Stories by: Juha Saarinen

Telecom New Zealand blocked access on its network to a U.S.-based website that contained material posted by the 027 voice mail hacker this month -- a move that InternetNZ calls "draconian".

Many of New Zealand's corporate switchboards still remain open to hackers, who can easily divert calls and listen to messages in people's mailboxes.

Massey University took delivery last week of its new Double Helix cluster computer and says it packs anywhere between five to ten times the computational power of the university's existing supercomputer, the 64-node Helix 1.

Users of Red Hat's Linux distribution can take some solace in Big Blue promising to keep existing support contracts going.

New Zealand vendors of Linux distributions have received requests from Red Hat to remove from their websites all trademarks, including names and meta tags, referring to the US company.

New Zealand open source advocates have attacked legal action in the US which has thrown the Linux market into confusion.

Open source is heading towards maturity and public recognition with breakneck speed, reaching more and more mainstream users in one form or the other - some run just one or more open source apps on proprietary platforms, others go the whole hog and run a complete open source IT solution.

"Eventually," says Internet pioneer Paul Vixie, "even Microsoft will have to embrace open source."