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Such proposals are inevitably given short shrift by folks on both sides of the Tasman.

However, yesterday's announcement that ISP (and sponsor of this site) IHUG has been acquired by Aussie Net firm iiNet might add further credence to the belief that we're being annexed by stealth anyway.

Isn't it just a matter of weeks since it was also announced that Melbourne IT had bought-up Domainz?

And who owns bought one of the nation's larger newspapers (The Dominion Post) recently?

Then there's the ownership of our trading banks. The old Trustbank was sold to Westpac, ANZ bought PostBank, etc, etc, etc.

Fortunately, it would appear that Qantas won't be buying a major chunk of AirNZ any time soon -- but that doesn't mean that Quantas doesn't want to buy and that AirNZ wouldn't like to sell.

Could we soon find that Telstra makes an offer for Telecom NZ I wonder?

Maybe it's time again to float the idiot-suggestion that NZ does become the seventh state of Australia -- before we wake up and find that it's already happened by default.

No, I'm sorry -- you can have our banks, you can have our ISPs, you can even have our Prime Minister (*please!*) -- but our sovereignty is not up for grabs. After all, how would John Howard cope with the foreshore issue?

Mozilla Firebird -- Does it Fly?
As a result of suggestions made to me by several enthusiastic readers, I downloaded and installed Mozilla Firebird yesterday.

Until now, I've been giving IE a very wide berth, using it only when I really have to because some lame-brained web designer isn't aware that Microsoft doesn't actually own the Internet or that other browsers exist.

First impressions are favourable -- except that I don't like the way it simply displays nothing but the optional ALT text when you turn off image loading. This means that in the case of a page that uses graphics as hyperlinked navigational elements those links disappear :-(

But, it's small (for a modern browser -- just under 7MB for the Windows version), installs *very* easily, integrated automatically with the Flash player and PDF viewer that were already on my PC, and seems to render pretty damned quickly.

I've crashed it a couple of times already -- but remember, it's not even at release 1.0 yet so such occasional hiccups are to be expected.

I'm also still a little confused as to how it handles the old Netscape shift-click operation that used to let you save the contents of a linked file to disk -- under Firebird, this operation seems to open a new browser window. I guess I'll have to RTFM.

Already I'm starting to think that I'll be able to avoid that giant security hole that Microsoft likes to call "Internet Explorer" for at least a little longer thanks to this new browser but the jury's still out. I'll give you an update in a few days.

If any Aardvark readers want to share an opinion on today's column or add something, you're invited to chip in and have your say in The Aardvark Forums or, if you prefer, you can contact me directly.

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