INDONESIAN police called on computer hackers today to track down who was behind a website claiming responsibility for July 17 twin suicide bombings that killed seven people in the capital.

in brief Optus has blamed a spam attack on an email outage that occurred between late Wednesday and Thursday morning.

"We did have some issues on Wednesday evening and our engineers rebooted the email servers," a spokesperson told ZDNet.com.au.

Optus' IT security systems had detected an influx of spam directed towards its mail servers. Its engineers rebooted its email servers at around 10pm Wednesday night, the spokesperson said.

Customers had reported email services were timing out and that they could not log into their accounts, said the spokesperson. Services were restored at 10am yesterday, the spokesperson said.

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IF you find web jargon confusing today, spare a thought for those who were first introduced to it.

Offering a free clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux turned out not to be such a simple matter after all.

The CentOS project aims to reproduce Red Hat's tested, supported, and certified version of the operating system, without its per-server subscription fees. Because RHEL is open source software, it's theoretically possible for an outsider to select the same software packages, apply the same patches, and produce a version of the Linux product that works the same.

But several lead programmers in the project went public on Thursday with complaints that CentOS founder Lance Davis is threatening the project with his reclusive ways. They also raise the prospect of mutiny, in effect, if Davis doesn't respond.

"You seem to have crawled into a hole, and this is not acceptable," the programmers wrote. "Please do not kill CentOS through your fear of shared management of the project. Clearly the project dies if all the developers walk away."

Conventional proprietary software products are hardly immune to problems such as corporate owners going out of business or canceling products. But the CentOS situation shows that the informal, free-wheeling ways common in the open source realm can have their own pitfalls. To be fair, though, many open source projects also have formal controls such as foundations and governance committees.

The open letter, augmented by several individual blog postings, was published Thursday on the CentOS mailing list and Web site. Authors include Russ Herrold, Ralph Angenendt, Karanbir Singh, Tim Verhoeven, and several other members of the CentOS development team.

Davis didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

The authors object that Davis maintains sole control over the CentOS.org Internet domain and IRC chat channel. And Dag Wieers, who works on the security, Web, and infrastructure aspects of CentOS, is among those concerned about money paid to the project through Google AdSense ads, Web site sponsorship, and users' donations through PayPal.

"For at least three years people were donating money and sponsors were paying for Web site ads while the money was not flowing into the project. Where it went to I can only guess," he said in a blog post. "Once the financial issues are resolved, there is a lot of work to turn the project into a real community project that can release even when one person is out of office, that is owned by a foundation, and that makes the best use of the power of its the community."

"The project depends on one person in too many ways...a person who doesn't answer calls, isn't available as meetings, doesn't publish things he promised to do," added Angenendt. "As Lance hasn't answered requests regarding that over the last few months, the remaining team now has put a stop on that. For the moment all ads have been removed from Web site and wiki, and we are not accepting any PayPal donations anymore."

The CentOS developers also implied that the developers could pick up the project and move it elsewhere. "Please contact me, or any other signer of this letter at once, to arrange for the required information to keep the project alive at the 'centos.org' domain," Herrold said in the letter.

Open-source software is developed under licenses that permit others to share and modify the underlying source code. That means that, unlike with proprietary software whose rights holder doesn't grant permission, programmers with serious disagreements can "fork" software into a new project. That's a powerful freedom, but it can produce chaos when the resulting divergence means software users must choose among different incompatible versions of a project.

Big forks are rare, though. Dissatisfaction with the Mambo content management system led developers to spawn their own version, Joomla, in 2005. FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD all stem from the same BSD Unix roots. NeoOffice was spawned from the OpenOffice.org project, which initially didn't support Mac OS X gracefully. The GCC compiler, a software tool used to convert human-readable source code into machine-readable format, competed for a time with the EGCS fork starting in 1997, but the two projects merged again in 1999.

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Darwin-based IT services company CSG has announced plans to acquire Oracle consultant Delexian.

The buy still rested on contract execution which is expected within the next 14 days. There was no figure named for the deal. Certified Oracle advantage partner Delexian serves private and government customers in Perth, Melbourne and Canberra. CSG intends to integrate it into its enterprise services division and would use it as part of the expansion into the east coast market.

CSG CEO Denis Mackenzie said the acquisition built the company's Oracle capability and added to its client and skills base: "The Delexian acquisition positions CSG to provide a full range of enterprise software, solutions and services across the two dominant vendor markets; Microsoft and Oracle."

This is the second Oracle specialist CSG has bought in recent times. It also snapped up CingleVue, which provided Oracle services to customers in the education sector, in October last year.

