Telstra Upgrades To Cable Against Government Regulation

TELSTRA is spoiling for a fight with the Federal Government on broadband ahead of the election after signalling that it is working behind the scenes on an upgrade to a cable network connecting 2.7 million homes instead of a high-speed broadband network.
Just a day after Telstra's chairman, Donald McGauchie, delivered a blistering attack on regulation, the chief executive, Sol Trujillo, made it clear the company would not be toning down its demand for changes to telecommunications policy in the lead-up to the election later this year.
Yesterday, Mr Trujillo indicated Telstra was working on alternatives to a fibre-to-the-node network in metropolitan areas, such as an upgrade to the Foxtel cable, which could eventually provide broadband speeds of between 50 and 100 megabits per second to 2.7 million homes.
Industry insiders believe Telstra's attempt to increase pressure on the Government over the construction of a high-speed broadband network in the cities is designed as a smokescreen for the cable upgrade.
Telstra is expected to ramp up the cable's speeds - used to deliver pay TV and next-generation broadband technology - to 30 megabits per second by August, before launching the upgrade a month later.
"As you saw with Next G, we didn't announce Next G before we built it, we just announced it when we did it," Mr Trujillo told reporters yesterday.
Telstra admitted earlier this week that it had started pouring some of the $4.1 billion earmarked for a high-speed broadband network into other investments. It has also left open the possibility of walking away from the Government process to select a company to build a fibre network.
A Citigroup analyst, Tim Smeallie, said the Foxtel cable could offer high-speed broadband to 2.7 million homes at a total cost of under $700 million, less than a fifth of the cost of replacing the copper wires that run from telephone exchanges to street nodes with fibre.
"We have argued for some time that Telstra has many technology options," he said. "The chairman's and CEO's comments suggest that Telstra will not invest in [fibre-to-the-node] until there is a change of regulatory settings and telecommunications policy settings.
"We don't envisage that to occur before the end of the year."
Earlier yesterday, Mr Trujillo echoed his chairman's comments from the day before when he said Australia suffered from a lack of investment in telecommunications because "money has been spent in the wrong places and because the policy settings don't make it economic".
Mr Trujillo's comments failed to provoke a firm rebuttal yesterday from the Communications Minister, Helen Coonan, who would only say: "Telstra's commercial priorities are a matter for the company, but consumers are a matter for the Government and that is why we have set up an expert taskforce to ensure that a new fibre network is built."

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Microsoft Releases Six Security Updates

The security bulletins for July 2007 are as follows, in order of severity:

Bulletin Identifier	Microsoft Security Bulletin MS07-036
Bulletin Title	Vulnerabilities in Microsoft Excel Could Allow Remote Code Execution (936542)
Executive Summary	This critical update resolves one publicly disclosed vulnerability and two privately reported vulnerabilities in addition to other security issues identified during the course of the investigation. These vulnerabilities could allow remote code execution if a user opens a specially crafted Excel file. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights.
Maximum Severity Rating	Critical
Impact of Vulnerability	Remote Code Execution
Detection	Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer can detect whether your computer system requires this update. This update does not require a restart.
Affected Software	Office, Excel. For more information, see the Affected Software and Download Locations section.

Bulletin Identifier	Microsoft Security Bulletin MS07-039
Bulletin Title	Vulnerability in Windows Active Directory Could Allow Remote Code Execution (926122)
Executive Summary	This critical security update resolves a privately reported vulnerability in implementations of Active Directory on Windows 2000 Server and Windows Server 2003 that could allow remote code execution or a denial of service condition. Attacks attempting to exploit this vulnerability would most likely result in a denial of service condition. However remote code execution could be possible. On Windows Server 2003 an attacker must have valid logon credentials to exploit this vulnerability. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could take complete control of an affected system. An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts.
Maximum Severity Rating	Critical
Impact of Vulnerability	Remote Code Execution
Detection	Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer can detect whether your computer system requires this update. The update will require a restart.
Affected Software	Windows. For more information, see the Affected Software and Download Locations section.

