IIA sought to add its voice to the case, arguing that its input was important because the outcome of the proceedings could influence the future of its members, specifically internet service providers, which it represents. Chief executive Peter Coroneos took the stand yesterday as part of the IIA's request to have its submission heard.

While the IIA's submission cannot bear on the submissions from each party, it may have had the opportunity to make submissions which Justice Cowdroy could take into account in the handing down of his judgement, expected in six to nine months' time.

The IIA has made it known that it considers the proceedings to be a "test case" that will influence future ISP regulation, considering it is the first time Part V Division 2AA of the Copyright Act (1968) will be considered in detail. However, the court today ruled against IIA's inclusion as it had nothing "useful and different" to add to the trial.

The court acknowledged that IIA involvement would not interfere with the hearing, despite the association's impartiality, though it determined that IIA "has not proffered anything materially different to iiNet".

The court also understood IIA's motivations, stating in its court order: "If the IIA intended by its application for intervention to bring to the court's attention the importance of its decision in these proceedings, it can take such fact as noted. The court, and has always been, well aware of the ramifications of the outcome of this decision for ISPs, rights holders, and the development of the internet more broadly".

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• Coroneos takes iiTrial heat
• iiNet stands firm on legislative defence
• iiNet continues rural DSLAM rollout
• iiNet's copyright crucible heats up

Marshall, who has served in the role for about two years, will be leaving Conroy's office on 22 January 2010.

It's not clear yet exactly what role he will play at the networking company, which, along with the likes of Ericsson, Huawei and Nokia Siemens Networks, is vying for a role as a supplier to the government's $43 billion National Broadband Network. However, ZDNet.com.au has confirmed the appointment. Marshall is a former chief editor of industry stalwart Communications Day.

The outgoing media advisor to Conroy will be taking with him intimate knowledge of the government's NBN plans. Alcatel-Lucent Australia, which recently underwent a major headcount reduction, had been the lead integrator on Telstra's massive Next IP core network revamp, which was a key part of its $5 billion technology transformation instigated by former chief, Sol Trujillo.

NBN Co chief executive Mike Quigley had, until 2008, served as its global chief operating officer.

Once one of the most important suppliers to the telco industry's biggest spender, Telstra, the company briefly faced being sidelined after its decision to hedge its bets on work for the first $4.7 billion government NBN proposal on Telstra. The telco had also signed a $3.5 billion memorandum of understanding with Alcatel-Lucent for its proposed fibre-to-the-node network.

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• When will Conroy release filter report?
• Conroy's broadband forum to cost $500k
• Conroy wins battle for Telco Bill debate
• Conroy calls ACCC doc release "regrettable"

Some, including economist Joshua Gans, believe it could be bad news. Others, like Netspace's Matthew Phillips, are also concerned but will wait and see what impact it has. Meanwhile, over the ditch, Kordia's Susie Stone says all backbone providers in New Zealand have their own retail operations. So what are we worried about?

Pipe Networks has focused on major capacity links in high traffic areas. Whether they become part of a retailer or not, the impact will not be as pronounced as it would in regional areas where little or no competition exists. Here Telstra is often the only backhaul provider, although the government has called for tenders for alternate providers. The influence of vertically integrated providers here is much more influential.

Should the NBN include many, if not all, backhaul links in its network? The involvement of the NBN in the provision of backhaul still seems a little fluid. Universal coverage of backhaul by the NBN would ensure that a guaranteed wholesale-only provider will exist on all routes to minimise the likelihood of vertically integrated providers inflating wholesale prices.

With their views on the Pipe acquisition and the extent of backhaul competition in Australia you'll hear from:

• Matthew Phillips, Regulatory and Carrier Affairs manager for Netspace
• Susie Stone, GM of Strategic Development at Kordia
• Joshua Gans, economist from Melbourne Business School

Bevan Slattery from Pipe Networks declined an invitation to participate in this week's Twisted Wire.

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• Pipe Networks sell-out an absolute travesty
• Kiwi TV spectrum could be wireless broadband
• Forget the NBN, 100Mbps is already here
• Can the Telco Reform Act be win-win?

