than the first iPhone worm as it seems to try to steal information from the devices."

Ducklin agreed. It was not widespread because it was only a threat to iPhone users that have a jailbroken iPhone, have installed SSH, and have not changed the root log-in password from Apple's "Alpine" default.

On the other hand, while ikee turned off SSH, which would have prevented further attacks of a similar nature, this virus changed the password, meaning that the controller of the server based in Lithuania could gain access to the device.

"That's why I gave out the password," said Ducklin. "It's more malicious because it installs a bot which checks home for instructions. That site's now down but it has the potential to send a file to delete all files on [an infected] phone."

The latest iPhone virus is the third of its kind in the past two months.

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Adrian Di Marco
(Credit: TechnologyOne)

"It is noted that the 2009 base salaries increased by 5-6 per cent because they were approved prior to the global financial crisis," the company's preliminary annual report for the year to 30 September said. "To compensate for this, at the remuneration committee meeting held on 6 November 2009, it was resolved to freeze the base salaries for executives on the back of the 2009 profit result."

Di Marco's pay currently sits at $831,101, of which $395,527 is base salary. His performance related bonus dropped 9 per cent in line with the company's profit reduction.

The company increased its sales revenue by 11 per cent to $120.7 million, a smaller number than it had hoped, as forewarned by founder and executive chairman Adrian Di Marco in September. Net profit fell by 9 per cent to $15.7 million.

One factor which lead to the profit fall was rising costs. Last year, costs rose 47 per cent up year-on-year on the back of growth. This year, TechnologyOne has managed to cut down the cost growth to only 17 per cent. Other factors in the lower profit included a delay in a multimillion-dollar contract, as mentioned by Di Marco in September, and the poor state of the market in the UK.

"[The UK market] has made operating conditions for a new entrant such as TechnologyOne much more challenging than originally anticipated," the results said. The company has now carried out a review of its sales operation and was making changes in Australia and the UK.

Yet Di Marco was not cowed by the company's numbers. "In a time of significant economic uncertainty and global financial crisis, when our competitors have reported dramatically reduced revenues and licence fees, TechnologyOne has posted our sixth consecutive year of record revenues and licence fees," he said in a statement.

In Australia and New Zealand, the company had won new deals with the New Zealand Stock Exchange, Beyond Blue, Lifeline Australia, the City of Melbourne, Arab Bank, SunSuper, the University of Tasmania, Seqwater and the Children's Medical Research Institute, he said.

Another strong point, according to Di Marco, was the $24.9 million research and development (R&D) spend, 20 per cent up on the last year.

"In such a challenging economic period some would argue that we should have made substantial cuts to our R&D programs," Di Marco said. "Without a doubt R&D has underpinned our long-term success in the market, and to this end TechnologyOne has taken a long-term strategic view that has seen all our R&D projects continue, with no staff reductions."

The company also announced that it would open a new "state-of-the-art" R&D centre in early 2010 to consolidate all of its R&D staff in one location. The cost of the centre was not stated, with the company only saying it would be a "significant" investment. TechnologyOne had, however, implemented a headcount freeze in its R&D division to control costs.

Di Marco was sure that the increased revenues were due to the R&D spend. As one example of where the spending is heading, next year will see the company create pre-configured enterprise systems which is slated to reduce implementation times and therefore risk.

"Since we launched our first preconfigured solution in September 2008, OneFMA, for federal government agencies, which we designed in response to feedback from customers needing to streamline their financial reporting, we have seen more than $3 million worth of new business," said Di Marco.

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The most significant telecommunications legislation in decades — the Labor Government's Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Competition and Consumer Safeguards) Bill — is likely to be scuttled, at least for the year, thanks to Shadow Communications Minister Nick Minchin's "abuse of Senate procedure", according to Ludlam.

"I will be surprised and impressed if we get to [the Bill] this year," Ludlam told ZDNet.com.au. "To use the [Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS)] Bill to delay passage of another is a real abuse of Senate procedure."

If Ludlam is right, Minchin will have achieved a previous goal to have the debate deferred until the government released documents related to the first NBN proposal — a motion that was voted down last month by crossbenchers — the Greens, independent Nick Xenophon, and Family First Senator Steve Fielding — which cleared the way for Thursday's debate.

