Conroy comes out swinging on Broadband

Communications minister Senator Stephen Conroy has laid the opposition’s broadband plans to ridicule in a fiery televised speech.

Though marked as an update to NBN construction progress, Conroy used his address before the National Press Club in Canberra on Tuesday to target opposition communications spokesman Malcolm Turnbull and what the Government claims is a negative and inconsistent approach from the coalition.

Accompanied by new adviser and telco expert, David Havyatt, Senator Conroy's speech marked a significant change in tone for the communications minister who has, to date, made small criticisms of the Turnbull's alternative policy but neglected to address it head-on.

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Windows XP turns 10

Ten years ago today Windows XP first hit retail shelves, and it was still the most popular operating system in the world until the beginning of this month.

However the sun is finally setting on the stalwart OS that has powered countless home and business PCs (it crossed the 400 million mark way back in 2006), as it recently slipped to number two -- right behind it's youngest brother Windows 7.

And it's about time too; XP was, and still is a great OS. But as the title states, it is now beyond ancient (2 years is typically a dinosaur in the tech world). It's time to move on and upgrade to Windows 7 now (trust me you will not regret it).

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Asus Transform Prime Tablet Is Coming

Asus' Transformer Prime, the company's next-generation Transformer tablet.

It was practically a given that the company would bust out a second edition, and now the particulars are starting to take shape. It'll be based on NVIDIA's next-gen quad-core Tegra 3 chip, and will share the same lid design as the Zenbook.

In laymans terms. It's beautiful to look at. And should easily outperform any other tablet currently on the market.

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Microsoft no received royalties on half of all android sales

Microsoft's general counsel and deputy general counsel (Brad Smith and Horacio Gutierrez) have co-written a new blog entry detailing Microsoft's latest licensing achievement. Yesterday's broad cross-licensing agreement with Compal Electronics means that Microsoft has now negotiated licensing terms with the ODMs (original Device Manufacturers) that build over half the Android devices on the market.

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NBN Co names 28 new fibre locations

NBN Co has laid out its network construction plans for the next year, planning fibre rollouts to 28 new cities and towns across Australia.

Unfortunately no joy for the Sunshine Coast just yet.

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Microsoft nabs Samsung Android Royalties

Microsoft’s chief legal counsel has used a patent royalty deal it struck with smartphone giant Samsung to shoot down Google’s claim that patent enforcement will kill innovation.

The agreement will see Samsung pay royalties to Microsoft for its smartphones and tablets running Android, which should avoid the need for Samsung to alter its devices to escape similar litigation battles to those it faces with Apple.

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Apple Confirms October 4 iPhone Event

The October 4 iPhone event date has been confirmed by Apple, as has the rumored location of Apple's Cupertino campus. There's no question what the star of the event will be: the event is called, "Let's Talk iPhone."



Although it's expected that Apple will launch other products on October 4, in particular, it's the iPhone that will be the focus for consumers, tech gurus, and analysts.

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Kinect's New Trick To Be In The Operating Room?

The next proving ground for Microsoft's Kinect? It might not be where you expect. After taking over the living room and exciting gamers across the world, the Kinect has made the move to all sorts of other categories. Everything from making music videos to PC-based hacks have been seen, but for the most part, nothing on a professional level has surfaced. That's all changing now, as the Kinect slides over into the operating room. Doctor's at the Sunnybrook Health Sciences Center in Toronto, Canada are hoping that the Kinect could soon help them out during sophisticated surgeries.

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The Breaking the Rules on Google+ Gets you Google -

Google+ may be a brand-new service, but there has already been at least one case of a user breaking the rules and getting the banhammer.

Google, in compliance with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, requires its users to be at least 13 years old. Last week, Alex, a 10-year-old boy from the Netherlands, created an account on the Google+ social network. Google promptly responded with a punishment after he entered his date of birth.

In return for violating the terms of service for the social network, the boy was kicked off of all Google services, and, as his father wrote in a blog post, will have his account across all services deleted within a month unless he can provide some proof of being old enough to use the services.

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1000 days left for Windows XP Support

Microsoft has begun counting down the last 1000 days of support remainining for aging stalwart Windows XP as it urges companies to upgrade.

The software giant would stop supplying security patches and hotfixes for all versions of 11-year-old operating system on April 8, 2014, potentially making it vulnerable to issues that may arise after that time.

