StarkHost have joined Team Dingo Racing as a product partner, providing the team with it's website hosting.

Team Dingo Racing will be competing within the 2006 Aussie Car Championship, fielding 2 cars with Carlos Rolfo and last year's runner-up Sheridan Phillips at the wheel, with the ultimate goal set on winning the championship.

Other Product Partners include: Dingo Australia, number one in the mini digger industry; StandOut Images; Stark Creations; AlpineStars, Currency Card and Adsun.

Keep a continued eye out on the progress of the team... www.teamdingoracing.com.au

A number of people have been killed and dozens injured in a large-scale terrorist attack on London. At least six bomb blasts have been reported in locations across the city on buses and Tube stations. Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair said there was evidence of explosives at at least one of the six sites.

Scotland Yard has denied reports they were warned of an attack by Israel minutes before the blasts. Two people have been confirmed dead and at least 90 people injured in the explosion at Aldgate Station. Prime Minister Tony Blair is returning to London from the G8 Summit in Scotland.

Confirmation of the locations affected in the attack are: King's Cross, Tavistock Square, Russell Square, Liverpool Street, Moorgate, Aldgate East and Edgware Road.

Update: A terror group linked to al Qaeda says it carried out a series of terror attacks on London that have left a number of people dead and hundreds injured. A previously unknown group calling itself "Secret Organisation al Qaeda in Europe" said it carried out the attacks as revenge for British "military massacres" in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Our thoughts and prayers go out to everyone involved. Emergency numbers can be found by clicking read more.

An international standards group has approved a new DSL standard that claims it will increase DSL technology's upstream and downstream speeds to as much as 100 megabits per second, 10 times faster than the DSL speeds that are offered by today's carriers.

According to a statement released by the ITU, the new standard will boost the competitiveness of DSL providers by allowing them to offer services such as high-definition TV (HDTV), video on demand programming, video conferencing, high-speed Internet access and advanced voice services like voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) which will all be provided over standard copper wires.

"This new standard is set to become an extremely important feature of the telecommunications landscape, and is a landmark achievement for our members, many of whom are relying on this recommendation to take their businesses to the next level," Yoichi Maeda, chairman of the ITU group that developed the new standard, said in a statement.

It is expected to take a few years before this new standard will be released to the general public.

Microsoft on Wednesday issued a prepatch advisory to counter the publication of exploit code for a newly discovered vulnerability in its implementation of TCP/IP. The Redmond, Wash., company's confirmation of the flaw is the first public test of the software giant's new security advisories pilot project, which is meant to provide instant feedback, guidance and mitigations when third-party researchers release vulnerability details and exploits before a patch is available.

In this case, Microsoft Corp.'s Security Advisory 899480 comes 24 hours after an alert with accompanying exploit code was published by FrSIRT (French Security Incident Response Team), a private research outfit. "Various TCP implementations could allow a remote attacker to set arbitrary timer values for a TCP connection. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could cause the affected system to reset existing TCP connections. Those connections would have to be re-established for communication to continue," Microsoft said in its advisory.

OptusNet announced today that its subscriber base has passed the 350,000 mark after adding 63,000 subscribers in the last three months.

Optus Consumer MD Allen Lew attributed the growth to the bundling of Optus landline, mobile and ADSL products. The company's success "stems from the increasing strength of the company’s bundling strategy which now sees more than 95 per cent of OptusNet DSL customers taking up multiple Optus products," Lew said.

He also noted the importance of broadband in future strategic planning. "With the trend across our industry for consumer fixed line voice revenue ... flat to declining, broadband revenue is key to the future of integrated telcos like Optus," he said.

Despite this recent growth, OptusNet remains just under half BigPond's size. Six months ago BigPond claimed 533,000 broadband subscribers and OptusNet 250,000. BigPond's latest available figures, confirmed today, claim 718,000 broadband subscribers.

Microsoft plans to release a new version of its Office productivity software next year, company Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates said Tuesday. Although many insiders had speculated that a new version of Office would come in 2006, Microsoft until Tuesday had not publicly confirmed when it would deliver the product. A 2006 release is in line with Microsoft's two- to three-year release schedules for Office. The last major version, Office 2003, arrived in late 2003.

Microsoft officials have been coy about the next Office release, which has been referred to as Office 12. Gates, in a speech at a Microsoft event for developers in Las Vegas, said the new release will offer enhancements in areas such as workflow capabilities, rights management, advanced scheduling, document sharing and business intelligence.

Firefox has unpatched "extremely critical" security holes and exploit code is already circulating on the Net, security researchers have warned. The two unpatched flaws in the Mozilla browser could allow an attacker to take control of your system. A patch is expected shortly, but in the meantime users can protect themselves by switching off JavaScript.

In addition, the Mozilla Foundation has now made the flaws effectively impossible to exploit by changes to the server-side download mechanism on the update.mozilla.org and addons.mozilla.org sites, according to security experts. The flaws were confidentially reported to the Foundation on 2 May, but by Saturday details had been leaked and were reported by several security organisations, including the French Security Incident Response Team (FrSIRT).

Jim Allchin, Microsoft's group vice president for platforms, looked at my Apple PowerBook and smugly pointed out that the number of copies of Windows sold this year will be more than all the Macintosh computers used worldwide. By the end of 2005, he proudly noted, over 730 million people will be using Windows. “Business is good,” he said, as he began to quickly page through his elaborate PowerPoint presentation.

For the next hour and a half, in a stuffy Manhattan hotel room last week, Allchin gave me a fast-paced, enthusiastic lecture on Windows' latest updates, which will be released later this month, and on its next major version—Longhorn, which won't be released until the end of 2006. Allchin, a wiry-built 54-year-old who has been in charge of Windows for almost a decade, is admirably blunt about his own frustrations using the current operating system. It annoys him, for example, that the adjustments necessary to move a laptop from a work to a home network aren't obvious.

Students using the new superfast Internet2 connections at many US colleges to share music and films are being targeted by the RIAA in its latest blitz on piracy. More than 1.5 million files were being shared on the network, according to the association - terabytes of data said to be equivalent to an entire video-rental store.

The network is still mainly intended for research, but students connected up realised the benefits of being able to download songs in 20 seconds and films in five minutes. However, the RIAA was less impresed at this use for it and will today file lawsuits against 405 students at 18 collegs across the US.

Cary Sherman, RIAA President, said: "We cannot let this high-speed network become a zone of lawlessness where the normal rules don’t apply. By taking this initial action, we are putting students and administrators everywhere on notice that there are consequences for unlawful uses of this special network."

Much of the sharing goes through a DirectConnect-style program, i2hub. A service spokesman said yesterday: "The i2hub organization does not condone activities and actions that breach the rights of copyright owners. Our companies are focused on bringing together students and connecting them in ways never before achieved."

Apple today announced that Mac OS X Server version 10.4 “Tiger” will be available on Friday, April 29, at the same time as the Mac OS X version 10.4 “Tiger” desktop version.

The next major release of Apple’s award-winning, UNIX-based server operating system, Tiger Server integrates over 100 leading open source projects and standards-based software applications with easy-to-use management tools that make it easy to deploy for Mac, Windows and Linux clients.

Tiger Server has over 200 new features including native support for 64-bit applications, ideal for high performance computing; iChat Server to deploy secure instant messaging within an organisation; Weblog Server that makes it simple to publish and share weblogs (blogs); and Xgrid™ to make it easy to turn a group of Macs into a virtual supercomputer.