This year's AUUG - the organization for Unix, Linux and open source professionals - conference being held in Melbourne this week, will cover a broad spectrum of IT management topics - from security to grid computing.

The opening keynote will be given by Lars Rasmussen from Google on organizing the world's information geographically with Google Maps. Another Google engineer, Michael Still, will speak about managing large clusters of machines.

In recent years, Security has taken centre stage at AUUG and this year's event looks like being no exception.

University of Auckland computer scientist Peter Gutmann will speak about the convergence of Internet security threats, plus phishing tips and techniques.

Gutmann's area of expertise is in cryptography, and he developed the cryptlib cryptography software library and contributed to PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) version 2.

He will talk about the way blended threats are increasingly being created by professional programmers and managed by international crime organizations, instead of being small-scale nuisances perpetrated mostly by "script kiddies".

The conference will also feature a security issues panel and include talks on content filtering, VoIP and wireless security.

Networking will also feature strongly with presentations on network monitoring to identify malware infected computers, the history and future of TCP, and a panel session on IPv6 Adoption.

Being an open source-centric organization, AUUG 2006 will feature many presentations on free software, including Pakistan's open source initiative and the economics of open source.

Other topics include building the Australian grid computer by Ac3 systems engineer Frank Crawford, and building Web 2.0 applications with django, a Python development framework.