Stories by Julian Bajkowski

ACA set to ban sat-nav jammers

The Australian Communications Authority (ACA) appears set to ban radio navigation satellite service (RNSS) jammers, including global positioning system (GPS) jammers after releasing a background paper on the subject last week.

Yahoo's local Overture aims to threaten Google, LookSmart

IT and e-commerce managers should keep an especially close eye on what their marketing departments are up to over the next six months, as horse-trading in the commercial Internet search-and-query space intensifies with US paid-for search listing vendor Overture setting up shop in Australia.

Tenix gets busy to harvest defence goodwill

Defence grade IT security vendor Tenix Datagate will reposition its business as a US- and UK-centric operation in an effort to expand sales and leverage Australia's most favourable status with its military partners in the wake of Australian operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Users cranky at slow fix

Fallout in the wake of the W32.Blaster worm outbreak has seen recriminations fly from customers of antivirus vendors that virus definition updates came too late and that Microsoft-issued patches are problematic at best.

Anti-US hackers deface Australian government site

An Australian government Web site has been revealed as another victim of Sunday night's Web defacement spree by hacker group The Ghost Boys, with the URLs acn.gov.au and cultureandrecreation.gov.au hijacked to show anti-US messages.

SCO war of attrition descends to farce

Source Wars, Episode 7. The intellectual property battle over who really owns what lies inside the Linux source code is primed to develop into a full-scale legal orgy, as Linux vendor Red Hat filed suit in Delaware last week alleging SCO is conducting an "unfair, untrue and deceptive campaign…to harm Red Hat's…operating system". Red Hat is demanding a jury trial, and the move immediately follows IBM's legal counter-attack on SCO.

Ghostly defacers get political

LG Electronics' Australian Web site has become the latest victim of an apparently political hacking group known as the Ghost Boys. LG's site lge.com.au is carrying an anti-US slogan. The site was still defaced at 08:00hrs Australian EST and carries the words "DEFACED BY The Ghost Boys UssA sux! Viva La Resistance! greetz to DkD[||".

Spy in the sky test for information superiority

The deployment of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) over the Solomon Islands has quietly ushered in the first true, home-grown operational test for Australia's Network Centric Warfare (NCW) capability.

IT employers shun agencies and go direct

Tentative signs of life appear to be emerging on the IT jobs front; however, it appears employers are cutting employment agencies out of the loop and recruiting directly.

BI mergers build mega vendors

Customer demand for standardised business intelligence solutions and better integration of performance management tools is driving rapid consolidation in the business intelligence sector.

Wireless authentication standards stymie market

Lack of interoperability security and agreement on standards will continue to see a moribund market for enterprise-grade wireless LAN solutions as prospective customers resist hitching their wagons to proprietary wireless standards, says industry analyst Meta Group.

Lawyer warns about surrendering to SCO

In the latest episode of world's most popular IT source code soap opera, analyst firm Gartner is recommending that Linux users contact SCO to find out how much they may or may not owe. Australian lawyers are having none of it.

Card skimmers face bank's non stop clout

To beat the burgeoning illegal trade of card skimming, banks need faster review capabilities of ATMs POS and remote banking transactions, a Canadian banking executive told an OzTUG conference in Sydney last week*.

ACA cracks whip as Telstra complaints double

A doubling of complaints to the Telecommunication Industry Ombudsman (TIO) about dodgy debt collection practices over the last three months has seen the Australian Communication Authority impose strict new conditions on carriers over the way they sell off their debt.

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