Voice over IP has attracted enough interest In Australia for the regulators to consider how it will be handled.

The Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, Senator Helen Coonan,has  announced the release of a Government report into the policy and regulatory
implications of VOIP services. All of the recommendations of the report
have been accepted and will be implemented by Government.

The report finds that there is no immediate need for any changes to
the regulatory framework and recommends some small adjustments to
existing numbering, emergency services and customer service regulation
to accommodate VOIP services.

A new non-geographic number range will be established for VOIP
services to allow providers to offer VOIP services which are not
location specific so a customer can keep the same number when moving
house.

My teenage son uses instant messaging almost exclusively to "talk" with his friends. Once the PC is turned on it’s quicker to send text messages on the PC than email or telephone.

Once I started looking into it, I realised that it’s widely used in business and will reportedly overtake email for internal use in the near future. And most likely all your PC’s already have some form of IM software.

Microsoft offers 10 Tips for Using Instant Messaging for Business: "Find out why Instant Messaging is a great tool for distributing to quick information about a project’s status, meeting times, or a person’s
whereabouts."

But IM needs some rules if used in a business: here’s 10 Rules

And there are many compliance issues including record retention, confidentiality and privacy.

SearchCIO.com has some good articles on practical uses and IEC has technical information on issues such as viruses.

And if you want to know what the abbreviations mean, here’s a dictionary.

In Who controls the internet I linked to a history of domain name regulation and ICANN control.

ZDNet has a report on the United Nations-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society beginning this week in Tunis at which some countries will argue for multi national control over domain names.

Canadian academic Michael Geist in
Facing The Facts on Internet Governance argues that  the current system requires change. He says that ICANN has consistently angered the Internet community by developing policies with little transparency or public consultation. According to Geist, creating an ICANN alternative need not lead to U.N. control over the Internet nor to greater global censorship.

UPDATE 17 November: Domain name regulation will stay with ICANN.See this CNN story.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority has developed and will host a program that finds ‘zombie’ computers on the Australian internet.

The trial program, called the Australian Internet Security Initiative, identifies infected computers with Australian internet addresses, with five internet service providers (ISPs).

Zombies are computers that have been infected by a computer virus or a similar intrusion, including hacking. Once infected, zombies can be used to commit online crimes remotely from anywhere in the world without the computer owner knowing. Online crimes include sending spam or hosting offensive material. Owners of the computers may also find themselves paying for bandwidth they did not know they were using.

ASX and Australia’s peak biotechnology industry body, AusBiotech, have released
the world’s first Code of Best Practice for Reporting by Life Science Companies.

The Code is designed to bridge the “information gap” between the biotechnology industry and investors by
providing a disclosure framework that identifies the key drivers of value for Life Science companies and gives guidance to companies on the information investors need to make informed investment decisions.

ICANN (Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers) controls domain names and disputes.

But who gave it control and for how long?

Kenneth Cukier’s article Who Will Control the Internet? sets out the history of domain name regulation and the issues and tensions involved over future control.