Rodney Gedda

After a small reshuffle resulting in four branches instead of three, the Australian Government Management Information Office (AGIMO) has given the task of communicating open source developments to senior manager Brian Stewart.

The Australian federal Attorney General's Department has slashed software spending by 18 percent a year following a widespread review of existing contracts.

n what is believed to be the largest open source project ever developed in Australia, Victoria's Department of Sustainability and Environment (DSE) has spent the past two years and A$1.2 million on a new content portal which will go live early next year. The Zope Amendment Production Platform, or ZAPP, is a repository for every planning scheme in the state, according to the project's manager Sharon Tyrer.

Terms like AJAX and wiki may be associated with cutting-edge Web development, but IBM is using both technologies to develop next-generation business applications.

Telstra has every right to be bitter about any forced regulation of its next-generation network according to one researcher who claimed similar policies were a failure in the US. Washington-based chairman of economic and regulatory consulting firm CapAnalysis, Jeff Eisenach, said he was first to experience the failures of unbundled local loop (ULL) regulation when it was mandated by the Federal Communications Commission for all US telecommunication services in 1996.

A critical skills shortage is holding back the widespread use of service oriented architectures (SOA) and the promise of a new era of interoperability, according Tony Clement, enterprise architecture and planning manager for the Australian Wheat Board.

Terms like firewall, IDS, and deep packet inspection may be indicative of today's network security landscape, but tomorrow's may also include 'big brother' style appliances that log all user activity in an attempt to counter internal threats. This week Israeli company Sabratec Ltd. is launching its Intellinx monitoring solution, which has been described as "one big sniffer".

Enterprises conducting e-commerce transactions have been quick to take up Visa International Inc.'s free, hosted security auditing service, according to the company. Edward Lodens, Visa's head of third-party assurance, said the take up since its launch in August has been good with "a lot of merchants" joining the program.