The Federal Government has confirmed it is considering a policy requiring Australian internet providers to retain precise data on how their users are using the internet, with the potential to include information on emails sent and — reportedly — their web browsing history.

“The Attorney-General’s Department has been looking at the European Directive on Data Retention, to consider whether such a regime is appropriate within Australia’s law enforcement and security context,” a spokesperson for the department confirmed via email today. “It has consulted broadly with the telecommunications industry.”

The spokesperson’s confirmation was also contained in a report by ZDNet.com.au (which broke this story), which stated that ISP industry sources had flagged the potential for the new regime to require ISPs to record each internet address (also known as URL) that an internet user visited.

Delimiter has contacted spokespeople from major ISPs such as Telstra, Optus, iiNet, Internode and Adam Internet to ask for a response on the matter, as well as the Internet Industry Association, a group which represents the ISPs. The office Communications Minister Stephen Conroy and the office of Attorney-General Robert McLelland have also been contacted for comment on the matter.

The European Directive on Data Retention (2006) requires communications providers to retain a number of categories of data relating to their users.

Broadly speaking, they must retain data necessary to trace and identify the source, destination, date, type, time and duration of communications — and even what communication equipment is being used by customers and the location of mobile transmissions.

According to the directive, where internet access is concerned, this means the ISPs must retain the user ID of users, email addresses of senders and recipients of email, the date and time that users logged on and off from a service, and their IP address — whether dynamic or static applied to their user ID.

For telephone conversations, this means the number from which calls were placed and the number that received the call, the owner of the telephone service and similar data such as the time and date of the call’s commencement and completion. For mobile phone numbers, geographic location data would also be included.

The EU directive requires that no data regarding the content of communications be included, however, and it has directives regarding privacy, including the fact that data would be retained for periods of not less than six months and not more than two years from the date of the communication.

Any data collected is to be destroyed at the end of that period.

Image credit: Mateusz Stachowski, royalty free

(Hell, it worked for those poor souls concerned that rogue postings on Facebook are going to destroy the fabric of Australian society)

Just like green IT some 18 months ago, Australian IT services companies and vendors are currently obsessed with cloud computing. And just like green IT, they are explaining it poorly with phrases of marketing guff that often mean nothing.

A prime example of this problem was the speech delivered by local Fujitsu chief Rod Vawdrey (pictured) at the MediaConnect conference on the Gold Coast on Sunday (disclosure: MediaConnect paid for accommodation and flights for journalists).

The executive announced a new product that Fujitsu calls “Infrastructure as a Service”, but didn’t initially provide any real details on it actually was. Take a look for yourself — you can read Fujitsu’s press release here.

After a brief speech, Vawdrey was hammered by journalists (including yours truly) who wanted to know exactly what Fujitsu was announcing. What applications would run in the cloud? How was the strategy different from what Fujitsu was already doing? What partners and software was involved?

It can’t have been an enjoyable experience for the executive, and the talk at the conference afterwards was disbelief at the lack of clarity.

And yet the detail was there, as Vawdrey and Fujitsu chief technology officer Marc Silvester gradually explained. It’s just that like so many other vendors at the moment, Fujitsu didn’t initially lay that out as clearly as it could have.

If you really drill down into what the company is doing, its cloud strategy is not that different from that of its rivals. What it really boils down to is more flexibility around how corporate applications — both standard packages and custom-built software — are hosted, where they are hosted and the platforms they are hosted on, and innovative pricing models.

It’s no big surprise that CIOs are demanding these sorts of services — they’re looking to cut some of the fat out of their infrastructure and run things a bit “lighter”. The old days of big, bad, monolithic in-house applications are gone, and should be.

There’s nothing wrong these days with handing off services like email and CRM to cloud providers and even accepting a little less than five nines availability along the way.

IT services companies like Fujitsu aren’t throwing the baby out with the bathwater. They’ll still continue to offer the same traditional IT services they always have. But they’re responding to obvious customer demand around new models.

One example of this would be the intense CIO interest in handing off corporate email systems into cloud platforms such as Google’s Gmail. Many managers are simply tired of the effort and expense required to manage a complex in-house solution like Microsoft Exchange for users who often don’t need 90 percent of the features.

Microsoft also knows this — it’s why it’s also increasingly talking about its own cloud email services. Just a few weeks ago CSC revealed it would provide a suite of Microsoft applications from Australian datacentres based on a cloud model.

What the industry really needs to admit at the moment is that cloud computing is not really anything that new. It’s just some smarter thinking about how IT services companies can work with technology vendors to produce better, more flexible outcomes for their customers.

So just say so.

Image credit: Fujitsu

A spokesperson for the loose coalition of individuals who attacked Federal Government websites this week to protest against the internet filtering policy today acknowledged some thought the attacks were juvenile, but said they sent more of a message than “signing a petition”.

The group this week knocked the website of the Australian Parliament offline in a distributed denial of service attack that also targeted the website of Communications Minister Stephen Conroy’s Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy.

Government workers were also sent a flood of email with porn enclosed, prank phone calls and dodgy faxes, in an initiative dubbed “Operation Titstorm”.

“Maybe some people think the attacks are juvenile but it makes more of a message then signing a petition as the attacks can not be ignored,” said an individual claiming to be a spokesperson for the group in an email interview.

They added they did not feel the attack would completely stop the filter initiative initiative from being cancelled. “However, even if they make the blacklist public I personally will be happy, but there are other people that will not be happy until it is completely destroyed,” the spokesperson said.

