internet

This is all getting rather pathetic… from those in glass houses…

The NZ SIS has just sent out an email an error. No database attached

— Patrick Gower (@patrickgowernz) April 2, 2013

Read more »

Planking was…well…lame…check out these from Japan…the latest craze sweeping Japan…staging Dragon Ball attacks:

Numerous Japanese teens, it seems, are uploading photos of themselves doing the Kamehameha attack from popular manga and anime series Dragon Ball.

Many of the photos, which also could be influenced by these floating pics, were uploaded to Twitter within the last week or so. On Twitter, Japanese teens are saying that this is how they’ve recently been goofing off with friends.

During the 1980s, when the Dragon Ball anime was on primetime television, kids would unleash Kamehameha attacks on each for fun at school or in the park. The difference here is that teens these days can snap digital photos and upload them for instant internet fame.

Read more »

Google is rolling out their fibre plans in locations in the US. It sounds totally awesome.

There are of course people who think there is no need for such speed.

In March of 2010, Google announced its intention to build super-fast fibre-optic internet service in “a small number of trial locations across the United States.” A year later, after receiving more than 1000 applications from cities and towns across the country, Google chose Kansas City as its first location. Last November, Google began installing service in people’s homes. For $US70 a month, the company offers Kansas City residents a 1-gigabit internet line – the fastest home internet service available anywhere in the world, about 150 times faster than the average American broadband speed of 6.7 Mbps. (You also get 1 terabyte of online storage as part of the deal, something Google normally sells for $50 a month.) For $120 a month, you get the 1-GB line plus cable-like TV service, as well as a Nexus 7 tablet that you can use as your remote. There’s also a “free” plan: After you pay a $300 construction fee – which you can split into 12 payments of $25 – Google will provide your home with a 5-Mbps internet line for “at least seven years,” and probably indefinitely. (Legally, the company needed to provide an end date for service.)

These are amazing services at unbelievable prices. For about the same fee that many Americans currently pay for cable, Google is offering internet speeds that, until now, were available only to big companies for thousands of dollars a month.

Therein lies the mystery. Google’s gigabit initiative, called Google Fibre, has sparked a round of questions across the tech industry. Is Google looking to become an internet service provider? Does it simply want to spur other ISPs into providing faster service? And, finally, why gigabit internet – what does Google expect people to do with the world’s fastest broadband service?  Read more »

It wasn’t just a few bloggers and a few tweets that got yesterday’s Supreme Court decision on water rights totally wrong.

RadioLive broke into their programme with a newsflash and host Duncan Garner started to opine about how he agreed with the decision.

But then of course, came the correction.  Oops.

Not a great day at the office for decent journalists trained and skilled.

I actually feel sorry for Duncan on this, he was fed a bum steer by the newsroom and other journalists who couldn’t wait to blurt their undisguised glee across Twitter and the air-waves.

UPDATE: Mediaworks has now blocked the Youtube clip. To be fair to RadioLive the audio is still here: http://www.radiolive.co.nz/Audio.aspx

Split across the “Wednesday” 1500-1515 segment.  The newsflash comes at 11 minutes 35  into this stream.

The reason RadioLive has blocked the Youtube video is because they don’t archive this stuff – and would prefer no one heard it.

Here is the audio anyway.

Beyonce’s publicist wants these unflattering pictures from the Super Bowl to be removed from the Internet

Good luck with getting it off the Internet.   Read more »

Rod Oram takes time out from lecturing at the Young Labour Summer School and gets right up Kim Dotcom and his fanciful claims in the Sunday Star Times, expect David Fisher to start running a twitter attack against him in short  order….or at the very least to spout forth arguments ion Kim’s behalf.

Dangerously for us, however, Kim Dotcom has plunged into this gap. The man and his business models are the absolute antithesis of what the internet and this country need.

He dangles a glittering prospect others have offered before: he says we could generate jobs, wealth and taxes if we turned ourselves into one of the world’s great data storage sites. After all, we have abundant, cheap and renewable electricity to power the servers. All we’d need is bigger cables to connect us with the world and a change of laws to make us the Switzerland of data secrecy.

He claims his new services, if they were based here, would within three years generate more traffic than the rest of NZ online activity combined. But everything is wrong about this proposition, from the economics to the practicality and morality.

So far Oram is the only media person to get up Kim Dotcom and called him on his bullshit, he goes further.  Read more »

Russell Brown has explained in sensible words why Kim DotCon is a fat thieving German fraud. I am much more base that Russell as you can see.

So it’s okay, because he’s not going to steal advertising inventory from small publishers, only large ones. Except that Google and Yahoo aren’t only publishers: they also operate advertising networks that place ads on third party sites – ads that produce revenue that many small publishers rely on.

I’ve written here before about the punishing trends in online advertising. When you read a story hailing 20% growth in digital advertising, you need to bear in mind that most of that is going to the big players – Google and Facebook – and a lesser portion to the larger established media players, such as Fairfax.  Read more »

One of the bloggers that I follow…and to a certain extent mimic, is leaving the Daily Beast to establish The Dish on his own site, funded only by donations.

Andrew Sullivan, the prolific writer who has built up his following for his blog “The Dish” first at the TheAtlantic.com and then at the Daily Beast, announced on Wednesday he is striking out on his own with a Web site dependent entirely on subscription revenue.

