Author Archive
Wikileaks shows internet’s resilience against fools
Written By: - Date published: 4:00 pm, December 8th, 2010 - 27 comments
A fascinating side-effect of the attacks at various levels on Wikileaks in the last week has been a demonstration of exactly how tough it is to take out a site without widespread support from people on the net.
renesys.blog has a excellent post looking at what has been happening to keep Wikileaks alive on the net.
ISOC looks at the extra-legal activity aimed at Wikileaks
Written By: - Date published: 1:21 pm, December 8th, 2010 - 10 comments
ISOC – the internet society that is probably the closest thing that the internet has as a governing body said “Unless and until appropriate laws are brought to bear to take the wikileaks.org domain down legally, technical solutions should be sought to reestablish its proper presence, and appropriate actions taken to pursue and prosecute entities (if any) that acted maliciously to take it off the air.”
We can probably expect that domain to be back on the air shortly.
Assange voluntarily goes to British court on extradition
Written By: - Date published: 9:15 am, December 8th, 2010 - 50 comments
Now that the Swedish prosecutors have finally given the British police a document that they can work with, Assange turned himself in, and has gone before a British court on the extradition request from Sweden. The court has remanded him without bail. I have already commented on exactly what I think of the charges – […]
Marianne Ny: Making an arse of Swedish law.
Written By: - Date published: 4:28 pm, December 4th, 2010 - 218 comments
The Wikileaks release of US government diplomatic wires is less interesting to me than the behavior of the Sweden’s director of public prosecutions, Marianne Ny. Her charges and actions against Julian Assange indicate that she is driven more by the politics than respect for the law. I fail to see why Interpol is involved for such a minor charge. Apparently the charge is question is something pretty weird called “sex by surprise”
What is all of the fuss about?
Written By: - Date published: 8:47 am, December 1st, 2010 - 10 comments
There has always been an inherent design conflict in giving widespread access to information. On one hand it allows better service for people and organisations. On the other hand it means that less material can be kept secret because giving more people access to information and more opportunity to whistleblow when people see a problem or an ethical conflict. That has always been the inherent conflict.
Gaynor on something important
Written By: - Date published: 10:00 am, November 29th, 2010 - 5 comments
“New Zealand investors are facing an accounting crisis. This is because domestic companies have rejected many of the new international financial reporting standards (IFRS) and are declaring “adjusted”, “underlying”, “operating”, “excluding non-trading” and “from continuing operations” profits that vary significantly from audited IFRS-compliant profits.”
Tougher than the rest.
Written By: - Date published: 12:00 pm, November 27th, 2010 - 2 comments
One of my favorite Bruce Springsteen tracks from when I was somewhat younger is “Tougher than the rest”. As heresy I’d have to say that I like the version by Everything But The Girl somewhat better. It has been coming up a lot on my playlist while pushing through the last month of coding. It was also the track that was playing when I heard the news about the second explosion at Pike River earlier in the week. I’d guess that will stay embedded as an association for a while.
Hope ends at mine (updated)
Written By: - Date published: 5:01 pm, November 24th, 2010 - 116 comments
There has been a second explosion at the Pike River mine.
“Superintendent Gary Knowles told the Herald the miners couldn’t have survived a blast of that magnitude, which occurred at 2.37pm. Family members were seen crying as they left a police briefing a short time ago.”
My heart goes out to the families.
Does John Key still want us to emulate Ireland?
Written By: - Date published: 8:40 am, November 24th, 2010 - 36 comments
Reading the news on the current plight of the Irish with a economy in a tailspin and a tottering government. I can but reflect that it was a bloody good thing that the National party wasn’t in power after 1999. For instance, John Key as recently as 2008 was praising the fragile economic model that […]
The sea-change on the left
Written By: - Date published: 1:59 pm, October 25th, 2010 - 41 comments
One of the strange things about helping to run a left blog like this is looking at the varied opinions of those on the left of the political spectrum, and then looking at the monolithic opinions that the right seem to have of the left. I was musing on this while reading Matt McCarten’s excellent Saturday article. Now you have to understand that Matt and myself are almost at the ends of the spectrum when it comes to politics on the left….
