So, what does this mean to you as a Telstra customer or a customer of another telco? 

Probably the most important result of this agreement will be that the NBN now has a much better chance of actually being completed according to the government’s plan and of being economically feasible when it is.  In a nation of the geographic size of Australia, it would make little sense to have two national broadband networks, replicating significant effort.  It is hard to see how NBN Co’s network could have been economically feasible without Telstra’s huge customer base.

This should mean that access to the national broadband network will be cheaper than it would have been had Telstra not come on board.  NBN Co will have a much larger customer base than they otherwise would have, so will be able to spread costs. 

Better competition should also mean good deals for broadband customers when the NBN is rolled out.  Other ISPs will now be on an equal footing with Telstra (though Telstra’s large existing customer base means they have something of a head start) and there can be no suggestion of Telstra being able to price competitors out of the market through being both a telecommunications wholesaler and retailer.

This deal removes a huge barrier to the success of the national broadband network and makes it far more likely that Australians will have access to broadband speeds already enjoyed in other parts of the world, without having to break the bank.

Some suggest that no-one cares about privacy any more and while that may be an exaggeration, there is certainly a trend in that direction.  It is certainly not a trend that I personally subscribe to and I wonder whether those keen to put their lives online have really thought through what they are doing.

A new site called PleaseRobMe.com popped up recently.  The site reposted Twitter messages that included location information, indicating people who were not at home when they posted.  The aim of the site was not really to identify candidates for burglary, but to raise awareness about “over-sharing”, the tendency for people to post information to social networking sites that they may be better keeping to themselves.  The site no longer lists tweets as the site owners consider that they have made their point and it is one worth making.

There are huge benefits to be had from the proper use of social networking sites, both in business and on a personal level, but it is important to keep in mind the potential risks.

SkyDrive requires only that you sign up for a free Windows Live account and immediately gives you 25GB of storage online.  Files stored on SkyDrive can be private or public and you can determine who has access to your files.  Files can be easily uploaded into a folder structure you define and downloaded via your web browser.  You can even download an entire folder as a zip file to reduce the time required to download.  Office 2010 will even have the ability to save directly to your SkyDrive.

Windows Live Photos is a photo sharing component of SkyDrive that allows users to upload photos via a web browser and share them with others.  Photos can be viewed in a slide show format or downloaded as a zip file.

Each folder you create on SkyDrive has a unique address, so you can link to folders from blogs, other web pages and e-mails.  You can even set up RSS feeds, so that subscribers will be notified when you upload something new to a folder.

SkyDrive has its limitations – it has a file size limit of 50MB and it doesn’t automatically sync files in the way that a service like DropBox does, but it is certainly a very useful service and the 25GB of free disk space is very generous.  The forthcoming ability to save and share files directly from Office 2010 will make it a very appealling platform for collaboration between workers in different locations.

You can find Windows Live SkyDrive at http://skydrive.live.com/

For anyone who keeps their systems up to date, this will have no impact, as Internet Explorer 6 is old (and seriously flawed) technology.  However, there are plenty of unpatched systems out there still using IE6 – over 10% according to the w3schools browser statistics site.

If yours is one of those systems, then you should make the switch now, either by upgrading to Internet Explorer 8, or by changing to another browser, such as Firefox, Chrome or Safari.

In short, the iPad looks more like a larger version of the iPhone or iPod Touch, rather then a tablet form iMac or MacBook.  It’s very thin and light with a 9.7 inch touch screen.

I can certainly see a market for this in the consumer area, though I wonder if the pricing will put some off (as is so often the case with Apple products).  There are three models – a 16GB model for US$499, a 32GB model for US$599 and a 64GB model for US$699.  3G mobile network access is an extra US$130 on any of the models.  I have not seen any mention of Australian prices or release dates as yet.

As an avid iPhone user, I can appreciate the convenience of being able to quickly look up a web site or check e-mail on a portable device that is effectively always on.  The larger screen on the iPad can only enhance this experience if you are happy to pay for it.

