Writings on technology and society from Wellington, New Zealand
Today on Radio New Zealand National I talked about the links between technology and culture.
Many people see technology as some kind of boring but necessary thing that someone else looks after, and if the truth be told rather look down on those who look after it. As I argue here that view is just plain wrong…
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Having just returned from Summer break with my family, I thought I’d list the top ten wonderful New Zealand experiences we’d had. But I couldn’t whittle it down to ten so there are a few more in the list. What a fantastic country we live in!
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…is the title of an old book by Harry Harrison which I haven’t read, but I’ve always loved the title. The title captures some of the enthusiasm around connecting our world. And today, we connect our world with undersea fibre cables, as I have written about before.
In New Zealand, our international fibre – our lifeline to the world – is all provided by a single company, the Southern Cross cable company. This company, or rather its backers Telecom and Optus, had the vision and the guts ten years ago to make the large investment necessary to run fibre right across the Pacific Ocean, by two different routes. A ring of fibre provides great service and makes it unlikely that the connection can fail even if a strand of cable is cut. Imagine trying to sell that to investors in the mid 90s!
But here we are a decade down the track and no-one doubts that the Internet is key to our society and our economy, to our place in the world. Undersea cables are a fact of life – they alway have been for New Zealand, of course, but the kind of capacity and robustness provided by Southern Cross is now a necessity in a wired age. Put bluntly, no-one will want to come here or remain here if we can’t be part of the Internet revolution that is happening in developed countries around the world.
…will be resumed as soon as possible or so it used to say on the telly in the UK whenever the TV station broke down. And normal service on this blog will be resumed in a few weeks once I have taken some time out with my family exploring some of this wonderful land we live in.
So, sporadic posting only for a few weeks. If you’re in New Zealand go out and enjoy yourself! Have a great break, drive safely, and above all make time to just relax.
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.
Today on Radio New Zealand National I talked about several things, including how to practice safe online behaviour when you aren’t at home. Read on for my notes, or pull the podcast to find out if I stuck to them!
Last week I spent a couple of days in Australia, and as part of it I was driven from Canberra to Sydney by the amazing Pia Waugh. In the car were not one, but two OLPCs.
The One Laptop Per Child is intended to be a cheap but functional laptop suitable for children in developing countries. It’s a very nice little machine, and I was really impressed.
The new MyLocation feature on Google Maps for Mobile is spooky but cool.
Google Maps is a way of finding maps of just about anywhere, online on your computer. Check out maps.google.com if you haven’t seen it. It provides street maps, driving directions from A to B, and it can overlay satellite photos so you can see what the area looks like from above.
Google upped the ante on that service in the middle of this year when it introduced Google Maps for Mobile – the whole thing runs on most of the fancier kinds of mobile phone. So, if you’re lost or don’t know a street you are looking for, you can whip out your phone and get a street map of Wellington, say, and search for the street you want or the one you can see.
And you can switch between the map view and a satellite picture type view – a very detailed aerial photo just like in Google Earth. This is endless fun. You can armchair travel to all kinds of places, or just look down on familiar ones. (more…)
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