Stories by Anthony Doesburg

Mega seeks CloudCode signatory status

Mega, the seven-month-old file storage service that rose from the ashes of Kim Dotcom’s Megaupload, is one of first cabs off the rank in seeking New Zealand CloudCode signatory status.

LinkedIn: membership age, privacy and skills endorsement

How are your freestyle llama wrestling skills? Worthy of endorsement by members of your LinkedIn network?

Only third of IT projects delivered on time, budget: survey

The headline-grabbing Novopay teachers’ payroll system is just the tip of the iceberg of troubled IT projects if a KPMG survey is to be believed.

Beware of websites with no privacy statement: NetSafe

Online safety advocate NetSafe says users should be wary of websites that lack a privacy statement.

IDC, TUANZ debate government's proposed copper-based broadband pricing

Research firm IDC and telecommunications user group TUANZ have come out on opposite sides of the debate over the government’s proposed copper-based broadband pricing.

UFB rollout is ahead of schedule

The government is trumpeting the latest figures for the Ultra Fast Broadband (UFB) rollout as showing the project is ahead of schedule.

Why IITP changed from being NZ Computer Society

What’s in a name? Plenty, according to Paul Matthews, chief executive of the Institute of IT Professionals, which until a year ago was known as the New Zealand Computer Society.

Wiki New Zealand’s big data initiative

Government collection and misuse of personal information may be giving big data a bad name, but a speaker at TEDx in Auckland on Saturday cast a positive light on the state’s databases.

Antivirus vendor: turn off alerts

As the Netsky virus continues to make mischief, an antivirus product supplier wants email administrators to stop sending automatic virus alerts.

Netsky plays havoc with conference organiser

Organisation of an international conference by the Ministry of Health has been disrupted by the Netsky virus.
Although the virus has not breached the ministry’s mail system, an infected incoming message with a spoofed sender name has caused a storm of virus notifications between the MoH postmaster and a mailing list of potential attendees of the Conference on Priorities in Health Care.
Ministry technology head Warwick Sullivan says the incoming message purported to come from a MoH address set up as a collective address for the conference mailing list. When the ministry’s system detected the virus, it automatically expanded the collective address, sending a virus notification to the 1500 to 2000 names on the list. Responses to the virus warning were in turn copied to all the names on the list.
Sullivan says aside from MoH IT staff having to close off the ability to expand groups from outside the ministry, the virus hasn't affected the ministry's mail system, which typically handles tens of thousands of messages a day.
“This is the first time we’ve had Netsky hitting one of our collective addresses,” Sullivan says. The virus harvests addresses from any number of online sources, including email address books, web caches and Word documents.
Conference organiser Wendy Edgar says she was receiving about 200 messages a day at the peak of the exchange.
“Email is a wonderful tool and I just get so frustrated that there are people out there without a life who are prepared to do this sort of thing.”
Edgar says she was embarrassed to have been asked for explanations of the situation from US congressmen and message recipients in Europe.
“The most worrying thing is that it will put people off the conference.”
The event is set to take place in Wellington in November and among attendees will be Radio New Zealand health correspondent Rae Lamb, whose name is on the conference email list.
“Messages have been popping up for the past week,” says Lamb, “with the number building up and up.”
Computerworld has reported that Netsky is up to its 28th variant and that there was speculation that it existed for the purpose of address harvesting.
Garry Sexton, Asia-Pacific head of spam filter company Brightmail, suggested that Netsky’s collecting of email addresses may not be simply in the cause of further propagating itself. It may be harvesting the addresses for delivery to spammers.
The worm has no apparent damaging payload, yet its multiple variants have been created to avoid filters, presumably offering a payback to someone.

Gotta be cruel to be kind

The head of IT at UK supermarket chain Sainsbury’s has a story to tell that anyone contemplating large-scale outsourcing might learn from. This one’s a success story, so the advice of Maggie Miller, who calls herself Sainsbury’s “business transformation director”, is worth listening to, although there’s a sting in the tail.