• Largest display among all-in-ones
• Fast dual-core CPU makes up for lack of quad-core (mostly)
• Finally has an SD card slot
• Wireless mouse and keyboard
• Mini DisplayPort input ripe with possibility

• Most Windows all-in-ones in the price range have Blu-ray
• Touch-sensitive mouse gestures not as responsive as we'd like
• Apple's expensive customer service policy

If we could, we'd take points away from this iMac simply because by giving it a 27-inch display Apple threatens our livelihood. You don't need our input to simply walk past the 27-inch iMac on a store shelf and recognise that it's the largest all-in-one currently available, and that it has a reasonable price tag relative to its size advantage. Look deeper into this AU$2199 iMac and you'll find a desktop that's equal parts compelling and polarising.

Some new features, like the SD Card slot, the now-standard wireless mouse and keyboard, and the LED backlight, have obvious appeal. The glossy screen coating, the limited (for now) bidirectional functionality of the Mini DisplayPort, and the absence of both a Blu-ray drive and a quad-core processor all provide openings for criticism. For us, however, and we expect for many others, the screen trumps most of our concerns.

With this most recent update to the iMac, Apple brings the design of its all-in-ones in line with that of its MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops. The aluminium and polycarbon body of the old iMac has been replaced with aluminium and edge-to-edge glass over the screen. From an aesthetic standpoint, the new iMac is as strong as ever, and maintains Apple's lead over other computer manufacturers. Provided you have the room for it, you should feel no shame putting the new iMac in a prominent location in any home or business.

The new screen size makes the iMac the largest ever in Apple's all-in-one line, but only by an extra 76mm in its width. The new iMac measures 520mm high by 648mm wide by 203mm deep. The old 24-inch iMac is only 566mm wide, but otherwise has the same dimensions. The extra inches in the screen have a more significant impact than the changes in chassis size.

In addition to going to a 27-inch LCD, Apple has also boosted the resolution of the display to 2560x1440 pixels — up from 1920x1200 pixels in the old model — which amounts to roughly 62 per cent more screen real estate. Where the old model couldn't quite accommodate two full-size Safari windows, the new iMac can fit two side by side with room to spare.

Along with bringing the MacBook Pro's chassis materials to the new iMac, Apple also incorporated some of the same tricks it uses in its laptops to make the display appear so vibrant. An LED backlight amps up the brightness to such an extent that the display in the old iMac seems washed out in comparison. A glossy coating on the display increases the apparent contrast, while the IPS-based screen helps with viewing angles.

The glossy coating on the screen is one of the flashpoints of criticism for the new iMac. Those opposed cite more intense reflectivity and increased glare from environmental light sources. As the iMac is generally a stationary device, you can't necessarily move it to a different spot to avoid glare, as you might with a glossy-screened laptop. Unfortunately, Apple offers no way to opt out of the glossy coating on either its laptops or the new iMacs; from a customer service standpoint, however, providing a screen-coating option would certainly add an extra layer of complexity for less savvy buyers.

For now, Apple has taken a stand on glossy screens, gambling that shoppers either prefer it, won't care or will suffer through and accept it. The folks at MacMatte and elsewhere are actively working against that decision. Your buying decision should hinge on your own preference, of course, and a trip to a retail outlet that carries iMacs will answer any questions you might have in short order.

We place a high value on our multitasking test, as it reflects how many people tend to work, but on single applications, the 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo chip helps push the iMac comfortably past its Windows-based competition. If you anticipate running particularly demanding multitasking workloads, you may want to consider going for the quad-core Core i5 or i7 iMac. Otherwise, the majority of you should feel confident that the iMac is the fastest all-in-one on the market, and you would be hard pressed to find a mainstream workload (or combination of workloads), that would bog this system down.

The screen and the core features out of the way, we can shift our focus to some of the secondary updates to the iMac. The SD Card slot is one of the most long-asked-for features in Apple's entire Mac line-up, and its absence thus far has seemed particularly silly given that you can find multi-format media card readers in even the cheapest of PCs. Anyone with a digital camera or other SD Card-equipped portable device will obviously benefit from the addition of the slot to the iMac. Popping a card in brings up a screen that shows you the card contents. OS X will then chide you if you don't hit the drive eject command before removing the card.

