Australian Cybermalls News

No, it's not your imagination. Australia's telephone system is steadily getting worse, and the large number of disconnects and misdials that have been afflicting many Australian Internet users over the summer are more a sign of declining standards in the phone system than amongst ISP's. According to official Australian Communications Authority (ACA) figures released in Federal Parliament today, Telstra's performance standards took an alarming backward slide in the last quarter of 1997. Key performance indicators for directory assistance, on-time fault repairs and installation of new services have all declined by between 14% and 20% from October 1st last year in the wake of the carrier's partial privatisation and its decision to shed over 25,000 staff - though Telstra themselves blame floods, bushfires and the problems associated with introducing a new staff management system for the record poor performance. The ACA figures, released in the wake of new legislation which leaves Telstra liable to fines of up to $10 million if the company fails to achieve pre-set service standard limits, show that the odds of now getting a faulty phone line repaired with 24 hours of notification in most suburban areas of Australia is now as low as 53%.

Is it a future face of the Net? Nielsen Media Research and WorldGate Communications (WGC) have announced a partnership for tracking viewers surfing the Net on their TVs. WGC offers a new technology it calls Channel Hyperlinking which allows viewers to access the Internet from a TV using a standard cable TV set-top box. The company will be rolling out a trial version of the service in St. Louis with Charter Communications in the next few months, and is working with several other providers to begin offering its system elsewhere. Channel Hyperlinking allows users to switch from a TV station to a Web site. WorldGate is also working with some 30 broadcasters to incorporate it in their signals. Nielsen, a provider of audience information and ratings, will measure viewers as they go from TV to specific Web sites. WorldGate also unveiled a deal with the Weather Channel yesterday to develop 24-hour links from programming and advertising to related Web content such as weather forecasts, travel information, and advertising.

Australian hacker Skeve Stevas, who broke into ISP Ausnet via the Internet in 1995 and obtained hundreds of customer credit card details, was given a three-year prison sentence when he appeared in court today. Skevas, who claimed that he had broken into the ISP's customer records to prove their online security was lax, had allegedly been refused a position at Ausnet immediately prior to the attack. The court heard that the incident had drawn national publicity, damaging Ausnet's business and alarming consumers around the country. Skevas was the first to be prosecuted under Australia's tough new "anti-hacking" laws. Meanwhile, two German teenagers today bragged about how they'd hacked T-Online, the online service run by Germany's national telephone company, and stole information about hundreds of bank accounts. The two 16-year-old hackers boast about their exploits in the latest issue of the German magazine CT, calling Deutsche Telekom's security for the online service "absolutely primitive," according to a report by Agence France-Presse. The German teens played online games for free after breaking into the system, and later stole financial data, which they said they destroyed without using.

Sun Microsystems scored an important victory in court yesterday when U.S. District Judge Ronald Whyte ruled that Microsoft had to remove the Java-compatible logo from its products pending a final outcome in the suit Sun filed in October last year, which alleged that Microsoft's implementation of Java did not pass compatibility tests required of all Sun's licensees. The ruling requires Microsoft to remove the Java logo from its Internet Explorer browser and Software Developer Kit for Java. Sun is arguing in court that Microsoft is deliberately trying to sabotage Java by splintering it into different versions, destroying Java's "write once, run anywhere" promise. Microsoft has denied the charge and says the conflict stems from a simple contract dispute, but will be forced to comply with the ruling nonetheless. Sun company executives hailed the ruling as a victory not only for Sun but also for end users and Java programmers. "What is important for us is that it be clear to the world which products pass our Java-compatible test suites," said Alan Baratz, president of Sun's JavaSoft division. "The average user going out to the store and seeing the logo thinks he's getting something Java-compatible and this is not right," he declared.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has announced that it will investigate Telstra's Internet pricing policies after receiving a deluge of complaints from competing telcos and ISPs over the last year about the way the former monopolist levies network access fees. Telstra, who effectively "own" the Internet in Australia through their control of the fundamental infrastructure, wholesale bandwidth to customers at $190 per Gbyte - roughly 45 times higher than current US pricing. The carrier also refuses to give credit for traffic drawn onto its network by high profile sites, effectively penalising success on the Internet and forcing many of Australia's most successful sites offshore. The ACCC announced today that it has formed an industry working group to look into Telstra's fees and access undertakings and examine the carrier's true costs - a move that industry observers believe will ultimately lead to lower domestic Internet tariffs.