Simon Canute and the blogs
Written By: - Date published: 12:17 am, October 17th, 2010 - 30 comments
Simon Power is ‘consulting’ on regulating the on-line communities to prevent violations of normal societal and legal standards. Clare Curran asks ‘hopefully’ that this isn’t simply a reaction to the idiocy of ex-National party member Whaleoil in how he chases readership. But I suspect that is why this foolishness has come back on the agenda again. Plus National would prefer that there wasn’t so much criticism of their wimpy leader.
The failing polls..
Written By: - Date published: 4:58 pm, October 16th, 2010 - 12 comments
An article in The Economist looks at the failing basis of polling techniques in the USA. It isn’t that much different to the circumstances here.
“The proportion of those called who end up taking part in a survey has fallen steadily, from 35% or so in the 1990s to 15% or less now, according to Mr Keeter. Reaching young people is especially difficult. Only old ladies answer the phone…”
Sunday Morons: an omnibus of silly people
Written By: - Date published: 1:02 pm, October 10th, 2010 - 19 comments
With all of the political activity over the last week, there are a few items that missed getting covered as well as the ones that we covered extensively. Rather than do individual posts on the idiots of the week, I’ve written an omnibus post of my notes from the last week.
Friday funny: Paul Henry
Written By: - Date published: 11:55 am, October 8th, 2010 - 3 comments
Due to widespread demand (ie BLiP), I’m going to try to find a Friday funny each week. This particular video is a pretty good spoof on Paul Henry. The only problem is that for comedic effect you’d normally need to go further than the origional. However going further than Henry requires more international incidents. TVNZ needs to fire him.
Fonterra – killing Orangutans.
Written By: - Date published: 3:48 pm, October 6th, 2010 - 45 comments
There has been an interesting ad from Greenpeace running around the site today. It is obviously intended to go viral before the lawyers from Fonterra get it into court… I think I might help out a bit… So should you – dump it onto the social media.
Breakfast bigot suspended
Written By: - Date published: 2:18 pm, October 5th, 2010 - 95 comments
Paul Henry has been suspended from TVNZ. He will return on air on Monday 18 October. That simply isn’t good enough – he needs to be sacked because he is a recidivist offender who appears to be incapable of learning. As Mike Treen says “Paul Henry has become the poster boy for bigotry. He has no place on a national broadcaster paid for by taxpayers – taxpayers who include many of the people he humiliates.”
GST is going up today
Written By: - Date published: 1:23 pm, October 1st, 2010 - 62 comments
Remember how John Key used to talk about GST? Here is a video reminding everyone of the past before he did his usual flip-flop to favour the rich while increasing costs on most people. The GST increase and the consequent inflation will make almost everyone worse off unless they are wealthy enough to bribe the NACT’s.
What are you using?
Written By: - Date published: 3:26 pm, September 19th, 2010 - 36 comments
Periodically I have a look at the stats captured for the site. This time I thought I’d show you some of them for the last three months. I’ve picked out what browser and operating systems people have been using.
Newspapers had their uses
Written By: - Date published: 2:54 pm, September 13th, 2010 - 12 comments
Reading the New York Times this weekend, I found this wee gem.
Compared to my iPad, I’d have to say (sadly) there is at least one thing that newspapers are better at. However I don’t think that this will prevent me from avoiding bloating landfills.
What happened..
Written By: - Date published: 2:49 pm, September 4th, 2010 - 14 comments
New Zealand is one of the oddest places geologically (Japan is similar) in the world because of our position between two plates and because we are at the twist where the plates change how they interact with each other. But the position of the Christchurch earthquake is a long way from the plate boundaries. Highly Allochthonous has a look at the mechanism of the quake.
