A musician in Germany sued an Internet user after his home network was used to download music illegally. When he successfully proved that he had been on holiday at the time the court in Karlsruhe fined him $164 because there was no security password on his wireless access point.
“Private users are obligated to check whether [...]

In late November last year Optus rang up saying that my contract was just about up and asked if I was going to renew my contract. The phone caller offered a new Nokia 6710 Navigator as part of the 2-year contract. After telling them that there was still 3 months to they offered to waive [...]

It hasn’t been a good fortnight with a close relative passing away quickly from terminal cancer. The morning of the funeral I got a text message – no one could log in at TAFE, the Xserve was down. I ducked in and the server wouldn’t boot. There was nothing I could do so I told [...]

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 [...]

There is an interesting article on CRN (a website about IT trends and news) trying to suggest that Harvey Norman is not happy about selling netbooks because of the low margins. Harvey Norman of course denies this but another IT retailer is complaining about the low margins ($35 – $50) the low cost netbooks give [...]

My teenage daughters decided that they would throw their grandfather (my father-in-law) a surprise birthday party. It was at the local lawn bowling club with about 60 guests, including a few friends granddaughters who ae aged from 2 – 8 years old. Like lots of people do at at parties I took along a digital [...]

I have an ADSL2+ Internet connection at home into my office and I’ve been with Internode for over 6 years now. They have a great support desk located in Adelaide and provide a great mix of “unmetered” content including ABC iView, numerous Internet Radio stations from around the world, an FTP server with plenty of [...]

Computers consist of two components, hardware and software. The way to tell the difference is that hardware can break and software can be corrupted These can be related but they usually occur at the most inopportune time, just before planned upgrades, just after warranty expires or just when a report or other document [...]

Well, those running Windows anyway. The Windows 2003 Server that acts as a domain controller for the Windows network that allows students to login in the lab at TAFE decided that it would randomly “lose” the drive (a single partition on a single drive) used for storing student data. In fact it would lose the [...]

I’m still getting calls about Windows XP and even Windows Vista systems slowing down noticeable over the last few weeks. Any Windows XP systems with only 512 MB RAM and Windows Vista with 1 GB RAM, particularly if any of this system RAM is also used as “shared” video RAM. It seems that the minimum [...]