Stories by Rohan Pearce

Over the last two decades cybercrime has matured from the early days of curiosity-driven hackers and pranksters to a fully fledged industry. In the process, much of the distinction between ‘traditional’ crime and online crime has been eliminated: On the one hand organised crime now uses the internet as another tool for communication and transferring criminal proceeds; on the other hand spam, phishing and malware are mature criminal industries.

The increasing capabilities of smartphones and tablets and their importance as productivity tools for business mean that mobile security is a hot-button issue.

Social media and social networking for internal collaboration and knowledge sharing can raise the productivity of some employees by up to 25 per cent according to a McKinsey report released last month.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has ditched its proposal for evaluating applications for new ‘dot word’ style top-level domains (TLDs) such as ‘.bank’ in batches of 500. A statement issued yesterday said that ICANN instead would work “based on a tentative project plan that foresees the processing of applications in a single batch, and simultaneous release of results”.

Voice over IP provider MyNetFone has won a contract worth up to $20 million dollars to provide VoIP services to the Tasmanian government. The contract has an initial term of three years but may have extensions of up to 10 years, and may be worth up to $20 million. MyNetFone has a ready for service date of 1 January 2013 for the agreement.

Earlier this year Cisco released its IBSG Horizons Study, which surveyed 600 US IT and business leaders. The results of the survey provided a clear wakeup call for anyone in doubt about the reality of the bring-your-own device (BYOD) onslaught.

More than 250 chief information officers and IT managers gathered yesterday at the Sofitel Wentworth hotel for the 2012 Sydney CIO Summit, hosted by CIO magazine.

In another blow to Research in Motion, Qantas will reportedly ditch its fleet of 1300 BlackBerrry smartphones for iPhones.

Managed hosting and Cloud provider Aptira has partnered with US company Piston Cloud Computing to deliver private clouds for Australian enterprises based on the open source OpenStack cloud computing project.

Analysis by researchers with security vendor BitDefender has highlighted the large number of iOS apps for the iPhone and iPad that make seemingly unnecessary access to users’ personal information.

The proposed Resource Super Profit Tax may have strained the relationship between Labor and the resources sector, but mining companies may stand to benefit from the bandwidth delivered by the roll out of the government's National Broadband Network (NBN).

The first tablet to run version 4.1 of Google's Android mobile platform -- Jelly Bean -- will launch later this month in Australia, retailing for $319 in stores including Harvey Norman, JB Hi Fi, Dick Smith, Bing Lee, The Good Guys, Officeworks and EB Games.

The internet is set for something of a shakeup, with the introduction of new 'dot word'-style domains, like .bank and .app.

Almost every inbox has been plagued by them: Emails offering a chance at a share of millions of dollars (or pounds or euros). Someone works at a Department of Finance or Department of Oil or is terminally ill or for some other reason needs to shift a large chunk of money out of their country. And they need your help.

Swinburne University has launched a new supercomputer dubbed gSTAR — "GPU Supercomputer for Theoretical Astrophysics". The new 120-teraflop computer will be used by students and staff at the university's Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing for modelling and processing the vast amount of data produced by telescopes.