Australian Technology News

Greens Senator Scott Ludlam today predicted legislation around the Federal Government's internet filtering project would have to wait until after the next federal election.

"I predict that the filter legislation wlll not be on the table before the election," Ludlam told journalists at the Kickstart conference in Queensland today.

Ludlam said the Senate at the moment "could politely be described as constipated", due to what he claimed was opposition attempts to delay and "block everything" passing through the upper house. The Greens senator described the political action as "quite a destructive move" on the opposition's part.

In a wider sense, Ludlam said he thought the government had really "mis-stepped" by pushing the filter initiative. He said the government's "inflexibility", attempting to just crash through with its agenda, had lost it support. "They are probably just going to have to think again about that," he said.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd this week said the government wouldn't apologise for pushing ahead with the initiative.

The Greens senator has quite a lot on his communications portfolio at the moment, with Communications Minister Stephen Conroy having recently published exposure drafts of legislation relating to the National Broadband Network Company, and also looking to pass legislation around the break-up of Telstra.

But he said the filter debate remained "the single biggest issue" for him. "It's something I've been pursuing and will continue to do so until it gets resolved," Ludlam said. Last year the politician described the policy as "pointless" and "misguided".

Ludlam believed that the Telstra legislation, on the other hand, would get through before the election, despite one attempt by Conroy to introduce the Bill into the Senate being shot down in flames last week. At the time, Greens Senator Rachel Siewert had said her party was ready to debate the legislation.

In early February, Labor Senator Kate Lundy had said she believed the filter legislation was on track to be introduced into parliament in the late February/March time frame.

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The Commonwealth Bank of Australia has told staff it will shortly be upgrading their desktop browser from version 6 of Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) software to version 7.

The bank has been running on IE6 for a number of years as part of version 3 of its desktop standard operating environment (SOE). However, it emailed staff recently to let them know they could look forward to IE7 as part of SOEv4, which is to be rolled out progressively from March. CBA has about 38,000 staff in total.

IE7 is a more modern browser than IE6, introducing new features such as the tabbed browsing made popular in rival browsers like Firefox, an anti-phishing filter and enhanced support for web standards. Microsoft reworked a number of core areas for IE7's release — such as the rendering engine and the way the software handles security.

However, IE7 was released in October 2006 and has since been superceded by version 8 of the Microsoft browser, which was released in March 2009. Internet Explorer 9 is currently in development.

Although some might call the bank slow for only now deciding to upgrade the browser, it wouldn't be the only company still running on IE6. A report from May last year by research house Forrester found that 60 per cent of companies were still using IE6 as their main browser. 39 per cent were using IE7, while Firefox sat at 18.2 per cent.

It's understood the bank needed to test a plethora of applications for compatibility with IE7 before starting to roll out the upgrade — a common problem in certain sectors, such as in financial services and some areas of government.

The bank's new standard operating environment will be again based on Windows XP. In April 2009, the bank said it had examined Windows 7, but was yet to formally test what was then the beta version of the software. The final version of Windows 7 was released late last year.

One further upgrade to make it into the new SOE will be welcome in some of the bank's branches. It's understood a lack of modern broadband connections into some locations had made delivering online video based on Adobe Flash an issue. The bank had previously disabled the software in certain situations — such as if a branch was using an old ISDN connection for internet access.

However, it will now enable Flash across its operations following gradual network upgrades to bring the old connections up to speed.

A CommBank spokesperson said the bank had "nothing to announce" when asked to comment for this article.

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The Australian Services Union (ASU) claimed yesterday that IT giant IBM was looking to offshore around 800 jobs, many more than the 150 positions the union had originally believed affected.

Workers had been told that the services for each of IBM's customers, except for the Federal Government, could be potentially offshored to low cost centres in India and China, ASU branch secretary Sally McManus said in a statement.

"We understand that there are potentially 800 jobs that will be lost," she said. Last week, the union had flagged that IBM was looking at offshoring, but had estimated the number of affected jobs to be only around 150.

There were also suggestions that some of the work could be sent to Ballarat, according to McManus.

"Company representatives have told workers that whilst they cannot tell them a definite decision has been made that their individual jobs will be affected yet workers should 'read between the lines' and prepare their CVs," McManus said.

In a company statement, IBM did not dispute the new claims.

"IBM continuously transforms its business, rebalancing skills and capabilities in order to meet the changing needs of clients and our business as a whole," it said.

"We hired to build skills in key growth areas throughout the global financial crisis, increasing our overall employee number in Australia and New Zealand by more than 30 per cent over the past five years. We will continue to hire in 2010, and we expect to end the year with more employees than when the year began," the company said. According to the company's website, IBM has around 14,000 people in Australia.

IBM spokesperson Matt Mollett declined to comment further, referring ZDNet.com.au to the company statement.

The IT giant wouldn't discuss the offshoring with the union, McManus said.