Bulletin Identifier	Microsoft Security Bulletin MS07-040
Bulletin Title	Vulnerabilities in .NET Framework Could Allow Remote Code Execution (931212)
Executive Summary	This update resolves three privately reported vulnerabilities. Two of these vulnerabilities could allow remote code execution on client systems with .NET Framework installed, and one could allow information disclosure on Web servers running ASP.NET. In all remote code execution cases, users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights.
Maximum Severity Rating	Critical
Impact of Vulnerability	Remote Code Execution
Detection	Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer can detect whether your computer system requires this update. The update will require a restart.
Affected Software	.NET Framework. For more information, see the Affected Software and Download Locations section.

Bulletin Identifier	Microsoft Security Bulletin MS07-037
Bulletin Title	Vulnerability in Microsoft Office Publisher Could Allow Remote Code Execution (936548)
Executive Summary	This important security update resolves one publicly disclosed vulnerability. This vulnerability could allow remote code execution if a user viewed a specially crafted Microsoft Office Publisher file. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights. User interaction is required to exploit this vulnerability.
Maximum Severity Rating	Important
Impact of Vulnerability	Remote Code Execution
Detection	Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer can detect whether your computer system requires this update. The update does not require a restart.
Affected Software	Office, Publisher. For more information, see the Affected Software and Download Locations section.

Bulletin Identifier	Microsoft Security Bulletin MS07-041
Bulletin Title	Vulnerability in Microsoft Internet Information Services Could Allow Remote Code Execution (939373)
Executive Summary	This important security update resolves a privately reported vulnerability. This vulnerability could allow remote code execution if an attacker sent specially crafted URL requests to a Web page hosted by Internet Information Services (IIS) 5.1 on Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2. IIS 5.1 is not part of a default install of Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could take complete control of the affected system.
Maximum Severity Rating	Important
Impact of Vulnerability	Remote Code Execution
Detection	Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer can detect whether your computer system requires this update. The update will require a restart.
Affected Software	Windows XP Professional. For more information, see the Affected Software and Download Locations section.

Bulletin Identifier	Microsoft Security Bulletin MS07-038
Bulletin Title	Vulnerability in Windows Vista Firewall Could Allow Information Disclosure (935807)
Executive Summary	This moderate security update resolves a privately reported vulnerability. This vulnerability could allow incoming unsolicited network traffic to access a network interface. An attacker could potentially gather information about the affected host.
Maximum Severity Rating	Moderate
Impact of Vulnerability	Information Disclosure
Detection	Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer can detect whether your computer system requires this update. The update will require a restart.
Affected Software	Windows Vista. For more information, see the Affected Software and Download Locations section.

More updates In August 2007

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Xbox 360 Warranty Extended To Three Years

Company boosts console warranty after investigation finds too many consoles needing repairs.

Computing giant Microsoft today announced that it would boost the warranty on its Xbox 360 gaming console to three years from date of purchase. The new warranty comes into effect globally.

The announcement came after an investigation found what Microsoft is calling an “unacceptable number of repairs to Xbox 360 consoles”. The investigation looked into possible causes of the “three flashing lights” hardware failure that has affected an estimate 33% of all Xbox 360 consoles according numerous online reports.

The company believes it has found the cause of the problems and has made improvements to the Xbox 360 design but declined to outline what those faults were or what caused them.

However, the cost of its Xbox 360 program will be significant with the company announcing it expects to take a pre-tax charge of between $US1.05billion and $US1.15billion for the quarter ending June 30, 2007 as a result of the warranty upgrade.

“The majority of Xbox 360 owners are having a great experience with their console and have from day one. But, this problem has caused frustration for some of our customers and for that, we sincerely apologize,” said Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft’s Entertainment & Devices Division. “We value our community tremendously and look at this as an investment in our customer base. We look forward to great things to come.”

To keep faith with its gaming market, Microsoft has announced that it will retroactively reimburse any customer that has previously paid for repairs that related to a three-flashing lights general hardware failure. This will also include shipping costs.

