Right now, we’ve become aware of a range of IP addresses belonging to Vodafone NZ subscribers being blacklisted by the ‘UCEprotect’ site, located in Germany. Even worse, the particular site may be a scam, allegedly demanding money from Vodafone before they’ll correct their list.

We picked up a useful article in ‘stuff’ this week. It seems that the anti-SPAM laws are now going to be more vigorously enforced. Despite the law change back in 2007, there has still been a small number of persistent rogues.

We’re hearing stories about phone systems being hacked. Stories out of Christchurch talk about massive thousand dollar toll bills occurring over just 2-3 days. As the stories go, the hackers are apparently out of Somalia. It seems they are using the stolen services to sell cheap toll cards to their customer base.

Just days after a security vulnerability in IE6 caused problems for Google in China, we are now advised that IE6 and older are no longer supported

As happens from time to time, new security threats emerge for common software. Hackers are always looking for new ways to vandalise the internet. Recently some attacks have happened in China, apparently targeting Google. It seems the hackers have found a way of using a vulnerability in Internet Explorer.

Microsoft Office is the one program that most of use each day. Whether it's for Word, Excel or something else, Office is key to our daily productivity. So with a major new release due in the middle of this year, Kinetics staff are busy getting familiar with the beta release.

This week, Google announced their latest smartphone, the Nexus One, unfortunately not available here in New Zealand. The pricing is incredible, the equivalent of just NZ $243 with a two year contract, or NZ $718 without a contract. Devices like this are changing the internet, and the shape of PCs.

With the Christmas holiday season upon us, you can go on vacation knowing that Kinetics will be here to look after your IT

Susan Carlow recently delivered Windows 7 coaching seminars to NZ Institute of Chartered Accountants in Remuera. The event was a success, and attendees took away a comprehensive user guide, packed with hints and tips to get the best out of Windows 7.

The latest news reveals that Windows 7 is now on more desktops that the current Mac OS - after just one month.

We think SharePoint is the most exciting Microsoft technology available today. We’ve helped many clients get get their intranets underway, using the technology that in many cases they already own. More and more of our clients use the document management features to share documents, track updates and access them over the internet. They use workflows to manage business processes ranging for staff leave through to accounts payable and job orders, and that’s just scratching the surface.

Some time back, we posted a comment on our 'Handy Hints' page about the most useless key - scroll lock. It's prompted a loyal reader to ask why the '@' key, one of the most useful keys, is still relatively inaccesible.