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Opposition will vote against Telstra Bill

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

The Federal Opposition has confirmed it will vote against wide-ranging legislation being introduced by Communications Minister Stephen Conroy to reform the telecommunications sector, including the separation of Telstra.

Tony Smith, shadow communications minister

New shadow Communications Minister Tony Smith: Rudd is like a "crazy architect"
(Credit: Office of Tony Smith)

Conroy's last attempt to introduce the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Competition and Consumer Safeguards) Bill into the Senate was shot down in flames two weeks ago, but at the time the Greens — who the government will now need to get the Bill across the line — had signalled their readiness to debate it.

The legislation is listed on the Senate run-sheet for today. In a statement yesterday, shadow Communications Minister Tony Smith described the legislation as a "deliberate assault" on Telstra, its 1.4 million shareholders and 30,000 employees.

"As we've said from day one, Telstra shareholders have every reason to be outraged by Labor's plans to force the break-up of the company," said Smith. "The Coalition has never advocated the forced break up of Telstra and this was never part of Labor's plan before the last election."

The politician said the Telstra break-up attempt was "all about trying to prop up" the government's "reckless" $43 billion National Broadband Network plan — which he said the government had embarked upon without a cost-benefit analysis or a business plan.

"This bully boy legislative attack on Telstra and its shareholders is an admission that their NBN isn't commercially viable."

Smith called for Conroy to release both the NBN implementation study as well as the final legislation relating to the NBN Company, which has so far only been released in draft form.

At the beginning of this month, Conroy said that he had not yet received the implementation study, which was being put together by consulting firms McKinsey and KPMG, although it was supposed to be completed by the end of February.

The implementation study was originally slated to determine the operating arrangements for the NBN Company, as well as detailing network design and financial details — for example, attracting private sector investment.

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Cisco announces new router

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

On Tuesday Cisco announced the CRS-3, its next-generation internet router for the world's largest internet service providers.

Cisco's CRS-3 Carrier Routing System (Credit: Cisco Systems)

After a two-week countdown to an announcement that it said would "forever change the internet", the company unveiled what looked like an upgrade to its existing "core" router called the CRS-1.

The new router offers 12 times the traffic capacity than its older-generation routers offer. It's three times faster than the older CRS-1, which was introduced in 2004. And it can handle 322 terabits of traffic per second, or simultaneous video calls for every person in China, the company said.

The new router, which starts at US$90,000, will be sold to the world's largest internet service providers. The router is aimed at companies such as AT&T, Verizon Communications, Level3 and Sprint, as they are the internet service providers that aggregate and shuttle the bulk of the US's internet traffic across what is known as "the internet backbone".

When the new Cisco routers are installed, the average broadband consumer likely won't notice anything new. But over time, they will see the benefits of the upgraded infrastructure. The Cisco CRS-3 will allow these internet backbone service providers to increase capacity so that new applications, especially video-based applications, like high-definition TV, video-conferencing and 3D TV, can be offered to the mass market.

Cisco CEO John Chambers said this new router will serve as the foundation of the next-generation internet that will see tremendous growth due to video.

"Video is the killer app," he said. "Video brings the internet to life and most of the devices that will be coming on the network will evolve quickly into video."

Chambers said just looking at the devices and applications that were at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January and Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February are a good indication of what is to come in the future. And he said all these products feed into the internet, which will load the network with more traffic.

"Whether it was gaming or video or tablets or ESPN bringing 3D sports to TV, it's about video," he said. Chambers added that this video traffic, along with other data intensive applications for things such as health care, will require more bandwidth than anyone could have imagined a short time ago.

Cisco's announcement is more of an incremental upgrade to the company's existing product, the CRS-1.

However, Zeus Kerravala, a senior vice president at the market research firm Yankee Group, has said the announcement is still very important to the growth of the internet and future innovation of new applications.

"There is no way that a routing announcement could live up to the hype that Cisco created," he said. "But if you look down the road, when consumers want to watch multiple channels of high-definition video and 3D programming, and as more mobile apps come onto 4G wireless networks, companies like Cisco and its rival Juniper Networks need to push the envelope in terms of routing engineering."

Via CNET.com

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Microsoft IE7’s zero-day hole

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

Microsoft warned of a new vulnerability in Internet Explorer 6 and 7 that has been targeted in attacks, and released fixes for eight holes in Windows and Office as part of Patch Tuesday.

The company issued Security Advisory 981374, which addresses a privately disclosed vulnerability. The hole could allow an attacker to take control of a machine if a user visited a malicious website, Microsoft said.

There are some features that could mitigate the effects of an attack. For instance, all supported versions of Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Outlook Express and Windows Mail open HTML email messages in the Restricted sites zone by default, the company said.

"Protected Mode in Internet Explorer on Windows Vista and later Windows operating systems helps to limit the impact of the vulnerability as an attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability would have very limited rights on the system," the advisory said. "By default, Internet Explorer on Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 runs in a restricted mode that is known as Enhanced Security Configuration. This mode sets the security level for the internet zone to High. This is a mitigating factor for websites that you have not added to the Internet Explorer Trusted sites zone."

The advisory also provides information on workarounds. Microsoft suggests that IE6 and IE7 users upgrade to IE8 immediately.

"For the second time in three months, Microsoft has also issued a warning about a new IE zero-day bug," said Andrew Storms, director of security operations for nCircle, referring to the IE hole that was exploited in the attacks on Google and other companies late last year and disclosed by Microsoft in January. "There's no doubt that this new bug will be fodder for the ongoing security discussion that is a key part of the browser wars."

In its Patch Tuesday preview on Thursday, Microsoft said it would issue two bulletins rated "important" on Tuesday to fix eight vulnerabilities in Windows and Microsoft Office products. Details are in the company's Security Bulletin for March.

The first bulletin for March, MS10-016, addresses a vulnerability in Windows Movie Maker that could be exploited by getting a user to open a maliciously crafted Movie Maker project file.

"Both Windows XP and Windows Vista ship with affected versions (2.1 and 6.0 respectively). Version 2.6 is also vulnerable and can be freely downloaded and installed from the web," Jerry Bryant, senior security communications manager lead at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post on the Microsoft Security Response Center. "Customers who install 2.6 on any supported platform, including Windows 7, will be offered the update."

The vulnerability also affects Microsoft Producer 2003, a free download with limited distribution. "At this time, we are not offering an update for Producer 2003," the blog post said. "While we continue to investigate Producer 2003, we recommend that customers either uninstall the application or apply an available Microsoft Fix It to disassociate the project file type from the application to add an extra layer of security."

The second bulletin, MS10-017, affects all currently supported versions of Microsoft Office Excel, as well as Office 2004 and Office 2008 for Mac, the Open XML File Format Converter for Mac, supported versions of Excel viewer and SharePoint 2007. A successful attack exploiting the hole would require a user to open a maliciously crafted file.

Meanwhile, the Malicious Software Removal Tool was updated to include Win32/Helpud, a trojan that steals log-in information for popular online games.

Microsoft also re-released MS09-033, a bulletin for a hole in Microsoft Virtual PC and Microsoft Virtual Server, to add Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 to the list of affected software.

The software giant said it is continuing to monitor threats in connection with Security Advisory 981169 related to a hole in VBScript affecting older Windows systems that Microsoft disclosed publicly on 1 March.

Although proof-of-concept code exploiting the hole has been released publicly, Microsoft said it was not aware of any active attacks. Customers using Windows 2000-, XP- and Server 2003-based systems are advised to apply the workarounds. Customers running Windows 7, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Vista are not affected.

Via CNET.com

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