There are a number of reasons why all New Zealanders should be concerned about this bill, which is being rushed through the House under urgency. Some of those reasons are discussed in "Covert video surveillance and the (c)overt erosion of the Rule of Law". 

Apart from the bill itself and the unseemly haste with which NZ Parliament intends to push it through, the submissions process is worrying. 

This means that, at most, people had 13.5 hours in which to find out that submissions were open and make a submission that same day. 

Those who made submissions and who wished to speak may have got a shock. Hearings on submissions started yesterday. The committee reports back to parliament on Monday, Parliament intends to pass this into law before October 6th.

As Shakespeare wrote: "Something wicked this way comes".

The Rugby World Cup 2011 is underway in New Zealand and two games are being played in my home town: Georgia vs Romania and Argentina vs Georgia. Ticket sales have been slow, unsurprisingly as they are expensive, but the rugby bug bit me on Friday and I decided to answer the Mayor's call to get along to a game. Little did I know what an exercise in frustration this would turn out to be.

Disabled people who require wheelchair accessible seating cannot purchase tickets online. The official ticketing site offers this advice:

The message says to email or call:

I phoned the number that is listed and was informed that they could not advise if wheelchair accessible seating is available. The contact centre asked me to email their special needs helpdesk. So I did.

Okay, so the automated response encourages me to call the contact centre directly. I'd already done so and decided to wait. If disabled users all go through the same process to check availability and book tickets waiting 3-5 business days should not lead to missing out (assuming there may be seats available that is). What I didn't expect was this reply:

This is clever - tell people who call that they must email then, when they email, tell them they must call. Back to the drawing board. Are seats available or not? 

So, back on the phone to find out availability. Things are looking good - the ticket seller says he must take all details and open an account: name, address, contact numbers, credit card details. Information is given about where to pick up the tickets. Cool, this must mean seats are available - right? Actually, no. All this was done BEFORE he checked if there was any availability. This is because, according to him, he cannot sell tickets. He claims this must be done by a supervisor after the account is opened.

At the end of two days of messing around by phone and email, I learn that all wheelchair accessible seating has gone for both matches. The stadium is far from full and there are hundreds of tickets available. But the 8 wheelchair accessible seats (out of a total 18,000 tickets) are booked. 

Dave, the ticket seller said, "There was not enough wheelchair seating to cover the demand." He wouldn't be drawn on whether this was the situation across all the Rugby World Cup games.

I'm neither surprised nor particularly disappointed by this.   In Palmerston North there are over a dozen people who play wheelchair rugby and an unknown number of other rugby fans who use wheelchairs.  I expected demand to exceed availability. What does, however, disappoint me is that 17,992 people can book tickets online and know immediately if seating and tickets are available but anyone who requires wheelchair access gets conflicting information, a run-around that makes us feel like unwanted, second-class citizens (what's new eh?) and gets caught in a process loop that one could reasonably have expected to have been sorted out years ago. 

New Zealand has, today, passed new legislation. The Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Bill was pushed through under urgency which allows laws to go through second and third readings in the same day and bypass committee procedures. I won't comment on this new law - if you want to know more about it just use Google. Much has been written and, as the day progresses, much more will be written. 

Listening to the debate last night, on Parliament TV, I was struck by how ill-informed the majority of NZ Members of Parliament are. If you do search for stories you will find quotes that make you laugh, or shudder with horror. One MP, New Plymouth's Jonathan Young, compared the Internet to Skynet. He appeared to believe that Skynet exists. It does exist, but only in the Terminator movies.

A day before voting for the Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Bill, MP Melissa Lee posted this message to Twitter:

 Mauricio Freitas raises the question about whether this is illegal filesharing on his blog and has some interesting comments coming through. 

The 111 MP's who voted for the legislation showed ignorance and a disconnect from the wishes, and needs, of the New Zealand public. MP Katrina Shanks was at least honest when she said, "I've got no idea". Only the Green Party and independent MPs Chris Carter and Hone Harawira voted against the bill. Greens' MP Gareth Hughes gave arguably the best speech of the night. Hughes has his 30th birthday this year. 

This raises the question - are those 111 MP's old fogies? Should we expect them to understand how the Internet works and how presumptions of guilt that result in Internet disconnections could compromise a person's ability to work and fully take part in today's society?