"IBM has been refusing to meet ASU representatives since December last year and have been using legal means to fight our demands to negotiate," McManus said.

The ASU was therefore preparing to take action in Fair Work Australia to ensure workers were "represented and have a union involved in negotiations", she said. "Workers wish to bargain for issues such as a fair process should there be redundancies."

The workers believed they should receive extra redundancy payments when skilled jobs were sent overseas as jobs were "lost" to Australia forever.

McManus reiterated her concern that overseas-based workers would not provide the same level of service to companies as those based in Australia. "We believe there is an increased risk of 'data theft' with offshoring and this is something IBM customers — ultimately the public — should be concerned about."

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Vodafone Hutchison Australia (VHA) has confirmed it will ditch the Vodafone arm's point of sale (POS) software provider in favour of the supplier of Hutchison's 3 brand.

Enterprise resource planning and point of sale vendor Pronto has sealed a deal to replace the current system in Vodafone's 170 stores with its own, more than doubling its presence in VHA retail outlets. Vodafone has been using Australian vendor, Transacta.

Hutchison's 90-odd 3 retail stores already use the Pronto system. The system is also the standard for VHA's Crazy Johns stores, which number just under 100.

Spokesperson for VHA, Greg Spears, said that the new retail system for Vodafone stores would go live by May.

VHA has made significant progress consolidating suppliers across the two businesses, with the company in the final stages of selecting its core network management partner. The deal is being contested by Huawei, and VHA's incumbent suppliers Ericsson and Nokia Siemens Networks.

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Health Minister Nicola Roxon has referred the e-health Bill for the introduction of a universal identifying health number — the Healthcare Identifiers Bill — to a Senate Committee.

According to the minister's office, the Bill was introduced to the Senate Standing Committee on Community Affairs to satisfy "ongoing community and stakeholder interest".

"Whenever there are high levels of community interest in [a] bill it's very common practice for a bill to be referred to the committee," Roxon's spokesperson Katie Hall told ZDNet.com.au.

The committee is expected to look into privacy safeguards in the Bill, which involves the issue of a unique 16-digit unique number to Medicare members, medical providers and healthcare organisations. The committee will also look at the operation of the services required to utilise the numbers, and the Bill's expected role in the national e-health agenda.

Written submissions regarding the proposed Bill from the public and stakeholders must be received by 5 March. The committee is scheduled to deliver its findings on the Bill on 15 March.

According to Hall, the Bill is set to be debated in parliament's next sitting, which starts 9 March, having been introduced on 10 February. It can, however, be passed through the House before the Senate committee reports.

"This legislation is an important part of the Rudd Government's reform agenda. Without healthcare identifiers there cannot be an integrated, consistent, e-health system in Australia," the office said.

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AUSTRALIA'S web users are at the forefront of the social networking craze, research finds.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd this morning threw more wood on the fiery debate about the government's internet filtering plans, saying it wouldn't apologise for pushing ahead with the initiative.

The politician took several strongly worded questions from a viewer of Channel 7's Sunrise program, who asked why the government was implementing a plan that he claimed would fail in its objective to protect the children, and whether Rudd could guarantee business would not suffer a loss in productivity from decreased internet speeds.

In response, Rudd pointed to the Refused Classification material the filter aims to block. "What does it involve? Acts of child abuse. Acts of sexual abuse against children, including material which also provides 'how to' kits in terms of conducting terrorist acts," he said.

"I think this stuff is filthy, I can't stand it. I think these are the right measures. You're running a business, we're pro-internet, but we don't make apologies for this."

The news came as efforts have stepped up within Rudd's own party to push an amendment to the legislation to implement an "opt-out" option for Australians who don't want their internet to be filtered. Labor Senator Kate Lundy is hoping to gain the support of other Labor MPs and senators in the days before the legislation is tabled in Federal Parliament.

However, some have criticised even Lundy's moderated proposal.

Australia's Pirate Party last night said the opt-out idea was "censorship lite" and a hollow response to community concerns that the filtering project could lead to legitimate online information being blocked off from Australians.

On Sunrise, Rudd also responded to growing concerns about offensive material being posted on social networking site Facebook related to several traumatic events in Queensland, such as the death of schoolgirl Trinity Bates.

Queensland Premier Anna Bligh has written to Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg to express concern about the issue. News Ltd commentary site The Punch today reported the company was planning to respond, but would not consider a policy change to address online material.

Rudd said he would investigate an idea being promoted by Sunrise and Independent Senator Nick Xenophon to set-up an online ombudsman to deal with such complaints. He said it was obvious which material went too far, and rejected any criticism that it was draconian to address offensive online material.

"This is where we get into this really stupid debate, with what I describe as extreme civil libertarianism, which says any such move in that direction means soviet communism, a'la 1980," he said. "Look, it's not like that. People out there, mums and dads, they know where the balance lies."

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