I don’t want to go into the political ramifications, but the technological aspects are just as interesting.  People tend to take e-mail at face value and assume that they come from the person in the Sender field and were sent at the time shown in the Sent field, though hopefully people are becoming a little wiser with the number of phishing scams doing the rounds of the Internet.

It’s very easy to fake e-mail headers, though, which is why so much of the spam that you receive seems to have come from yourself or from Angelina Jolie.  In the Ute-gate case, it appears that the e-mail fakery was not even particularly well done.  It certainly did not take the Australia Federal Police to declare it a fake.

It’s a reminder to everyone that e-mail is not necessarily what it seems and to be careful what you assume.  It also raises the question yet again of how much faith should be placed in e-mail evidence and how it ranks in evidenciary terms against other forms of communication, such as paper documents and phone calls.  Of course, those can be faked, too, but perhaps not as easily as e-mail technology that was designed nearly forty years ago without spammer, phishers or legalities in mind.

*When are journalists going to show some imagination and come up with a name for a scandal that doesn’t just involve adding ‘gate’ to the end of a word.  Watergate was 35 years ago!

Here, then, is a brief rundown of spam avoidance methods that are available now to minimise the problem as far as possible.

• Block it in the cloud – Services such as MessageLabs or Postini (now owned by Google) provide e-mail security services that block spam before it even gets to your network. To use these services, which are paid on a subscription basis, you need to modify your MX records so that e-mail to your domain goes to the security service provider’s mail servers. Spam and other e-mail nasties are removed there and only good e-mail is then forwarded to your mail servers. The benefit of this approach is that spam never even reaches your network, so you don’t waste bandwidth or resources on it.
• Block it at the firewall – Any decent firewall box will have spam-blocking capabilities, be it a dedicated hardware firewall such as a Fortigate or Sonicwall device, or a PC-based firewall running security software such as Untangle. Spam may be either blocked totally or quarantined for review. The quarantine method mitigates the problem of false positives – legitimate e-mail that is marked as spam – as blocked e-mails are not immediately discarded, but available for review.
• Block it at the mail server – Plug-ins at the mail server can be employed for blocking and quarantining suspected spam. Exchange 2003 and 2007 have their own built-in spam detection capabilities and there are (more effective) third-party options from security software makers such as Trend Micro and Symantec. Again, quarantine options allow users to retrieve e-mail that is incorrectly marked as spam.
• Block it at the e-mail client – The last level of protection is at the e-mail client itself. E-mail clients such as Outlook or Thunderbird can be set up to detect spam and move it to a separate mail folder. This folder can be reviewed by the user periodically to check for false positives and is usually configured to purge itself after a specified number of days.
• Guard your e-mail address – The last method is different than the previous four in that it is about prevention rather than detection. It is common sense that the best way to avoid spam is not to allow your e-mail address to get into the hands of the spammers in the first place. That is easier said than done, but it involves not divulging your e-mail address to untrusted third parties wherever possible. This might mean not putting your e-mail address up on your web site, using obfuscation to make it more difficult for spammers to harvest your address from web forums, etc. (e.g. using me [at] me [dot] com instead of me@me.com) or using a free webmail address for online forms instead of your main e-mail address.

The most effective spam prevention regime usually involves a combination of these tactics. With the right configuration, it is possible to reduce spam to a minor irritation, if not eliminate it completely.

As with any software release, testing is recommended before deploying to all PCs in your organisation.  IE8 can be downloaded from the Microsoft web site now.  It will be distributed via Automatic Updates at some stage in the not-too-distant future, but Microsoft have not yet announced when.  When it is, users will be asked whether they want to install it, so there will be an opportunity to decline the installation if you are not ready to install.  Of course, organisations using WSUS or other patch management tools will be able to control deployment across the organisation.

Firstly, the good stuff.  IE8 includes a feature that Microsoft calls Accelerators.  These allow you to highlight some text on a web page and then quickly use that text to do a search, translate the text into another language, include it in a blog or several other actions.  Accelerators are configurable, so you if you prefer to use Google’s translator rather than the Windows Live translator, you can make the Google version the default.  This is similar to the ability to change your default search provider in IE7.

Searching on a page has been improved with the ability to highlight all occurrences of your search term on a page (Firefox users will find the new search features very familiar). 

