Under house arrest, banned from using internet.
US crime-fighters failed in a bid to keep alleged Internet pirate Kim Dotcom behind bars on Wednesday when a New Zealand court freed him from jail and instead put him under effective house arrest and banned him from using the Internet...

States ink contracts for .sydney, .melbourne and .victoria.
The NSW Government has yet to decide on whether it will register a .nsw domain, with less than two months until applications close.

The State Government's central procurement agency this week contracted ARI Registry Services to apply  for at least three generic top-level domains (gTLD) on behalf of NSW and Victoria...

First Aussie facility makes growing list.
Macquarie Telecom has revealed a preliminary Tier III certification for its forthcoming Intellicentre 2 data centre in the Sydney's North Ryde.

The $60 million, 20,000-square metre facility, was officially certified by oversight body the Uptime Institute on Australia Day this year, based on design documents provided by the data centre provider...

Not compelled to install filtering technology.
Online social networks cannot be forced to block users from downloading songs illegally, as this would push up their costs and infringe privacy, Europe's highest court said on Thursday.

The Luxembourg-based Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) was ruling on a case involving two Belgian companies: music royalty collecting society SABAM and online social network Netlog...

Increases rack density with 1425 square metre build-out.
Vocus has revealed plans to open three new co-location facilities in Sydney and Melbourne over the next year to meet increased demand for data centre space.

CEO James Spenceley told iTnews the company would build a third Sydney facility, S3, behind its existing centres in Alexandria, which it bought from E3 Networks alongside a Melbourne-based centre for $5...

No personal touch in the cloud.
Online retailer Roses Only should by any measure be an ideal candidate for the cloud computing business model.

The company’s website hums along at a fairly predictable pace for most of the year but for the four days leading up to Valentine’s Day, it explodes...

Australian data centres key to winning Government work.
Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has raised cross-jurisdictional data challenges and security as key inhibitors to cloud usage in Australia.

Addressing the AIIA cloud summit conference in Canberra, Conroy said consumer concerns over the privacy of hosted data and Government concerns over security could "impede us from fully realising the benefits of the cloud"...

Australian data centres key to winning Government work.
Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has raised cross-jurisdictional data challenges and security as key inhibitors to cloud usage in Australia.

Addressing the AIIA cloud summit conference in Canberra, Conroy said consumer concerns over the privacy of hosted data and Government concerns over security could "impede us from fully realising the benefits of the cloud"...

Snares sub-contracts with camp construction firm.
Construction firm Pindan has sub-contracted the installation of internet systems at two mine accommodation camps in Western Australia's Pilbara region to UXC Connect.

UXC will provide a mix of gigabit passive optical network (GPON) fibre and satellite systems to camps at Fortescue Metals' Solomon Hub Project and Rio Tinto's 200-bed Northern Link Construction Camp...

Gore Hill facility to be 'fully operational' by April.
The Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) has switched on services to co-location customers at its new high-speed data centre in Gore Hill in Sydney's north today.

The $32 million, 1000-square-metre Australian Liquidity Centre (ALC) was initially scheduled to launch in November with 100 ASX cabinets and 500 cabinets for its trading customers...

New accommodation to be built ahead of planned Olympic Dam expansion.
BHP Billiton has confirmed it will fund fibre internet connections to 300 new rooms to be built at Roxby Downs Village under $1.12 billion in pre-commitment works for its Olympic Dam mine expansion project...

HP servers chosen over mainframe.
The Department of Health and Ageing (DOHA) has awarded Accenture a $111 million contract to build an enterprise data warehouse to support the Government’s National Reform initiative.  

Signed on 22 December, 2011, the deal was not publicised until a report in The Australian yesterday...

Partial shift off Tax Office infrastructure.
The Tax Practitioners Board (TPB) has made its first moves to separate from the Australian Tax Office's IT environment, calling for a cloud computing solution to serve as its primary ICT infrastructure...

Further slippages could imperil desktop consolidation.
The Department of Defence has revealed the migration of its primary data centre to Sydney's Global Switch will take eight months longer than anticipated.

A Defence spokesman said the deadline for migration into Global Switch had slipped from March to November this year...

Class action brewing for legitimate Megaupload users.
Spain's Catalonian Pirate Party will attempt to launch a class action against the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) for "misappropriating personal data" during the closure of the Megaupload file locker...

Microsoft, Google, Britain irked by EU 'forget me' proposal.
Microsoft, Google and the British Information Commission's Office have warned that a proposed overhaul of Europe's data privacy regime may be unworkable. 

European Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding detailed the EU's proposed changes to the 1995 Data Protection Directive on Wednesday, which aim to strengthen protections for individuals and raise the bar for companies trading in personal data...

Funnels pirate activity back to P2P networks.
The crackdown on file-sharing site Megaupload is expected to do little to reduce overall piracy of music, software and Hollywood movies, while potentially stifling emerging means of distributing content online...

Serious ramifications for all cloud services.
Last week’s arrest of MegaUpload staff in New Zealand and the possibility of their extradition to the United States raises significant questions for users of cloud services the world over.

I spent the weekend discussing the ramifications of the case with Shelston IP partner Mark Vincent, a globally recognised expert on cloud computing and the law, who by good fortune also happens to be a New Zealand lawyer in Auckland...

Australian web industry mixed on SOPA impact.
Wikipedia's website blackout protest against the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act attracted 162 million eyeballs, it said in an update. 

Eight million people also looked up their elected representatives' contact details, the online knowledge base reported...

Prepares to launch second Pawsey machine in March.

Fornax, supplied by SGI, comprises ten racks of equipment in the University of Western Australia'...