Apparently the government and Telstra have been talking about this for awhile, so it shouldn’t have come as a big surprise to the company. Of course, that doesn’t mean they won’t fight it. Considering how much friction there has been between the company and the government over the past few years, you’d expect a confrontation.

Here are some of the restrictions Conroy announced this morning:

If Telstra don’t play along and do thins voluntarily, the Government will change the Telecommunications Act 1997 so that:

* Telstra conduct its network operations and wholesale functions at arm’s length from the rest of Telstra;
* Telstra provides equivalent price and non-price terms to its retail business and non-Telstra wholesale customers; and
* this equivalence of treatment is made transparent to the regulator and competitors via strong internal governance structures.

Furthermore, the Government will prohibit the company from gaining any additional spectrum for advanced wireless broadband while:

* remains vertically integrated; and
* owns a hybrid fibre coaxial cable network; and
* maintains its interest in Foxtel.

Discussions will need to be completed by December at the latest, with the Bill set to be voted on in October or November. Which gives us a couple of months of entertainment at least. Let’s just hope the consumer – who Conroy claims will benefit most from this – actually does see the benefit.

[DBCDE]

Mike Elgan, former editor-in-chief for Windows Magazine, writes a great column on how gadgets blogs fail readers. It’s solid feedback and tough love. Here’s my list on why Tech Magazines are failing readers:

1) Too Slow: Most Computer magazines will write reviews of product you’ve already bought or read about on blogs 2 months before. With the exception of Laptop Mag and a few others. How are they catching up in speed? Surprise: blogs.

2) They sometimes ignore the things companies want you to ignore: Magazines need to cover the unofficial topics that are important, even if it involves illegal activity like IP theft. Like BitTorrent. Even if the sponsoring companies don’t agree with how the technology is used, its important to educate the public and industry to its benefits and problems. And rumours are clearly useful to warn people not to buy the stuff that’s just about to become outdated. Without news that corporations don’t sanction, magazines might as well reprint press releases.

3) They charge: So much info on the web is free and ad subsidised, including the blogs. They’ve got ads. So why are they still charging when its costing them readership? The magazine model of getting people to pay for copies is dying a slow death. See: The difference in subscription and cover prices and Chris Anderson’s Free.

4) The websites sometimes suck: In the worst cases, you can’t tell where the new content is. It’s all over the place, nested in a field of links that mean nothing to anyone but advertisers and industry wonks. In the best cases, they make you click through 10 times for every feature: Come on. Pageviews are a dead competitive metric, and you’re just annoying everyone.

5) Their columns are written by people I can’t relate to: The most prestigious print columnists today are at least a decade away from 35. The age is not the issue — but there are economic, social and generational gaps that can’t be bridged.

6) They cover a whole lot of stuff no one cares about: Just because a company puts something out or writes a press release, and it’s on a publication’s beat, doesn’t mean anyone actually cares about it. Market share is not indicative of success. Porsche sells fewer cars than Toyota. More tech journalists should learn to follow their gut instincts, because as tech lovers, you get a great sense of what people are also excited about.

7) They review products without the bigger picture: Most trade mags do a fantastic job of explaining the specs and the benchmark results, without the overall real world effect (usually a small delta of improvement) and social context (see: iPod shuffle’s tiny buttons). Most tech pubs fail at this, blog or mag. Exception: The big columnists at the papers do a great job of this, especially the four horsemen, Pogue, Moss, Levy, and Baig.

8) They presume to be error-free: Last year, right before I canceled my subscription, I read a computer trade with more errors than I’d seen in any magazine. It included type-Os, but also factual F-ups like mention of “Pioneer LCDs TVs”. (Pioneer doesn’t make them here.) Magazines have copy editors, fact checkers and 2 months to deliver this content. And you can’t retract paper.

9) The writing is often boring: OK, not every article has to be funny or Shakespeare, but it shouldn’t make you want to tear your eyes out or go to sleep, either. Tech is inherently a left brain topic; making it an easy and enjoyable thing to learn about and digest is critical and something many trade pubs fail to do! This is increasingly critical as tech and gadgets go more and more mainstream and the average joe comes looking for information.

10) They fail to realise news is collaborative: Mike criticized the gadget blogs for rehashing reviews. First off, aggregation is a service. If someone can check one site, instead of 400, that’s useful. This attitude also seems to ignore the fact that news is collaborative. Sites send each other tips and in return, send links and readers back to the source. That’s how we give credit to our peers online and grow together, as a network. You can’t do that in print.

Bonus 11) Paper: They kill trees and give you papercuts. They cost money to mail. They are heavy and take up space. And they can catch on fire and burn your entire house down! And after all these years, the subscription cards are still annoying. And you can’t search through old print as easily as you can search through old online content.

[image by Mannobhai]

John Mayer may not have shown up at the Apple iPhone keynote yesterday, but that doesn’t mean we’re not the best place to keep up on John Mayer news. And this one, my friends, is one juicy piece of John Mayer news. [John Mayer's Twitter]

Freeview – that marketing push for the free-to-air networks that we love so much – has actually done something pretty decent in their standards by saying that any hardware that wants to receive the Freeview badge will need to be capable of receiving MPEG4 signals as well as MPEG2, essentially futureproofing the box for when the TV networks do make the switch to MPEG4.