Most NZ MP's are of a generation that grew up with music cassette tapes. Sharing of tapes between friends and format-shifting between CD and tape was commonplace. Boom boxes and other cassette players were specifically designed for recording. Some had twin cassette decks to make copying easy. By the 1990's, most had twin cassette decks plus a CD player. Twenty years ago, people would have been hard-pressed to go to a social gathering without hearing music compilations that were copied and mixed from copyright media. MP Melissa Lee clearly still does this. Yet, these are the same people who scream foul because today's technology provides tools that may be used to copy media where the copyright holder has not authorised such copying.

Tellingly, MP's have latched onto terminology they don't understand. Filesharing means one thing: the sharing of files. If I send you an email and attach a file, it is filesharing. This is not illegal. If I load up a Bittorrent client and share software I have written, it's not illegal. Unauthorised use of copyright works is illegal, which is why we have copyright laws. We had copyright laws in the 1980's and 1990's too - the same laws that prohibited the illegal copying of music.  

The cassette generation understood that what they did was the norm. If they faced civil action for breach of copyright the Courts may have imposed fines. Hard evidence of wrong-doing was required (and still is, for this type of illegal copying). Yet, people from this same generation, lacking the wherewithal to understand what the Internet actually is and how access to it is essential today (many see this as a Human Right that should be enshrined in law - its importance is so great), decided that copyright law needed a special use-case amendment.

Gareth Hughes is too young to have been part of the rampant copying of the cassette tape generation. The 111 don't appear to consider themselves hypocrites, yet its hard to imagine they have never created a compilation or copied music from one format to another. 

Illegal copying is bad news for everyone involved but using the Internet to do so doesn't make it any worse than using a cassette deck. The person who illegally copies a CD or DVD breaches copyright yet the burden of proof and remedies are different to the person who takes a copy via the Internet. 

Should we expect MP's to understand how the Internet works? Perhaps not. But we should expect them to listen to their constituents, the businesses that rely on those constituents, and the experts in these areas. We do, after all, live in a representative democracy. Informed decision making did not happen today in the New Zealand parliament. Those 111 MP's would have better served the public if they had stayed at home listening to compilations. 

I'm sure all of us have, at some time, purchased an item that we really have little or no use for just because it was fun to do. That's what I did when I bought my ukelele. I can't play the ukelele but I love mine to bits. It's 4-string, made from coconut shell and coconut palm wood, hand-painted, and one-of-a-kind. I got it when I went to prison. 

       

A few years ago I had the opportunity to spend a week in Rarotonga. Rarotonga is the capital island of the Cook Islands, in the South Pacific Ocean, North-East of New Zealand, between French Polynesia and American Samoa. Before leaving an acquaintance told me, "if you want an unique island experience, go to the prison to buy a Ukelele". 

While driving around the island, my companion and I passed the entrance to the prison. It's on the west side of Rarotonga, in the village of Ararangi, a little out of the way unless you have transport. "I want to go in", said I, "Let's see if this story about buying ukeleles is true."
"Not a hope in hell", he said, looking decidedly sick at the idea of driving, uninvited, into a secure prison. 

I won.

With great trepidation, we drove through the entrance to the end of the prison driveway. To demonstrate that women are much braver than men, I jumped out of the car and boldly marched up to the nearest building. "I would like to buy a ukelele", I told the warden. 

Greatly amused, the warden escorted us into a building where he proceeded to show me the ukelele (in the photographs above) and, after ascertaining that I couldn't play it, gave us an impromptu performance. Another guard joined us and a former prisoner, back for a visit, also joined in the fun. 

After a couple of hours of music and laughter, my time in prison ended. I came home with a beautiful ukelele and an official receipt from the Cook Islands prison service. Maybe, one day I might even learn to play the ukelele.

Vodafone Australia has confirmed a security breach of the company's customer database. Media reports say this has exposed the personal information of millions of Australians. Today, it was announced that the Australian Privacy Commissioner will be investigating Vodafone over the security breach. While Australians are panicking over potential identity theft, New Zealand media has been reporting that Vodafone NZ has "rushed to reassure New Zealand customers their information is safe after a massive security breach saw millions of Australians' billing, call details and private information posted on the internet." Um... hello? Vodafone AU doesn't hold personal data for Australians only.