Minchin's spokesperson said the logic of Ludlam's accusation was "bemusing" and that it was actually Minister for Communications Stephen Conroy's fault that the Bill, following its debate, was unlikely to pass this year.

"It's bemusing where Ludlam is coming from when it was Senator Conroy who argued the case of how urgent the legislation was — and who before going to Egypt, gave a commitment to the Senate to raise the bill in the last sitting week and have it voted on this week," a spokesperson for Minchin's office said.

"How can you draw the conclusion that non-appearance of the legislation is quite bemusing. What we're seeing is an inability of the government to manage its legislative program."

If the Bill is passed in its current form, Telstra will either be required to voluntarily separate its wholesale and retail arms or else face harsher regulation and be forced to sell its HFC network and stake in Foxtel as well as being banned from acquiring radio spectrum that would support emerging 4G wireless technologies. It also amends ministerial powers to determine how Telstra is broken up, and makes significant changes to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's powers to regulate the industry.

The government is likely to be persuaded into making significant amendments to the Bill. The Nationals support for the Bill in its current form is likely to be contingent on the outcome of the CPRS debate, but how that plays out is not known. The Nationals, in particular Barnaby Joyce, have expressed support for Telstra's separation but may back the Liberals to show a united Coalition.

Ludlam said the Greens support was contingent on the government making seven key amendments to the Bill, largely focused on telecommunications regulations during the years between the Bill's passing and the deployment of the National Broadband Network in its entirety.

The Greens also want protections for Telstra's staff included into the Bill, and ministerial discretion over what Telstra's separation should look like wound back. Ludlam said that as the government faced an election year, Conroy should not have "the ability to write a blank cheque" which could impact how Telstra's assets are valued.

Xenophon has already thrown his support behind the plan to split Telstra but, like the Greens, wants to ensure regional households are not disadvantaged by proposed Universal Service Obligations under the Bill.

It's still unclear exactly which way Family First Senator Steve Fielding will swing, or indeed what he wants, given his belief that negotiations between the government and Telstra over its separation should be conducted commercially rather than through legislative instruments.

Fielding's office today told ZDNet.com.au that his main concern was "the legislative gun which is being held to Telstra's head".

"We want to make sure Telstra gets a fair deal, but this is a matter of commercial negotiations between the parties," a spokesperson told ZDNet.com.au. Fielding has yet to make a final decision on whether to support the Bill.

Meanwhile, Minchin has celebrated that after two years in power the government has not delivered its NBN. "This Labor government and Senator Conroy have been huge disappointments and despite all the big talk, Mr Rudd cannot escape the fact he has failed to deliver a single new service under his NBN in two years," Minchin said in a statement this afternoon.

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• NSW Education inks $280m Telstra deal
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Capgemini's new exec
Deepak Nangia
(Credit: Satyam)

75 of the increased headcount came from the company's acquisition of Nu Solutions last September, but the other half has come from organic growth. The company now has around 534 people in Australia. It also has around 250 employees working in India to support Australian clients.

"We've gone tremendously well this year," Capgemini CEO Paul Thorley told ZDNet.com.au.

The company has been trying to escape the image that it is purely a technology consultancy competing with the likes of KPMG. Its true competitors are the IBM's and Accentures of the world, Thorley said, since outsourcing and technology services were a large part of its portfolio.

Currently, the global percentage sits at around 70 per cent outsourcing and technology services and 30 per cent consulting. Having this sort of focus helps escape the "feast and famine" type model which Capgemini has suffered under in the past, Thorley said.

Despite there being many suppliers in the outsourcing and technology services market, Capgemini was succeeding by finding its own niche, according to the company's managing director new business, Deepak Nangia, who decided to move to Capgemini from Mahindra Satyam instead of becoming acquainted with the disgraced Indian outsourcer's new global management.

For instance, Capgemini has had some success in the financial services market with specific products such as credit card processing, wealth management and anti-money laundering products. "We've focused ourselves and looked at the market and said we're going to bring you expertise in certain areas," he said.