More interesting than the SD Card slot is that the Mini DisplayPort on the back of the iMac is now bidirectional. Right now you can find a cable with two Mini DisplayPort connectors, which lets you use the new iMac as a second display with another Mini DisplayPort-equipped Mac. You can hot-swap the cable between different systems without having to shut down, and the display management software is the most intuitive and most flexible we've seen. You can switch between extended and mirrored modes, and an icon-based orientation system lets you switch the extended orientation from side to side, up and down, or virtually any other configuration, as long as the two screens border each other. This capability also extends the useful life of the iMac, addressing a long-standing criticism of all-in-ones. Even if you someday demand a faster computer, you can always use the iMac as a secondary display.

Unfortunately, the dual-Mini DisplayPort cable from Belkin won't let you input video from other devices. For that you'll have to wait until January. Details on what Belkin's cooking up are scant, so we can't offer much information about the forthcoming adapter other than that it's on the way and it does more than connect two Macs. But given that you can output the iMac over HDMI, DVI and other formats with the Mini DisplayPort adapter cable, we'd expect that any updated input adapter would include those formats as well. Our hope is that, similar to all-in-ones from a variety of PC vendors, the new cable from Belkin will allow you to input video to the iMac from game consoles, cable boxes, Blu-ray players, HD camcorders, and other such devices currently bound to your television. The appeal of such capability should be obvious, but we'll unfortunately have to wait until the adapter hits before we can test it out.

The wireless mouse and keyboard are the last major additions to the new iMac. Mostly, we're glad to see Apple switch to all wireless-input devices, as the wired versions always seemed to disrupt the clean aesthetic Apple seemed to be going for with the system itself. Not everyone likes wireless devices, because of responsiveness concerns and intense battery demands, but for the responsiveness in general usage we experienced no difficulty.

We'll refer you to our review of the touch-sensitive Magic Mouse for our full opinion of Apple's unique new input device. For now we'll say that we like the design of the Magic Mouse, and we found the basic functions worked well enough. Clicking and scrolling all worked as expected, and we even appreciated the acceleration detection that speeds up scrolling down longer pages. The multi-finger gestures were no replacement for dedicated forward and back buttons, let alone lateral scrolling like you find on Logitech and Microsoft mice. We can't feel too disappointed in the Magic Mouse as a bundled mouse with the iMac, however, since it has the basics down. We just find it interesting that for all its attention to design and usability in other products, Apple has never really conquered the lowly mouse.

The last point we'll make regarding the iMac's features has to do with the lack of a Blu-ray drive. Apple CEO Steve Jobs made his feeling about Blu-ray well known a while back by calling it a "bag of hurt", but various tech bloggers still speculated that Apple might finally introduce Blu-ray in this round of iMac updates, especially considering the hardware cost has dropped substantially in recent months. The iMac's giant screen has better-than-1080p resolution, and the iMac's audio output is decent enough that it would certainly do justice to the format.

Mitigating factors include Belkin's forthcoming adapter, if it allows for HDMI input via the iMac's Mini DisplayPort. Of course, in that event, you still incur the added expense of the adapter and a separate Blu-ray player itself. We also understand that you can download HD movies at 720p from iTunes, and we acknowledge that Blu-ray as a format hasn't demonstrated the same rapid adoption that came with the switch to DVD, thus minimising the level of consumer interest. We don't believe that Blu-ray is a must-have for all computers, and we can think of several features we'd rather have instead. That said, leaving Blu-ray off the new iMac gives Windows-based all-in-ones a selling point. Apple's customers miss out, and would be right to feel disappointed.

Finally, we hate to end a positive review on a negative note, but we continue to find the extra AU$268 for AppleCare a questionable deal. You get a yearlong warranty with the iMac, which matches the industry standard, and you can also haul your Mac down to one of Apple's Genius Bars or an authorised Apple service provider. But in order to be eligible for phone support after your first 90 days of iMac ownership, you need to pay the extra AU$268 for AppleCare. Yes, that gets you a three-year warranty as well, but long-term phone support should be free.

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ZDNet.com.au
news editor
Renai LeMay
(Credit: CBS Interactive)

commentary How fast can you pedal backwards while making it look like you're actually gaining ground?

That's the question that our noble communications minister and his steadfast team of public servants are currently grappling with as they figure out how they can distance the Federal Government from its controversial policy to introduce an ISP-based filter to shield Australia from objectionable content.

