Weekly Roundup: Government stays mum on national broadband and Dell has a bad day in court

Conroy is refusing to comment about plans for the $4.7 billion NBN, claiming he is applying the same gag order imposed on NBN bidders on himself.

His silence did not sit well with Liberal Democrats, who attempted to question the Minister at a Parliamentary meeting on Tuesday and believe he may have something to hide.

Despite the NBN gag order, it was learned this week that the Tasmanian government has put down the $5 million bid to take part in the project. It joins Telstra, Terria (formerly the G9), Optus, and TransACT.

Gartner says rise of data-intensive applications, data centre pressures, and mobile and networking technologies is driving a business uptake of cloud computing.

It predicts that by 2012, 80 percent of Fortune 1000 enterprises will be paying for some cloud computing services, and 30 percent will be paying for cloud computing infrastructure services.

iPrimus announced a new ADSL2+ package that it says include the largest data amount ever offered to Australian residential customers by a broadband provider. The plan, dubbed ‘the Big Kahuna’ offers 200 GB of data, broken up between peak and off-peak hours and is available to customers now.

After months of negotiations, Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang said that, although Yahoo is still willing to negotiate a full merger, Microsoft has apparently lost interest in making a deal. Yang said that some kind of partnership between the two internet giants is still possible, but the issue of the price tag is the still the biggest hurdle.

Researchers from Symantec, McAfee, and Sans are warning computer users of a new online attack using infected Flash SWF files. The compromised pages have been found on several Chinese-language sites and contain JavaScript code which silently redirects users to the attack site.

US computer manufacturer 3K Computers introduced a US$299 laptop which weighs just under 2 lbs and used a Linux based operating system.

A New York court found Dell Computers guilty of false advertising and fraud after hundreds of customer complaints were filed.

Court papers said Dell enganged in abusive debt collection practices, misled consumers about the financing terms for which they had qualified and failed to provide consumers with promised rebates.

Dell now faces the possibility of a huge damages claim, but blames the trouble on a small number of customer complaints.

badbroadbandcourtdaydellgovernmenthasinnationalroundupsoftwareweekly