Kiwiblog

Some readers may have followed the case of Liskula Cohen who was called a skank and “psychotic lying whore” on a blogger.com blog. Google owns these.

Cohen regarded this as defamatory and went to court to sue the author, and as part of that the court ordered Google to reveal the identity of the author.

Google complied and supplied the e-mail address used to register the blog. And this allowed Cohen to deduce that a Rosemary Port was the author.

Now to my mind, this is how it should be. If you defame someone anonymously, then your identity will be revealed.

Port, rather than apologise for her slander, is now saying she will sue Google for A$18 million for revealing her email address.

I think Port needs to get over herself and get a grip. Google was ordered by a court to reveal her address. I can’t see she has any chance of success.

The SST has an interview with Father of the Internet Vint Cerf.

Cerf was in Auckland and Wellington last week as the keynote speaker at a conference addressing an impending crisis in the internet’s infrastructure. In the next two years, the world will run out of internet addresses, necessitating a shift to an updated version of internet protocol called IPv6. It will have enough addresses for everybody in the world (China currently has only 22% internet penetration), as well as their phones, PDAs and whatever else they want to put online (Cerf knows of a guy who internet-enabled his surfboard). The impending scarcity will lead to an ugly scramble of grey markets and desperate, retroactive crisis management unless efforts are sped up to adopt the new protocol.

“It’s going to be messy,” he says. “I’m not looking forward to 2010.”

The latest projection is that IANA will allocate the last IPv4 block to an RIR in July 2011, and the RIRs will allocate the last block in May 2012.

Cerf is often asked to predict where technology will lead in the future; you need only to go back a decade to check his hit rate. In 2000, he wrote in Time magazine of a mobile device on the horizon that would combine a phone, camera, email, payment system and digital book, and would have a catchy name. He suggested Widget (Wireless Internet Digital Gadget for Electronic Transactions); seven years later, Apple plumped for “iPhone”.

His current predictions that the falling cost and rising sophistication of programmable devices will allow the internet to be widely embedded in inanimate objects, in our bodies, and in outer space are already starting to be realised. Cerf’s wine cellar is internet-enabled, sending him a text message when the temperature and humidity reach unfavourable levels. Cheap, passive computers, embedded in objects and activating sensors, will become ubiquitous, he predicts, leading to advancements in automated shipping and inventory control.

I like the Internet-enabled wine cellar.

Was interested to see this PR:

New Zealand’s leading business search directory yellow.co.nz is now available to the country’s estimated 20,000 iPhone owners with today’s launch of the Yellow iPhone app.

The Yellow iPhone app provides location awareness via the iPhone’s built in GPS, mapping and directions functionality courtesy of Google Maps and the ability to save businesses to your contacts and email search results to others. …

Features include:

• Full ability to search Yellow’s entire directory
• Local search via iPhone’s integrated GPS
• Find local businesses on the integrated maps
• Get driving or walking directions to any business via Google Maps
• Email  business details to friends & contacts
• Save your favourite searches for next time
• Add your favourite businesses direct to your iPhones contacts

The local serach vis GPS is what especially interest me. I think location based services over your mobile is the next big thing. I can see you walking past your local bookshop, and they’ll be able to text you and say “Hey if you want to pop in we’ve got the third book in that series you have already pucrahsed Parts I and II of – and we’ll give it to you 15% off”.

I hope Yellow work on a similiar tool for the Blackberry.

I was on Media 7 last week with Russell Brown, Nat Torkington and Colin Jackson discussing 20 years of the Internet in NZ. It was a fun discussion and reminded me of how much we take for granted today, and how different the world was before the Internet.

Finally signed up for twitter which is a sort of micro-blog – maximum 160 characters – more like the Facebook status updates.

Anyway my latest twitter updates are displayed on the sideroll, and if you are on twitter you can follow me directly.

All these different social networks get difficult it manage, so pleased to have Ping.fm referred to me. One can do updates there which flow into all your different networks. So for example it will update both Twitter and Facebook status updates. Aldo does Flickr, Bebo, various blog platforms.

This table comes from Whats my Pass (via BoingBoing). It’s fascinating insight into what people use.