Capgemini's niche wasn't just in specifics, but also in deal size, Thorley said. He believed that if a company had a $50 to $100 million outsourcing deal as opposed to a $100 million to $400 million deal, it would think twice about giving it to IBM. "You don't want to be the twentieth largest customer for IBM," he said. He thought customers would rather be a more important customer of Capgemini.

Nangia pointed out that there had been a lot of industry consolidation, such as HP buying EDS, which meant there were less service providers that were not hooked up to particular products. "There are very few organisations which are true blue service organisations," he said. This could lead to favouritism he said. "It's easy for an organisation to discount one part of the business," he said. Despite this, he believed that Capgemini's independence was its ace.

Thorley thought the financial services would see the biggest growth in the new year, followed by the consumer products sector, the Federal Government and telcos.

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The upgrade means moving from SAP's traditional R/3 platform to the new suite — a combination of what the vendor believes are the best applications for doing different business functions such as customer relationship management. It was announced in February, and was made generally available in May.

Thirty nine and 47 per cent of Australian and New Zealand companies respectively had made the commitment to move to it, SAP ANZ Solutions manager Tim Wilkes told ZDNet.com.au yesterday. Those figures put the speed of adoption at 10 to 15 per cent faster than the last major release, R/3 4.6C, back in 2000, he said.

Customers truly saw the benefit, according to Wilkes. "The heart of it is that there are sound platform reasons for upgrading," he said.

Business Suite 7 was set to put an end to stove pipe systems, with data inside the company being linked with external feeds such as Twitter to give executives a complete view of its company and products. This creates more "clarity" for users, according to Wilkes, something useful in penny pinching times of crisis. Companies were able to use the suite to get a better idea of how the business is really operating — "instant gratification" in terms of information.

The new release also tackled a problem of battling through massive upgrades where the end result of billions of dollars worth of research and development was pushed through in one go. For Business Suite 7, SAP has expansion packages which come out every four to six weeks. Customers choose which of the new features they want in a check-box fashion.

"Once you've got [Business Suite 7] in you don't need to upgrade," Wilkes said. He believed customers were thinking about what they needed to do to get ready for better times.

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A statement by the minister's office said the telco had established it was not able to deliver six major milestones in its operational separation progress by the due date of 31 December 2009.

Telecom NZ is in the process of splitting its business into three as it attempts to keep its retail, network and wholesale operations separate from each other, in a plan approved in March 2008.

"The approved variation to the Undertakings sets a new date of 30 September 2010 for implementation of logical separation of shared information systems containing customer confidential information," Joyce's office said in a statement.

"The approved variation also exempts a small number of aging PSTN information systems that contain technical information about the PSTN, from the requirement for logical separation." PSTN refers to the public switched telephone network, or in other words, the old copper analog telephone network.

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"Optus confirmed today that it is already upgrading its HFC network in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane to [standard] DoCSIS 3. Further details will be announced shortly. Optus is committed to offering innovative plans and pricing across all its competitive networks," the company said yesterday in a statement.

Upgrading to the DoCSIS 3.0 specification significantly increases transmission speeds — 100Mbps in the case of Telstra, which this week announced the completion of its $300 million DoCSIS 3.0 upgrade to one million homes. Optus did not say which speeds it hoped to achieve.

When Telstra's upgrade was first announced last year, Optus would not be drawn on whether it intended to follow suit.

"Upgrading HFC is not the answer to Australia's broadband future as it will only ever benefit selected areas in major capital cities and not 98 per cent of the population," a spokesperson for the company told ZDNet.com.au at the time in a statement. "The fact is, only a very low percentage of customers at best will ever experience the claimed speeds of 100Mbps."

The speeds on HFC would vary, Optus had said, since the network was shared, meaning that the more users on the HFC network the slower the speeds. Optus also believed that the upgrade, which would require each home to be individually wired up to the HFC, would be an inconvenient process for most customers, and potentially be an expensive one if they wanted to achieve the higher speeds, since they would have to upgrade their modems.

However, the telco seems to have overcome its concerns about laying out money to achieve faster speeds, even going further than Telstra by upgrading all cities where it has a presence. Optus' HFC network is available to around 1.4 million homes in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney.