It has been more than a month since Conroy received a key report into trials of ISP-based internet filtering technology from Melbourne-based testing facility Enex Testlabs.

On the 19 October, the minister promised parliament that he would release the report "shortly" and "as soon as is practicable". A public consultation process was to accompany the release.

Clearly either Conroy's definition of "shortly" differs remarkably from that of the public, or his team is currently figuring out how best to conduct the release of the report and the associated consultation in a way that will cause as minimal damage as possible.

And who could blame him?

After all, the Enex report is likely to go one of two ways for the government; and both are extremely undesirable.

Firstly, it could show that ISP-based internet filtering simply does not work, in the sense that it will provide no meaningful obstruction to those determined to obtain objectionable content such as child pornography online.

This is the more likely scenario, given previous trials of the technology. And Enex's results could potentially go even further — they may show that ISP-based filtering technology has the potential to significantly reduce internet speeds.

This is an outcome that would be disastrous for Conroy. It would expose once and for all the veracity of long-standing claims by industry experts that ISP-based filtering is a waste of time and always has been, in the face of forceful government policy to the contrary.

And it would be bad publicity for Conroy if he were to release a report recommending a technology that would slow internet speeds — at the same time as building a National Broadband Network to improve them.

The second alternative could prove even worse for the minister.

If the trial shows that ISP-based filtering does, in fact, work, it will force Conroy to push ahead with implementing the technology and stand by the policy he has pledged to implement, contingent on the recommendations of the report.

The outcome of such a push would be far worse than bad publicity for Conroy. In fact, it would be political suicide.

The filtering policy is so unpopular in Australia that it has resulted in demonstrations on the streets, with comparisons to China's draconian internet censorship regime, and is at least partially responsible of the entrance of Europe's libertarian Pirate Party into Australian politics.

I anticipate in the next few weeks that Conroy will release a heavily censored version of the Enex report

If Conroy does push ahead with implementing an extremely unpopular ISP-based internet filtering policy in Australia, that will be his legacy; and the history books will ignore any of his other accomplishments in favour of vilifying him as one of the internet's great villains. And, of course, a powerful and patient lobby group will rise to push for the reversal of the filter policy at every election.

It is for these reasons that I believe that no matter what the Enex report ends up finding, Conroy will "spin" those results somehow as being in that beautiful grey middle zone in an attempt to distance himself from the entire debacle and remove the unsightly canker sore from the intense gaze of his boss: Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.

I anticipate in the next few weeks that Conroy will release a heavily censored version of the Enex report — as he did the report of the expert panel into the first National Broadband Network tendering process.

This version of Enex's document will likely not come to a hard conclusion either way about the veracity of ISP-based internet filtering, or if it does, the language will be watered down. The justification for implementing the controversial policy will therefore be unclear, as will the recriminations towards Labor for attempting to implement a flawed policy in the first place.

This mockery of transparency will allow Conroy to walk away from the process relatively unscathed politically. But the internet has a long memory.

I suspect that this episode will be etched onto the brains of civil libertarians and technology enthusiasts in Australia for a long time to come, as the years when Australia nearly implemented an online filtering regime that had all the potential to become as draconian as that of our Communist cousins — especially, as some have speculated, if it was concentrated in the hands of a single administrator such as the National Broadband Network Company.

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• Conroy will 'shortly' release filter report
• ACS filter report just what Conroy needs
• Has Conroy's dept received filter report?
• 'Anonymous' knocks PM, ACMA offline

Telstra chief executive David Thodey had flagged the changes at a company investor day in October.

A range of new broadband plans will offer customers faster speeds and higher data allowances for the same price, while excess usage fees have been removed on most plans, acting group manager of Telstra's consumer business Glenice Maclellan said.

New plans from December 1 will see 10 times the data allowance on Telstra's entry level plan and new high usage plans of 100 and 200 gigabytes. A range of bundled packages will also be offered to deliver broadband, home phone and Foxtel on a single bill, Maclellan said in a statement today.

Telstra's most recent annual results showed a drop in fixed broadband takeup, but its wireless broadband revenue grew by 69.2 per cent to $587 million.