They said the aim of the attack was to make governments everywhere aware that they “can not mess with the internet and not have a backlash”.

Despite their sentiments about petitions, the spokesperson said the best thing the broader Australian public could do to protest against the filter was to sign the petition of Electronic Frontiers Australia and tell government officials that they disagreed with the policy.

It’s not the first time Anonymous has attacked government websites; in September last year, the group, which has achieved notoriety for its attacks against the Church of Scientology, temporarily took down several Australian Government websites, including the website of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.

In response to a question about whether that prior action had had any legal consequences, the spokesperson said the group had not had any reports of legal action, but as every member of Anonymous was an individual, the group had no formal membership and anyone could take part in the protest action, news of legal action against individuals did not always spread.

In this week’s attack, the individual estimated that there were about 100 people actively participating in the protest, but because of the way Anonymous is organised, it was impossible to tell. Last night, they said, there were at least 480 people in an associated chat room discussing the attack.

One of Anonymous’ claims is that the government is cracking down on in an inappropriate way on certain types of content online that may not be illegal, but may suggest illegal behaviour — for example pornographic images of women with a certain chest size that may suggest they are below 18. In answer to a question about the veracity of the claim, the spokesperson pointed to government statements and information released by the Australian Sex Party.

Delimiter also asked the Anonymous spokesperson about their views on the internet meme lolcatz, which, like Anonymous, has been associated with the internet messageboard 4chan. “Lolcatz is great, what is not to love about a cat with a funny caption under it,” they said.

Note: Delimiter does not have any specific knowledge of the identity of individual members of Anonymous. We simply emailed the operation.titstorm@gmail.com email address listed on Anonymous’ press release earlier this week and received a reply from an individual claiming to be a spokesperson. There are obvious journalistic difficulties with verifying the spokesperson’s identity, however we believe them to be affiliated with Anonymous.

The spokesperson stressed they personally had not taken part in attacking government websites and was just acting as a spokesperson for Anonymous.

Image credit: Anynonymoose, Creative Commons 2.0

Qantas today confirmed that it would shortly migrate its corporate email platform from IBM’s Lotus Notes/Domino platform to Microsoft Exchange/Outlook.

Confirming a report this morning in the AustralianIT, Qantas executive manager of corporate services and technology David Hall said the process of migrating to Exchange had already begun, with piloting underway across the airline’s executive team.

“This is part of the Qantas technology group’s focus on leveraging technology to improve efficiencies for the business and enhancing communication effectiveness across our workforce,” said Hall.

“Subject to satisfactory piloting, we anticipate the migration to be substantially completed by the end of the year.” It is expected that around 20,000 staff will be migrated to the Microsoft platform.

Hall said Qantas would also be consolidating “a large number” of Lotus Notes applications and databases as part of its drive to “standardise, reduce and simplify” the number of business applications and tools it used.

Since moving up to his current role in October 2008 from his previous position as chief financial officer at Qantas subsidiary Jetstar, Hall has made dramatic changes to Qantas’ IT support operation.

In a landmark speech in August 2009, Hall said he believed Qantas could cut its IT costs by $100 million over the next financial year. Over the past couple of years the airline has pursued a number of IT outsourcing initiatives. For example, in mid-2009 some 200 Qantas staff were offered jobs at IBM as Big Blue took over responsibility for the airline’s project delivery servies.

Image credit: Qantas

news Microsoft and PBL Media joint venture ninemsn this week started allowing users to register email addresses in the Australian Hotmail.com.au domain, as opposed to the traditional Hotmail.com domain.

A ninemsn spokesperson confirmed the move yesterday afternoon, saying it increased the availability of email address options to users and gave them a local option to the free online email mainstay. There are more than 4.3 million people using the Windows Live Hotmail service in Australia, according to a Nielsen Netview report from December 2009.

Users had already been able to register to use the live.com.au domain name for several years, but it’s the first time the Hotmail.com.au name has been available. Hotmail.co.nz has also been made available for New Zealand use.

Users are encouraged to login to the Windows Live https://signup.live.com.au to pick the email address of their choice.

Hotmail was one of the first free email services to launch online (back in 1996) and was acquired by Microsoft in 1996 and re-branded several times. It remains one of the most popular online offerings with several hundred million users globally.

Security issue?
Local systems administrator Alan Lee, who works for content management firm Elcom Technology, expressed concern over the move, as he said he saw a substantial amount of traffic through his email servers that was already wrongfully addressed to Hotmail.com.au addresses — email users had mistakenly been appending the .au suffix to emails for some time.

He added there was a concern that people could impersonate others who had existing Hotmail.com addresses — for example, an individual could set up a john.smith@hotmail.com.au address and mimic an individual who already had a john.smith@hotmail.com account. He questioned whether ninemsn should have mapped the new domain to the old one, so users with existing Hotmail.com addresses would receive email to the same account name at Hotmail.com.au.

But Alex Parsons, director of marketing and MSN products at ninemsn, said the company had yet to receive feedback of duplicate email addresses being an issue for customers.

“However, as with all mails you send, we recommend checking over the recipient’s email address to ensure you are sending the email to the correct person and webmail address,” he said.

“If a customer had more than one email address, through pop3 functionality which Hotmail provides, they could link their existing Hotmail account to a new one they created and use the new one as the primary account.”

Image credit: Stephanie Hofschlaeger, royalty free