Waiting for Telstra, Pt III

We're still waiting. Its now some weeks later and, despite numerous phone calls to the Telstra dealer concerned, Mercury Blue, and to Telstra itself, still no sign of either the promised modem, or anything else.
Mercury Blue is based in Adelaide it seems, and based on this experience, they're simply a waste of time.
They do a variety of things for Telstra it seems. Mobile upgrades, and also operate as The Broadband Centre.
www.mercuryblue.com.au

Waiting for Telstra, Pt II

This week Telstra reported its one-millionth customer signed up to a broadband service.
Based on my experience, most of those will be customers of services bought from another company,
rather than directly from Telstra or one of its dealers.
Once we had shifted our home phone service back to Telstra, preparatory to choosing an ADSL service supplier
(which could easily have been Telstra), we were interested to get a call from someone offering us a free ADSL kit.
Initially I declined the offer, because, as eventually became clear, the only thing that was free about the offer, was the look you got at the
the contents of the box sent to you. I'd read about this scam on Whirlpool, so was awake to it.
EWven so, I was surprised that this Telstra dealer, calling itself the Broadband Centre, was making such a misleading offer.
But later on I figured that, what the heck, if they were willing to send us the modem and sign up disk and details etc,
I might as well accept the offer, even if I planned to send it straight back, because it would help me in figuring out
how to get my home network of 3 PCs set up with a wireless ADSL service.
That was my mistake. More tomorrow.

Waiting for Telstra broadband. Part 1, still wating

Waiting for Telstra was, famously, the title of one of the espisodes in the top-rating Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Kath and Kimseries.
The plot involved Kath inadvertently (but typically) gravitating to various misadventures and, in this particular episode, whilst she waited all day
for the Telstra phone technician to arrive.
Waiting for Telstra has been, for many years, a common experience for Aussies whilst dealing with our national, publicly-owned operator of the public switched telephone network (PSTN.
So too, has your correspondent been waiting patiently for Telstra's broadband service to arrive, over the last month or two, after the incumbent provider of our two home phone services, Optus, repeatedly declined our invitation to connect us to their ADSL service.
Now that Optus has revealed it plans to build its own ADSL network service in Australia's three largest states, instead of just re-selling Telstra's service,
the reason why Optus declined our invitation is clear.
And it is important background to understanding why we switched one of our phones back to Telstra.
You see, Telstra, as monopoly owner of the so-called 'last mile' copper-wire between the street and Australians' homes, is the actual carrier of all ADSL services in Australia ( at least from the home to the local exchange), even if many wholesalers actually re-badge the ADSL services they sell as their own.
So we figured the quickesty and simplest way to get on to an ADSL service (even if it doesn't offer the best value for money, or the fastest service) would be to switch one home phone service back to Telstra.
We figured that after that, getting on to Telstra's ADSL service would be a doddle.
That was some time back now, and we're still waiting.
Now, very few people have given any indication that they are reading this blog. Certainly no-one is leaving any comments.
So what have I got to lose if use this blog to name names and well, spill the beans, on waiting for Telstra.
It will be sort of a therapeutic bile purging for me, and could possibly save someone else from the same fate.
Stay tuned for part 2.

ePassports are no good for 6-12 year olds

Last weeks ePassports seminar out at the Reserve Bank's Note Printing works in outer Melbourne was very interesting, if only because of the revelation that
our new electronic passports are going to be less than perfect.
They'll have a scanned picture of us on their chip, which will be checked by
an automated face recognition scanner at the airport.
(I assume how it will work will be that the machine will compare the face of the passport holder with the scan stored in the passport chip).
Trouble is, the faces of kids aged between 6 and 12 change quite a lot as they grow.
So, as the senior official from the Department of Foreign Affairs freely admitted, these ePassports are likely to be pretty useless and the customs or immigration officials will have to fall back on the traditional checks.
Of course, the whole question of identity fraud remains very serious and I want to make it very clear that I'm not questioning the need for ePassports.
After all, there are sites on the web like fakeguruid.com advertising Australian drivers licenses made to order.

eBay confirms email I received was fake, watch out for email from eactahshx@orc.ru

