Stephen Bell

New Zealand's Electronic Commerce Action Team (E-cat), which is winding up its two-and-a-half-year life, claims it has been instrumental in improving New Zealand's e-commerce awareness but said issues such as an underdeveloped telecommunications infrastructure are still holding the country back.

Discussions with other administrations at the Microsoft Corp.-organized Government Leaders' Summit in the U.S. last month confirmed to the New Zealand representative that the real challenges in e-government relate more to change management and people issues than the technology.

The SCO Group Inc.'s legal action against IBM Corp. on Linux code, now broadened to include other Linux users, has serious implications for the IT industry, say lawyers.

Local IT service companies could benefit from tax changes signalled by New Zealand's finance minister Michael Cullen in the 2003 Budget, delivered to Parliament yesterday.

Some New Zealand-based Internet commentators believe error messages returned from Al Jazeera's English site indicate possible tampering with the domain-name server (DNS) structure.

The IT manager of a potential reference site for Linux in the New Zealand public sector, Rob Herries of Housing New Zealand, said the organization "doesn't get asked very much" about Linux and the open-source approach by other government agencies.

Users are hopeful that 10G bps (bits per second) Ethernet links could connect Beowulf-type architectures; supercomputers constructed from hundreds or thousands of PC processors working in parallel.

Web site proprietors don't recognize the legal risks they are taking, says consultant and New Zealand Computer Society (NZCS) fellow Ian Mitchell.