Also for the non geeks:

ncc1701 The ship number for the Starship Enterprise
thx1138 The name of George Lucas’s first movie, a 1971 remake of an earlier student project

I wonder how many people worldwide have used those as passwords?

1. Neil Sanderson has research from Pew. In 2008, the number of people gettign their news off the Internet went from 24% to 40%, beating newspapers at 34% for the first time.  Tv remains top at 70R% but is slowly declining.
2. Chris Trotter has a repost of a 2001 address he gave on defence. Many may be surprised by his views. I found myself agreeing with much of it!
3. Tim Blair notes that *only* 1,147 cars were burnt in France on New Year’s Eve, which was described by authorities as “rather calm”
4. MacDoctor finds the new English requirements for foreign nurses as idiotic at a time of nursing shortages, and points out most NZ nurses could not meet the new standard.

There’s been quite a bit of media interest lately about the Australian Government’s daft idea to force Australian ISPs to install compulsory filters that will ban sites the Government deems undesirable.

Radio NZ did a piece this morning:

The Australian government plans to force Australian ISPs to filter out more than a thousand websites with content including child pornography, excessive violence, crime and drug information as well as promoting terrorism.

The policy, dubbed the ‘Great Aussie Firewall’, has been met with a storm of criticism across the Tasman.

Internet New Zealand board member David Farrar says much of the banned content is traded over peer-to-peer networks which won’t be caught by filters.

He says the filters will also cause a sharp fall in download speeds for Australian users.

Internet Service Providers Association of New Zealand president Jamie Baddeley said the policy is insane and unworkable.

But he says it is symptomatic of pressure coming on ISPs to do more to police the internet.

One can also listen to the full item, at the bottom of the linked page. Jordan Cater is also interviewed.

I’ve also just been interview by TV3 for their 6 pm news tonight on the same issue.

I commented that luckily in NZ we have far smarter MPs, and I doubt more than a handful here would back some sort of compulsory government filter.

Also put in a plug for Netsafe, who provide really great resources for those worried about Internet safety.

1. Great to see a $100,000 fine for Lance Atkinson for spamming. The law was designed to allow us to target the big time professional spam outfits who make us pay through our ISP costs for their spamming. It’s all about property rights, and they have no right to make me pay for them sending me and others billions of emails.
2. The Law Commission is looking at the vexed issue of suppression orders and the Internet. It is a very worthy topic. As a web publisher myself I find it difficult to obey the law, because I don’t know what information has been suppressed, so it is difficult to police the site for mentions of it, when you don’t know that the info itself is suppressed. The entire suppression and contempt regime does need to be evaluated against the Internet age we are in, and this looks a useful first step.  You can read the paper from the Commission here, and submit on it by February.

Michelle Sullivan continues her rating of the parties and their websites. In her earlier article she gave National an A and Labour a C+ for their web strategies.

• NZ First – same design since 2002 – a D
• ACT - website okay but needs tweaking, not enough use of social networking and You Tube – a C
• Maori Party – simple website, little content – a C
• Family Party – a shiny website, too American, but will be popular with many. No grade given
• Green Party – expected big things but underwhelmed. Suggest more video on front page. Overall good and gets a B grade.
• United Future – nice three column setup. Blgo is integrated into site. Also like minipolls. A solid B.
• Progressive – unusual design – some will like it. Little content – C-.

So the overall rankings would be:

1. National A+
2. Greens B
3. United Future B
4. Labour C+
5. ACT C
6. Maori C
7. Progressive C-
8. NZ First D

That is pretty close to the rankings I gave out earlier this year in various presentations I did on the issue. I had Greens and National the top two but Greens higher. I also had Progressive and NZ First as the bottom two.  I did have ACT over Labour though but still around the middle.

The SST reports on the PR advice to Sanlu (the company part owned by Fonterra) from its PR company in China:

Carried on Chinese weblogs, the memo, purportedly from Sanlu’s PR company, notes growing numbers of damaging references to the company, which is 43% owned by Fonterra, in connection to infant kidney failures, and lays out strategies for addressing the issue. These included silencing victims, and paying off Baidu, China’s largest internet search engine, to remove negative references from its web searches.