There’s no timeframe for when that switch might happen though, and the Herald Sun’s report that it will all go down on May 1 (when the first Freeview product will hit shelves) completely misleads consumers with incorrect statements (”that expensive plasma or LCD will be obsolete from May 1″). Essentially it is up to individual broadcasters to decide when to make the switch, but seeing the confusion around the current switch to digital, my gut says it won’t happen for a while.

Freeview have issued a press release this morning refuting the Herald Sun article with the opening line setting the tone:

The Herald Sun newspaper (16 March, 2009) has misled Australians in a report that claimed millions of plasma and LCD televisions would become obsolete from 1 May, 2009 due to changes in the way broadcasters transmit.

But perhaps the most surprising aspect of this entire issue is that even after two days, the Herald Sun still hasn’t changed, modified apologised or retracted the original article, even though they are evidently incorrect.

[Herald Sun]

The following is a retelling of an excellent—but far less judgmental—BBC News story:

Step 1: Two Belgian hackers show up at the Sumitomo Mitsui bank reception desk in London on Sept. 16, 2006, and asked for the bank’s security chief, a Mr. O’Donoghue. ERROR: They were caught on closed-circuit camera, not just talking to but joking around with O’Donoghue, who even showed the two to a freakin’ secure terminal.

Step 2: The so-called hackers used a USB key to log keystrokes on that terminal, and returned to retrieve the keystrokes—usernames and passwords of employees—themselves. ERROR: They had to return in person. O’Donoghue decided to cover the Belgians tracks by cutting wires to CCTV cams, and even “enquired about creating extra access badges.”

Step 3: On Friday, October 1, they showed up and used the logins to attempt 10 cash transfers to accounts in Spain, Dubai, Hong Kong, Turkey and Israel. ERROR: They never actually learned how to fill out transfer forms, so the transfers didn’t go through. (Also, they chose countries that sounded like Bond film locations, and they chose a target—Nomura Holdings—that sounded like the company Hans Gruber tried to rob in Die Hard.)

Step 4: Having failed, they went back again on Saturday. ERROR: They went back again on Saturday.

Step 5: On Monday, when the bank managers noticed around $US320 million in failed bank transfers, they alerted authorities, who quickly zeroed in on, you guessed it, Security Chief O’Donoghue. ERROR: O’Donoghue should never have come back to work. Also, $US320 million? Didn’t they know about rounding up pennies?

Although the case against O’Donoghue and the Belgians seems open and shut, there’s a lot more to this tale, including a dapper “self-styled lord of the manor” named Hugh Rodley, a money-laundering porn-shop owner named David Nash and a mysterious Swedish dame by the name of Inger Britt Marie Malmros. I am not making any of this up.

Please go to the BBC and read more—there’s even a video. [BBC News]

CNN’s article starts out nicely enough, tipping the hat to our beloved super commenter:

“If I’m going to buy something, I want it to count. I want it to last,” said Baron, who incidentally goes by “OMG! Ponies!” when he posts comments on Gizmodo, a popular tech and gadget blog.

So, even though he’d like to upgrade his 4½ -year-old HDTV, this cowboy’s holding back the reins. And while the latest iPhone was a “must have” for Baron, he said he’s “waiting to pull the trigger” on that camera he’s been circling. “I just can’t go out and spend $US400 right now.”

But then, when our writer and feature editor Wilson Rothman shows up, it’s like he works for Ponies or something:

“What he’s telling you is right, but it’s only half the story,” said Wilson Rothman, feature editor at Gizmodo, the site “OMG! Ponies!” frequents.

I love it. Gizmodo is now known as “the site OMG! Ponies! frequents.” You can put that one on your resume, Roth. And Ponies, please, please don’t fire me. [CNN Thanks Alex!]

Apparently some weaves are tighter than others. (Apparently, some relationships are tighter than others too.) After 20-year-old Briana Bonds told her boyfriend Juan she didn’t love him anymore, the a-hole shot up the back of her mid-’90s Pontiac. The rear windshield was shattered, but she was still alive and without major injury, possibly thanks to that weave.

The ladies down at the beauty parlor are not totally convinced, though. Scientifically speaking, the weft (where the weave meets the hair) is where the fibers are interlocked most tightly. But whether or not that makes it any where close to the equivalent of a Kevlar mesh is beyond current beauty-parlor technology to ascertain.

Hair stylist Kim Walton told Kansas City NBC affiliate KSHB, “I never heard of weaves saving anybody’s life.” Still, if it turned out to be what saved Bonds, she added, “Thank God for weave.”

Bonds herself told the news channel that it was more about God than the weave: “I think God was in my passenger seat.” As of Thursday, Bonds had a headache; no word on what happened to that dick Juan. [WOAI via Geekologie]

The National Health Service in the London Borough of Hounslow, in an effort to coax young people into getting tested, is offering free self-service STD kits, with an added bonus: text message diagnosis!.

After sending off your little envelope of chlamydia ‘n’ hope to a lab, you can opt to receive your potentially traumatic results via SMS, phone or letter (though Twitter, with its convenient-for-notifying-exes “@” system, might have been a better choice).

Despite how trivialising this sounds, it could actually be an attractive option for some. Phone calls involve direct interaction with another person about an extremely embarrassing subject, and a physical letter can take quite a while—again, not exactly appropriate for the, uhh, urgent nature of the situation. Here, technology might actually make the whole process a little less intimidating for young folk (philanderers and strumpets, every last one of them!), but it’s not a totally shame-free—the NHS has assured that there are still actual humans sending out the texts. [Register]