Australian Technology News

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has announced the appointment of two new board members for NBN Co, one of which is an ex-McKinsey director, bringing the number of ex-McKinsey employees on the board to three.

New appointee Clem Doherty was a director of McKinsey and Company, heading up the Asia Pacific telecommunications, electronics, media and multimedia segment, until 1996. He was also co-leader of the global telecommunications sector and a member of the Asia Pacific board.

Siobhan McKenna and Diane Smith-Gander, who have already been appointed to the board, were both former McKinsey partners. McKinsey has also already been awarded some work for the National Broadband Network, being commissioned with KPMG to carry out the implementation study.

The NBN Co also appointed Christy Boyce, former McKinsey principal consultant, as its head of industry engagement.

Doherty has served on the Australian Government's Higher Education Review Committee, the ABS Australian Statistical Advisory council and the Knowledge Nation Taskforce. He is currently chairman of angel investment company Like Minded Individuals and holds directorships of Swimming Australia, the Centre for Policy Development, The Australian Innovation Research Centre and Network Insight Group.

The other appointee, Terrence Francis, has a banking industry background. He has been the managing director of the Australian arm of Bank of America, the executive director of Deutsche Bank Australia and the vice president of Continental Illinois National Bank.

Francis is a director of the Emergency Services Telecommunications Authority, ANZ Specialist Asset Management Limited and ANZ Business Equity Fund Limited, Boom Logistics, and the Northern Victorian Irrigation Modernisation Project, as well as being a member of the University Council at RMIT.

Doherty and Francis "broaden the strong commercial and industry experience" of the board, according to Conroy's office. The additions will bring the number of board members to eight, including executive chair Mike Quigley.

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy also today released draft legislation meant to make it compulsory to hook up greenfields estates with fibre-optic cable. It requires an addition to the Telecommunications Act 1997. The simplified outline of the new Part (20A) says:

If a real estate development project is specified in a legislative instrument made by the minister, a person must not install a line in the project area unless the line is an optical fibre line.

The draft has already been seen by state and territory planning ministers and the government's Stakeholder Reference Group.

Conroy's office said that the Federal Government was working with state and territory governments to see how the legislation will fit with their planning arrangements. It hoped to introduce the legislation by early 2010, to come into effect from 1 July 2010.

"It is counter-productive to have our newest homes and businesses connected with old technology, particularly when it will cost more to retrofit them later," Conroy said in a statement.

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Analyst firm Frost and Sullivan has rolled its newly formed Asia-Pacific IT division into the better performing information and communication technology division, making two people redundant in the process.

The division started 18 months ago as the company brought in some ex-Gartner analysts with the hope of forming a dedicated arm of research into the areas of IT services, hardware and software analysis.

Frost and Sullivan has always had a strong telco and networks arm, but hadn't made any forays into the areas such as servers and PCs. "We thought we'd take a crack at penetrating that market," a spokesperson for the company said. "It didn't quite work out as we hoped."

The decision has been made to now focus on the core business, moving the IT arm into the mainstream information communications technology arm which deals with wide area networks and managed network services.

Two Australia-based analysts have been made redundant in the process, but the two most senior analysts on the team, one Australia-based and one Singapore-based, will remain with the company.

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in brief Telstra today launched an SMS alert system for social networking tool Twitter, saying the SMS alerts would be free for its own customers.

However, if users want to post tweets via SMS, they will be charged standard SMS rates. Other functionality includes direct messaging and friend following are also accessible through Twitter's SMS service.

Twitter's mobile director, Kevin Thau, was enthusiastic about the project. "We are very excited to bring Twitter to Australia via SMS and it was great to work with such an enthusiastic partner as Telstra," said Thau in a statement.

According to the official Twitter blog, New Zealand's SMS service has been active since May of this year. Twitter's mobile service has also been active in the US, Canada, UK, India, Indonesia and Ireland. Telstra was unavailable for further comment at the time of publication.

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A US court injunction has banned Microsoft from selling current versions of  Word software.

A Queensland man who headed up one of the world's largest online spamming operations has been given a $210,000 penalty.

New Zealand-born Lance Thomas Atkinson, 26, admitted to being involved in a large-scale spam sending operation that delivered emails to internet users all over the world.

The court heard Atkinson's spamming racked up as many as 140,000 reports in Australia alone.

Both his defence lawyer and the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) last week submitted to the Federal Court in Brisbane that he should receive a $210,000 pecuniary penalty for the offences.

On Tuesday, Justice Andrew Greenwood agreed with the proposed penalty, adding a seven year injunction from sending spam and ordering Atkinson not to knowingly associate with any person involved in sending spam.

In his judgment, Greenwood labelled the spam as "annoying and irritating".

"It requires computers to constantly update spam filters," he said.

However, he noted Atkinson had cooperated with the court.

The court had previously heard the spamming occurred over a 14 month period and that Atkinson, from the Sunshine Coast, was involved in recruiting spammers.

Some of the less explicit email subject lines he used included "2 pills a day got me an extra 2 inches" and "Any bigger and I would be in a circus".

It has previously been reported that Atkinson, who has already been fined $16 million by US authorities and was also fined in New Zealand, had a computer system capable of sending up to 10 billion emails per day.

In order for electronic advertising messages not to be considered spam, a company needs permission to send a message, state who they are and offer the opportunity to unsubscribe.

Under the Spam Act, individuals found guilty can only receive civil penalty provisions and not jail time.

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A QUEENSLAND man who headed up one of the world's largest online spamming operations has been given a $210,000 penalty.

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CSC Australia and Lockheed Martin have pulled themselves out of the running for the Australian Taxation Office's centralised computing contract.

Their withdrawal leaves only incumbent HP Enterprise Services, formerly known as EDS, and IBM to fight for the deal. The agency has valued it at around $160 million a year.

According to the ATO, both companies said the move "was based on a business decision to focus their efforts for the Tax Office on the [end-user computing] tender process and on other business opportunities".

There had been a change of plans on the centralised computing contract in July this year, when the ATO extended EDS's contract for the bundle at the cost of $604 million, saying that feedback from vendors had shown it would take longer than expected to transition the datacentre services to another vendor.

CSC and Lockheed are still going ahead with their bids to win the end-user contract for which they were shortlisted last month. EDS and Kaz missed out.

The tender for the centralised computing bundle closes on 25 February 2010.

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