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• Thodey: NBN speeds a hard sell
• Industry laments loss of Pipe Networks
• Adam plucks first SA WiMax apple
• Exetel boss bets against NBN and Quigley

"The department is implementing a shared service for ERP that will eventually cover every department in NSW," said Martin Kenny, manager of Business Critical Systems for HP South Pacific. The number of users was expected to grow to "several thousand" as more departments came online, he added.

The comments came in a statement by the vendor issued yesterday morning, which noted HP would provide the underlying hardware platform migration. The department was unable to immediately provide more details, but the project is believed to be based on software from German giant SAP.

HP will migrate the department's three existing ERP systems into a single hardware platform, running on HP Integrity rx8460 Itanium servers and HP StorageWorks XP24000 storage. The technology firm will also build a disaster recovery facility. The implementation will include HP Global Instant Capacity on Demand (GiCAP) Software, which will allow the NSW Government to activate additional capacity as required.

"The instant capacity allows them to start small and only pay for extra capacity as they need it," said Kenny.

This initiative follows the NSW Government's call in October for expressions of interest from the information technology industry to consolidate its data processing and storage. Minister for Commerce Jodi McKay said the government would look to build two dedicated datacentres by 2011. The government currently uses 130 datacentres in total and is looking to combine up to 55 of them into the new centres.

The new facilities would house IT systems for NSW Health, the NSW Department of Education and up to 30 other government agencies, according to the Expression of Interest document.

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• Govt sets up new CERT
• TechnologyOne execs see pay freeze
• IT: Govt's cost-cutting bitch
• Vic issues massive datacentre tender

(Water supply image by recoverling, CC2.0)

"Sydney Water customer management system is now expected to cost $55 million, more than double original budget of $21 million and one-and-a-half years behind schedule," the auditor report said. The original due date was August 2009, but it is not set to be delivered until February 2011.

The expanded budget was due to external costs, according to the auditors. "The significant increase in budget is due to the system integrator costs," the report said.

ZDNet.com.au understands that IBM won the integration work, but it seemed prices were higher across the industry than the utility expected. "The budget for this stage of the project was found to be inadequate after receiving quotes from prospective service providers," the report said.

The schedule was dragged out by a year-and-a-half because of extending the design phase and a long procurement process. The integration work went out to tender in October last year.

Once implemented, the project, which also has a second phase, bringing expenditure up to $68.9 million, is expected to reduce operating costs by $1.9 million a year. It is also expected to improve customer service and reduce reliance on multiple unsupportable systems.

"Sydney Water is currently undertaking a major upgrade of its IT systems," said a spokesperson for the utility, responding to the report. "The reason why two large IT projects have exceeded their original budget estimates is because they were early estimates."

"They were done before detailed project design was undertaken and didn't factor in the cost of implementing the software and integrating it with Sydney water's systems. The higher costs became apparent once tenders were received from service providers. The increased costs are relatively small compared to Sydney Water's overall budget."

Another project, a roll-out of IBM's Maximo asset management system, is also running a year behind schedule and millions over budget. "The corporation underestimated the complexity of the Maximo consolidation project and this is the main reason for the $12.9 million increase in the project budget," the auditor said.

The replacement of Sydney Water's current systems was necessary, the auditor said, as they were "approaching obsolescence" and were unsupported by vendors.

Achterstraat was unimpressed by yet another NSW government IT project breaking its time and money bounds. Recently he also reported on the NSW government's licensing consolidation project which was nine years late and $23 million over budget. "It is imperative that government computer projects are well thought out, budgeted for and governed to deliver benefit to the NSW taxpayer," he said.

Sydney Water already has a bad record with IT spending after a failed billing system implementation in 2001. The agency has only just begun to receive funding for technology projects again.

To balance out the bad news, however, the audit report revealed that Sydney Water's project to replace a number of disparate document management systems with one which will allow better access and sharing of information was on time and budget. Sydney Water was looking for a project manager for the program earlier this year. The delivery date for that project is June 2011.

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• Sydney Water dumps GroupWise
• Sydney Water looks for project manager
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In each department unauthorised people could access personal information quickly and easily

Victorian Auditor-General

The audit report, Maintaining the Integrity and Confidentiality of Personal Information, found a plethora of security oversights, blunders and poor practices that left citizens' personal data highly vulnerable to exposure.

The audit examined security governance and risk management arrangements at three Victorian Government agencies, including the departments of Premier and Cabinet, and Treasury and Finance. It did not name the third department.