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• Optus HFC sale could be NBN victory
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The NSW Supreme Court has emphatically dismissed civil proceedings against One.Tel founder Jodee Rich, but Packer has disputed aspects of the trial and called for the immediate launch of a separate one.Tel legal action.

A statement issued by Consolidated Press Holdings Ltd (CPH) on Thursday said Packer "reiterated that he had been profoundly misled as to the financial position of One.Tel prior to its collapse".

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission's (ASIC) civil trial failed to prove that Rich and One.Tel finance director Mark Silbermann misled the One.Tel board, which included Packer and Lachlan Murdoch, over the financial state of the telco.

However the NSW Supreme Court concluded that One.Tel would likely have survived if a $132 million rights issue, underwritten by Publishing & Broadcasting Ltd and News Ltd, had been able to go ahead.

Special purpose liquidator, Paul Weston, is investigating the cancellation of the rights issue shortly before one.Tel's collapse, and is currently seeking funding to continue his legal action.

Packer challenged Weston to bring it on, saying he and Mr Rich should "immediately serve the writs they have issued in the Supreme Court of NSW". "Prompt action is essential to seek to ensure the integrity of evidence which will become a central feature of these proceedings," the statement said.

The NSW Supreme Court should also immediately order that all documents be preserved for the litigation hearings, Packer said. "CPH looks forward to arguing these cases, and to demonstrating in court the true financial position of One.Tel," the statement said.

"CPH will call for discovery of all of Rich's documents.

"Rich, the SPL (special purpose liquidator) and their witnesses — whomever they may be — will be required to promptly file witness statements and be subject to cross examination by us. CPH expects to have all material documents, including reports of financial experts, fully admitted in these cases."

In relation to the ASIC case, Packer said it was a penalty proceeding that gave significant procedural protections for the defendants.

Rich and Silbermann did not have to provide their evidence until after ASIC closed its case, and many documents that ASIC sought to tender in the case were not admitted into evidence, he said.

Of the documents that were admitted, the court found that many were unclear without a proper explanation from the authors, and as a result, ASIC could not establish that the documents proved a particular financial position, he said.

"In other words, Rich did not positively prove One.Tel's financial position, but rather ASIC was not able to make out its case against Rich and Silbermann," the statement said.

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(Credit: Alex Serpo/ZDNet.com.au)

The $280 million contract will run for four years and span 2400 sites, according to Firth.

"Telstra says the network will be the largest in Australia and one of the biggest in the Southern Hemisphere," she said in a statement.

Over 4500 kilometres of fibre will be rolled out, creating 150 jobs, according to Firth. The roll-out starts now and will continue until September, a Telstra spokesperson said. Speeds will range from 4Mbps to 100Mbps, depending on the needs of the school.

"A flexible system means bandwidth provided to schools can be increased or decreased to meet temporary spikes in demand as well as growth of declines in the student population," Firth said.

Victoria made the move to fast broadband for schools last year, with all sites undergoing a Telstra led upgrade from 4Mbps to 10Mbps, funded through the government's $89.3 million VicSmart Initiative.

Catholic schools also agreed in July to pay the telco $146 million to connect 1550 schools.

Firth said that the investment added onto NSW's investment in connected classrooms; $66 million to install interactive whiteboards and video-conferencing facilities in all NSW schools by 2011, and $29 million for all students to have their own secure online workspace for receiving and handing in homework.

The Federal Government also spent $2.1 billion on its Digital Education Revolution, bringing a computer to each year nine to 12 student.

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• Telstra boosts Melbourne cable to 100Mbps
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Steven Sinofsky
(Credit: Microsoft)

"I want to talk about the making of a laptop," said Microsoft's president of Windows and Windows Live, Steven Sinofsky, at the day two keynote for its annual Professional Developer Conference being held in Los Angeles. "What we wanted to learn in building Windows 7 was what it's like to make some hardware. We don't do that a lot in the Windows Group."

Sinofsky had been promoting new features available in Windows 7 to hardware developers, such as multi-touchscreen maker Sony, to improve the user experience via new APIs (application protocol interface) available in Windows 7. The device comes as speculation mounts over the arrival of an Apple multi-touchscreen tablet equivalent to the iPhone.