All PC's currently on sale in Australia (and most on sale in the US and Canada) are likely to fail or run into difficulties with the Year 2000 problem, according to Millennium Diagnostics, an Australian Y2K testing company. The company announced today that it had been unable to locate a single computer motherboard on sale in Australia which passed its rigorous testing procedures for Y2K compliance, and said that in nearly all cases the problems were associated with the BIOS chips on the boards and their inability to cope with the roll-over to the new century. However, the claim has been disputed by Sydney firm Y2K Integration, who said that they had tested thousands of machines and have passed the majority of those recently landed in the country. Even so, the company added that it had found that up to 80% of pre-1997 motherboards did fail Y2K testing - and that the majority of PC's currently used in Australia were pre-1997 models.

Despite the formation of an International Standard for the language, Sun's Java took another fragmentation hit today when Hewlett-Packard (HP) announced that they have developed their own slimmed-down version of Sun's Java Virtual Machine (JVM) for use in small devices with embedded processors. HP, the second-largest computing company in the world next to IBM, also simultaneously announced that they have struck a deal with Microsoft to licence the HP-Java product for use in Microsoft's hand-held version of Windows (Windows CE) which is due to debut later this year. Windows CE has so far been hamstrung by the difficulties inherent in running Windows in low-memory environments. Hewlett-Packard have said that their version of the JVM is a "clone" of ISO-standard Java, and Sun's immediate response was that if this the case, the move would not split the world-wide unity that has grown behind Java in the last two years. Sun currently have a lawsuit against Microsoft over the latter's creation of a "Wintel" version of the Java released with Explorer 4.x which only runs on Microsoft-owned platforms.

According to a survey by the authoritative Gartner Group, at least 10% of all critical systems in hospitals and health care facilities will fail on January 1st, 2001 because of sluggish response to the Year 2000 Millennium Bug issue. According to Gartner, who surveyed 2400 organisations across 17 countries for the study of Y2K preparedness, "results across industries are shocking.... for health care organisations the results are even worse." Gartner failed to find a single organisation which had a detailed Y2K plan or which had allotted resources to deal with the problem and noted that health care organisations were particularly at risk because of their high dependence on embedded systems, where the Y2K bug may exist in the microcode of chips in X-Ray equipment, life support systems and many of the other paraphernalia of modern, hi-tech medicine. Gartner also found that suppliers of equipment to the health industry were also lagging badly in addressing the Y2K problem, with less than 25% of suppliers responding to Y2K questions.

The Tonga domain (.to) is to become the first spam-free domain on the Internet after a joint decision by the domain's administrator Tonic and the King of Tonga to introduce a zero-tolerance policy for spammers. Under the new rules introduced this week, spammers in the Tongan domain will be given one warning, then have their domains terminated if they re-offend. Although there are only 5,000 Tongan domains in existence and the policy will probably have little effect on spam levels world-wide, Tonic president Eric Lyons hopes the move will have symbolic importance and perhaps encourage other top-level domain administrators to adopt a similar policy, further tightening the noose around the necks of spammers as a general abhorrence of the practice grows on the Net. "We've kicked off a couple of spammers already," Lyons said. "In the last six months there's been a lot of shake-out about whether spam is really bad or something that's just annoying. We decided to follow the turning tide that says spam is a very bad thing. And we realize that as a top-level domain we can do things that no one else can: pull a name that's being used in spam. We think the time is right."

The Australian Federal Government is set to introduce a number of significant reforms to corporation law in the near future which, amongst others, would allow small companies to raise capital without needing to produce detailed prospectuses and to distribute these over the Internet. Treasurer Peter Costello, announcing the Corporate Law Economic Reform Program yesterday, said that under the new rules small businesses will be able to raise up to $2 million from up to 20 private investors without the need for any prospectus at all, and up to $5 million simply by issuing a fact sheet or an information statement on a company's financial position. Company directors would also be absolved from personal liability for breaches if they could demonstrate that they had undertaken 'rational business decisions'. The proposed changes are designed to greatly simplify the heavy administrative burden that current rules impose on Australian corporations and encourage investment, Mr Costello said, and have already drawn favourable reactions from many business and industry groups. The ability to distribute prospectuses over the Net may also lead to the formation of online capital markets for Australian businesses similar to those found in the US and Canada.