"While we examined only three departments, the ability to penetrate databases, the consistency of our findings and the lack of effective oversight and coordination of information security practices strongly indicate that this phenomenon is widespread," the report said.

The audit found that "in each department unauthorised people could access personal information quickly and easily" because "the information was not appropriately classified" and "the database controls were either missing or not operating".

Further, because the departments didn't maintain or regularly review system logs, they had no way of knowing if their systems had been breached and personal information in their care had been accessed without authorisation.

The Auditor General's office found that departments were storing and exchanging information in unsecured formats.

"Data was transmitted from the three departments by emails in formats that were easily read," the report said. "This means they could be accessed by someone other than the intended recipient.

"Personal information was stored on portable storage devices, CDs and DVDs that are vulnerable to loss, in easily-read formats. Personal information was exchanged via personal email accounts, some of which were particularly vulnerable to unauthorised access. Extracts or whole copies of personal information from the selected databases were stored in unsecured shared drives on departmental networks accessible by unauthorised staff."

These departments were providing information to third parties such as IT services providers and hosting companies which were "not required to certify that their security arrangements at least equal public sector requirements".

It also found that the Victorian Government has to date failed to implement "a comprehensive suite of standards to guide and support effective information management and security practice across the public sector".

"The Department of Treasury and Finance and the Department of Premier and Cabinet have not fulfilled their responsibilities to develop and maintain whole-of-government information security standards and guidance, to improve the coordination of identity and information management systems at state level, and to provide policy advice on emerging trends and issues in identity and information management," the report said.

The Auditor General's report recommended that the departments should:

• Clarify their roles, responsibilities, policies and standards regarding information security
• Assign responsibility for information security to senior management
• Develop more robust risk management practices
• Train staff in good security practices and the importance of information security
• Assess threats and vulnerabilities and take steps to address them.

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• Vic audit slams smart meter roll-out
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Minister for Finance and
Deregulation, Lindsay Tanner

Credit: Minister's Office

The move comes amid negotiations on regulatory changes expected to result in Telstra being structurally separated.

Telstra, now a public company, is 10 per cent owned by the sovereign wealth fund.

Tanner told a lunch in Canberra on Wednesday that the board of the Future Fund, set up three years ago to manage federal public sector superannuation assets, already made its investment decisions independently.

But the government was examining further steps that might include removing Future Fund employees from coverage by the Public Service Act.

"Such an employment framework would aim to reinforce the independence of the board, but still provide values and standards for the agency, particularly with respect to its responsibilities relating to public money," Tanner said in a speech to the National Press Club.

"The government's decision to examine these options reflects a greater understanding of the nature of the Future Fund," he said, likening the Fund as a public authority to the Reserve Bank of Australia.

"Being primarily responsible for investment management, the agency operates within financial markets in a largely commercial environment," Tanner said.

"Removing the fund from the Public Service Act would enhance its independence from government and make it easier to recruit specialised fund managers."

The Future Fund, whose board of guardians is headed by former Commonwealth Bank of Australia chief executive David Murray, is Telstra's largest single shareholder.

In August, the fund sold $2.37 billion worth of its original holding of 17 per cent, ahead of the government's announcement of reforms to the telecommunications industry, in preparation for the construction of a national broadband network.

A key part of the national broadband network legislation revolves around Telstra, which faces the structural separation of its wholesale and retail businesses, either voluntarily or forcibly.

The prospect has angered smaller Telstra investors, who are concerned about the impact on the value of their shareholdings.

Tanner said the fund had had no prior knowledge of the government's plans when it sold down its holding in Telstra.

He stressed that the government's negotiations with Telstra about structural separation meant that the fund's activities "must be absolutely independent".

"With this is in mind, today I want to make it absolutely clear that the government will not be directing the board in relation to its Telstra shareholdings as is allowed under the Future Fund Act, including the exercising of its voting rights in relation to any shareholder vote on structural separation," he said.

"Nor will the government discuss with the board its intentions in relation to the use of its voting rights.

"The Future Fund will make its decisions with only one issue in mind: shareholder value."

