patch monday – Page 24

03 May 2010

Patch Monday: Google versus Groggle

Google, one of the world’s largest corporations, is in a trademark dispute with Australian web start-up Groggle. What’s the law here?

Groggle, based in Brisbane, is a “location-driven alcohol price comparison service”. It says its name is a play on words around the traditional Aussie slang “grog” for alcohol. But Google’s lawyers reckon their name infringes Google’s trademarks. Unless they reach an agreement by tomorrow it’ll end up being heard by IP Australia.

In the Patch Monday podcast this week, I chat with Cameron Collie, one of Groggle’s founders, and Kimberlee Weatherall, who teaches intellectual property law at the University of Queensland.

You can listen below. But it’s probably better for my stats if you listen at ZDNet Australia or subscribe to the RSS feed or subscribe in iTunes.

Please let me know what you think. Comments below. We accept audio comments too. Either Skype to stilgherrian or phone Sydney +61 2 8011 3733.

19 April 201019 April 2010

Patch Monday: Backups for small business

Are your data backups up-to-date? Are you sure? Have you tested them lately? Could your business survive an equipment failure, flood, fire or theft?

In the Patch Monday podcast this week, I take a look at backup options for small and SOHO businesses. Is it time to move beyond sticking a tape drive in your Windows Small Business Server? After all, terabyte hard drives are under $200, and cloud storage options are available for just a few dollars a month.

We hear from Sally McIntosh of PR firm Condiment Communications with her lack-of-backup horror story, and my mate Garth Kidd who does storage and backup stuff for the big end of town. He reckons it’s worth bringing this enterprise computing attitude to small business backups.

You can listen below. But it’s probably better for my stats if you listen at ZDNet Australia or subscribe to the RSS feed or subscribe in iTunes.

Please let me know what you think. Comments below. We accept audio comments too. Either Skype to stilgherrian or phone Sydney +61 2 8011 3733.

16 April 2010

Patch Monday: Why transport smart card projects go bad

Melbourne’s $1.3 billion myki smart card ticketing system still hasn’t been rolled out to buses or trams even after experts were flown in two months ago. Sydney’s Tcard project was cancelled and now it’s starting again. What can we learn from these transport IT disasters?

hat’s what I spoke about in this week’s Patch Monday podcast, which I’m now posting on Friday. Slack, eh?

My guest is Tom Worthington who, apart from teaching computer science at the Australian National University, has a strong personal interest in transport ticketing systems.

You can listen below. But it’s probably better for my stats if you listen at ZDNet Australia or subscribe to the RSS feed or subscribe in iTunes.

Please let me know what you think. Comments below. We accept audio comments too. Either Skype to stilgherrian or phone Sydney +61 2 8011 3733.

07 April 201010 March 2012

Patch Monday: Refused Classification means what, exactly?

Australia’s planned mandatory ISP-level internet filter will block Refused Classification (RC) material. Communications Minister Senator Stephen Conroy says that’s “child pornography, pro-bestiality sites, pro-rape websites and material like that”. But it’s actually more than that.

I covered this in the most recent episode of the Patch Monday podcast, back on 29 March, but I forgot to re-post it here. Consider that fixed.

My guest is Professor Catharine Lumby, one of the authors of Untangling the Net: The Scope of Content caught by Mandatory Internet Filtering.

You can listen below. But it’s probably better for my stats if you listen at ZDNet Australia or subscribe to the RSS feed or subscribe in iTunes.

Please let me know what you think. Comments below. We accept audio comments too. Either Skype to stilgherrian or phone Sydney +61 2 8011 3733.

22 March 201022 March 2010

Patch Monday: Parents don’t act on cyber-safety fears

Most Australian parents are concerned about the safety of their children online. But new research shows that parents don’t back up their concerns with meaningful actions, and that in any event they might well be concerned about the wrong risks.

Last week Microsoft Australia released their “For Safety’s Sake” research [PDF] which, while giving them a chance to pimp the parental controls in Windows 7, also produced some interesting figures.

While 64% of parents were concerned about cyber-safety, 65% don’t use any parental control software and 62% allow their kids to access the internet unsupervised.

Parents perceive their kids to be more at risk accessing the internet from friends’ homes than their own, and rate the risk from online predators as being more dangerous than exposure to pornography. In turn that’s seen as more dangerous than bullying, which is seen as more dangerous than identity theft.

In this week’s Patch Monday podcast I speak with Microsoft’s chief security advisor in Australia, Stuart Strathdee, as well as with child protection expert Karen Flanagan from Save the Children Australia. The risks are not what they seem.

You can listen below. But it’s probably better for my stats if you listen at ZDNet Australia or subscribe to the RSS feed or subscribe in iTunes.

Please let me know what you think — especially if you’re a parent. We accept audio comments too. Either Skype to stilgherrian or phone Sydney +61 2 8011 3733.

11 March 201014 March 2010

Patch Monday: WAN optimisation and the Facebook patent

The perceived speed of your internet connection isn’t just about raw bandwidth. The National Broadband Network won’t automatically speed up everything.

In this week’s Patch Monday podcast, Steve Dixon from Riverbed Technology explains how inefficiencies in TCP/IP network protocols mean that latency can be as much of a problem as bandwidth. “WAN optimisation”, which is something Riverbed and others sell, can help.

And Kimberlee Weatherall provides some perspective on the controversial Facebook “news feed” patent for “Dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network” into perspective. She teaches intellectual property law at the University of Queensland.

You can listen below. But it’s probably better for my stats if you listen at ZDNet Australia — where you’ll see some of the comments already posted — or subscribe to the RSS feed or subscribe in iTunes.

Besides, you’ll get it faster than waiting for me to post it here.

Please let me know what you think. We accept audio comments too. Either Skype to stilgherrian or phone Sydney +61 2 8011 3733.