Another nice little feature is colour-coding of related tabs.  If you open a link from a page in a new tab, those two tabs will be displayed with the same background colour in the tab bar, giving you a quick visual reference as to which tabs relate to a viewing thread.

A big plus is the way that IE8 handles browser crashes.  There is nothing more frustrating than having the browser crash when you have multiple tabs open and then having to remember which pages you need to open again.  IE8 does a pretty good job of recovering from a crash and re-opening all of the tabs you had open at the time of the crash.  (Of course a better feature would be eliminating browser crashes altogether, but I guess we can dream)

There are some gotchas, though.  IE8 is intended to be standards-compliant, something that previous versions of Internet Explorer have never been.  This means that sites designed around non-standards-compliant features of Internet Explorer will not work properly by default in IE8.  There is a compatibility mode in IE8 that allows these sites to work, but it has to be turned on for each such site.  I have found in my testing that some sites will not work properly even with compatibility mode turned on.  Interestingly, these sites worked with the IE8 beta, but broke in IE8 RC1, so things have obviously changed between those two releases.

I would certainly recommended testing IE8 thoroughly with the sites used by staff in your organisation before rolling it out when it becomes available.  As nice as some of the features are, if it IE8 breaks commonly used sites it doesn’t make sense to deploy it just yet.

While it wasn’t really a New Year’s resolution for me, I have decided to try to streamline my e-mail management processes, using a method that falls under the heading of Inbox Zero.  This is a term that encompasses a wide range of techniques and tricks, but essentially it means processing e-mails as they come in, dealing with each e-mail in your Inbox once and keeping the number of messages sitting in your Inbox at zero.  It sounds like a fantasy at first, but it becomes more feasible and attractive when you look at what that actually means.

When an e-mail comes into your Inbox, there are a number of actions that you can perform – Delete, Do, Delegate, Defer, Archive.  You are already doing each of these processing tasks, but it’s probable that you are leaving messages in your Inbox to deal with later and then having to spend time re-reading those messages later, perhaps several times.  Using Inbox Zero methods attempts to reduce the number of times you do that with each message.

So, here is how I am implementing Inbox Zero processing (and this is not my own idea – I am simply implementing some of the ideas that have already been documented):

• Under my Inbox, I have created two new folders – Deferred and Delegated.
• As e-mail comes into my Inbox, I perform one of the five processing tasks above, i.e.
  • Delete – if the e-mail is of no interest or does not need to be kept, it gets deleted straight away.
  • Do – If the e-mail requires me to do something and it is a quick task, I do it immediately, then I either delete or archive the message.  Some Inbox Zero documentation lists Respond as a separate processing action, but I think it falls under the Do action.  If an e-mail requires a quick response, just respond, then delete or archive the message.
  • Delegate – If the e-mail requires some action, but I can delegate it to someone else, I do so and then move the e-mail to my Delegated folder.
  • Defer – If the e-mail required some action, but it is not a quick task, I move it to my Deferred folder for later action.
  • Archive – If the e-mail contains information I may need later, I archive it to another appropriate mail folder.  The archive folder structure is a matter of personal preference.  Some people like to have an archive folder for each year, but I prefer to have folders set up by category and store my archived messages that way.  The main point is that archived messages are not clogging up the Inbox.

Now, the obvious potential flaw in this process is that the Deferred and Delegated folders can end up just as clogged up as the Inbox used to, so the other part of this process involves checking these folders frequently (several times a day), actioning items and then archiving the messages.  In the case of the Deferred folder, perform the tasks required, such as drafting responses.  In the case of the Delegated folder, check the status of the delegated task with the person to whom you have delegated and archive the message when the task has been completed.

There are many additional processing tasks that can be performed to keep the Deferred folder in check.  Some people simply delete any messages from this folder that are more than 30 or 60 days old, reasoning that if it hasn’t been dealt with by then it is too late.  I plan to run with the process for a while before deciding whether I need to impose any further rules like that on myself.

So far, I like the general process.  It makes me feel like I am in control of my e-mail and I believe it will save me time in the long run, as long as I can stick to the process.