Mr. Sullivan said in an announcement posted on “The Dish” that starting on Feb. 1, he plans to charge readers $19.99 a year or whatever they might want to pay to subscribe to his site. He said that he spent the last dozen years blogging and trying to figure out how to make his venture profitable. He tried pledge drives for six years and then shifted to partnering with larger institutions like the Atlantic and the Daily Beast. He said he decided to make this change now since his contract with the Daily Beast was finished at the end of 2012.

“We felt more and more that getting readers to pay a small amount for content was the only truly solid future for online journalism,” Mr. Sullivan wrote. He added “the only completely clear and transparent way to do this, we concluded, was to become totally independent of other media entities and rely entirely on you for our salaries, health insurance, and legal, technological and accounting expenses.”

Read more »

This has to really be comment of the week, but it follows on from yesterday’s post about Carnage in Politics.

The left is eating itself, and because of the advent of social media and blogs it is all very, very public. It is actually a delight to behold and far be it from me to hide the carnage under a bushell. I read The Standard Lynn Prentice’s hate speech blog so you don’t have to.

This comment left by SHG on The Standard Lynn Prentice’s hate speech blog is an example of what is currently unfolding within Labour:

Clare Curran’s greatest hits (this is an update of a post I made on Danyl’s blog a while back)

I keep hearing how Curran is a communications expert, and seeing absolutely no evidence of it. As Labour’s telecommunications spokesperson she appears to be technically ignorant and of average literacy at best. Examples:

http://blog.labour.org.nz/index.php/2010/05/27/lets-all-admit-it-our-internet-speeds-are-rubbish/
Curran finds out about a site on the interwebs called “speedtest.net” (/facepalm) and has discovered that NZ is actually geographically remote and its “bandwidth data” or something is, um, less good than that of someone somewhere else.

http://blog.labour.org.nz/index.php/2010/05/28/advertised-vs-actual-broadband-speed-there-is-a-difference/
Curran discovers that broadband in South Korea and Japan is faster than in NZ and DEMANDS AN EXPLANATION.

http://blog.labour.org.nz/index.php/2010/07/03/beyond-lol
Curran, Labour spokesperson for Communications and Information Technology, proclaims that typing “LOL” is silly and that everyone should stop it.

Do you do Droopol (sp?) tell me. Would you do some stuff for us? #pleasenicely—
Clare Curran (@clarecurranmp) May 10, 2011

Curran, Labour spokesperson for Communications and Information Technology, seeks crowd-sourced assistance with Open Source content management framework. Shortly before it was revealed that Labour’s “Droopol” installation was sharing confidential donor information with the entire Internet.

Oh yeah, there was her hard-hitting poll on Red Alert:

“Internet speeds: are they fast enough?”

[ ] YES
[ ] NO

http://blog.labour.org.nz/index.php/2011/08/10/explaining-netflix-to-simon-power/
Curran, Labour spokesperson for Communications and Information Technology, lectures Simon Power on this thing she’s discovered called the Internet, informing him that (and I quote) “Bit Torrent is one of the major sites where you go to get content and download it for free (and illegally).”

http://blog.labour.org.nz/index.php/2011/08/22/the-importance-of-being-labour/
http://blog.labour.org.nz/index.php/2011/08/22/the-importance-of-being-labour-2/
Curran posts to Red Alert basically saying “Fuck the fucking Greens, those bastards are stealing left-leaning voters and those votes belong to Labour BY RIGHT.”

https://twitter.com/#!/clarecurranmp/status/117484871269617664
Curran goes full retard by accusing Cameron Slater, David Farrar, Matthew Hooton, the Young Nationals, and (this is a verbatim quote) “the non-Labour left” of conspiring together to attack Labour. No shit, she said “the non-Labour left”. So there’s an evil conspiracy against Labour being masterminded by the National Party, right-leaning private citizens, and everyone else in the world who isn’t part of Labour. That’s a pretty big conspiracy, eh.

http://blog.labour.org.nz/index.php/2011/04/14/no-new-zealander-can-be-disconnected-from-the-internet/comment-page-2/#comment-167800
Curran, Labour spokesperson for Communications and Information Technology, defends the bill which makes NZers guilty upon accusation by opining that it does NOT make NZers guilty upon accusation. In spite of all legal advice to the contrary.

https://twitter.com/#!/clarecurranmp/status/110122884172759040

Are there loudness discrepancies found on NZ TV adverts vs progs and if so should they be monitored and a unified national standard created?

Curran, Labour spokesperson for Communications and Information Technology, decides that the subjective difference between the loudness of TV shows and TV ads is so important as to require monitoring and national standards. For bonus lols: check the datestamp, she decided and proclaimed this DURING THE ELECTION CAMPAIGN. Presumably there was nothing else important going on.

http://blog.labour.org.nz/2012/06/17/john-keys-ghost-followers/
Curran, Labour spokesperson for Communications and Information Technology, decides it would be a good use of taxpayers’ money to investigate if John Key’s twitter-follower count is accurate. Seriously.

Remember, this is a person who thought that of all the issues facing families, workers, and beneficiaries in Dunedin South the most important thing to thrust into the spotlight in Parliament was her support of the Highlanders Super Rugby jersey. Understandable of course, what with it being a taonga with the cultural significance that only comes with not actually existing before 1996 and being manufactured by a German sportswear company in China.

“Here I am laying my own Mega deep-sea Internet cable.  Not long afzer zis photo was taken, eight Maui dolphins guided me along.“

Kim Dotcon — supplied