The Official CASE Blog

The Sydney Joomla Users Group is putting on “Sydney JoomlaDay 2009″ on the 17-18th of October. The conference itself runs on the Saturday with workshops being held on Sunday. They’ll be looking at the new features of the upcoming Joomla 1.6 amongst other things. Presenting will be Andrew Eddie, Sam Moffat and Brad Bake. At CASE we’re pretty interested in Sam Moffat’s talk on Joomla security and hope to ask some questions of him! For full detail on what will be presented you can view the conference program.

The essential twitter details are @sydjug for their official feed and #SJD09 for the hashtag.

Tickets are only $50 and these days always prove very informative. Head over to the official Sydney JoomlaDay 2009 site to find out more.

Last weekend Sen. Kate Lundy held the third installment of her “publisphere” series. This even focused on ICT & Creative industries.

The Australian ICT industry is extremely broad in scope and expertise – from core infrastructure to mobile, Web 2.0 and of course the creative industries such as gaming, film and digital arts. Australia has done quite well on the international scene, however we could still do more to inspire many smart Australian professionals and companies to base themselves in Australia in the long term and to encourage international investment in the Australian ICT sector.

Having a strong Australian-based sector means a positive contribution to a number of important national goals: economic growth and exports, provide opportunities for skills development and experience in Australia’s workforce and finally, reinforcing Australia’s international reputation for excellence.

You can see the whole overview here and here!

Chris Smart, Australian Linux guru, has started writing for Linux Magazine. This week he’s looking at the Linux graphical user interface “KDE”.

“KDE stands for the K Desktop Environment and was first released in 1998 by Matthias Ettrich, who was a student at the time. Ettrich saw a need for the Unix world to have a unified desktop environment which had a consistent look and feel, rather than just multiple applications looking and behaving however they wanted to…Now in its 11th year, KDE has come a long way in a short amount of time and recently celebrated the release of version 4.0, marking a turning point in the development of the project…”

If you’ve been thinking about giving Linux a shot, maybe the new KDE will give you the confidence to go ahead with it. Chris also runs Make The Move, kind of like an Apple version of “Make the Switch”, only Chris’s solution is thousands of dollars cheaper!
Read his article “KDE 4: The Komplete Desktop?” here.

The first Public Sphere event has just finished It’s been an information packed, thought provoking few hours. Here’s a brief rundown of material that has resulted:

• Official Public Sphere event details on Senator Kate Lundy’s site.

• The Twitter feed from the morning.

• Craig Thomler’s liveblog from the event.

• Tom Worthington’s blog (Including links to the slides of the morning’s  presentations)

More posts to follow, just need to let the dust settle!

From the auDA announcements list:

“Misleading unsolicited emails from Asian domain name companies
30/Apr/2009
auDA is aware that at least two companies apparently based in China and Hong Kong have been sending unsolicited emails to people with .au domain names, attempting to mislead them into registering their name in a number of Asian domain spaces.
Examples include:
We are a domain name registration service company in Asia,
Last week we received a formal application submited by Yadu Investment Co Ltd which wanted to use the keyword “***” to register the Internet Brand and with suffix such as .cn /.com.cn /.net.cn/.hk/ .asia/ domain names.
After our initial examination, we found that these domain names to be applied for registration are same as your domain name and trademark. We aren’t sure whether you have any relation with this company. Because these domain names would produce possible dispute, now we have hold down this registration, but if we do not get your company’s an reply in the next 5 working days, we will approve this company’s application
In order to handle this issue better, Please contact us by Fax ,Telephone or Email as soon as possible.
and
We are a professional domain name registration center in asia, mainly dealing with the domain name registration and internet intellectual property rights protection.
We received a formal application from a company who is applying to register “***” as their domain name and Internet keyword on Apr 2th, 2009. Because this involves your company name or trade mark so we inform you in no time. we would like to confirm if this company is your partner, subsection or some one you authorized, if it is not, pls inform us if these domain names and internet keyword are important to you and it is necessary to protect them by registering them first or not, thanks for your cooperation, looking forward to your reply.
auDA does not have jurisdiction to handle complaints about these emails, as they do not involve the registration of .au domain names. We have been advised that authorities in Hong Kong are investigating at least one of the companies sending these emails.
In auDA’s view the claims made in these emails are most likely false and misleading, and we advise people to disregard them.”

If any CASE member recieves a simiar email they are encouraged to follow the above instructions. If members have any additional questions or concerns they can contact CASE’s web support through usual channels.

CASE’s patron Senator Kate Lundy has been online since 1996. While holding a variety of portfolios she’s use the Internet to her advantage, allowing constituents a closer connection to their representitive in a way that politicians worldwide have only just begun to embrace (the emerging Twitter fad, for example). Now she’s had her site updated and has amalgamated her online presence at http://www.katelundy.com.au. It’s worth checking out as it’s full of content and very useful links.

The Age is reporting that:

“Bottle Domains has been banned from its primary business of registering internet domain names.The Australian Domain Name Administrator (auDA) yesterday terminated the accreditation of Australian Style, trading as Bottle Domains, “due to a serious breach of its obligations under the registrar agreement”. In January this year the personal account details, including credit card numbers, of up to 60,000 Bottle Domain customers were posted for sale at an online forum by a computer hacker.“

To read more on this dramatic story follow the link:
Nicholas Bolton loses internet domain registration business

A fascinating story involving British villagers (the rich kind, not the poor kind) preventing Google from taking photos of their houses over security concerns. I guess it’d make it harder for a burglar to plan from the comfort of their own home. But blocking Google’s doesn’t stop the criminals  from driving their own cars up and down the streets!

“The Google Street View car was blocked from filming last week by angry residents, led by Paul Jacobs, who alerted neighbours after spotting the car from his window.”I don’t have a problem with Google wanting to promote villages. What I have a problem with is the invasion of privacy, taking pictures directly into the home,” Mr Jacobs told the BBC.”

Villagers block Google mobile – Technology – theage.com.au

CASE is interested in mobile computing technology that assists education. ABC News is reporting that, in a massive development for students in NSW:

“The New South Wales Government says more than 200,000 laptops will soon start rolling out to secondary school teachers and students, after it awarded a $150 million contract to a Chinese computer maker.“

Chinese firm wins school laptop contract – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that

“The national competition watchdog has read the riot act to the nation’s telephone companies, telling an industry conference that the overall poor level of consumer service remains unacceptable. Addressing the Australian Telecommunications Users Group annual conference today, the chairman of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, Graeme Samuel, ordered the industry to lift its game or face the commission’s wrath – backed up by beefed-up consumer protection laws set to come into effect next year.”

$1m fine threat waved at shoddy telcos | smh.com.au

The ACCC could be in a position to place fines of up to $1million on Telcos that aren’t up to scratch. With over 4000 complaints a year, this sounds like a step in the right direction…