News.com.au reports “a Perth-based company and its director has been fined $5.5 million for sending spam emails.”

The fine levied against Clarity1 Pty Ltd and its director is pretty significant, not only because of the price tag on the fine but because it is the first time an Australian company has been fined under the Spam Act since it became an Australian federal law in 2003. Looks like this law has some teeth after all!

If my maths is correct, a $5,500,000 fine for sending 280,000,000 unsolicited e-mails works out to nearly two cents per message. I’m not confident that sales income from spam sent would have covered this operating expense, but still my in-box expands……

This article over on C-Net suggest that spending on Municipal Wi-Fi networks like those in several large cities and many small ones will proliferate over the coming years with costs in the hundreds of billions of dollars. It will be interesting to see how people react as there will then be little to protect them from Big Brother should it decide to monitor the activity of the users. Currently your ISP offers some protection from such activities. You don’t probably do anything all that bad, but what if you buy something on-line and then forgot to pay the state or city sales/use tax? They would know it and be able to monitor your purchases if they desired. I bet everybody you know has done something like that at one time without giving it a second thought. Outages would be widespread if virtual monopolies develop in these markets as well. Remember that there is a large likelihood that a successful wi-fi install will bump out many of the traditional providers who cannot affort to compete. So invest now I guess, but see what the reaction is too.

Stealing a little thunder from Microsoft’s IE7 release is Mozilla’s update: Firefox 2.0. This version had been in beta for a while, but now available as a full version release.

The user interface has improved (improved tabs, spell check, session restore, search suggestions, live bookmarks, and so on), security has been up-ed further, and and the number of extensions has grown to over 1,000. This update really does see a great browser become even better.

I particularly like the anti-spyware measures described on the Firefox site “Firefox will not allow a Web site to download, install, or run programs on your computer without your explicit agreement. Period. You will be notified whenever downloading or installing software, and Firefox will always tell you what’s happening so that you can stay in control of your computer.”

Of course unlike IE7, Firefox 2.0 is avaliable for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

CNet has published an extensive review which says it all far better than I could have. I was interested to see the critical comparisons to the new IE7; only a week old but apparently miles behind the Firefox offering. User reviews are also interesting.

Of course there’s only one way to be sure, and that’s to Get Firefox 2.0 and Internet Explorer 7 and compare for yourself!

News to me, a loyal WordPress user: there is a companion bulletin board software that apparently started back in December 2004. I’ll have to give bbPress a try as I am really tired of my existing bulletin board software.

After five beta’s and a final release candidate, Internet Explorer 7 has launched. Grab your own copy and test, but understand that like all prior IE Browsers, it will replace your version of IE6. That is problematic for developers as we now need to keep two machines running side by side, one for IE6 that is still in most common use, and one for IE7 as it will become more and more common. When Vista launches around the first of the year, it will expand even more in use as it is the native browser with Windows Vista.

With Detroit up five runs in the 6th inning, Sean Casey at bat and … boom they show him batting in slow motion and you can actually see his calf muscle give out. It hurts me to watch it. Baseball is boring until this time of year when the games actually matter, don’t you think?

Good news update: They are calling it a spasm. It looked like something more significant to me. They claim they are icing it and he may be back in a day or a few days. It looked much worse than that to me. It looked like the old lampshade rolling up injury from a torn achilles to me, but hopefully these pictures told the wrong story.

It’s never been more obvious how much the hardware and software industries go out of their way to drive each others business. Pricing for Vista has been released and the standalone copies of Vista that you can purchase in any PC shop are so expensive that the vast majority will go with the OEM version that comes with new PC’s after Vista’s release. In other words, if you want to get Vista at a reasonable price, you have to buy a new PC. So Microsoft greases the hardware vendors, and in exchange, they (hopefully) will push Windows to new users.

I’m wondering if this relationship is symbiotic or parasitic. It occurs to me that if the DOJ and EU wants to even the playing field for competition, they should probably consider abolishing the OEM license. If that happened, Microsoft would be forced to compete on price across the range of their products.

After all, their OS monopoly appears to have amassed primarily from OEM sales.

On the subject of Vista, in addition to the high price of non OEM versions, you can now expect more stringent piracy checks as well. Apparently in the enterprise you are supposed to have your own licensing server running, but what happens if that server fails? Time will tell I guess.