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Today on Radio New Zealand National I talked about a treaty called ACTA about which its hard to find any information. ACTA is being negotiated now by countries including New Zealand, and it has the potential to curb people’s privacy and their rights to use the Internet. MED has issued a call for submissions on what New Zealand’s negotiating position should be, although it has delayed answering an OIA request for more information until after the deadline of next Monday.

Does this affect you? Quite possibly it will if some well-funded lobbyists get their way. It’s clear that some want this treaty to impose DMCA-style laws across the world. This would effectively stop innovation in its tracks except when it was done by big companies. And the last New Zealand copyright law change pandered to the interests of the big players at the expense of the rest of us. (Read to the bottom of the linked page.)

Read on for my speaking notes, and for the address to send you emailed submission to. Or, listen to the podcast.
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Here’s a very good blog post by someone who has devoted a lot of time to looking the risks of electronic voting machines. Dan Wallach is responding a report written by the manufacturers, claiming that the machines are secure. This blog entry appears to be based on Wallach’s testimony before the Texas House Committee on Elections, which presumably gets to make decisions about how people vote.

Hat tip to Bruce Schneier’s excellent blog about security for the link.

Today on Radio New Zealand National I talked about electronic voting – why you might, why you might not, and why it probably won’t be coming here for a while. Read on for my notes and links (warning: hilarious video!) or listen to the podcast. (more…)

Today on Radio New Zealand National I talked about hackers and what they do.

The term “hacker” has two quite different meanings. Some people are proud of being hackers, and they mean that they are clever programmers rather than computer vandals. Others, sadly, use skills – or sometimes just programs that other cleverer people have put together – to break into computers and generally cause problems.

Read on for my speaking notes or pull the podcast.
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Today on Radio New Zealand National I talked about censoring the Internet.

Back when the Net was a lot younger, someone famously said that “the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it”. He was wrong, of course – some countries’ citizens can’t read about material their governments don’t want them to, or not without technical workarounds that are beyond many Net users.

And, even in liberal democracies like New Zealand, there are limits to free speech on the Internet. If you publish objectionable material – child porn and the like – on the Internet here, expect to be prosecuted.

Read on for my speaking notes or listen to the podcast and hear what I really said.
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Today on Radio New Zealand National I talked about the impenetrable legal terms and licences that we are confronted with every day when we use software or even just read email.

Read on for my speaking notes.

Feel free to post your favourite examples of silly or unreadable email disclaimers in the comments!

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This week on Radio New Zealand National I talked about the core government web site at newzealand.govt.nz, how it’s starting to use some of the ideas of Web 2.0, and how the government is releasing the software that runs it as free software under the GPL. (more…)

And before modern communications technologies, rumours were all most people heard about foreign wars. Today on Radio New Zealand National I talked about how that all changed with the reporting via telegraph of a disastrous military engagement over 150 years ago.

Read on for my speaking notes and for some really good links. (more…)

Sorry about the dreadful pun! I’m on my way to Geneva to represent New Zealand at a meeting of the International Standards Organisation, ISO.

Geneva was the home of the protestant reformer John Calvin. Calvin held that adherence to biblical precepts was far important more than any act of charity or kindness. These days, we’d call him a fundamentalist. And, like so many charismatic religious leaders, he got to define exactly how people lived according to those precepts. People who opposed him, or whose theology was a little different, tended to come to a sticky end. He gave his name to particularly dour branch of protestantism. There are echoes of Calvinism in a lot of modern Christian thought.

Anyway, I’m going to Geneva to attend a Ballot Resolution Meeting for a draft standard – DIS29500, commonly known as OOXML. New Zealand voted “no” on this standard last time round, as did sufficient other countries to prevent it being made a world standard on the spot. This meeting is to discuss the various objections that the different countries have to the technical quality of the draft standard and to see if changes can be agreed to it. Countries which have already voted, like New Zealand, then get 30 days to decide whether they wish to change their votes.

This will be a very solid 5 day meeting. Even so, at 6,000 pages with another 2,300 pages of comments the draft standard is so big that the meeting can’t possibly do justice to the whole thing.

According to ISO rules I’m not allowed to blog or broadcast about the contents of the meeting, which is closed to the public and the press. I’ll do my regular Thursday radio broadcast from Geneva (Wednesday night, my time) and I’ll talk about the process and about what it’s like to be involved.

I’m looking forward to the meeting, and I’m also looking forward to meeting some people I have worked closely with round the world, but have never actually met. Ain’t the Net marvellous?

New Zealand spam, even, and I’m not talking about the pressed ham. A few years ago a man in Christchurch was outed by investigative journalist Juha Saarinen for sending vast quantities of the stuff – he boasted of 100 million messages per day – mainly with solicitations to buy things that were supposed to enlarge your penis. If you even had one. That person got extremely grumpy when he received many angry phone calls about his business, complaining that his children were taking calls from strangers angry about unsolicited and inappropriate messages. The irony was apparently lost on him. When challenged, he said that he was doing nothing illegal.

Anyway, after the publicity that person (I would normally use the word “gentleman”, but somehow it doesn’t fit) said that he would stop spamming. Fair enough. But this week the newly-formed anti-spam division of the Department of Internal Affairs has swooped on on an alleged spammer, again in Christchurch, after an expose by the BBC and some fine work by a Danish journalist. The product is again male bodily extension. And this time, all the computers at an address – 22, not bad for a home – have been seized with a view to prosecution under the Unsolicited Commercial Messages Act of 2007.

That’s right, the Spam Act has been used in anger. If this person was indeed spamming he deserves the full penalties of the act, there’s no argument about that. But let’s, for a moment, think about the cynics of this act back when it was a bill – it didn’t get unanimous support in Parliament, after all. Where would New Zealand now be if it hadn’t passed? Left explaining to the BBC’s audience that this vile activity, illegal just about everywhere else, was acceptable in New Zealand? That we think it’s alright for New Zealanders to write to the world’s boys and girls offering to supersize their genitals? 100 million times a day?

Well done every MP who voted for it.