Australian Cybermalls News

Free home page service GeoCities - long known for its zero-tolerance approach to online porn - has begun broadcasting adult ads on its site. The new policy, which began last month and which GeoCities admits is purely a revenue-earning move, has sparked a growing controversy amongst the GeoCities community who've accused the company of double standards and towering hypocrisy in online chat rooms. Although GeoCities have limited the adult ads so that they only appear on results pages after users search on sexual terms and has elected to maintain its ban on hosting adult content, the appearance of the ads has nonetheless incensed many GeoCities users who object strongly to the change in the site's "flavour". GeoCities have countered by arguing that because the new ads are served only to those who search on related terms, general users are protected from stumbling on sexually explicit content they do not want to see. GeoCities agreed earlier this year to a takeover by Yahoo!, but have denied that this has had anything to do with the sudden change in policy.

According to Irish Internet research agency NUA, there are now approximately 163.25 million people using the Internet. NUA, who have been attempting to measure the true size of the Internet population for the last few years, believe that there are now 1.14 million users in Africa, 26.97 million in the Asia/Pacific region (which includes Australia, with an estimated 4.36 million Internet population), 38.55 million in Europe, 0.88 million in the Middle East, 90.63 million in Canada and the USA, and the remaining 5.26 million in South America. Meanwhile, UK analysts Netcraft believe that there are now almost 5 million web servers hooked to the Net - up from 1 million at the same time in 1997. Netcraft also found that the top web server is still Apache with an estimated 66% of the market, followed by Microsoft (24%), Netscape (6%) and all others (4%).

In a display of either supreme arrogance or high sensitivity to criticism, a spokesperson for Communications Minister Sen. Richard Alston today said that the avalanche of negative reaction to the Australian Federal Government's proposals to censor content on the Australian internet had been "excessive". The Senate Select Committee investigating the matter - made up of pro-censorship Senators Harradine, Tierney and McGauran - plans to begin its third hearing into content regulation shortly. While not wanting to adopt either the Chinese or Singpaporean approaches (ie. either zero or strictly controlled Internet access), the spokesperson said that Government wishes to 'at least try' to block access to offensive information on the Net. And while denying that the Government's plan amounted to leaning on Australian ISPs to control content posted on their servers, the spokesman said that the proposed new legislation would "have a system where an ISP isn't responsible for content carried through their service unless they actually generate it, but once they become aware of it or are notified of it and its illegal nature, obviously they have a legal responsibility to remove it.". The proposed Bill, due to be tabled next month, has drawn widespread and trenchant criticisms from the ISP industry, Australian free speech groups and the CSIRO since it was first announced last month.

Almost 3 in every 10 large US companies now monitor employee e-mail - an increase of almost 50% in less than 2 years. The shock disclosure, which has come from a survey conducted by the American Management Association, follows the increasing use of email in court cases in recent years (most notably, the DOJ's use of email against Microsoft in the current anti-trust suit being waged between the two). The survey also found that big organisations are much more likely to carry out email monitoring than small businesses, and that when companies decide to pursue a tight email-monitoring program, almost 1 in 5 (16%) fail to tell their employees that this is occurring. However, the survey also found that the highly-objectionable "Big Brother" practice of after-the-event computer use reviews (where all inputs and outputs to a machine, including emails, keystrokes and actual usage times are captured, analyzed and compared against staff reports and timesheets) appears to have been arrested. The AMA survey found that only 16.1% of companies continue to use this odious practice, slightly down from the 16.2% who pursued the policy in 1997.

According to a study by Cognitiative Inc, 32% of US consumers dislike spam so much that they now deliberately avoid doing business with the sender, and online consumers now rate sales email as second only to telemarketing in terms of intrusiveness. Nonetheless the study also found that consumers felt empowered by vendors they trusted and with whom they had built up an online relationship, and that the simplest way for a site to build extreme brand loyalty was to exceed a customer's expectations in terms of customer service. Cognitiative's study also found that there are now differences between the way businesses and private consumers find web sites. In terms of private consumers, word of mouth was cited by 100% of respondents and links were cited in 83% of cases, followed by advertising (67%), magazine articles (61%), newspaper articles (50%) and conferences (17%). However, business consumers tend to discover sites primarily from magazines (94%), links (88%), advertising (76%), word of mouth (71%), newspapers (53%) and conferences (47%). Cognitiative also found that Net consumers are largely dissatisfied with the current level of customer service on sites at the present time, even though almost 59% rate receiving online customer service as their most important online activity. Here, Cognitiative found that while consumers prefer to receive a response within a number of hours, a one day response time is now considered acceptable to the majority.