It was a fake, phoney, bogus and bad. At first I thought someone had make a mistake when typing in an email address, and typed in mine.
It clearly wasn't me because I've never sold anything on eBay.
It was a complaint email. It appeared to be from someone claiming that I'd taken their money but not delivered what I'd promised.
It asked me to click on the message icon and explainwise I'd be reported to the police.
But then I looked a bit closer and realised that the 'from' in the email address didn't look right.
It said "From: Ebay and gave the email address of the sender as .
Now call me old-fashioned by an email address from a russian domain looks a little bit suspicious. So I forwarded the email to abuse@eBay.co.uk.
I've now got a reply confirming that it was't sent from eBay. In other words, it was a phishing attack, trying to trick me into giving up my eBay userID and password.
So beware of whoever is . They're scam artists, conmen and frauds. Don't be bluffed and click on the message icon in his email.

eCommerce Report - number one in online payments

Australia's most popular payments gateway is eCommerce Report.
If you don't agree then I challenge to you to disprove prove it.
You'll probably find that you can't disprove it, for the same reasons that the claim
can't be proved either.
There simply isn't any independent source of evidence.
Thats why I'm preparing a special research report on Australia's online payments
gateways.
I'm already making people unhappy doing it because I've published a teaser on
the report in the latest issue of my newsletter. The story questions the claim
by Sydney based Internet business, NetRegistry, that it is Australia's number one payments gateway.
Their web-site used to feature a nice graphic element proclaiming their market leadership.
But it seems to have disappeared.
I wonder whether that has got anything to do with my investigations?

Visa to release on-line index down under

It mightn't be an age-old mystery, but the question of just how much business is done on-line is at least a hardy perennial.
Certainly the release of the on-line retailing sales data in the US in recent times has helped confirm that on-line
is only a niche market in most areas, such as grocery and the like. On-line retail sales are about 2% of all retail sales
according to the US Bureau of Census.
But then again the official definitions leave out many of the market segments where on-line business, i.e. ecommerce,'has really
taken off. Ticketing, for example, and not just for airline travel. Ticketing for entertainment is now big business online and not yet
captured in the official data.
Still, that may be about to all change very soon with Visa sources telling your blogger that they are soon to begin publishing
an on-line index. Visa is, of course, in a very good position to publish an index of business activity on the web because credit-cards are still
the main way people pay for things on-line.
Indeed earlier this year Visa issued some stats for ecommerce both globally and down-under. For down-under at least Visa found
that there were some 4.35 million ecommerce transactions a month.
Head to the Visa down-under web-site, click on media and choose archived press releases for March April or May this year.
( I forget which month it is precisely).
www.visa.com.au

Lets meet the Latrobe uni ecommerce people

Stewart Carter and Dr Fei Liu in the lecture theatre at Latrobe University.

Last Friday I had the good fortune to visit Latrobe university and give a guest lecture to mainly post-graduate students studying ecommerce in the department of computer science and computer engineering.
I talked about on-line payment systems and, as usual, found a lot of the students were very interested in credit-card fraud online.
That was partly because most of them had had some experience with on-line shopping. And in at least one case a student had had a bad experience.
I figure that all just underlines how significant the whole topic of payment systems are with on-line shopping.
Anyway, I'd like to express my gratitude to Dr Fei Liu, senior lecturer in the Department, for her invitation.
Dr Liu teaches the subject Electronic Commerce Systems CSE42ECS and it was great to meet with her and her grad students afterwards to hear about their various research interests and projects.
I'll be publishing something about them on my eCommerce Network site, but in the meantime I figured I'd use this blog experiment with posting pictures to my blog. And specificially, a [icture of me with Dr Liu in the lecture theatre.
For more info on the Latrobe ecommerce subject head to the departmental web-site at http://www.cs.latrobe.edu.au

US company to vouch for Australian identities in new e-Passports?

Later this year, US company Cybertrust will be vouching for your Australian identity when you present an e-passport at international airports.
And the International Civial Aviation Organisation will be verifying that your passport was issued by the Australian government.
That appears to be the upshot of this weeks news that Australia's new e-passports will use Cybertrust's public key infrastructure (PKI) to secure the micro-chip that will be embedded in the document.
The new e-passports, developed to meet the increased security requirements of the US post September 11th, will have a digital image of the passport owner embedded in the micro-chip.
And a public key will also be programmed into the chip, so that the e-passport reader machines at international airports will be able to verify both that the image data has not been altered, and that the picture is of an Australian citizen.
In practice, this will mean that the e-passport reader machines will look-up a Cybertrust database to verify the passport data.
Australia is fast becoming the 53rd state of the US it seems.