In the same month, CSG expanded its horizons by buying Commander's contract portfolio. Although it lost some of them that had gone to tender before the acquisition, the company still won itself a foothold in the Canberra market. Two months earlier it had also acquired a printer fleet management firm.

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THE iPhone can be hacked, experts have discovered, and Apple has only two weeks to fix it.

Queensland's ICT industry is up in arms about a state government proposal to handle the recruitment of all IT contractors through one master vendor to drive down contracting costs.

I really think there'll be some blood on the walls on this one.

Source

The details on the proposal currently being put to industry have not yet been made completely clear, but the government has aired the idea in a presentation this week that current supplier panel arrangements be replaced by a master vendor that would draw on a database of contractors.

According to the government's presentation, the panels currently draw from the same pool of candidates and result in higher costs for suppliers, which is an increase in costs and an inconsistent experience when dealing with the government. The government pointed to figures that put upper-range wages for IT contractors at $338,430, a tick more than the Prime Minister at $330,000.

Despite those figures, the plan has the industry up in arms, especially as it flies in the face of the consultation the government has done in the market on the issue. The presentation saw some unhappy faces. "Both sides wouldn't look at each other. It was getting pretty vehement," one source said. "I really think there'll be some blood on the walls on this one."

Some think the proposal will reduce the quality of contractors brought in, others believe it will mean a migration of skilled workers out of the state. Many are waiting until the government clarifies issues before they speak for or against the proposal.

A report that the industry lobbying group, the IT Working Group, and the Queensland Government Procurement Office commissioned from Queensland-based analyst firm Longhaus to look into the government's engagement with the IT contracting industry did not recommend the model being proposed.

That type of model could be positive as it would form an industry standard, according to Longhaus' report, which has entered the public domain, yet the database could end up being just another place for contractors to list their services with specialist panels springing up as soon as skills couldn't be found in the database.

Longhaus found the rates charged by many companies were necessary to cover costs. "Industry perceptions surrounding excessive margin costs charged to government (as a percentage of daily rate charges), as a potential source of savings is unfounded. Contrarily, the 20 to 40 per cent charged by labour-hire or recruitment management companies, and the 50 to 100 per cent for consulting companies would appear to represent reasonable business practice and be commensurate with the cost of operation, value and risk mitigation provided by both sub-sectors within the ICT labour industry servicing the Queensland Government," the report said.

The problem, according to Longhaus, lay in the way the Queensland Government was engaging with the industry. Often the government would bring in a worker to do a job, who would then bring in more contractors in a snowballing effect that ends in the government bearing higher costs than it had planned.

Instead of the government bearing the risk for such projects, Longhaus believed it should forge deals with firms for a specific job, so that if the requirements for that job expand, it is the industry that bears the risk if more manpower was required than expected.

The government could also automate the renewal of the tenures for long-term contractors who are treated like public servants and employed by the government for years, but are contractors and are paid as such. Another recommendation was to have a standard engagement model instead of a variety of sanctioned panels, non-standard contracts and direct agency acquisition.

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Australia Post will no longer be accepting packages that contain lithium batteries by air.

The batteries have been classified as dangerous, leading the International Civil Aviation Organisation to enact more stringent controls. This follows on the exploding laptop batteries debacle of 2006, prompting a recall, and further recalls in 2008 and 2009.

Lithium batteries may still be sent by road, but only if they are lithium-ion and rated for 2 grams, 100-Watt-hours or under.

Most devices should fall under this requirement, although in the official document (PDF) Australia Post mentions that "Equipment will not be safe to send if it contains more than two batteries/four cells" — six-cell batteries being common in laptops.

A customer is also required to attach a "Road Transport Only" sticker to the package, although Australia Post does not guarantee its arrival if remote locations can only be reached by air. Air carriers scan mail for dangerous goods, and any packages containing lithium batteries will be rejected.

This has potential run-on effects for those who import electronic products from overseas to bypass Australia's often higher priced goods. Australians will also not be able to send offending products overseas, and those who wish to send electronic gifts over long distances but still within the country will have to be sent early, to make up for the additional road transport time.

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It's been a highly entertaining week for ZDNet.com.au and Builder AU staff as we sifted through quite a few hilarious reader captions.

Competition for laughs was fierce as entries such as "This is the 9th Doctor in front of TARDIS, the chameleon circuit is working now. Where is Rose? " and "This is not what I had in mind when I asked if we could make them greener" led the pack.

In the end though our winner was:

"Back in my day, we didn't have any of these small keyring USB drives. We had portable hard drives like this that we used to carry on our backs through the rain and snow." — Nathan

Nathan has won himself a double DVD box set, including The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning. Thank you all that have entered and the entertainment provided, it's been a blast.

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PATIENTS are being lured into being tested for Chlamydia with prizes such as iPods and Wii consoles.