Australian Technology News

Widespread service problems are continuing to plague customers on Telecom New Zealand's 3G XT mobile network throughout the South Island and areas on the North Island south of Taupo.

Yesterday, the telco promised customers that service would be restored around midday for XT customers.

However, customers are experiencing patchy or no service in areas south of Taupo today. Andrew Joll of Online Computer Consultants in the southern city of Invercargill reports that there is XT service in some suburbs, but the network is down in the central business district.

A Telecom spokesperson confirmed that a number of XT cell sites are affected, mainly in the South Island.

The spokesperson said that "there is loss of XT service in parts of Dunedin, Invercargill, Timaru and Queenstown". Apart from these southern cities, the spokesperson said customers in areas south of Taupo are also experiencing degraded service.

Asked if Telecom has an estimated time for resolving the problems, the spokesperson declined to answer.

The IT services arm of Telecom, Gen-i Australasia, has confirmed the widespread outages today in a new email from CEO Chris Quin to customers. Quin is advising Gen-i customers to use landlines for emergencies and to check voicemail on XT.

Yesterday, there were reports that an enraged Telecom CEO Paul Reynolds has ordered an independent review of the fault-stricken XT network. Alcatel-Lucent built the WCDMA network for Telecom.

There were no details about the review available yet, such as when it will be conducted and by whom, according to the Telecom spokesperson.

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Westpac Banking Corporation has joined other financial institutions in upgrading its online trading platform and expects to grow its customer base by eight per cent this year as a result.

Westpac launched its new platform, Westpac Online Investing, on Thursday and says it will now provide its 250,000 broking customers with new features including home page customisation, upgraded research and better technical charting tools.

Head of Westpac Securities James Staltari said the new platform would lead the market.

"There is no single, online trading platform that provides all the new features and functionality on one platform that we've made available to our customers," Staltari told AAP.

Staltari expects the platform to generate an eight per cent increase in the bank's broking customer base over the next 12 months.

Industry researcher Investment Trends said the number of active online traders in Australia surged by 20 per cent from September 2008 to 600,000 traders by June 2009.

Westpac's move follows re-launches of Macquarie Group's online trading platform in 2009 and moves by Commonwealth Bank's online broker, CommSec, to improve its platform.

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Pipe Networks has joined ISP iiNet and Greens Senator Scott Ludlam in an online protest against the Federal Government plans to filter the internet by blocking "refused classification" material.

Pipe Networks CEO Bevan Slattery published an email he sent to staff on broadband website Whirlpool.

"This campaign is being run to bring attention to the stupidity of the governments proposed filtering plan," Slattery said.

The company joins a number of websites protesting against the filtering plan. Websites participating are using a piece of JavaScript code to "blackout" their website. It notifies a person browsing a site with the code inserted about what the government plans to filter.

The code has already surpassed 300,000 views on websites it has been inserted on, according to the Great Australian Internet Blackout Twitter account.

The news comes on the back of claims by the Sex Party that "small-breasted" women in their early 20's would not be able to take a picture of themselves naked and then upload it to the internet without it being classified "refused classification", the type of content the government plans to block.

"This is in response to a campaign led by Kids Free 2 B Kids and promoted by Barnaby Joyce and Guy Barnett in Senate Estimates late last year," wrote Australian Sex Party spokesperson Fiona Patten on the party's blog.

Scope creep of websites filtered is something critics of the plan have now turned their attention to, with technical studies by Enex Testlab showing filtering was effective and delivered only negligible speed impact to users

In December, the Sex Party said that it feared the end of porn on the internet.

"I don't think people are aware of how the classification system works in Australia. Australia has one of the strictest classification systems in the world for adult material," Patten said.

The Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA) also weighed in on the debate over the long weekend.

"It seems to go against not only the general Aussie way of things," ALIA executive director Sue Hutley said on the association's blog

A national filter protest is planned for 6 March.

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in brief A spokesperson from Rio Tinto confirmed today that the $371 million Automated Train project is still on hold.

"The suspension remains in place, and we have not revisited the issue yet," a Rio Tinto spokesperson told ZDNet.com.au.

The automated system which extends over 1300km of railway was halted a year ago, with the company giving the worldwide economic gloom as an explanation.

"We placed the Automated Train Operations (ATO) project on hold a year ago, as part of our response to the global financial crisis and the need to conserve capital and operational expenditure," said the spokesperson.

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The Australasian College of Health Informatics (ACHI) has criticised legislation enabling the creation of an individual health identifier for all Australians, claiming that it establishes a framework for a system that has not yet been adequately planned and "may never exist".

The government hopes that a unique healthcare identifier number could be assigned to patients and providers to improve the management of patient information. Medicare has been working with NEHTA to test and implement the identifiers. The Department of Health and Aging released draft legislation to enable the vision late last year.

However, the college thought the government was putting the cart before the horse.

"The draft seems to establish the framework for an e-health system that may never exist or be funded. It seems to ACHI the information available regarding any possible framework is also very scant and inadequate [...] the draft legislation leaves many important matters to regulation that has yet to be planned and does not leverage or comply with existing standards," it said in its submission. Formed in 2002, the ACHI is Australasia's peak health informatics professional body.

The ACHI and several other groups also claimed in submissions that the implementation of the health identifiers system has not been adequately addressed in the draft HI Bill.

"The establishment and broad implantation of a health identifier requires a comprehensive and mature legislative underpinning, which can be achieved by broad consultation," the group wrote.

Several advocacy groups also raised concerns about regulation, consumer access to information, outmoded technology and potential loopholes in definitions.

Australian Privacy Foundation stated in its submission that "the current exposure draft HI Bill is deeply flawed. It is both incomplete and inadequate in relation to privacy protection and meaningful input by health consumers."

Yet there was also a bevy of positive feedback from government departments such as the South Australian Department of Health, the Federal Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, and the Bureau of Statistics, as well as from industry bodies such as the Health Information Management Association of Australia and the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare.

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TWITTER users responded snarkily to the name of Apple's latest innovation the iPad, dubbing it the "iTampon".

Apple has today declined to reveal whether the iPad 3G model would be available in Australia, but confirmed that the Wi-Fi-only version would be here in March.

"I can't confirm that [the 3G and Wi-Fi model] will be available in April along with the US," a spokesperson said. "[There's] nothing to be announced today."

However, the model with Wi-Fi (without 3G access) will be available in Australia in March, the spokesperson said. Pricing is as yet unavailable, and will be announced "at a later date", according to the spokesperson.

If the 3G model were to be available in Australia, the spokesperson said there had been no details announced as to whether it will be locked to a carrier. But Apple CEO Steve Jobs said the iPad will be unlocked and use GSM micro SIMs.

A micro SIM, also known as a 3FF or "third form factor" SIM, is a smaller version of a SIM card that holds the same data. Physically, it is not compatible with larger SIM cards like the ones used by most telecommunication companies in Australia.

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Users may find it harder to leave Facebook the more they use it, according to a web marketing research company.

IMAGINE the screen of a MacBook Pro minus the keyboard and you’d have a good idea what the iPad is like.