Paying Google not to carry negative references on your comapny – now that could be a lucrative income stream.

Except of course once it got known, Google would lose market share massively.

The memo also said a “PR protection” deal had been negotiated with Baidu, in which Sanlu agreed to buy $640,000 of advertising with the search engine, in return for having negative stories blocked from search results.

Hmmn wonder how much they’ll pay Kiwiblog to remove a negative story. Wouldn’t cost $640,000!

Winston – make an offer

Emma Hart at Public Address has done an excellent post on how the Australian Government is spending $75 million implementing compulsory filtering of the Internet, and why we should be very wary of any such proposals here. Some extracts:

In July, the government ran a trial of various filtering systems in Tasmania. There’s an excellent round-up of the results here. In brief:
- while load testing was based on thirty users and only blocked 3930 sites, network degradation was as high as 75%. The more accurate the filter was, the worse the effect it had on performance. One filter caused a 22% degradation in speed when it wasn’t actually filtering.
- at best, sites were correctly blocked 92-95% of the time. At worst, more than one in ten got through.
- at best, sites were incorrectly blocked (blocked when they contained no objectionable content) 1% of the time. That doesn’t sound too bad, but imagine that’s your business, one of the one in a hundred sites blocked from the entire Australian market when you’ve done nothing wrong. At worst, over-blocking hit over 6%.
- the only way to filter content on instant messengers or peer to peer protocols was to block them completely.
- The filters do nothing to protect children from actual dangers such as cyber-bullying or stalking.

I helped set up a test a few years ago of the UK Clean Feed system, with the Dept of Internal Affairs and the Chief Censor’s Office. The UK system is actually quite good as they manually check every site that gets entered on – they don’t rely on some sort of “guess”. They didn’t appear to block any legitimate sites (a 1% false positive rate as the Ausises have is actually very high) but they didn’t block a huge proportion of objectionable (in the legal sense) sites. So relaying on such a filter may give a false sense of confidence, as the reality is that illegal sites changes hosts, domain names, IP addresses almost every day.

The way Australia is going about it, is just bureaucratic madness. Read Emma’s article in full to see why.

The Herald calls Google the world’s most powerful 10 year old.

It brings back memories of AltaVista, the former number one search engine. It was amazing how quickly Google replaced it as the search engine of choice.

Google is powerful but not quite all conquering. When they launched Google Video, I thought that would dominate the online video market as they had the brand and resources of Google.

But You Tube kicked their butt, because they had a superior product. The “embed” function especially turned every blog into a gateway for You Tube and they gained massive market share over Google Video.

Of course Google then went and purchased You Tube. But it still shows that product is still more important than brand, and that Google’s dominance can not be assumed to last forever.

But having said that, I am a regular user of:

1. Google Search
2. Google News
3. Google News Alerts
4. Google Adsense
5. Google Analytics
6. Google Maps
7. Google Images
8. Google Toolbar
9. Google Calendar
10. Google Docs
11. Gmail
12. Google Talk
13. You Tube

I have also played with Google Chrome and check out Google Groups very occassionally. So it is hard to see an Internet without a dominant Google anytime soon.

One of the little projects I have had a bit to do with is helping arrange a partnership between TVNZ7 and InternetNZ for the 2008 Internet Election Debate.

InternetNZ ran an online debate on ICT issues in 2005 between some of the party spokespersons (including Labour and National). It was webcast, and allowed remote participation through an IRC channel, e-mailed questions etc. It worked well, with both the politicians and the audience enjoying the somewhat unconventional format which allowed more time for actual debate and detail.

As ICT issues such as broadband, fibre rollout, wireless, digital copyright have become far more prominent in the last year ro two, we thought there would be enough interest in the debate to look at having it televised also. And TVNZ7 were the natural partner with their focus on news and current affairs. So we were delighted when they showed not just interest but enthusiasm.

We’ve also got a great range of journalists for the debate. Sean Plunkett has agreed to be the overall moderator. Fran O’Sullivan and Russell Brown will fire questions from the media bench and we will also have an online moderator who will filter questions through from the online and viewing audience.

The debate is on Tuesday 23 September starting at 9.10 pm. The first hour is live on TVNZ7. The second hour will be webcast (as will be the first hour) live and also available through TVNZ On Demand.