Any overseas visitor to Australia who purchases a Prepay SIM card for the duration of their visit (something which is commonly undertaken by New Zealanders visiting Australia, to avoid exorbitant roaming fees) has to activate their SIM card before it can be used. In order for anyone to activate a Vodafone SIM card personal details must be given to Vodafone. The details of acceptable identification are as follows:

(See: https://selfserve.myvodafone.com.au/registerme/activateRedSim/login.jsp )

Overseas visitors only have one form of ID that is acceptable to Vodafone AU - their passport.

Visitors who have left Australia may not see news reports about this security breach. They may never need to login to their Vodafone account again so may not be made aware of the potential risk to their privacy. Trying to get Vodafone to delete an account, thereby removing personal details that include full name, date of birth,  home address, address in Australia, contact telephone numbers, passport information, and possibly credit card information, is a waste of time - they refuse to do this. So, while there are possibly millions of Australians affected, every foreign visitor who has used Vodafone is also at risk - perhaps even more so given the status of the ID they have been forced to divulge to Vodafone.

Vodafone AU collects everything an unscrupulous person needs to steal identities. If you used a Vodafone AU SIM card while visiting Australia, or know someone who has, it would be wise to contact Vodafone Australia and demand to know if the account has been compromised. If it has, then consider the information that has been released and take whatever actions necessary to block misuse of your personal details. Call your local passport issuing office and seek advice immediately if you suspect that your data was compromised by this security breach.

In New Zealand, the passport office recommends that passports should be replaced. The cost of this ranges from NZD$153.30 to NZD$664.30. A high price to pay for entrusting personal information to a telecoms company.

Twitter users have, for years, complained about Twitter's inaction over spam reports but it seems it isn't just spam that Twitter ignores. After being told that Twitter was ignoring a takedown notice issued under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), I visited the Chilling Effects website to verify if a formal complaint had, indeed, been lodged. Back in April, Twitter gained attention for taking down tweets in response to what some called, "bogus DMCA claims". At that time, Twitter's DMCA policy was a real mess. It has since been cleaned up and copyright claims now centralised under one email address - copyright@twitter.com. Twitter also works with Chilling Effects to make DMCA notices public. I didn't find the notice I was looking for but I did find something very interesting.

On 30th November, Beachbody, LLC, of Los Angeles, issued a DMCA takedown notice over a tweet "directing users of Twitter and the public in general to a torrent web site offering illegal downloads of our P90X fitness program". Not very interesting so far, but the Twitter username they complained about was familiar to me. It is an account I had reported as spam and which had appeared, without authorisation from me, in my Twitter stream a few weeks back. The account was created on 1st August 2010 and has sent out over 4800 spam messages since then. 

Twitter removed the tweet that was the subject of the Beachbody, LLC takedown notice. However, Beachbody, LLC also stated that they owned registered trademarks and other intellectual property in their products and stated that, "melanie71882 (Shonda), is using Twitter's services to advertise, offer for sale or otherwise deal in counterfeit Beachbody product". Did they also lodge a complaint using Twitter's separate process for trademark violation? I don't know. IANAL, so look at http://twitter.com/melanie71882 and judge for yourself if that account is still infringing on Beachbody's rights. 

I think it's reasonable to assume that when a notice is issued against an account, and one tweet removed, a filter would be put in place to alert Twitter to any later infringements. This one promoting a DVDRip, for example: http://twitter.com/melanie71882/status/9970405024464896 which was posted two days after the date of the DMCA notice.

Removing tweets obviously doesn't involve physically looking at them. If Twitter did, how would they miss what any reasonable person would consider to be spam?  Do spam reports from Twitter users simply disappear into a black hole?

Twitter is a law unto itself but in a world of data linking, it seems incredible that it has not yet implemented a system for linking spam reports with trademark violation reports and DMCA takedown notices. Until it does, spammers will continue to annoy genuine users of the Twitter service and companies will have to continually monitor their brand, wasting time sending repeated notices to Twitter. I can't see a let-up in Twitter spam anytime soon.

As to the DMCA takedown notice that started me looking into this, I have some advice - do a cost/benefit analysis and evaluate your chances of success in getting Twitter to stop hosting infringing behaviour. Look at how much time you will spend monitoring, and sending notices. It might be cheaper to hire a private detective and go after the source.