Australian domain registry Melbourne IT (MI), which trades under the name of Internet Names Australia, will begin registering .COM domains on April 26th. MI has been selected by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers as one of five international .com, .org and .net domain registries following the recent end of Network Solutions' monopoly over these domains - a monopoly which has existed since 1993 with US Government approval. MI believe that the granting of the domain concession will lead to significant extra revenue opportunities, and hopes to focus on retailing domains to the emerging Asia-Pacific region. For Australians, the move will provide a much easier way to register .COM domains locally, providing MI adopts the same relaxed approach to .com domain issuance followed by Network Solutions. Melbourne IT has drawn criticism in the past over its administration of .com.au domains because the rules it imposes on Australian customers are the strictest of any domain registry in the world.

Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) has announced that it intends to co-ordinate a national day of protest over the Federal Government's proposed Net censorship bill (see yesterday's story). EFA is planning demonstrations and rallies in several capital cities on May 28, including Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney. The bill has come under fierce and increasing criticism since it was first mooted last month and has been described as a "technology voodoo" being foisted on the Australian public by politicians, most of whom do not yet use the Net themselves yet and therefore have no true understanding of how it works and how unenforceable and ineffective the bill would be if implemented. The bill has also been slammed by proponents of free speech, who argue that "filtering" content is the thin end of a wedge aimed at separating the general public from the free and unfettered access to knowledge that the Net provides. In the meantime, the EFA has been given extra time to coordinate its response to the Government's draft legislation. Parliamentary discussion of the bill has been adjourned till the winter sittings of Parliament later this year.

A draft of the Australian Federal Government's controversial Net censorship bill - the Broadcasting Services Amendment (Online Services) Bill 1999 - was introduced in parliament today. The bill proposes that Australian Net content will be administered by the Australian Broadcasting Authority (ABA), and provides a mechanism that will allow consumers who object to offensive material online to lodge a complaint about it with the ABA. If the ABA upholds a consumer complaint, it will then instruct the broadcaster to either put a password block on the site (if it contains R-rated material) or the ISP to block the site (if it comes from overseas and broadcasts material deemed illegal in Australia). The draft Bill has already drawn widespread criticism from the Federal Opposition., the Australian ISP industry, Electronic Frontiers Australia and many other Internet groups for being impossible to effectively police and implement and - in the end - being short-sighted and foolish. However, the Bill is being defended by its proponent Communications Minister Sen. Richard Alston, who said that it will "meet the Australian community's legitimate concern to control the publication of illegal and offensive material online, but without placing onerous or unjustifiable burdens on the Internet industry and thus inhibiting the development of the online economy."

Australia's largest computer retailing chain Harvey Norman have threatened to terminate any suppliers who attempt to sell products through the Internet directly to end consumers. In a statement published in The Australian today, the chain's computer and communications general manager Tony Gattari said that any suppliers using e-commerce would be deemed "hostile" and removed from the chain's 87 stores. "We don't mind having competitors in the market," Mr Gattari was reported as saying, "but when those competitors are also suppliers, that's when we go our separate ways." IBM, Compaq, Hewlett-Packard and Toshiba all supply consumer PCs to the Harvey Norman chain. The company also stocks software from Microsoft and most other top-tier software vendors. All these supplier companies currently operate highly profitable direct-selling operations through the Net on a global basis, and are expected to ignore the retailer's threat. However, smaller manufacturers may feel obliged to comply.

The value of popular and memorable domain names appears to be increasing, according to a report in Webpromote Weekly (WPW). WPW note that Microsoft's online magazine Salon recently paid an undisclosed amount to finally own salon.com after having tried a number of close alternatives like www.salon1999.com, www.salonmagazine.com and www.salon.net during its four-year life. Meanwhile, New Commerce Communications - which owns the domain "wallstreet.com" - will publicly auction off its name soon, with a reserve price of at $300,000. New Commerce says that even though the site is not operational, it gets almost 300,000 hits a month simply from people typing "wallstreet" into their browsers. "This is a premiere name," the company claims. "If you're a brokerage company, e-commerce company, bank, television network, radio network, financial magazine, financial news syndicate or are in any industry related to the financial industry, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity." Meanwhile, online "name brokerage" houses who register and then resell common domains at large markups are beginning to proliferate on the Net. WPM report that one US brokerage house now has more than 260,000 "premium" domains up for sale.