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• ASIC to investigate Future's Telstra sell off
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"The Human Services portfolio, of which Medicare Australia is an agency, is currently reviewing its information and communications technology strategy," a spokesperson for Medicare said. "While this is underway, Medicare Australia has put in place a one-year contract with IBM Australia for ICT infrastructure services."

The services included providing computer hardware and software, as well as mainframe and data warehouse environments, a gateway and help desk services.

"The extension of this contract is part of a broader approach towards coordinated procurement more widely across government," the spokesperson said.

Medicare said last year before the Gershon review on Federal Government IT was released that its contracts were coming to an end and it was in the process of developing its future ICT sourcing and services delivery strategy. Former Human Services Minister Joe Ludwig said he wanted to better coordinate ICT procurement within agencies in his portfolio. At that time, IBM held most of Medicare's ICT infrastructure services.

Since that report's release, the Federal Government has been trying to put together a datacentre strategy as well as desktop and telecommunications panels for whole-of-government use. Defence has led the charge to create an interim desktop panel for those who need new services before the panel is in place, but vendors for the panel were only scheduled to be assessed this month.

The new contract is not the first extension IBM has achieved since its original contract ran out, although the amounts it received for its work has reduced with each recent resigning. The extension of the IT services and support contract for the half year from October 2008 to February 2009 gave IBM $55 million. Another, announced in October last year, pledged a year's IT service and support for $70.3 million — a 36 per cent discount. This newest extension, signed in September for $62.9 million, discounts the company's work by another 10 per cent.

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• IBM finishes $22m Qld toll system
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Microsoft's 2009 instalment of its annual Professional Developer Conference was held at the Los Angeles Convention Centre, where around 5000 developers gathered from around the globe.

ZDNet.com.au attended the four-day conference, thanks to Microsoft, which put on a show bigger than Ben Hur. Granted, most of the action occurred outside the walls of the conference centre's south hall, but keynotes were delivered, and the sponsors exhibition hall did contain a few neat inventions by Microsoft's developer community.

Liam Tung attended the Professional Developer Conference as a guest of Microsoft.

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• Early Windows 7 will be out at PDC
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But is this the right thing to do? How should Turnbull and his office disclose when it is or when it isn't the opposition leader personally tweeting? And what do people think about it all?

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• Sydney Media140: Photo gallery
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McMeekin is retiring on 22 December. "It's time for me to hand over the baton," he told ZDNet.com.au this week. The CIO was 60 years old, he said, and had been working in the IT sector for 40 years, working in universities for 22 of those years. McMeekin joined Monash in early 1998 from the University of Southern Queensland and spent 11 years heading up the university's IT function.

The new IT director will continue to migrate staff to Lotus Notes from the university's former client Thunderbird. The migration started 18 months ago, yet, until now, only 4500 out of 10,000 staff have been moved. Lotus Notes was chosen three years ago, according to IBM.

When queried on the long time scale for the migration, McMeekin said that he'd left it up to users when they wanted to migrate. "They're choosing a time that suits them," he said. Migrating emails and calendar from Thunderbird also took time, he said.

McMeekin had chosen to move from Thunderbird because it didn't fit in with the unified communications strategy the university was working towards. "It didn't provide a full collaboration suite," he said.

Along with rolling out Lotus Notes, McMeekin has been moving the six campuses from traditional PABXs to IP telephony in partnership with Cisco Systems. He has completed five campuses and expects to finish the last next year. Video-conferencing has also been a focus, with the university having 130 meeting rooms set up with Tandberg video-conferencing technology.

The university also announced recently that it would move its 58,000 students to Google's Gmail.

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• Google wins Monash Uni email
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After 40 days of review, the Commission decided that "in combining search engine platforms, Microsoft and Yahoo! may have been able to achieve the necessary scale to provide effective and sustainable competition to Google".

The Commission also said that the agreement would not lessen innovation incentives for either Microsoft, Yahoo or Google.

Under the terms of the agreement, Microsoft would gain an exclusive 10-year licence to Yahoo's search technologies to integrate into Redmond's Bing search engine. Yahoo would also become the exclusive worldwide sales force for both company's premium search advertisers.

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Universal Studios logo, Universal City, Los Angeles, California
(Credit: Liam Tung)

As the Federal Court battle between iiNet and the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (which represents Hollywood's largest movie studios) hits its final 48 hours, Justice Cowdroy allowed Coroneos to take the stand to be cross-examined over the IIA's submission as a so-called friend of the court.

