Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Over the past three days, I've heard several general news broadcasts touch on the topic of the Conficker worm, no doubt because it has been widely reported that April 1 will see some real action from this payload of really creative code.
This would be a good thing, the publicity I mean, if people were careful about specifiying that Conficker is a Windows worm. It is not a general computer worm, it affects only systems running Windows.
People runnings Macs, Linux, any of the BSDs - you have nothing to fear. And the media should be spreading this message too, not pretending that the sky is going to fall on all computer users.
Why does the general media - and quite often the tech media too - avoid naming the culprit? Is it because they are afraid of offending Microsoft? Or is it plain ignorance?
If you leave Swiss cheese lying around your pantry, can you blame mice for wanting to creep in and eat it at night?
Similarly, if you create software that has obvious weaknesses, can you blame coders for wanting to make a buck on the side by exploiting those weaknesses?
Added to the annoying term "computer virus" in most of these broadcasts is the portrayal of Microsoft Corporation as some kind of white knight, offering a reward of - hold your breath - a quarter of a million US dollars for tracking down the creators of this worm.
First, when you have $US40-odd billion in spare cash lying around, $US250,000 is not even peanuts. It's less than that. Steve Ballmer probably spends that amount on a haircut.
Second, you create a problem and then try to act as a gallant knight to solve the problem. Isn't it your responsibility to solve it by any means? Why act as though you are doing the rest of those using Windows a favour?
If this kind of worm pandemic had happened a few centuries ago, Ballmer would have been put in the stocks for a decade. Or he would have been tarred, feathered and ridden out of town.
Today, armies of lawyers, one of the prime indicators that something is seriously wrong with human society, stand in the way of natural justice being served.
The people who created the worm are being painted as the bad guys. Who provided such an enticing target and gave them the chance to make the world's biggest software maker look like what it is - a motley collection that sells mediocre technology?
There's something called cause. There is something called effect. Windows is the cause. Conficker is just of the thousands of effects. No Windows, no Conficker.
Time to own up, Microsoft. Time to take responsibility. Time to start developing systems that are solid from the ground up.
David Bass
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