After a month of changing IP addresses and servers, Australian Cybermalls concluded the last of our planned 1999 developments by relocating our offices during the last week. Regrettably - as was the case with the restructuring of our web server - this move forced us to suspend site updates for a number of days while work was carried out. The move has also compounded some existing delays in our updating schedules caused by earlier work, and has produced a backlog of email correspondence we'll be attending to immediately. We apologise for any inconvenience that our regular visitors have suffered over the last month and look forward to resuming normal schedules from early next week. Our new offices are located at 33 Park Avenue, Auchenflower in Brisbane, Queensland. Our new phone number is (07) 3876-9023. Our postal address (PO Box 1358, Toowong 4066) and email addresses remain unchanged.

Australia's respected CSIRO has poured scorn on the Federal Government's recent proposal to introduce Net censorship and content filtering by re-releasing a report prepared by the CSIRO's e-commerce advisor Dr Phil McCrea. In the report, the CSIRO warns that blocking offensive material at the ISP level is ultimately pointless and that filtering really should be left up to the individual. Dr McCrea said that although the report was prepared about a year ago for the Federal Government's National Office of the Information Economy (NOIE), "it sheds light on aspects of the recent discussion on censorship of the Internet". The report found that filtering sites by an ISP before they are passed to the end-user "will never be 100% effective. Illegal or offensive material may still get through and entirely harmless sites may be blocked".

Readers' Digest's LookSmart are hoping to reposition their search engine in the Australian market after receiving a cash injection of up to $95 million from investors. The finance deal, reported yesterday in The Australian, includes investments by at least 10 companies from Australia and overseas, including the Packer-owned Consolidated Press Holdings which already has a partnership with LookSmart through its subsidiary PBL Online. LookSmart officials said that they plan to use some of the money to target the local market. LookSmart was originally developed in Melbourne by Australian programmers under contract to Readers Digest. While the engine has enjoyed significant success since it was launched in the US, the local mirror has so far failed to dislodge other engines from their top 10 positions.

A report from the Benchmark Group which ranked the most popular sites for French users has disclosed that when it comes to the Net, the French largely prefer their own home-grown sites to localised US mirrors, with French sites holding 8 of the top 13 positions. Benchmark found that Yahoo France was the most popular site, followed by the local portal Voila Wanadoo, AOL France, AltaVista, and the financial news site Les Echos. Other sites which recorded in excess of 10 million page impressions per month were Caramail (a free email site); Chez.com (a site that provides personal home pages); the French site directory Nomade; then MSN, ISP Club Internet, Excite, Multimanie (another personal home page provider), and Infonie, a French ISP. Benchmark also compiled an alphabetical listing of sites with over 3 million page impressions per month. These included the financial site Boursoama, followed by media sites Canal Plus, Elle, Europe 1, and France 2. Other sites included the portal Francite, the magazine Gaumante, IFrance, and game site Jeux Video. Also on the list were newspaper sites Le Monde and Liberation, Lokace, Lycos, and news sites Pariscope, La Tribune, Telerama, TFI and Web 66.

A study by Media Metrix (MM) has found that work-related Internet use in the USA has expanded by almost 69% in the last 12 months - a trend likely to be mirrored in Australia. According to MM's survey, workers viewed an average 243.3 pages per month in 1998 and spent 6 hours a month doing it, but are now spending 7 to 8 hours online each month and viewing an average of 409.9 pages. MM also found that significantly more time is now spent surfing the Net at work rather than at home - a trend it attributes to the expanding use of dedicated lines with high-speed Net access in medium and large-scale US enterprises. By contrast, MM found that the changes in home Net use patterns over the last year haven't been quite as dramatic. According to MM, home users viewed an average of 206.5 content pages per month in 1998. They now view 293.1 pages per month. However these figures are fairly static when compared to figures two years ago, and that most home users now spend around 5 hours a month online, up from 3 hours per month in 1996. Curiously, MM also found that workers spend an average of 45 minutes a month using the Net to shop and 46 minutes downloading pornography. It found the most popular sites for office workers were those dealing with news, information and entertainment.

Microsoft President Steve Ballmer announced today that although the company had said a year ago that Windows 98 would be its last DOS-based operating system, Microsoft is now planning to release another version for consumer computers in 2000. Ballmer, speaking at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference in Los Angeles, said that another version of Windows incorporating a number of "new features" will be released in 2000 as part of a wider partnership between Microsoft and semiconductor giant. However, industry analysts believe the real reason for the company's apparent about-face on Windows, are the widely-reported difficulties and catastrophic deadline slippages the company is experiencing with NT5/Windows 2000, which was planned to be the successor to all Windows systems. Microsoft's revenue model is founded on persuading the majority of PC users to upgrade their operating systems every 24 to 36 months, and analysts speculate that the lack of a viable, saleable Windows2000 product has forced the move.

