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In this Issue:

• Featured Site - Neck Tie Coolers
• Telstra boosts Melbourne cable to 100Mbps
• NBN Co's Mike Kaiser gets $450k salary
• Thousands of web sites compromised, redirect to scareware
• Quotes of the Day

Featured Site  

Neck Tie Coolers

Neck Tie Coolers are water activated personal evaporative cooling systems great for anyone working or exercising outside! They can cool you down after a hot workout, bike ride, or mowing the lawn. Tie them around your forehead, neck, ankles or wrist and feel cool. Cool Hats are the perfect cooling headwear for keeping cool in the summer heat. Pink Ribbon Coolers are a tie on product where one size fits all. They are completely safe, non toxic and reusable, so will be enjoyed for many years.They are worn around the neck, forehead, wrist or ankles. Our products are Australian Owned and Australian Made.

Visit the Neck Tie Coolers website...

Telstra boosts Melbourne cable to 100Mbps  

Telstra has announced an upgrade to its HFC broadband network within Melbourne as well as its Velocity fibre-to-the-home network and will begin trailing a new TV set-top box.

Both networks have had their download capacity upgraded to 100Mbps, with the HFC upload having an upper limit of 2Mbps. The HFC upgrade will reach one million residences in Melbourne.

"This means the actual download speeds an individual customer will receive on the services will depend on factors including customer equipment, server limitations, Wi-Fi reception/capacity, and so will be less than the total capacity into the home," Telstra said in a statement.

Telstra said in August that it had spent $1.5 billion on the upgrade.

The telco also announced a new set-top box called T-Box that uses two digital TV tuners and has the ability to record, rewind and pause live free-to-air television. The device also connects to BigPond's TV and movie rental services.

"T-Box also gives users unmetered access to the seven BigPond TV internet channels including live news, sport and online music all streamed directly to the television set," Telstra group managing director of product management, Holly Kramer, said.

The T-Box will be trialled by Melbourne customers, due to the network upgrades, over the coming months. ZDNet Australia November 2009.

NBN Co's Mike Kaiser gets $450k salary  

The salary of Mike Kaiser, the National Broadband Network Company's government relations and external affairs chief, has been outed by a senate motion started by Shadow Communications Minister Nick Minchin yesterday.

Kaiser will earn $450,000 a year. He is currently leading Bligh's camp but will start work with NBN Co on 1 December. He served in the Queensland parliament until 2001 when he resigned after admitting during the Shepherdson inquiry to involvement in vote rigging in Labor Party ballots in the 1980s.

Minchin was staggered by the amount, pointing out that Kaiser was getting $100,000 more than the Prime Minister at $340,000.

"It is absolutely outrageous that a spin doctor for Labor's NBN Co is being paid $450,000 per annum by Australian taxpayers to promote a company that generates no revenue, has no customers and provides no services to anybody," Minchin said in a statement. ZDNet Australian November 2009. more >>>

Thousands of web sites compromised, redirect to scareware  

There are now over a million affected sites serving scareware, with only a small percentage of them currently marked as harmful. Google has been notified. As always, NoScript and your decent situational awareness are your best friends.

Security researchers have detected a massive blackhat SEO (search engine optimization) campaign consisting of over 200,000 compromised web sites, all redirecting to fake security software (Inst_58s6.exe), commonly referred to as scareware.

More details on the campaign:

The compromised sites are hosting legitimately looking templates, using automatically generated bogus content, with a tiny css.js (Trojan-Downloader.JS.FraudLoad) uploaded on each of them which triggers the scareware campaign only if the visitor is coming a search engine listed as known http referrer by the gang - in this case Google, Yahoo, Live, Altavista, and Baidu. ZDNet Nov 2009. more >>>

(Be very wary of SEO companies touting for your business) Ed.

Quotes of the Day  

Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten. B. F. Skinner (1904 - 1990), New Scientist, May 21, 1964

Arguments are to be avoided; they are always vulgar and often convincing. Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900)

Where we have strong emotions, we're liable to fool ourselves. Carl Sagan (1934 - 1996)

A taste for irony has kept more hearts from breaking than a sense of humor, for it takes irony to appreciate the joke which is on oneself. Jessamyn West (1902 - 1984)

Brought to you by The Quotations Page

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