Cornoneos was asked by AFACT's legal counsel, Tony Bannon SC, about the IIA's "disconnect" group, established in 2005. Coroneos said the group, which included Telstra, Optus, iiNet, Internode and others, was formed to counter the growing number of copyright infringement notices sent by AFACT and fellow copyright advocate, Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI).

In May 2008, Coroneos had aired a plan in an email to members that would deliver a "knockout blow" to the copyright lobbyists. The deed would be executed via a proposed ISP code which would limit, under the banner of privacy, the period ISPs could retain IP addresses — AFACT's and MIPI's starting point for building its case in the current proceedings. If the ISP did not retain records of IP addresses, there would be no opportunity for the applicants to cross reference their evidence.

Raising a later email written by Coroneos, Bannon said the IIA chief had written the end result would be that AFACT "would have an insurmountable practical problem in seeking to persuade ISPs to enforce their terms of agreement".

"No," replied Coroneos, "not the terms of the agreement, but the policy push for ISPs to implement the practice of terminating alleged infringing accounts. So it was in response to the policy proposals from MIPI and AFACT. It was only in response to those policy proposals that we were examining this opportunity." Former director of the IIA and general counsel for Verizon Business, Mary Jane Salier hatched the plan, said Coroneos.

At the close of yesterday's proceedings, Justice Cowdroy said he would make a decision on whether to allow the IIA's submission on Thursday, when court resumed.

On the witness stand, Coroneos defended the legitimacy of the IIA's submission because it offered a "different perspective" on the laws contested in the hearing and because it viewed the battle as a "test case" which may lead to proceedings against its other ISP members.

"Perspective adds nothing new," said Bannon, reminding Justice Cowdroy that for the IIA's submission to be acceptable under the amicus curiae rule, it had to offer something new to those already made by iiNet.

The IIA's legal counsel, Clayton Utz barrister, Stephen Burley SC, said the IIA wanted to address the question of the role of AFACT's breach notifications and whether that in conjunction with an ISP's inaction amounted to authorisation of copyright infringement.

"That's of great significance to the industry," said Burley, adding that the notifications, if construed this way, would be "unilateral determinations" but were just allegations.

Countering the argument's novelty in the proceedings, Bannon retorted: "I assure you Mr Burley that point has been made."

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Attorney-General Cameron Dick said it was already an offence to obtain card details by skimming an ATM or EFTPOS machine with a device but new measures would strengthen those laws. Under the amendments, possessing card-skimming devices — such as laptops, mobile phones, cameras or Bluetooth and other technology — for the purpose of obtaining or dealing with identification information would attract a maximum three-year jail term.

"There are some aspects of the criminal code that arguably could be used to criminalise that sort of behaviour," he said. "We want to put it beyond doubt, beyond question."

Mr Dick said to prevent the mere possession of common items becoming unlawful, the offence would require proof of an unlawful purpose. Police Commissioner Bob Atkinson welcomed the new laws, saying they would allow the seizure of criminal equipment and prosecute criminal intent.

He said the crime was sophisticated and skimming equipment — bought via the internet — was difficult for the public to detect.

"There is a degree of skill and expertise in fitting this equipment to an ATM of course that wouldn't be within the domain of the average criminal," he said.

"It's very cleverly done in the sense that once it's done I defy anyone really to look at an ATM, particularly at night time, and say this looks like it's been modified."

Fraud squad Detective Inspector Jason Saunders said it took just 30 seconds to fit a card-skimming devise to an ATM and less than that to steal information from cards through EFTPOS in a business's backroom.

The laws will be in place by the first quarter of next year.

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Lawal Adewale Nurudeen was sentenced to 19 years in prison and ordered to repay the woman. On Monday, Nigeria's anti-graft agency said about $US9,300 ($A10,061) that had been gathered so far would be returned.

Nigerian authorities say the 28-year-old man presented himself as a Briton working in Nigeria for a multinational company. Nurudeen told the 56-year-old woman he was a widower whose wife and only child had died in a car accident.

Authorities say a few weeks later he called the woman, introducing himself as a doctor and saying her "fiance" needed money for medical treatment following an accident.

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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.

Wright and Rolfe declined to comment.

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