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Analysts Cast Doubt on Turnbull's NBN

Telco analysts have expressed caution on the Coalition's latest claims that it could provide a national broadband network faster than Labor's $35.9 billion project.

Opposition communications spokesman Malcolm Turnbull talked up the Coalition's broadband proposal at a Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA) lunch this week.

The Coalition's plan would include immediate cessation of the NBN build pending a six-month cost-benefit analysis of the network and possible alternatives.

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Vint Cerf calls for clarity in NBN cost data

Google chief internet evangelist Vint Cerf, credited in some quarters as the “founder of the internet”, has called on the Australian Government to provide a full and frank breakdown of the costs of building the National Broadband Network.

A detailed report on the costs, provided at the conclusion of the project, could greatly aid and inform attempts by other countries to build national network, Cerf said in a new interview.

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Facebook launches video chat with Skype

Facebook will integrate Skype video chat into its social networking service, striking a deal to cement its role as a hub for communications.

The agreement, announced by Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg at the company's Palo Alto, California, headquarters on Wednesday, deepens its cooperation with Microsoft, which is in the process of acquiring Skype for US$8.5 billion.

Zuckerberg said Facebook now has 750 million users. The new service, rolling out from on Wednesday, could be a huge boost for Skype, which currently has about 145 million regular users.

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Chrome lands 20% market share

According to new reports on web usage, one in five browsing sessions now happens with Chrome, with Microsoft's long-dominant Internet Explorer finally slipping before 50%. The information is provided by StatCounter, which is known for doing these sorts of reports every so often.

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FBI rack raid knocks 'tens' offline

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is staying mum on why it ripped out entire server racks from a US datacentre used by Swiss-based web host, DigitalOne.

The host emailed affected customers on Tuesday to advise that the disruption was due to the FBI confiscating three enclosures, according to the New York Times.

It claimed the FBI had seized servers relied on by “tens of clients” during its hunt for just one.

The FBI has not said who it was targeting in the raid, but a government official told the Times that the bureau had teamed up with the CIA and European cybercrime bureaus in pursuit of the Lulz Security group, responsible for a dozens of recent high profile attacks on corporations and government.

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Telstra seal $11b NBN Co deal

Telstra has finalised an $11 billion agreement with NBN Co and the Federal Government that would see the incumbent telco decommission its copper network and move fixed line broadband customers to the National Broadband Network as it is rolled out.

The agreement, finalised in an ASX announcement from Telstra this morning, comes a year after initially announced and following several delays in negotiations between the two broadband companies

Read more at www.itnews.com.au

No support for ISP filter in Cyber-Safety report

Plans by the Australian Government to introduce a mandatory ISP-level internet filter have suffered another blow with the release of the interim report of the Joint Select Committee on Cyber-Safety.

After reviewing arguments from both proponents of the cyber-safety measure and those opposed, the Committee declined to make any recommendations or endorse the policy in a chapter dedicated to discussion of the proposal.

Read more at www.itenews.com.au

Google Wins Race to 1 Billion Unique Visitors

According to Internet market research company comScore, Google websites welcomed more than a billion unique visitors around the globe in the month of May 2011, becoming the first Web property in the history of the Internet to reach such a milestone.

"In the past year, Google Sites has seen its audience grow 8 percent to eclipse the 1 billion threshold," comScore said in a blog post. "Microsoft Sites was the second largest Web property in May to reach more than 905 million visitors, followed by Facebook.com with 713.6 million visitors."

Read more at www.hothardware.com

NBN Could deliver 10 Gbps in five years

Australians connected to the National Broadband Network could receive peak speeds of up to 10 Gbps within five years through upgrades to the gigabit passive optical network (GPON) network, according to NBN Co.

Gary McLaren, chief technology officer at the government-owned network builder said that new wave division multiplexing (WDM) technology would increase the network's GPON capacity from 2.5Gbps available today to 40 Gbps.

Users could feasibly receive peak speeds of 10 Gbps – 100 times those promised today – depending on the load on their shared 32-premise GPON link, he said.

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Scientists break data transfer record

A newly developed data decoding technique has allowed German scientists to transmit a record 26 terabits of data on a single laser beam in one second.

Although it was only a quarter the record 109Tbps demonstrated on multi-core fibre connections in March, the new, single-source technique was expected to deliver efficiency and capacity gains.

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