Internet NZ weighs in on secret copyright negotiations
In its December newsletter (pdf file), Internet NZ is alarmed by media stories indicating a change in direction in the latest round of Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) negotiations.
The ACTA negotiating round was held in Korea in early November, and has reportedly shifted focus to deal with non-commercial infringement of copyright material by ordinary citizens, and arguing for termination of people's Internet accounts.
"If correct, this is cause for alarm and shows a significant change in ACTA's focus,” says InternetNZ Policy Director Jordan Carter. [Read more →]
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December 15, 2009 No Comments
A step towards real Open Government
This is a very heartening opening gambit from Finance Minister Bill English backing freer access to state data.
The Government could release screeds more of the data it holds in order to encourage private-sector problem solving, says Finance Minister Bill English.
A ministerial committee is exploring the concept, which he termed "inside-out government".
"If information is power then you can distribute power by distributing information," he told an audience of about 300 public servants at the Beehive.
"Inside-out government" required the Government to be open to good ideas.
"We want to see ideas generated in the private sector and ngo [non-government organisations] sector genuinely considered and appraised - not simply ruled out on the basis that these sectors might not understand all aspects of government."
Could it be that we are moving towards genuine Open Government? That might pose some interesting rethinks from traditional political assumptions.
While we're at it, lets go the whole hog, the idea of "commercial in confidence" is a boondoggle; we should all be able to see who is getting paid how much of our money for delivering what services. Once we get real publicly-paid-for data in the open we will all be able to know how well, and to what effect, our government is being run.
Do I want to know exactly whose phone is being tapped, and why? Of course not, but I do expect to know how many phones are being tapped, and by which department. Over time that will let me look at the rate and scale of phone-tapping and enable me to chart whether it is increasing or decreasing in any marked way.
Mashup some other public data such as the number of police employed with that data to give us an idea of whether increasing police numbers results in higher or lower numbers of phone taps; link that to the number of prosecutions that rely on phone taps and their conviction rate and we can start to see some interesting patterns. Then we can decide whether we like them or not.
Similarly, we should be able to see, at the very least post facto, the bids and evaluations and reasoning for accepting and rejecting bids for Government Contracts. As the people who pay the pipers, we should be at least able to read the music and now that this technology offers the possibility to do that.
Its refreshing when we are not treated as untrustworthy by those who ask us to trust them. Instead of filling us with marketing obfuscation, more organisations should be doing stuff like this (Hat tip to Ben Kepes who runs and excellent blog on SaaS issues).
What about your organisation? Could you withstand this kind of scrutiny? How would you respond to it becoming the norm?
September 25, 2009 No Comments
NZ Research on virtual reality in education
Guest posting from John Waugh, freelance journalist and second lifer.
The New Zealand virtual world education group, Second Life Education New Zealand (SLENZ), is conducting a research project in the on-line virtual world of Second Life for New Zealand educators to pilot two projects into determining how multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs) might benefit New Zealand education and how this can best be done. [Read more →]
June 17, 2009 No Comments
Some unrealistic expectations of ICT in pandemic response
I had a call from Matt Abud at ABC asking to discuss an article from Japan on using cellphones in a pandemic. Its interesting to see the kind of thing people are proposing these days. Here's some of the original article from behind a firewall.
The details have yet to be fixed, but SoftBank hopes to pick a school with about 1,000 students and give them phones equipped with GPS. The locations of the children will be recorded every minute of the day and stored on a central server.
The families of exposed students will be notified by messages to their mobile phones, instructing them to be examined by doctors. In a real outbreak, that could limit the rate of new infections.
"The number of people infected by such a disease quickly doubles, triples and quadruples as it spreads. If this rate is decreased by even a small amount, it has a big effect in keeping the overall outbreak in check," said Masato Takahashi, an infrastructure strategist at Softbank.
He demonstrates with a calculation: if an infected person makes about three more people sick per day, and each newly infected person then makes another three people sick, on the 10th day about 60,000 people would catch the disease. If each sick person instead infected two people a day, on the 10th day about 1,000 people would get sick.
The experiment was conceived before the outbreak of swine flu, but has drawn attention now that Japan has the highest number of confirmed cases outside North America.