Sinofsky said Microsoft had worked with Acer for the past three months to come up with its so-called "Tablet PC — Microsoft PDC Edition". He said it was not so much focused on "industrial design" as it was an attempt to assist developers uncover some of the new APIs available in Windows 7. While nodding to the advantages a maker of both software and hardware has, Sinofsky steered clear of a full commitment to a new mode of production.

"We wanted to make a laptop to give to a developer and that developer can understand how to use all the Windows 7 APIs in a practical, low-priced way to do it. So we kitted it out," he said, holding the device up. "We actually learned a great deal about hardware. We talked about the different touchscreens. And we learned how hard it is to mount a multi-touchscreen, depending on the technology," he continued.

"It was great for us, as members of the ecosystem, to understand the ins and outs and ups and downs of building hardware." The device has been preloaded Office 2010, and virtualisation software.

It's still unclear whether the device, specifications for which are here, will be made available to the general public, with pricing for the device not yet available. However, Microsoft, to the delight of about 5000 paying delegates, gave attendees the device.

"It's a machine really just for developers. It's the Windows 7 PDC laptop," said Sinofsky. "It's going to be available to you for free." The room exploded in applause and whooping for around one minute.

Predicting a mass exodus to the stand where the device would be handed out, Sinofsky said, "I encourage you to stay here for the rest of the talk."

Liam Tung travelled to the Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles as a guest of Microsoft.

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Scott Guthrie
(Credit: Microsoft)

Head of Microsoft's developer division Scott Guthrie showed off the latest features available in Silverlight 4, including a barcode reading tool, which is underpinned by an open source project called Code project.

Guthrie also unveiled "IIS smooth streaming", which allows Silverlight to adjust the bitrate that data flows to the various devices depending on various network conditions.

Guthrie noted that Apple did not yet support Silverlight, however; Microsoft itself has bowed to the popularity of Apple's iPhone. Silverlight 4 offers an automated encoding feature to enable streaming to the popular device. Though Guthrie's attempt to show off this feature was thwarted by the Los Angeles Convention Centre's network. In total, four attempts failed. "Can someone kick the router?" asked Guthrie.

Silverlight 4 addresses many of the complaints developers had aired to Microsoft over Silverlight 3, which was only released four months ago. The final release of 4 will be available in the first half of next year, Guthrie said.

Showing off a new graphic editing feature that extends Silverlight's HTML support, Guthrie "rickrolled" delegates with a YouTube clip of 80's pop star Rick Astley, singing Never gonna give you up. With the click of a button the image was transformed into jigsaw puzzle pieces, which retained the clip in pieces but still in-motion.

Less exciting, but useful additions to Silverlight 4 also included full support for Microsoft Visual Studio, as well as drag-and-drop functionality with Microsoft Office's Word. The new feature smooths out text editing for web applications.

Liam Tung travelled to the Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles as a guest of Microsoft.

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Mike Kaiser, who also served as chief of staff to former NSW premier Morris Iemma, has been named as principal of government relations and external affairs for NBN Co — the company charged with rolling out the Federal Government's National Broadband Network.

He will receive an annual salary that is $100,000 more than what Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is paid.

Fraser told reporters today that the debate over how Australia could build a broadband network to secure the economic prosperity of the next century needed people of Kaiser's calibre.

"Mike secured that position obviously through an independent process and it's a matter for NBN to decide his worth as an individual," he said.

"I've certainly known Mike Kaiser for a long time and believe that he's a highly skilled individual."

Kaiser served in the Queensland parliament until 2001 when he resigned after admitting during the Shepherdson inquiry to involvement in vote rigging in Labor Party ballots in the 1980s.

He will be responsible for engaging with governments at all levels, including the federal sphere, as well as other external stakeholders. NBN Co chief executive Mike Quigley has said that one of Kaiser's early focuses would be to identify opportunities for utilities to work with NBN Co. Kaiser begins his new role on December 1.

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Both networks have had their download capacity upgraded to 100Mbps, with the HFC upload having an upper limit of 2Mbps. The HFC upgrade will reach one million residences in Melbourne.