Microsoft supremo Bill Gates, in Australia for two days to meet with Government and industry leaders, indicated yesterday that his company is less than fully committed to Windows98, the next version of his Windows operating system due for release on June 25th. Speaking at a press conference in Sydney, Gates said that his personal recommendation was that most business users should adopt the upcoming Windows NT 5.0 product instead because it would have a "richness and security" that Windows98 will lack. Simultaneously, his company issued an advisory notice on their website for computer hardware developers to announce that the vast majority of PC users may not be able to upgrade to Windows98 in any event because of serious conflicts that have emerged between Windows98's advanced configuration and power interface and the BIOS installed in most machines - even the very latest models. The problem has arisen because Microsoft have based part of the hardware specification for Win98 on Intel's yet-to-be-released 440LX logic chip set. Footnote: At yesterday's press conference an employee of Channel Nine leapt onto the stage with a cream pie in one hand and a promotional cap for Nine in the other. A humorless Gates - offered a choice between the two - said "I'll take the hat."

Australian Prime Minister John Howard announced on the weekend that if his Government is re-elected he will put the remaining two-thirds of Telstra still held in public ownership onto the market in 1999. If the move goes ahead, it is expected to raise at least $40 billion dollars, and sharemarket analysts quickly agreed today that there would be little difficulty unloading the shares into the hands of eager institutional and private investors. Telstra's share price has risen from an initial $2.67 to as high as $3.94 over the last four months and investors who bought into the heavily over-subscribed float at $1.95 have doubled their money in that time. Competition has yet to make any significant dent into Telstra's profits either, with the former monopolist expected to post a $3-plus billion profit for the current fiscal year. Mr Howard said that he wanted to make Australia "the greatest share-owning democracy in the world" and that he would use the bulk of the proceeds to pay off approximately 40% of Australia's foreign debt, reserving a small amount for social programs. He also pledged that foreign ownership in Telstra would be limited to 35% and that no individual foreign shareholder could hold more than 5% of the stock. The Labor Party and the Australian Democrats have announced that they will oppose any further sell-off.

The Melbourne PC Users Group (MPCU) settled a defamation action out of court this week after a British man claimed he had been defamed by a newsgroup posting at the ISP's site in September last year and sued both MPCU and the author. The decision by MPCU to settle the matter has caused alarm in Australia's ISP community, who have long contended that ISPs bear the same relationship to the Internet that telephone companies bear to the phone system and should therefore not be held liable for content or messages broadcast through their facilities, any more than telephone companies can be held liable for obscene or threatening phone calls. President Stan Johnston said that the group had settled the matter out of court because MPCU did not have the funds to mount a test case, but that all Australian ISPs wanted a legal decision to declare that they were not publishers in the traditional sense to prevent similar incidents arising in the future. "There are a terrific number of disputes that can arise," he said. "ISPs can't be held responsible for preventing them. What's considered offensive on one newsgroup may not be considered offensive on another. It's an open-ended thing, uncharted waters, and we don't know what's going to happen next." The British litigant also sued the writer of the message and this court action is continuing.

Spam King Sanford Wallace is out of the spam business - for the time being, anyway - after agreeing to pay a $2 million damages settlement to US ISP Earthlink. The settlement, which was agreed to today, is the second that Wallace has settled this week on behalf of his company Cyber Promotions. On Tuesday, email provider Bigfoot also won a judgment against Cyber Promotions for an undisclosed sum. Wallace, who drew the ire of anti-spammers when he announced his intention to set up an ISP with partner Walt Rines several months ago which would allow spammers to flood the Net with junk email, has now returned to his former business of restaurant promotion. The judgments against Wallace and Cyber Promotions are being hailed by anti-spammers as the "beginning of the end" of spam on the Net. Many ISP's currently have damages actions pending against spammers in the US courts, and the weight of penalties being handed out are actively discouraging many firms from attempting spam promotions. Wallace admitted today that it has been "very difficult" to obtain funding for his proposed spammer ISP, though he also claims that he has not yet given up on the project.