Thank the regulators
Written By: - Date published: 9:26 am, September 4th, 2010 - 109 comments
The Christchurch earthquake was a shallow high magnitude earthquake close to a urban population centre. That is the disaster scenario for planners. It is a disaster, but not a major disaster. The enforcement of building regulations ensured that the city took damage, but survived largely intact.
Multi-site
Written By: - Date published: 10:41 am, August 29th, 2010 - 11 comments
The site has now been reconfigured to be a multi-site system. This will allow us to start setting up child sites for more specialized topics in the future. It should allow us to keep expanding our range of posts with the ever increasing number of authors.
6000 published posts and climbing fast
Written By: - Date published: 7:52 am, August 27th, 2010 - 12 comments
There have been 6000 published* posts, 192 thousand comments, and many millions of page views. I’d guess that this multiple-author blog has a wee bit of an audience.
And the server has been stable….
An interesting result
Written By: - Date published: 9:20 am, August 22nd, 2010 - 37 comments
Australia is about to enter a new era in politics. They appear to have a hung parliament this morning according to the Sydney Morning Herald. There are a number of marginal seats in the balance. The single Green MP in the lower house and a number of independents will determine which major party forms a government.
Kudos to “The Veteran”
Written By: - Date published: 11:45 am, August 21st, 2010 - 21 comments
Reading about Act ritualistically disemboweling themselves this week has been interesting, and has quite a few implications for the political landscape at the next election. The factor that has been attracting my attention was highlighted by Fran O’Sullivan this morning – where did those defense papers wind up. Apparently with The Veteran at No Minister, who wins kudos from me by acting responsibly to the leak.
An inflated star collapsing
Written By: - Date published: 5:55 pm, August 18th, 2010 - 37 comments
Watching ACT at present must be similar to watching a red giant finishing consuming all of its helium, expel its envelope, and collapse down to dwarf star. A breaking Herald report on the back story of the ACT leadership assassination says Heather Roy’s “leaked documents…portray Act leader Rodney Hide as an abusive, intimidating bully”
The Standard turned three
Written By: - Date published: 9:57 pm, August 17th, 2010 - 49 comments
We managed to miss The Standard’s third birthday a few days ago despite some earlier avowed intentions to make a fuss over it. The site started on August 15th 2007 and has grown into a massive community project of the left since then. Long may it continue….
The dire probabilities of unusual weather
Written By: - Date published: 1:45 pm, August 13th, 2010 - 32 comments
In Morning Report yesterday there was a clear question and statement on the difference between weather events and climate. This is a question that always seems to confuse our CCD’s (climate change deniers and skeptics). So it is worth examining it a bit in the view of some of the unusual weather that has been happening recently. A increased frequency of such events is going to be the main effect of climate change over time, leading eventually to famines.
John Banks: Knucklescraper
Written By: - Date published: 12:02 pm, August 6th, 2010 - 17 comments
A story in the Heralds Sideswipe offers and interesting insight into veteran professional politician John Banks, and his priorities and social evolution. I’d suggest that women and any males who aren’t still living in the 19th century take note – and vote against the knuckle scraper.
C&R: A risky misuse of rates
Written By: - Date published: 12:00 pm, August 4th, 2010 - 73 comments
Why in hell are John Banks and the irresponsible Citizens and Ratepayers dominated Auckland City Council giving me (as a ratepayer) the risks of rebuilding Eden Park. They (and I) already have more than enough risks to handle in the massive costs of the leaky building liabilities.
Two peas from a pod
Written By: - Date published: 1:00 pm, August 1st, 2010 - 35 comments
The activities of the dishonorable Minister for Social Development and Employment Paula Bennett has been increasingly reminding me of the blogger Whaleoil. Consider the number of common points of obnoxious behaviour. The similarities are quite striking. The main difference is that one is a blogger opinionating on current affairs and the other is a minister of the crown with the responsibility for large numbers of dependent people.
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