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This week on Radio New Zealand National I talked about the strange world of quantum computing and its more surprising implications. Read on for my notes…
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Today on Radio New Zealand National I talked about mashups – a way of joining together songs or videos to make something wholly new.

Read on for my notes and links.
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No, not a way to make people use tasteful names on the Net, but the practice of registering names to see if you can make money off them and cancelling them inside the free “grace period” if you can’t.

There are people out there registering 100,000 names a day and cancelling 99% of the names before they have to pay. Typically these people put a webpage full of advertising on the name as they register it, and they only keep it if people click on the adverts.

This is a bad practice because it prevents people from getting access to names because some taster has grabbed them. It also stresses the registration systems. And its very much against the spirit of the system.

There’s a lot of discussion going on at ICANN on how to shut down the tasters. Perhaps the free grace period will be removed, or perhaps people will only be allowed to cancel a small proportion of the names they register.

It’s interesting to watch the people who care about this practice coming up with a solution to the problem.

I’m in Delhi at a meeting of ICANN, the body which runs the core Internet domain name and number systems. It meets three times a year in a different world city every time. I’m doing some work for ICANN as part of a review team; but I already know many of the people here from my days as president of InternetNZ.

I don’t think I’m going to have time to see much of Delhi, unfortunately. It’s also a lot colder here than I believed it could be – I’m far too cold sitting round in a business suit. Most people have winter woolies on!

Last weekend I was lucky enough to be able to go to the Foo Camp, a technology camp in Warkworth. I talked about it today on Radio New Zealand National – read on for my speaking notes. (more…)

Some undersea cables have been cut by a ship. The results have affected Internet and phone service in the Middle East. (more…)

I’m just off to Warkworth for the second ever Kiwi Foo camp. 150 clever people in one place, all weekend, no agenda. Last year we had some musicians, journos and politicians as well. Things got done, and it was a blast. This year, Kim Hill is broadcasting her Saturday morning progamme on Radio New Zealand National from the camp. I’ll talk about it on Kathryn Ryan’s programme next Thursday.

I’m looking forward to it!

Today on Radio New Zealand National I talked about Free Software and how this is a different concept from Open Source.

Yes, there are important distinctions between these two. Free Software is sometimes taken to mean software which is free of charge under some circumstances, but the phrase really refers to software that carries certain freedoms with it – “free” as in unencumbered.

Read on for my speaking notes.
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The late, great Billy T James shows us how to buy a used car…

I have been asked to be one of a three person team representing New Zealand’s view on the draft international standard commonly called OOXML, at a meeting of the international standards body ISO at the end of February. OOXML is essentially the format used by Microsoft latest version of its Office suite, although not by earlier versions of Office.

Standardising the file formats used by office programs may sound a little arcane, but it’s actually rather important because a properly implemented standard would allow competition in the office software field, since people would be able to buy or download any standards-compliant program they wished and still keep access to all their documents.

There is already an international standard for office document formats. It’s the one used by a host of mostly free programs including Open Office. This standard, called ODF, was passed unanimously by ISO a couple of years ago. Now ISO is being asked to consider blessing another standard. There was a vote on this back in September, to which New Zealand voted No, as did the rest of the world by a narrow margin. I’ve blogged about this before.

The Geneva meeting is to work through the OOXML draft standard and see how it could be improved technically. After the meeting countries will have a chance to change their votes.

The New Zealand delegation will consist of three people: a StandardsNZ staffer, a Microsoft employee, and me. I’m honoured to be able to contribute to New Zealand’s efforts on this – it’s important for New Zealand and for the world.