The four MPs are Labour’s Minister of Communications Hon David Cunliffe, National ICT Spokesperson Hon Maurice Williamson, ACT Leader Rodney Hide and Greens ICT Spokesperson Metiria Turei.

The whole idea of the debate is it will be a two way communication, not just one way. So if you are interested in faster broadband, digital copyright, Internet Safety etc etc tune in on the night. You can also ask questions in advance on Geekzone.

Anthony Doesburg reviews “Connecting the Clouds” which is a history of the Internet in NZ, by Keith Newman.

The book was launched last Thursday in Wellington. I was somewhat gutted I was in Auckland and unable to attend, as I actually helped commission the book, proposing some years ago to InternetNZ that we should get such a book written while all the original pioneers were still around.

As Anthony notes, Keith Newman more than delivered, with the 100,000 word project expanding to 400,000 words.

The book will not make the best seller lists, but for those with an interest in the Internet and its development, it should be a fascinating read. Like most books, it is best to have the hardcopy so one can read in comfort, but it has also been made available online at nethistory.net.nz, which will be kept updated into the future. It is in wiki format which will allow others to contribute over time to it.

The Herald has a report on some UK MPs concerned about You Tube. Let;s look at what they want:

“We are concerned that user-generated video content on sites such as YouTube does not carry any age classification, nor is there a watershed before which it cannot be shown.”

How stupid are these people? A watershed time before some content can be shown? Oh yes that will work. And what time zone should be used, morons?

The MPs expressed their anger that the operators of such sites did not routinely screen clips posted on them by the public.

Oh yes that is so very practical. Let us look at how many videos are uploaded every day – around 65,000. Now if each is ten minutes long, then one person can do around 50 in a day. So these UK MPs think You Tube (which costs $1 million a day to run already) should hire around 1,300 staff just to screen the videos that come in.

Incidentially did you know You Tube concumses more bandwidth today than the entire Internet consumed in 2000?

They said the practical problems of sifting through vast quantities of material could be overcome as technology is being developed that can rapidly spot hardcore pornography when it is uploaded.

Pornography is banned on You Tube. It normally gets reported very quickly and is gone within hours or minutes. Do these MPs really think people spend all their time on You Tube frantically searching for porn in the few minutes it is there before it is deleted?

I mean if people want porn, they will go to Youporn or Pornotube which have nothing but pornography.

“In a lucrative market, the cost to internet service providers of installing software to block access to child pornography sites should not come second to child safety,” the committee said.

Child pornography is sickening and authorities do a good job in prosecuting those who produce or distribute it etc. But the incidence of child pornography on You Tube is incredibly small, and anyone who uploads it will have their IP address given to authorities.

In terms of wider issues around access to child porn, I agree ISPs should restrict access where possible. But any such blacklists should be based on emperical evidence (ie the site has been verified as having illegal material) such as the British Cleanfeed system, and not on automated filters which “guess” is a site has illegal material and ends up blocking legal content.

The committee called for video-sharing sites to include a “one-click” facility that enabled users to report clips appearing to contain images of abuse directly to the police.

Not a bad idea, but which Police? The FBI? Scotland Yard?b

Internet policy people will be interested in the interview the Herald did with Peter Dengate-Thrush, the NZers who chairs ICANN – the global allocator of domain names and IP addresses. Some extracts:

In terms of safety is the web getting better or worse?

“The internet is neutral about these things – it’s really a question about the users. One of the reasons I’m participating in this is to assist with the constant requirement for user education – in this case we’ll be educating the educators. It’s a bit like saying is fire a good thing or is the wheel a good thing. It’s good when it’s done properly.”

That’s a great response. The Internet is no more good or bad than fire or wheels are.

What are the biggest threats to our internet freedom?

“The biggest threat to the internet itself is developing the wrong culture along the lines that I was just talking about. If we get that wrong, it’ll be humans and the way that humans use this particular tool that will cause the problems. You’ve got to be clear – there’s nothing inherently good or bad in the technology itself, it’s what we choose to do with it.

Indeed.

Our own stupidity that could trip us up?

