Reporters Sans Frontièrs (Reporters Without Borders for Press Freedom) have added Australia to the “Under Surveillance List” because of Senator Conroy’s determination to censor the Internet. Even though members of his own Labor Party (how can you trust a political party who misspell their name), most notably Senator Kate Lundy whose motto shows her understanding [...]

AGIMO’s policy and planning division general manager Graham Fry told a Senate Estimates Committee hearing that scoping the potential for a platform change could cost more than it saves.
“Agencies are obliged to consider value for money on each occasion they apply a software,” he said.
“That means considering value for money between the alternatives of open [...]

It has been an interesting 7 days for the computer “geeks” and early adopters. Windows 7 was released with much fanfare and hype over the built-in security. Canonical released the latest Ubuntu 9.10 on 29 October with a range of upgrades. Of course this has meant a couple of busy days as I copy all [...]

Software Freedom Day was a great success. I was assisted at the Computer Fair by my eldest daughter and her boyfriend and we managed to give away nearly 100 OpenEducationDisc DVDs and 50 Ubuntu 9.04 CDs. We had a PC running Windows 7 Professional and all of the software on the SFD2009 OpenEducationDisc so people [...]

We’re nearly to Software Freedom Day 2009! I will be down at the Computer Fair on Saturday, 19 September, giving away Ubuntu 9.04 CDs and a special OpenEducationDisc DVD. There are some extra goodies on the DVD I’ll have a Windows 7 Professional PC running the software from the DVD, so you can [...]

A recent presentation at Blackhat USA 2009 detailed a new “bootkit” that could be used to infect all versions of  Microsoft Windows from Windows XP to the soon to be released Windows 7, including Server 2003 and Server 2008. It does this by infecting the Master Boot Record (MBR) and is then even able to [...]

One of the problems with the rapid advances in open source software is keeping up with the latest releases. The most popular open source software is Mozilla Firefox, the cross platform web browser. I use Firefox on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X because of the speed, security, flexibility and wide range of add-ons.
Ubuntu 9.04, [...]

I have booked a table at the Computer Fair held at Bathurst Showgrounds on Saturday 19 September 2009. I will be giving away Ubuntu 9.04 CDs and the latest OpenDisc CDs as well as giving demonstrations of Ubuntu Linux and the OpenDisc software on Windows. This is actually the “official” day so I won’t be [...]

Maintaining a network of Windows PCs is time consuming, sure there are steps you can take to automate some tasks but you still need to check that everything has been done. One of these steps in a corporate environment is Windows Server Update Services (WSUS). It’s not a good acronym, Windows SUS[pect] but [...]

Earlier this week many IT news reporters were frothing about Microsoft changing colours and attitude to Linux – Microsoft releases source code for Linux-on-Windows. Well that code has been quietly dropped because it violates the Gnu Public Licence required for code in the Linux Kernel – Microsoft’s Linux Kernel Code Drop Result of GPL Violation! [...]