In a bid to revive its fortunes, Apple is reportedly working on a "next-generation" multi-media device that would play music CD's, digital video discs (DVDs) and hook directly into the Net. The secret project - code-named Columbus - would be marketed to consumers as an entertainment device and would compete directly against Microsoft's Web-TV. Unlike Web-TV, the Apple box would not require any special software and - as a result - could be connected to the Net through any ISP. And unlike Net PC's (currently under development by other companies), the new devices would provide an "instant on" capability, allowing consumers to access CD's or DVD's without waiting for a PC boot-up sequence. Like Web-TV, the Apple product would be primarily targeted at consumers who don't have a household PC. However, the potential ability of the device to link a CD or DVD directly to a web site has already aroused the interest of marketers, who believe the product would offer opportunities for tightly targeted marketing that Web-TV does not. The new project is being steered by interim Apple CEO Steve Jobs. Microsoft, Sony and several other companies are also rumoured to be attempting to develop similar products.

The independence of members of a committee charged with distributing $4.5 million in grants for research into the possible health risks associated with mobile phones has been called into question by Democrat Senator Lyn Allison. In a series of questions to Communications Minister Richard Alston in the Federal Parliament, Allison stated that he'd discovered that three key members of the Government's Electromagnetic Energy (EE) expert committee either currently worked for Motorola or have been previously employed in Telstra-funded research projects and asked the Minister if he felt that the committee was "sufficiently at arms length from the telecommunications industry" and if he was satisfied that conflict-of-interest guidelines for the EE provided an adequate safeguard against any real or perceived conflict. Allison then went on to state that the engagement of a Motorola employee was a clear breach of the EE's policy guidelines and that his office had a letter on the subject dated December 1996 stating that the EE committee would have "no connection with the telecommunications industry". The Federal Government was prompted to create the $4.5 million research committee after alarming research results were released in South Australia last year which showed that electromagnetic radiation similar to that used in mobile phones appeared to be capable of causing cancer in cancer-prone rates and - in a separate West Australian study - that there appeared to be a link between brain tumors and mobile phone usage. Ironically, one of the EE committee members Senator Allison drew attention to was involved in the South Australian study.

Yahoo! Australia launched a new online travel site today in conjunction with travel.com.au which may presage continuing job losses in the Australian travel agency industry. The new site will combine travel guides from Lonely Planet and National Geographic with travel.com.au's discount fare scheme (which offers consumers a 5% discount for all travel bookings made over the Net), providing an all-in-one "do it yourself" travel site. Up to 60% of all travel bookings are expected to be made online within the next few years, both companies say, and the new joint venture is intended to cement travel.com.au's already wide lead over other Australian travel companies. Meanwhile, Woolworths announced today that it will be opening an online grocery shopping site in Sydney shortly which will cover an initial 12 locations after a successful small-scale trial of the idea in north Queensland. The move into online grocery shopping will steal the march on its chief rival Coles-Myer, and may precipitate a rush of similar services from other grocery chains later this year.

According to Irish Internet research group NUA, more than 5.8 million Germans aged between 14 and 59 years of age now use the Internet on a regular basis, with teenagers comprising the strongest demographic group online. 14 out of every 100 Germans aged between 30 and 39 are now adept at online services while seven percent of those between 50 and 59 know how to navigate the Web. Similarly, one in twenty five British households are now linked to the Internet, showing a strong commitment to online services . And there are now 8.8 million online users in Japan, a number that's more than tripled over the last 24 months. However - on a per-capita basis - all three countries still lag well behind both the USA (one in five households) and Australia (one in eight households).