A group of British scientists have reported that the microwave signals emitted by mobile phones appear to increase the brain activity of users by as much as 4%. The scientists, reporting the results of their study in the journal Nature, exposed laboratory mice to radiation simulating the effects of mobile phones and noted the results. Although they concluded that the observed 4% increase in brain function doesn't appear to cause immediate brain damage (nor is likely to do so over the longer term), the latest report caps a string of similar disturbing discoveries about the possible health risks associated with mobile phone usage which have been surfacing in Australia and Britain over the last three years.

Australia Post has announced that it will close down its KeyPost digital certificate issuing authority on August 1st, a little more than than 6 months after unveiling the service the the general public. KeyPost was Australia's first digital certificate authority. It offered Australians the opportunity to obtain secure authorisation for online transactions domestically rather than through the two leading US-based players in the market: Thawte and Verisign. Australia Post said the reason for the sudden reversal was the poor returns it was achieving from the $500 products and a much lower than expected uptake - especially from Government agencies where it had initially expected to generate significant interest. The move will leave accounting firm KPMG's rival Ensign service - operated in conjunction with Dun and Bradstreet and announced at the same time as KeyPost - as the sole remaining digital certification authority in the country.

Australian Internet industry groups have promised to fight the Federal Government "tooth and nail" over a web censorship law that was proposed late last month in an attempt to woo the vote of independent morals campaigner Senator Brian Harradine for other controversial proposals such as the GST and the further privatisation of Telstra. Electronic Frontiers Australia, OzEmail, the Australian Computer Society and the Internet Industry Association have all claimed that proposed content filtering to "block" unacceptable overseas sites is technically infeasible and would lead to little more than a massive slowdown in average Net access speeds across the nation. They claim that content filtering was rejected as unworkable in a CSIRO report commissioned by the Federal Government in June last year, and that the whole idea of attempting to impose censorship on the Net was little more than "voodoo technology" that didn't stand up to impartial analysis. "This is inconsistent with our country's desire to become an e-commerce hub," according to an IIA spokesman. The legislation is expected to be tabled in mid-May.

The Australian-developed AAA Matilda search engine (which also has a US mirror) has claimed the crown as the country's busiest web site. According to webmaster James Lilburne, the site now displays an average of 6 million page impressions per month - an increase of more than 1 million page impressions over the last few months and a clear 4 million page impressions ahead of its nearest rival. AAA attribute their success to the company's policy of encrypting adult web sites and being the first major search engine on the Net to adopt a "children-friendly" policy that makes the site safely accessible to all age groups. According to Mr Lilburne, AAA's wide-ranging content also demonstrates that the average visitor to the site has a much higher interest in general content than in adult content, and that the site's unusual design is no impediment to accessibility. AAA adopted a subscription-based model for their site in 1998 but still make large volumes of material (and their search engine) available free of charge to general audiences.

David L. Smith, a 30-year-old New Jersey resident, was arrested by US Federal and state officials yesterday and charged with creating the Melissa virus that began spreading across the Internet on March 26th. The macro virus, which exploits a security hole in Microsoft Outlook, sends an attachment containing 80 adult site URLs to the first 50 names in an Outlook address book. Infected email carries the heading "Important Message From X" (where "X" is the infected party's full name) and the body of the message reads: "Here is that document you asked for ...don't show anyone else ;-)", with the adult sites supplied as an attachment. The virus hit Australia within a day of its initial release and has already led to the shutdown of several major Government computing sites and caused an estimated several million dollars in losses to companies infected by the virus world-wide. Smith was tracked down with the help of America Online and by tracing phone calls. If convicted, he could face a sentence of up to 40 years in prison.

The number of Australian sites on the Internet sustained another fall in March 1999 according to the search engines we monitor to construct our monthly Australian Internet Growth Index - the fifth month in succession where the volume of new entrants failed to exceed the number of cancelled ventures. As has been the pattern since the last growth spurt in October 1998, all capitals experienced some degree of die-back during the month. The April 1st figures (with March 1st figures in brackets) are as follows:

Australian Internet Growth Index March 1999
(Figures Show Estimated Sites)

Brisbane - 2,243 (2,306)
Sydney - 7,084 (7,475)
Melbourne - 5,190 (5,856)
Adelaide - 1,958 (2,073)

Perth - 2,490 (2,567)
Hobart - 821 (893)
Canberra - 1,925 (1,974)
Darwin - 1,898 (2,052)

During March 1999 Australian Cybermalls hosted 80,412 visitors despite some technical difficulties associated with our move to an OC48 line (which had us off air for several short intervals). During the month we also displayed 324,029 pages to our visitors and consumed approximately 9.6 Gb of bandwidth.