News

A bill outlawing spyware is likely to go before Parliament as soon as September.

In a surprise move the first chief of the Australian High Tech Crime Centre (AHTCC), Alastair MacGibbon has quit his post after 18 months and will trade in his federal agent’s badge to become the Australian director of trust and safety for multibillion dollar flea market, eBay.

Local government officials in Munich approved Wednesday a plan for rolling out the Linux operating system and other open source applications in more than 14,000 city administration computers.

The IT security of Australian Web-hosting providers has come under serious question, with more than 30 state and local government Web sites defaced in the last six months – including the homepages of two locally hosted foreign diplomatic missions and the highly sensitive NSW Casino Control Board.

Microsoft’s relentless product support lifecycle is forcing users to seek out alternatives as upgrades add little business value.

Former Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry director of policy Karen Curtis has been named by the government as Australia's second Privacy Commissioner and will take up her post of July 12.

The Victorian government's newly appointed chief technical officer Tony Aitkenhead is standing firm and refusing to buckle to demands from industry body Open Source Victoria (OSV) to adopt ACT-style open source procurement legislation.

Public record institutions across Australia and New Zealand will spend more than $6 million establishing a massive digital library that will be used as an international standards benchmark.

The Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC) is working to establish a national grid to integrate eight supercomputing facilities around the country.

More than 2.5 million Queenslanders could soon become a walking database of personal details and private information should the introduction of a 'smartcard' driver's licence be given the green light.

The federal government has quietly let loose its ICT sourcing guide for commonwealth departments and agencies in the biggest shake-up of government ICT procurement strategy since the damning Humphries report into whole of government IT outsourcing.

Privacy advocates and some lawmakers are pushing a debate over potential privacy abuses from the growing use of radio frequency identification chips as huge retailers such as Wal-Mart Stores move toward large-scale use of the technology.

Having faced high-profile antitrust cases in both the U.S. and European Union (E.U.), Microsoft may not immediately spring to mind as governments' favored friend. So it is perhaps not surprising that the software giant has waged a quiet campaign in recent months to change its image from that of monopolist to "good corporate citizen."

A top official of Microsoft last week claimed that governments that support open source software are not helping build a viable software ecosystem in their communities.

Telstra is sending 450 software jobs to India as part of its outsourcing agreement with IBM Global Services.

The Public Record Office of Victoria (ProV) has announced it will develop and roll out a centralized digital records archive for the entire Victorian government.

China's first direct connection to the Internet was established 10 years ago this week. Through a series of feature articles, this six-page report looks back at how the world’s largest nation got connected to the Net, takes a look at the key players, the role of the government and what lies ahead.

The sale of Telstra will not proceed until the 2006/07 financial year, according to federal Budget papers released this week.

Not content with the announcement of a $50million IT services and infrastructure deal with Woodside Energy, fledgling IT services outsourcer Hewlett-Packard (HP) has revealed it will gun hard for the public sector in the wake of the break up of large cluster agreements.

In a scorched earth budget that has spent $8.39 billion of surplus taxation revenue to appease voters, the federal government will spend more money than ever on new technology to nail down security - and new security to nail down technology.