Microsoft is currently in a three-way battle with Sony and Nintendo in the gaming console market. According to figures released by market research firm NPD Group, Nintendo’s Wii console outsold the Xbox 360 in the US by more than two-to-one, selling 338,000 units to 155,000 with Sony’s PLAYSTATION3 coming a distant third at just 82,000 in the race for next-generation supremacy.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has announced the date for the expect release of its Xbox 360 Elite in Japan – October 11. The latest version adds HDMI video output plus a larger 120GB hard drive.

Reports from The Register are that Microsoft is having a tough time shifting its console in the tough Japanese market, where the Xbox 360 trails both the Nintendo Wii and Sony PLAYSTATION 3. In the month of June, over 270,000 Wiis were sold in Japan against 41,600 PLAYSTATION3s and just 17,600 Xbox 360 consoles.

Japanese market figures for the first half of 2007 are no better with the Xbox 360 selling just 122,000 units against a stagger 1.78million Nintendo Wiis and over 500,000 PLAYSTATION3 consoles.

Microsoft’s Xbox 360 reliability issues have been heavily reported on the internet in recent times with much of the heat focussed on the console’s own heat production. Speculation has been raised on Gameworld Network that the failure is due to insufficient airflow near the graphics processor unit (GPU) causing the chip to heat and solder on its ball-grid array pins to melt.

At time of publishing, Microsoft has not outlined the reasons for the higher than expected failure rate.

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Science Direct-ly into Google/Google Scholar

ScienceDirect (SD) is a compendium of scientific, technical, and medical (STM) literature from Reed Elsevier, one of the world's largest publishers. SD, most often made available on a subscription or licensing basis to large institutions like universities, biopharmaceuticals, and other research or health related companies, claims to contain approximately "25% of the world's science, technology and medicine full text and bibliographic information." SD is an expensive, and often contentious product in Higher Education due to high year-on-year pricing increases, but it is a highly desirable one, nonetheless.
It was therefore notable when its absence from Google Scholar, Google's search interface for scholarly-related material, was realized. Scholar has become tremendously popular for focussed searches in the scholarly literature among not only academics and students, but seekers of health information and other science-based data. Elsevier has long supported its own search interface for scholarly literature, Scopus, and it was no surprise to many that they avoided inclusion. However, they doubtless lost eyeballs as more and more of this traffic migrated to the freely available Scholar product.
Elsevier has now undertaken to have the majority of its SD journals (those for which it holds or can obtain the copyrights) crawled and indexed by Google. Both Google and Google Scholar are slowly incorporating an increasing amount of this content, and these data will be appearing in search results for Google and Google Scholar.
Ale de Vries, the SD product manager, informs me in an email:
About Google/Google Scholar: we're making good progress. As you may be aware, we did a pilot with some journals on SD first, and now we are working to get them all indexed. We're making good progress there - it's a lot of content to be crawled, but going along nicely. Both Google Scholar and main Google are gradually covering more and more of our journals.
This is notable for a wide range of reasons. One of the most prominent is that Elsevier clearly feels comfortable with having its core intellectual property crawled and analyzed by Google to augment discovery. In contrast to the various European newspaper publisher-related lawsuits, Elsevier has clearly felt that even with the basic, essential tools available today - robot exclusions, sitemaps, and business agreements - their ability to execute business strategy is unimpeded by encouraging greater content exposure.
While this type of scholarly literature is often more opaque to the public than publisher- or library-based digitization programs, it is at least as important, if not more so, in relation to the number and relevance of a wide variety of searches in the critically important fields of science, technology, and health. Google's ability to index this massive quantity of information will provide it with benefits that are significant; obviously Elsevier will profit as well.
For Google, as with its Books program, the gains to indexing the world's STM information revolve around not merely that data itself, but the linkages it can form between that data and the other information to which it has access, including geospatial information, data from books, historical/timeline data, biographical data, government documents, and so forth. Clearly the rewards from this mass of material for searchers are tremendous, almost overwhelming.
Both information seekers and publishers bear the responsibility of remembering that the Lens of Google through which we increasingly seek the world is only one lens, albeit one with further and further vision.

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