Category: Technology

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Conflict of interest: ABC caught changing online story

The ABC has been caught out changing an online news report after iTWire pointed out that the report in question — about Thursday’s Q+A program — contained no mention of the fact that Alastair MacGibbon, the chief technology officer of security shop CyberCX, is currently providing advice to Medibank Group, a company which recently suffered a devastating network attack.

[This story was originally published at itwire.com]

MacGibbon was given a platform to tout his wares on the ABC’s Q+A program on Thursday with only a fleeting mention of the fact that his firm is now advising Medibank how to deal with its ransomware attack and subsequent data leak. Continue reading “Conflict of interest: ABC caught changing online story”

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Venturing into the world of external hosting

This morning, for the first time in nearly 18 years, I did not run apt-get update on my server to look for any software updates. The reason is, I can’t. There is no server; it was decommissioned on Saturday, a decision that was forced on me. I have hosted my domains myself ever since I bought them.

Yes, the government forced me to do it. Pardon me while I take a rather circuitous route to explain.

Australia is in the laborious process of rolling out a broadband network across the nation; due to political wrangling, the rollout has been something like the Shakespearean drama The Comedy of Errors.
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Gates: profit should not be the only motive. Yes, he said it

Bill Gates and his wife, Melinda, giving the commencement address at Stanford.
Bill Gates and his wife, Melinda, giving the commencement address at Stanford.
At the beginning of the year, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates was making pronouncements about poverty coming to an end. Now, he is advising graduates at Stanford that profit should not be the only motive for innovating.

What is it with this man? Having made billions by unloading poor-quality software on the world by using monopolistic practices, why doesn’t he just buy an island somewhere, disappear into obscurity and stop his malign influence on others?

Or why not follow the example of fellow co-founder Paul Allen who has been quiet for most of his adult life?
Continue reading “Gates: profit should not be the only motive. Yes, he said it”

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The death of free-to-air television

A FEW months before Christmas 2005, the UK’s biggest electronics retailer, Currys, announced that it would not be stocking VCRs that year. It was one of the earlier announcements of the approaching death of what was a staple in many households worldwide.

By the end of the 2008, the VCR was well and truly gone. JVC, one of the major brands, made its announcement about shutting down its manufacturing of the gadget at that time.

In its place has come the hard-disk recorder, which also affords the user the option of burning recorded material to DVD or, more recently, to Blu-Ray. Technologies come and go in this manner.
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Is this where Fox News got its slogan?

FOX News is now the most widely watched television channel in the US. One cannot call it a news channel because most of what it dispenses is right-ring propaganda.

It is doubtful whether it would spread to the extent it has in any other country. But in the US, lots of people are poorly educated and unable to tell fact from fiction.

Hence there seems to be a logical reason for Fox’s financial success.clean_and_balanced

Continue reading “Is this where Fox News got its slogan?”

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Stupid is as stupid does

Sent from my iPad. Sent from my iPhone.

These are two of the most stupid lines you encounter at the end of an email or a text message these days. They serve the valuable purpose of informing you that the sender of the message has purchased one of these devices from the Apple Computer Corporation and is using it.

That’s certainly newsworthy enough for you to know about it, isn’t it?
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British traders being disadvantaged by pathetic mail service

BRITAIN’S Royal Mail service is royal no longer. Indeed, one could question whether it is a mail service at all, it takes so long to deliver material for which people have paid. At times deliveries do not take place at all.

This comes at an unfortunate time for a country which was once known for its efficiency. The number of people buying things across borders has soared with the development of the world-wide web and if things are not delivered in time, then traders risk losing customers.

Nobody will come back to a trader who cannot send his goods across in time. This is unlikely to be the fault of the trader but that does not bother the increasingly self-centred customer.
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Smartphones. How about dumbphones?

SMARTPHONE. Nice word – is the phone meant to be the smart one or does it make the user smarter? Or is it the case that the phone increases the chances of error to the extent that people do tend to make more errors?

There is a sense of arrogance evident when people use smartphones, forgetting that if they are stupid then they will end up doing stupid things.

Any computer can only be programmed by human beings. Humans are prone to make errors. And those errors will reflect themselves in the way computer programs behave.
Continue reading “Smartphones. How about dumbphones?”