The War on Satire

It's good to see the Australian High Tech Crime Centre fighting the "war on satire". It was undoubtedly important that they stomped on Richard Neville's johnhowardpm.org site before comedy sleeper cells across the country leapt out to do their evil deeds.

Just to show the battle aren't over, the comedians of Melbourne IT, notably CTO Bruce Tonkin claimed "that particular agency has damaged their credibility". Like all good comedians, Bruce has an element of truth in his spiel. The Feds have damaged their credibility, but nowhere to the degree Melbourne IT has.

The message is clear: No Australian can have confidence that Melbourne IT will not cut their website off without notice. All it takes is some nebulous "advice" from a government department.

The question remains why Melbourne IT didn't check the site was falsely registered themselves. Richard Neville claims he paid for the registration by credit card, so it would have been easy for them to check the name of the registration and the provided contact details. Melbourne IT's jumping the gun shows that their priority isn't to look after their customers.

A few more bigger and important questions are also raised by this. How many other Australian registrars would act without question on "advice" from the High Tech Crime Centre? Also, does the AFP have so many resources it can spend time investigating every suspicious domain registration, or does it only jump when it receives "advice" from an irritated drone in the PM's office.

The lesson though for Australian website owners is clear: Unless you absolutely need an address in the .au space, register it overseas. Not only will you save money, but you'll be a little less prone to the whims of Melbourne IT and the High Tech Crime Centre.

Windows Vista running late. Surprised?

Microsoft's announcement to delay the release of Vista might have come as a surprise to the stock market but it's no surprise to those of us who remember the releases of Windows 95 and XP. Microsoft never release things like this on schedule. Experienced Microsoft watchers take any schedule from MS with a very large grain of salt.

More of a worry is Jim Allchin's reported comments that the delay was due to "performance, drivers, testing and security". Gee is that all? This is an operating system that was due for release at the end November and they haven't got this stuff under control in March.

This is more reason why early adopters should avoid Vista, or any other OS release, until it's 1.1 (or Service Pack One in Micro-speak.)

It's a bit of blow to retailers and manufacturers who were looking at Vista giving a spark to the pre-Christmas shopping rush, but for those of us that support these things, we're breathing a sigh of relief that something severely buggy isn't going to be rushed to market.

Hello from Planet Canberra

Who'd want to be an Australian voter? First the Liberal Party enhances it's small government credentials with 300 pages of regulations to help make employment laws simpler. Not to be outdone, the Labor opposition decide to ban Internet porn.

The Internet porn ban is an old, and easy target, who doesn't want to protect the children from the pornographers of the net? The Liberals toyed with this idea some years back and, finding it too difficult, decided to setup the Net Alert and strong armed the ISPs into the "Ladybird" program. Both are good, if under publicised, services with useful resources.

Kim Beazley's dopey proposal has all the hallmarks of an "idea" where the only thought involved was to get the attention of the morning radio talk shows. For this proposal to work it requires the Australian Broadcasting Authority and to licence the international Internet gateways. This would only cost a few hundred million, another hundred or so public servant and few more phone books of regulations.

Of course, when it comes to issuing phone books of regulations Kim and his gang of aging factional warriors have nothing on the current mob holding the keys to the ministerial dunnies. The Liberals have announced another telephone book of regulations to help "guide" us through the maze of their new workplace laws, all of which can be changed on the whim of the minister. I guess we small business owners should be thankful the low taxing, red tape cutting, small business friendly Liberals are in power.

Firefox 2 alpha released

For those who seriously live on the bleeding edge of technology, the next version of Firefox is available for download as an alpha release. While we're great fans of Firefox at PC Rescue, we don't trust beta software, let alone alpha releases. We'll leave that to people like Charles Wright at Bleeding Edge who actually looks forward to the pain involved.

Apparently the Mozilla people are less than happy with this being publicised. Their view is this is just another nightly release as part of the software and they'll announce an official alpha when they are good and ready.

Continuing the theme of early adopters, Slashdot reports the recall of nearly 12,000 plasma screens. The linked USA Today article goes on to point out a whole list of recent high tech snafus. The point being (I think) that technology companies are rushing products to market.

There's certainly more than an element of truth here. One of the banes of running an IT support company is the amount of software and hardware that fails to come anywhere near meeting what was promised. The competitive pressures seems to favour rushing new stuff to market, regardless of any bugs in the product.

The rapidly changing market also messes up retailers. I was chatting to a salesman at Harris Technology about this last week, he was complaining about the confusing and rapid changes in the desktop and laptop market. You can't be too optimistic with your stock levels when the manufacturers are going to supersede everything within two months.

I guess another issue is just how long the manufacturers keep spare parts for these things. That's another reason why a three-year manufacturers warranty is essential for state of the art equipment. At least that way the manufacturer carries some risk.

Windows Vista: A sense of Deja-Vu?

An article in today's ZDNet had me thinking how often I've heard that the next version of Windows will be more secure. I'm sure if I really exercised my mind I'd remember Microsoft saying something similar about DOS 6.22 or Windows 3.11. EVERY version has been marketed as more secure even when they've left gaping holes open across every platform.

The ZDNet article has some strange claims, does Joris Evers seriously believe more than 75% of Windows boxes are infected with Spyware? While spyware is the biggest security threat to Windows users, grossly exaggerating the problem does nobody any good. The real figure is probably around 15-20%, which is still an outrageous number.

Another weird comment is "spyware has been able to haunt users of XP." I guess Joris doesn't know anyone running earlier versions of Windows. It was the difficulty of cleaning spyware from Win9x boxes which lead us to declare the death of Windows 98 some months back. A badly infected ME system is in reformat territory, which is pretty well an admission of total defeat from an experienced tech.

Being younger than me, Joris probably doesn't remember the success of Microsoft's earlier attempt at bundling an anti-virus with their operating systems. It doesn't fill me with confidence when the MS Antispyware tool is choosing to ignore some of the notorious spyware programs. While Defender and OneCare will help, they won't be putting Symantec and McAfee out of business yet.

The biggest plus for Vista is that users will no longer be running as administrators by default. This should have been done with Windows XP and if MS had have done this, the spyware plague would probably not have happened. I suspect the reason they didn't was because so many MS apps require admin rights.

If Vista does restrict users by default, then we'll see a lot of older programs not running. The problem we are going to see is some users will get used to giving Admin rights to every dialogue box that pops up. Worse, we'll probably see some vendors recommend changing user rights to administrator level.

This last point is why the average user needs to ignore all the hype about Vista. Even if it gets released on time, it will be this time next year at the earliest before we techs have figured out how to use it properly. The early adopters, as usual, will be our crash test dummies.