Darren Pauli

Wireless communication, once the domain of broadcasters and carriers, is now available everywhere we work, play, study, dine and drink coffee. These days wireless also seems to be equipped in every imaginable device, including toys made by the likes of Fisher Price. The technology can also be thanked for eliminating what was once the common eyesore of Ethernet cable carpets.

Wireless has become an ubiquitous service, not just one of convenience. On a typical morning commute, more often than not, a myriad of blinking mobile Internet dongles and illuminated iPhones glow aboard buses and trains as workers link in to the office, or digest their morning news.

You may reject the idea of a microchip implant, but your grandchildren could embrace them, according to an Australian professor.

Katrina Michael, associate professor of the University of Wollongong's school of information systems and technology, and author of scientific paper Towards a State of Uberveillance, said subdermal chip implants in humans could be commonplace within two to three generations.

Beer is the world's oldest alcoholic beverage, and the favourite tipple of Australians. Captain Cook brought it with him as a means to preserve water, and his idea seems to have caught on -- Australians globally are about the fourth or fifth most prolific beer-drinkers per capita, slugging back about 110 litres per person per year. And as it is to the art of winemaking, technology is integral to modern brewers.

Coopers is the third largest and only independent brewer from the 10 biggest in Australia. Its iconic naturally-conditioned ales are popular among the pool of pasteurised lagers, and it is thanks in part to a system of electronic monitors and regulators that the brewer can pump out 60 million litres of its complex beers a year.

The Chinese Government is set to terminate circumvention methods of its mandatory Internet filter ahead of the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre next month, just as it did last year, according to the Tor Project founder.

Tor is an anonymizer network used to bypass Internet filters, help cops catch criminals, and criminals elude cops.

The websites of Kellogg's, Nutri-Grain, Vogel's and Specialty Cereals were hit in a string of mass defacements on Sunday.

The ANZAC Day attacks were conducted by a single hacker, or hacking group, and affected Windows 2003 operating systems.

Full Name: Evgeniy Valentinovich Kasperskiy (Eugene Kaspersky)

Company: Kaspersky Lab

Adoption of mid-range smartphones is set to buck the trend of falling revenue in the mobile market this year.

According to IDC's Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker for Q4 2008, the number of mobile phones shipped fell by 16 per cent to 2.98 million units in 2008. It claimed the number of converged devices (smartphones) shipped increased by 8 per cent and will rise by a further 8 per cent this year due to adoption of midrange priced devices.

Security company Sophos has lashed out at the BBC for commandeering some 22,000 computers earlier this month, claiming the move was a reckless breach of privacy that could inspire a wave of vigilante copycats.

The computers were assembled into a botnet by the BBC following advice from hackers in online chatrooms, and were then used to spam dummy Hotmail and Gmail accounts to demonstrate the machinations of spam in its Click TV segment.

Artwork: Chip TaylorMore people use pirated software in Australia than in Sweden -- home of a popular pirate site -- according to a report by research firm IDC.

A separate telephone survey of 1100 Australians conducted last month by Galaxy Research and commissioned by Microsoft Australia, found up to 64 percent would use pirated software for personal use.

Apple has taken the place of Microsoft for disclosing more vulnerabilities than any other vendor, according to an IBM security report.

The company rose from second place in 2007 to take the top spot away from Microsoft, which had fallen into third place behind open source content management system Joomla.

Customers of small Internet Service Providers (ISPs) may be at risk of online fraud, following the industry's lax response to securing against the recently discovered Domain Name System (DNS) cache poisoning flaw.

The flaw was publicly revealed early last month when security vendors including the Internet Systems Consortium (ISC), Cisco, Debian and Microsoft released patches after about six months of quiet collaboration. IOActive researcher Dan Kaminsky discovered the hole in January this year.