Following on from the leaking of the site blacklist, the inclusion of legal sites on the list, and the scaling back of the size of the banned list to be used for the trial, this is another demonstration of the lack of forethought and clear goals for this policy.

The news has been roundly condemned by Coalition and Green party members.

Read the full story here

Making the announcement today, Mr Rudd described the $43 billion fibre-to-the-home scheme as the single largest infrastructure project in the country’s history and said it would create 25,000 jobs a year during construction, with 37,000 in the busiest year of construction.

“It is the most ambitious, far-reaching, and long-term nation-building infrastructure project ever undertaken by an Australian government,” said Mr. Rudd.

The network will connect 90 per cent of homes to a network with speeds of up to 100 megabits per second, with the remainder connected at 12 megabits a second.

The Government would hold a majority share in the company, which will also be part-owned by the private sector, and will invest $43 billion into the project over eight years.

The Government will then gradually sell off it’s share of the company five years after the project is completed.

Mr Rudd said the company would inject a “new competitive force” into the telecommunications market.

“Today we draw a line under a decade of policy area and neglect,” he said.

“This solves once and for all the core problem created when the previous prime minister privatised Telstra a decade ago without ever resolving the conflict of a private monopoly owning the network infrastructure and dominating the retail market.”

Mr Rudd said the broadband tender process was being scrapped because none of the submitted bids offered value for money to the taxpayer, but said anyone was open to invest in the new company.

Telstra was dropped from the bidding process last December after the Government rejected its proposal.

Down them all is a Firefox add-on and it is a download manager/accelerator. The website claims up to 400% faster downloads. It’s a bit like download accelerator pro in that it uses up maximum bandwidth when downloading large files.

I used Down Them All to download a few 700mb files, including the Ubuntu operating system from an Optus mirror. The results were excellent: using a 1.5mbps connection, I was averaging about 150kb/sec throughout the download.

I have since used it to download 5gig of data today, and it has saved me plenty of time.

What’s more, it integrates itself, so when you right click and save as, DTA will automatically appear as one of the options. Selecting it will open the download manager.

DTA allows for easy management of your downloads, including: pausing, resuming, limiting, and prioritising your downloads.

DTA can be found via: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/201

Guest post by Raja Devanathan of MrFeedback.net

OVer 10,000 thousand public servants were locked out of their computers in May after the NT government’s network was hacked and employee details and passwords deleted. Services affected included Hospitals, Prisons and the Supreme Court.

David Mcintosh has been charged with 13 computer related offences – with a maximum possible jail term of 10 years.

The prosecution alleges that the man was a disgruntled employee of a contract company that conducted IT services for the government computer system. It is alleged he used a colleague’s log-in and password to access the network and cause the widespread disruption.

After a two day committal hearing, Magistrate Sue Oliver today ordered McIntosh stand trial in the Supreme Court.

He has been remanded in custody and the case has been adjourned until December. 

Pop-ups not shown, but Advertisers billed?

It seems like Chrome’s new Pop-Up hider still loads the Pop-Up ads, but doesn’t present them to the viewer.

This is somewhat different to how traditional Pop-Up blockers work, in that they actually prevent the ad from loading. Our understanding of that approach is that this means the Advertiser wouldn’t be charged, as their ad is not loading.

The situation with Chrome may well be different, as the ad is being loaded but not shown, which could lead to advertisers still being charged for Pop-Ups that no one will ever see.

For Pop-Up haters that’s fine, but if true and if Chrome grabs a significant portion of the Browser market,  then this could well lead to changes in advertising methods.
 

Google promotes Firefox, oops!

In a very public spirited gesture, it seems that Google (via YouTube at least) is still advertising Firefox, even after the launch of Chrome.

Whether this is an oversight on Google’s part, or a requirement of their agreement with Mozilla we don’t know. Is Google still the default search engine bundled with Firefox installs, as per their agreement (which was re-negotiated earlier this year)? If so, how much longer will this arrangment last?
 

Thanks to Raja of MrFeedback.net for the heads up about the Firefox ad in Youtube.

We have seen privacy introduced in Internet Explorer 8 (beta 2 version) & Google Chrome, and Firefox has recently announced that private browsing will be incorporated into their browser in version 3.1 – currently you can get private browsing mode by downloading the Stealther 1.06 plugin available through Download.com, and there are similar solutions available from Mozilla’s add on website.

The concept behind Privacy mode is simple – any record of your browsing history is discarded once you close the browser session in IE or Google Chrome. Firefox plan to take this feature a few steps further and will have:

• no autofill for passwords
• all cookies will be discarded after browsing
• all downloads in Download Manager will be discarded after browsing
• Unlike IE, you won’t even be able to tell if you’re surfing in Private Mode. IE has a neon indicator to announce the activation of private mode. Firefox will keep the fact that you’re surfing in private mode, well..private. Nice feature.

Private surfing is useful, despite the obvious concern that it will assist people to do things on the internet which are questionable. As internet shopping becomes the norm, it will enable people to keep gift purchases, for example, and other activities private. It’s good that browsers are installing this feature, despite it inevitably being misused by a percentage of people.

I’d love to hear any comments or feedback on Privacy mode and Browser security in general.