"This means the actual download speeds an individual customer will receive on the services will depend on factors including customer equipment, server limitations, Wi-Fi reception/capacity, and so will be less than the total capacity into the home," Telstra said in a statement.

Telstra said in August that it had spent $1.5 billion on the upgrade.

The telco also announced a new set-top box called T-Box that uses two digital TV tuners and has the ability to record, rewind and pause live free-to-air television. The device also connects to BigPond's TV and movie rental services.

"T-Box also gives users unmetered access to the seven BigPond TV internet channels including live news, sport and online music all streamed directly to the television set," Telstra group managing director of product management, Holly Kramer, said.

The T-Box will be trialled by Melbourne customers, due to the network upgrades, over the coming months.

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US product managers, Reed Shaffner and Dev Balasubramanian explain Office 2010 beta.
(Credit: Liam Tung/ZDNet.com.au)

Office 2010 beta has glued together Microsoft's technologies across its server, client and web lines, aiming squarely at delivering a multi-platform Office suite. Not all problems have been ironed out, however; the software giant has addressed obvious limitations to the current suite by enabling the likes of Excel to be viewed and edited in a browser, as well as making it possible to synchronise files stored on SharePoint server to a Windows Mobile 6.5 mobile phone.

Outlook 2010 offers a "yearbook" view of contacts, which draws on LinkedIn profiles for headshots and profile data. LinkedIn is the only social network currently integrated with Office, though the suite's US product managers, Reed Shaffner and Dev Balasubramanian said at the conference that it did have software development kits available to integrate, for example, Facebook or Twitter.

"We fully expect the social network ecosystem to evaluate the opportunities of bringing that data into Outlook," said Shaffner. Balasubramanian later added that Microsoft would be leaving it up to social network operators to decide whether to integrate with Outlook.

Excel under Office 2010 can now be edited and viewed through a browser; however, users will not be able to manipulate spreadsheets with complex macros.

Acknowledging the growing wave of video content on the web, Microsoft has introduced a basic video editing suite to PowerPoint which allows, for example, YouTube videos to be inserted into a PowerPoint document. Video editing features include colour correction, reflection rendering and image framing. It has also introduced a compression function, which in Shaffner and Balasubramanian's demonstration, reduced a 25MB video file to 6MB.

Deeper integration with Windows Mobile may also endear users to Microsoft's mobile operating system. The software giant today launched a beta of Office 2010 Mobile for the operating system, which can be synchronised with a corporate SharePoint server. If changes are made to files via the phone, they will be reflected in the same file in SharePoint and vice versa.

Improvements to Word focused on document management and collaboration features, for example, greater control over multi-authored document changes, document tracking and basic record keeping functions. It has also addressed storage-heavy features in previous versions which can now only save changed document elements, rather than saving multiple instances of similar files. A few neat image editing features were also added, where users will now be able to choose whether to paste both images and text or just text when copying web content.

Office security also received a boost with the introduction of sandboxing, which allows a file to be opened in a discreet compartment should it contain malicious threats.

Liam Tung travelled to the Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles as a guest of Microsoft.

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Paul Weston is seeking funding to continue legal action in relation to the cancellation in May 2001 of a $132 million rights issue, which was underwritten by Publishing & Broadcasting Ltd and News Ltd.

His goal is closer after NSW Supreme Court Justice Robert Austin found on Wednesday that the junior telco would likely have survived if the planned rights issue had proceeded shortly before One.Tel's collapse.

Weston's statement of claim names as defendants most of the members of the One.Tel board on May 29, 2001 — including Packer and Murdoch — as well as general purpose liquidators, lawyers and auditors.

Weston, of Pitcher Partners, says while he is still digesting the more than 3,000 pages of findings the judge's comments are likely to help his case. "That certainly is a positive element to my pursuit of the case," Weston said.

"I can now move forward with my court appointed role in relation to the rights issue. The stage I am at is to try and secure funding to serve and run the proceedings against the defendants."

"The position is, as you might appreciate, that in pursuing action against such well resourced defendants is going to cost a fair bit of money ... the parties that I am dealing with in that matter wanted to see the judgement of ASIC vs Rich."

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