“Yes. The sort of threats at the moment come from people attempting to impose controls and that runs into all the usual problems that we’ve struggled with over the centuries of this civilisation.

“Where the boundaries are between harmful knowledge and harmful expression and the right to freedom of expression. Getting the balance right is always very difficult. It seems clearer in war time for example when there’s an acknowledged crisis, civil liberties are curtailed. Absent those circumstances we struggle to be as clear as we can. Another clear example is the universal prohibition on child pornography and the exploitation of children. Those don’t cause much debate – it’s in political expression and inciting racial hatred and these sorts of areas where the current debate is raging.

I think religious expression is very much a topical issue also.

Do you think we’ll be left with another toothless [copyright] law with one test case that will fall over at appeal and leave us back at square one?

“There’s a worse case than it being toothless and that’s it being very toothful – ISPs having to go around closing down all sorts of relatively routine and safe and stable websites because they happen to be hosting – even if it’s against their knowledge – some infringing material.

The new law removed any penalty for filing a false takedown notice, so the potential for misuse is considerable.

Should it be up to ISPs to police the behaviour of their customers? It’s almost like Transit NZ being blamed for a road crash.

“Occasionally Transit are responsible for that if they’ve designed the road badly, but in this case, I take the view that ISPs have a role that’s supposed to be no greater that that of other citizens in relation to infringements. I particularly disagree with the thrust of the current amendment, which turns the ISPs into enforcement agents for copyright owners. I’m a copyright lawyer and I’ve acted for copyright owners and I’ve written on the value of copyright to the community. It’s not an attack on copyright but we do need to get the balance right between copyright interests and the rights of ordinary citizens and what’s good for the internet industries.

For an intellectual property lawyer, he speaks a lot of sense

Those who like facts and figures will have no end of them in the NZ report as part of the World Internet Project. It is probably the most comprehensive study of NZer’s use of the Internet. Some interesting stats:

• 79% of NZers use the Internet
• 15% of users are online for over 20 hours a week (half a fulltime job)
• 66% of users have broadband
• 71% of users say the Internet is an important source of information, compared to 52% for newspapers and television
• 10% of NZ Internet users have a blog (this is a very high figure internationally)
• 28% of users use Facebook or other social networking sites
• 25% of users have made friends with someone online and half of those have gone on to meet them in person
• 15% seek info about political parties or MPs online
• 43% support Government funding to enable wider Internet access while 34% oppose it
• Almost 80% of teenagers visit social networking sites, and 40% of those in their 30s do so.
• Over 30% of Asian users have a blog, compared to under 10% for Pakeha and around 3% for Maori
• Around 20% of those in their teen or 20s have a blog, and slightly more females than males
• The more you earn the less likely you are to blog

It will be interesting to see how it has changed in a few years.

UPDATE: Paul Reynolds has a great post on what theimplications of the suvey are for NZ.

The 20/20 Communications Trust is having a series of seminars as part of their Impact ’08 series.

One of these is Monday 21 July at the Wellington Railway Station (part of the growing Vic Uni empire). It is from 12.00 pm to 1.30 p.m. and in Room RWW224 on Level 2.

The seminar is on (online) Identity and associated issues and implications. The panel speaking are:

• Rosemary Du Plessis (who will Chair the session from Christchurch) is an Associate Professor of Sociology from Canterbury University
• Eamon Daly will participate from Christchurch.  Eamon is an ethics researcher and advisor .
• Stephen Bell a ComputerWorld journalist with interests in identify and privacy issues.
• myself
• Laurence Miller, Deputy State Services Commissioner for ICT

I will be focusing mainly on the combination of identity and location services and the potential impact of these for good or bad.

If you have an interest in this area, you are welcome to attend. Just let Don Hollander know for catering purposes.

Bernard Hickey (and his teenage daughter!) review the $11.4 million Mission-On website.

Now let’s look at the performance. Sparc kindly provided me with some statistics on traffic for Mission-On, which was built on contract by a private company called Click Suite. It generated 39,132 unique browser sessions in June and has registered 15,000 kids in the four months since it launched. Sparc is targeting 30,000 by June next year. Sparc pointed out that Click Suite had told them this compared quite well with www.cleo.co.nz, www.247girl.co.nz, C4TV.co.nz and Kidspot.co.nz.

