This Week's Top Stories JONATHAN SWAN | About 60,000 cabinets that look like stretched refrigerators will be installed on footpaths under the Coalition's NBN bringing criticism from designers. | OPINION: Four years ago, Labor was right to push for the NBN, but circumstances have changed, argues Grahame Lynch. | BEN GRUBB 5:03pm | Could our risk averse culture be holding us back? | Security 11:23am | Chinese hacking ring broke into online video gaming companies and stole valuable source code, researchers say. | Barack Obama has proposed increased spending to protect US computer networks from cyber attacks. | South Korea says North Korea was responsible for a cyber attack against broadcasters and banks in March. | An international cyber attack campaign against Israeli government websites on Sunday failed to cause serious disruptions despite dire threats from Anonymous. | NBN Independent MP Rob Oakeshott slammed it, saying it represents "backward thinking". | LIA TIMSON | Malcolm Turnbull says the Coalition's plan is the best it can do with what it might inherit. | Australia has almost 40,000 public payphones, even though Australians have on average 1.2 mobiles and half of them have internet access. | BEN GRUBB | The Coalition's planned broadband infrastructure will "freeze" broadband speeds, and need ongoing and expensive upgrading to resemble the system that Labor is already building, IT experts have warned. | ROSS PEAKE | Communications Minister Stephen Conroy labelled the Coalition's plan as dumb for proposing to use Telstra's ageing copper wire network for broadband. | Tony Brown 4:12pm | Asia's fibre-to-the-home dreamland is not all it seems, says a telco analyst who believes the Coalition's alternative NBN plan is better. | BEN GRUBB | The Coalition has pledged to deliver cheaper and faster broadband sooner than Labor, saving nearly $10 billion from current government projections but leaving telco experts divided over which major political party's national broadband policy is the best for Australia's short and long-term future. | Chances are most phone calls you have made from a landline have passed through a sturdy aluminium cylinder assembled by Tyrone Maloney in a small factory in Melbourne's south-east. | JONATHAN SWAN | The Coalition says its national broadband network will be about $17 billion cheaper than Labor's and will be built two years sooner, but will use slower technologies than in Labor's version. | | | Advertisement  Business IT Business Venture firms are teaming up to provide funding for start-ups working with Google Glass. Patents Apple and Google are more interested in using litigation as a business strategy than in resolving disputes over patents, says judge. Social Media Sylvia Pennington | There are some sectors where intense online engagement doesn't make business sense. Business Mahesh Sharma | An Australian crowdfunding website for non-profit and social organisations will make campaign managers return money to donors when projects fail. Business Microsoft is skewering Google again with scathing ads in the US that reveal the animosity between the two rivals. Advertisement  Public Sector Inquiry Contractor has admitted giving the global IT giant a 'dry run' in the bidding for the Queensland Health payroll system contract. Software Trevor Clarke | NSW schools will come in line with the rest of the online world when a 25-year-old school library system is replaced. Data centres Trevor Clarke | The NSW government is looking for cloud computing providers to join a technology marketplace |