Raja Devanathan
Founder of MrFeedback.net

If you would like to guest post or have a post/review written, please get in touch via our Contact page. Standard rates for paid posts/reviews can be found on the Advertising page.

The first vulnerability was found on Wednesday by researcher Aviv Raff, who discovered that the browser was open to a highly-publicised ‘carpet bombing’ attack first found in Safari. The Safari hole was patched earlier this year, but because Chrome uses Apple’s WebKit software, the flaw has reappeared in the Google browser.

A proof of concept page was published demonstrating how an attacker could embed malicious code on a web page and then use it to conduct a remote malware installation with a separate specially-crafted Java applet.

Then researchers Rishi Narang and JanDeMooij posted separate reports of a vulnerability in the browser’s chromium.dll component that was exposed through the browser’s URL bar. The flaw can be made to cause an application crash, though neither report mentioned the possibility of remote code execution.

Squid is a popular open source web proxy server and web caching software. It has a wide variety of uses, from speeding up a web server by caching repeated requests, to caching web, DNS and other network lookups for groups of people sharing network resources and (which is of most interest to us for the purposes of this post) by aiding security via traffic filtering. It was originally inteneded for Unix/Linux but has been ported to a number of platforms.

Squid has powerful ACL (access control list). The primary use of the ACL system is to implement simple access control. This can be used to deny a user from accessing particular site.

In order to do this we have to edit the Squid configuration file.

e.g. # vi /etc/squid/squid.conf

Search for `Access Controls’ and append the following lines (in this example we are blocking access to ‘nastysite.com’):
acl badsite dstdomain .nastysite.com
http_access deny badsite

Save and close the file, and then restart Squid:
# /etc/init.d/squid restart

 If required, you can specify more than one site to be blocked:
acl badsite dstdomain .nastysite.com  .anothernastysite.com
http_access deny badsite

You can also use regex expressions to block access to more than one website. for example,  if you would like to deny access for any sites where the URL contains the word “twitter”, use the following ACL lines:
acl badsitegroup url_regex -i twitter
http_access deny badsitegroup

More information on Squid commands can be found at: http://wiki.squid-cache.org/FrontPage

Beta 1 of IE 8 was released in March, but that was aimed at letting web developers take a first look at the new browser. This latest version is aimed at a broader consumer audience.

Although there is no official release date for IE8 as of yet, Microsoft has pledged to deliver more regular updates of Internet Explorer, whose lead has been chipped away by Mozilla’s Firefox browser. It released Internet Explorer 7 in October 2006.

The latest version of Internet Explorer boasts features found in Firefox 3, including a “smart” address bar that remembers and redirects user to website addresses they have visited before.

IE 8 will also offer a mode called “InPrivate Browsing,” which ensures that history, temporary internet files and cookies are not recorded on a user’s PC.

A new security feature that allows a user to block content coming from third-parties trying to track and aggregate the user’s online behavior will also be available.

Microsoft has also updated features such as “Activities” which allows a user to use information found on one page (e.g. an address) in conjunction with online services such as mapping, without leaving the original site.

The latest test release of Internet Explorer 8 can be found at www.microsoft.com/ie8

Examples of Ping

Windows
ping google.com

Pinging google.com [64.223.167.99] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 64.223.167.99: bytes=32 time=37ms TTL=57
Reply from 64.223.167.99: bytes=32 time=37ms TTL=57
Reply from 64.223.167.99: bytes=32 time=75ms TTL=57
Reply from 64.223.167.99: bytes=32 time=40ms TTL=57

Ping statistics for 64.223.167.99:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 37ms, Maximum = 75ms, Average = 47ms

Linux
ping -c 5 itresource.com.au

PING itresource.com.au(203.88.118.177) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from kookaburra.cbr.hosting-server.com.au (203.88.118.177): icmp_seq=1 ttl=57 time=36.6 ms
64 bytes from kookaburra.cbr.hosting-server.com.au (203.88.118.177): icmp_seq=2 ttl=57 time=36.5 ms
64 bytes from kookaburra.cbr.hosting-server.com.au (203.88.118.177): icmp_seq=3 ttl=57 time=37.0 ms
64 bytes from kookaburra.cbr.hosting-server.com.au (203.88.118.177): icmp_seq=4 ttl=57 time=36.9 ms
64 bytes from kookaburra.cbr.hosting-server.com.au (203.88.118.177): icmp_seq=5 ttl=57 time=36.6 ms

— itresource.com.au ping statistics —
5 packets transmitted, 5 received, 0% packet loss, time 9000ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 35.918/36.638/37.106/0.400 ms

Mac OS X
ping -c 10 itresource.com.au

PING kookaburra.cbr.hosting-server.com.au (203.88.118.177): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 203.88.118.177: icmp_seq=0 ttl=53 time=40.019 ms
64 bytes from 203.88.118.177: icmp_seq=1 ttl=53 time=47.502 ms
64 bytes from 203.88.118.177: icmp_seq=2 ttl=53 time=43.208 ms
64 bytes from 203.88.118.177: icmp_seq=3 ttl=53 time=50.851 ms
64 bytes from 203.88.118.177: icmp_seq=4 ttl=53 time=46.556 ms

— ping statistics —
5 packets transmitted, 5 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 40.019/45.575/50.851/3.588 ms

Useful links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ping

http://www.computerhope.com/jargon/p/ping.htm