At this point I will mention that the official Neilsen Net Ratings for this blog in a month (and Neilsen are very conservative with their stats) are around four times their 39,132. In fact I get more than that in a week. And alas no $11 million of taxpayer funding.

I registered for the website as myself and tried to play a few games to get a feel for it. It’s the worst kind of patronising tosh I have seen in a long time. “It’s choice,” the website says of itself. It has one game called a “Creative Hip Hop Challenge”. One thing I do know about successful websites is they have to be driven by the users and not appear out of touch or preachy or just plain dumb. This is all three.

Ouch.

It’s also all built in Adobe (formerly Macromedia’s) Flash. Anyone trying to build a website that is picked up by Google and the other bots so people can find it knows that Flash is the dumbest way to do that. Adobe is only now giving Flash the ability to attract search engines. Flash is fantastic for making good-looking websites that make their owners look good in the eyes of their bosses. But they are websites that aren’t either popular or profitable. Flash sites are typically built by advertising, marketing or design agencies (like Clicksuite), who make advertisement or brochure sites.

But that is okay – the taxpayer will then be asked to spend money promoting the site.

So I asked my 14-year-old daughter what she thought of it. She had seen an ad for it on the side of a bus, but hadn’t visited. I asked her to check it out. She did what everyone does now. She typed the words “Mission On” into Google to find it. It came up at number 8 in the natural search rankings. Any web professional knows this is a disaster. I suspect it ranks so poorly because it is made in Flash and its search optimisation is woeful. It is also poorly ranked because few other sites have to linked to it, which is an ominous sign. My daughter eventually found it.

We are in fact already paying for adverts for it.

“Oh My God,” she yelped. “It’s all in Flash. I just never use Flash sites. You can’t navigate them, they’re usually just so crap. My browser is set to block these yucky pop-ups. No. No. No,” she said before shooing me out the door. I’m a very lucky father to have a daughter who knows so much more about web usability than I do.

Heh.

PS. One tip for Sparc. It needs to buy the Google ad word for MissionOn to create a sponsored link. It costs about 25 cents per click. Well worth the money. So good in fact that I’ve bought the MissionOn adword for Google and will link to this story once it’s published.

Now that is just evil. Very very evil. I love it.

Just been interviewed for a few minutes on Morning Report about the DNS sceurity flaw which was announced yesterday. It is somewhat unusual because so many vendors are affected and have been involved in providing fixes.

The Greens and other wowsers need to get real over the move to online Lotto.

If people want to gamble online, they are already doing it. Hell people in NZ are betting on US elections, playing blackjack, roulette etc etc.

All the Government is doing it allowing people to buy Lotto tickets on the Internet.  That’s bloody helpful.  They’ve even put in place spending limits.

This looks to be a smart move by Telecom – a dedicated ISP for business customers. Business needs are different to home user needs, and the Xtra brand is more focused in the consumer retail market.

The key deciders will be their pricing plans and their service levels, but it is a good idea in terms of meeting customer needs.

No wonder there are so many Polish jokes!

WARSAW – Poles should not be allowed to vote online because the internet attracts people who watch “pornography while sipping a bottle of beer”, a former prime minister told his party’s website.

Jaroslaw Kaczynski and other leaders of his conservative party have said they wanted to rejuvenate their ranks and reach out to internet users after losing power last October when younger voters flocked to their centre-right rivals.

Poland’s election commission is floating proposals such as allowing people to vote online to boost turnout.

“I am not an enthusiast of a young person sitting in front of a computer, watching video clips and pornography while sipping a bottle of beer and voting when he feels like it,” he was quoted as saying on his party’s revamped website.

He added that internet users are “the easiest group to manipulate, to suggest who to vote for.”

The Polish PM maybe onto something here. One could combine e-voting with pay per view porn – the porn covering the cost of the election.

NZPA reports on Orcon’s new package, only made possible thanks to local loop unbundling.

For $99 a month, people who live in range of their initial Auckland exchanges can for $100 a month get line rental, free national toll calls and Internet at up to 24 Mb/s download and 1 Mb/s upload.