Dead sites/pages die too slowly

Dead web-pages and out of date information are a curse on the web.
For my upcoming annual review of payments gateways down-under I've stumbled on quite a few surprising dead sites and out of date pages.
For example following the link www.eway.com.au to stgeorgebank include at least two sites/businesses on
their list of preferred partners who are, if not dead, then certainly no longer alive under those names.
To start with www.Vaultx.com.au and www.starpay.com.au are no more. It has been absorbed back into www.eway.com.au
I'm sure that I've got some out of date info on my site as well, but I somehow expected better of the St George Bank and its subsidiary Bank SA.

Melbourne IT is a popular domain name registrar for spam crooks at myprivateregistration.com

Last week my email inbox had yet another unsolicited financial scam, this time pretending to come from the brother of a Japanese diplomat killed in Iraq earlier this year.
A little quick checking showed that there is no web-site associated with the domain used for the email address (bkysconsortium.com).
Moreover the domain name itself was only registered on the 12th of August, with whois records suggesting that the person supposedly registering that domain has an email address at myprivateregistration.com
But once again there is no web-site at www.myprivateregistration.com and the domain is also very new.
The give away however is the claim that the person who registered this name at domain name registrar, Melbourne IT, is said to be none other than Merlbourne IT Ltd.
Yeah, sure, and my mother has three legs!!!
Indeed it seems that myprivateregistration.com is a very active financial scammer, with the same email contact associated with scams at www.invest3life.com and www.papyal-com-cgi-bin.org
What is the betting that a quick check will reveal Melbourne IT is once again the registrar for these oufits.
It would seem that Melbourne IT's checks on the identity of people registering domain names is non-existent.
You can claim to be anyone from anywhere and they just don't care, as long as you pay the associated fee.

Australians to get chip-based ePassports

Todays announcement that Australian passports are soon to include a micro-chip that will store an image of the passport-owner is not unexpected.
But it will be interesting to see how it works in practice.
The image stored in the chip is intended to be of a suitable quality to be usable in facial recogntion systems.
But what does that mean, and how do you tell, just by looking at a photograph, whether it is suitable for sue in facial recognition systems.
Australia has, of course, been experimenting with facial recognition systems at one of its airport with reputedly very mixed results.
Not only do the growth of mustaches and facial hair upset the systems, but so too do five o clock and other shadows.
In any event, as authentication for both off-line and online identity becomes ever more important to ecommerce and egovernment, these practical questions are going to be ever more important.
Thats why I've already registered to attend the seminar on ePassport security and identity being held at the Note Printing Australia works in Craigieburn on the 22nd of September.
Full details of the free seminar are up at www.noteprinting.com
See you there

Phishing attack hits National Australia Bank

NAB sources tell me yesterday's phishing attack has failed to have any impact at all.
Only five customers are known to have keyed in their details, with some 300 customers
phoning in to alert the bank, and 50 odd sending in emails.
As one NAB exec put it, "most of our customers are aware of these things now."
She said that the email didn't contain a trojan, and that it had originated from
Servia, via a domain registered in London.
"Most of our phishing attacks come from Eastern Europe" she said.

Victorian public transport smart card update

Victoria's $494 million public transport smart-card ticketing system will apparently use the same technology as does London's public transport system.
Sources who should know tell me that the contactless smart-card system will display the account balance of your card as you pass through the turn-stiles.
These sorts of details are unusually scarce at the moment because of the controversy over the tender.
As readers may or may not be aware, the Sun-Herald published details of the penultimate bids lodged by the various contenders. And the winning company, US based Keane consulting, did not have the lowest bid.
The whole business has now been referred to the Victorian Auditor-General, because clearly the tendering process was not carried out with proper confidentiality.
And in the wake of that the winning tenderer, Keane, has clamped down very tight on speaking to the press.
They'll only do it via a PR company, with questions required to be submitted in writing in advance.
So details of the system that Victorians are going to get have thus far been very scarce.
However I've learnt today that what we are going to get is essentially the same as what Cubic Transportation Systems have installed in London.