It is one of 24 trials the government recently approved as part of a programme to promote new uses for Japan's internet and cellular infrastructure. The country has some of the most advanced mobile phone technology in the world. It is blanketed in high-speed mobile networks, and phones come standard with features such as GPS, television and touchless train passes.
The scheme raises privacy concerns, and one of the goals of the Japanese experiment is to judge how participants feel about having their location constantly recorded.
If a disease-tracking system were launched for real, no one would be required to sign up, Takuo Imagawa, an official at the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, said.
Another concern for the experiment is how to inform people that they may be infected, even if it's just a virtual disease.
"If we don't think carefully about the nature of the warning, people that get such a message could panic," Katsuya Uchida, a professor at the Institute of Information Security in Yokohama, said.
SoftBank Telecom, the subsidiary that made the original proposal, might not be chosen by the ministry to run the experiment in autumn. But Mr Takahashi said that whichever company was chosen, he hoped the potential benefits of a monitoring system would be enough to persuade people to sign up and reveal their whereabouts.
There are a couple of tracks on this, the first is some preliminary discussion that we mostly didn't cover in the full interview. The second is the recorded interview, although it merges about 8:30 into a bit of extra discussion that was not meant for broadcast so I have trimmed out Matt's side of the conversation and just rambled on.
The pandemic appears not to be especially deadly at this stage (although the 1918 pandemic also started with a mild infection wave that was followed by the real thing) but it does put people out of commission for various lengths of time and disrupts systems that depend on working at optimal, if not maximal levels. This piece from the NZ Herald is telling:
Rangitoto College principal David Hodge said he learned how disruptive quarantine was when 22 students and three staff and their families were placed in isolation after going on the school's Spanish language trip to Mexico.
Closing Rangitoto - a college of 3100 students in Mairangi Bay, North Shore City - could put the whole community in turmoil.
He said the school was confident in its communication channels, and would be able to send work to students through the internet.
But it had not had been told if a school closure would apply to staff as well as students.
Schools may be able to work remotely with their students in theory, but having a system in place for 100 students, and trying to run an entire school by remote learning is an order of magnitude different. If teachers cannot get to the school with its IT and teaching resources, there can be no teaching at all, and managing entire classes remotely is vastly more demanding than teaching them in a classroom.
Then there are the issues of
- what to do about those students from the 100,000 NZ families that do not have internet access at home
- whether dialup internet for most of the rest is adequate to transferring the files necessary
- whether families can afford to have their phone line tied up for extended perioopds of the day
- many more considerations I'm sure you can add.
These issues apply equally, and perhaps more urgently, to NFP organisations and especially those in ther welfare sector.
Gladstone Primary principal Dave Shadbolt sent the pandemic plan of his Mt Albert school to parents yesterday.
Most of the advice was about general hygiene, he said, and staff were reminding students about hand-washing routines and covering mouths and noses when they sneezed.
This is good information, but do you have a plan for how, and when, to decide to close down your operation and send everyone home? By the time the government mandates it, it will almost certainly be too late, but what are the criteria you would use and how do you plan to manage things when the office is shut?
The manager of occupational health and safety for the Employers and Manufacturers Association Northern, Paul Jarvie, said the effect of widespread quarantine caused by swine flu would compound on the impact of the recession, especially for workplaces already operating with skeleton crews.
The greatest cost to companies would mostly be loss of productivity, because if an employee had used up annual sick and holiday leave entitlements, an employer did not legally have to pay them.
However, the greatest cost to society will be that many of those people are already living on the edge of financial viability, if they have to go without income for a couple of weeks, or longer, what happens to their food and medication supplies, their mortgage or rent payments, their other debts?
What is your policy for those who are without income in a pandemic and can't pay you?
Comments open now, lets get a little wisdom flowing here.
June 11, 2009 No Comments
Google NZ to trial search enhancements
No date mentioned on when we are to get these enhanced searches, but Google isn't in the vapourware business so we should expect soon to be able to drill down further into search results beyond the "other pages like this" option. via Google rolls out search enhancements [Read more →]
May 15, 2009 No Comments