Australian Cybermalls are moving to a faster server over the next 48 hours. The move will mark our fifth consecutive speed increase in less than 2 years and has - as always - been prompted by the continued growth in our site's traffic. Australian Cybermalls was originally hosted on a 64K ISDN link in Sydney when we began operations in 1996 and as visitor numbers grew we upgraded this to a 128K ISDN line. However, continued growth forced us to move offshore in search of better facilities by January 1997 when we relocated to the USA on a multi-threaded 8MBps T1 line, upgrading yet again to a 45 MBps T3 line a few months after that. At present Australian Cybermalls is housed on a server in the increasingly congested Washington DC network area. For our latest upgrade we'll be moving to a much less congested region of the US east coast and simultaneously upgrading our hardware to an UltraSparc 170 running Solaris 2.6 - a machine completely optimised for delivering superior web performance and full Year 2000 compliance. We hope this will make your visit to our site much faster as a result. Although we expect the move will be seamless, it is possible that we may be offline for brief periods during the next two days as it's carried out. We'd like to apologise in advance for any inconvenience this might cause. And thankyou, everyone, for your continued support!

Microsoft founder Bill Gates appeared before a US Senate hearing today and admitted - under close questioning - that his company made its channel partners sign an agreement that forbids them promoting rival Netscape's products on the front screens of their sites. Gates, who was appearing at a packed US Senate Judiciary Committe hearing dubbed "Market Power and Structural Change in the Software Industry", appeared increasingly agitated as he was asked probing questions about the overweening dominance of his company in PC operating systems; his boast of "choking off Netscape's air supply"; his company's business practices; and the agreements Microsoft made its partners sign which effectively limited the ability of new competitors to emerge on "Microsoft turf". Critics at the hearing - including representatives from Sun and Netscape - derided Gates' claim that "Microsoft does not have monopoly power in the business of developing and licensing computer operating software," pointing out that the company now supplies the operating systems for 90% of PCs world-wide. Instead, they argued that Microsoft should be held to a different standard precisely because of the market dominance it enjoyed. They also argued that although the company is not a monopoly in terms of existing US anti-trust laws, new laws may be required to rein it in to protect innovation in the software industry.and on the Internet.

According to a survey of Australian Internet use by www.consult (WWWC), New South Wales, the ACT and South Australia are the most "wired" states and Victoria - surprisingly, perhaps, given its high-profile multimedia initiatives - is the least. WWWC surveyed more than 11,000 users and discovered that NSW, the ACT and SA now have a 2% higher proportion of Internet users than each State's contribution to the total national population. However, Internet usage in Victoria lags 4% behind the state's population base. Queensland and Tasmania both have 1% fewer Internet users than population, while the Northern Territory is directly proportional and WA is 1% ahead. WWWC's survey also found that 60% of Australians surf the Net from home; that 30% of users are aged between 25 and 35; and that 63% believe that parents should assume responsibility for supervising what their children access on the Internet, with only 7% of the survey group believing that government censorship of the Net should be allowed. The survey also found that 25% of participants described their occupations as professional; 52% were full-time wage or salary earners; and only 2% were unemployed.

After two months of decline over the summer holiday season, the number of Australian Internet sites bounced back during February according to our monthly Australian Internet Growth Index (which has been measuring the approximate number of Australian sites on the Internet since January 1996). The search engines we regularly poll to construct the AIGI all showed an average growth of between 12% and 15% for the month - a significant turnaround on the mammoth 28% decline noted in December 1997 and the 1% fall noted in January 1998. Although all mainland capitals recorded a rise, growth in Melbourne outpaced Sydney for the first time since we began building the AIGI, logging a gain of almost 1,000 web sites over the month. The March 1st figures (with February 1st figures in brackets) are as follows:

Australian Internet Growth Index February 1998
(Figures Show Estimated Sites)

Brisbane - 2,275 (2,044)
Sydney - 8,829 (8,104)
Melbourne - 6,732 (5,744)
Adelaide - 2,984 (2,693)

Perth - 2,435 (2,190)
Hobart - 1,155 (1,027)
Canberra - 2,606 (2,346)
Darwin - 2,435 (2,044)

During February Australian Cybermalls' traffic also rose as the world returned to work, lifting to 53,535 visitors from 46,809 in January - an average of around 1,911 visitors per day. During the month we transmitted around 260,000 pages of information to our visitors and consumed approximately 8.5 GBytes of bandwidth to do so.