Archive for category General Ramblings
Filtering The Internet
Posted by Dylan in General Ramblings on March 11th, 2010
The New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs has been testing a internet filtering system for the past couple of years, which they’ve now launched. Intended to block web access to child pornography, it is currently a voluntary scheme which ISPs can enrol in.
There are, however, very serious objections to the whole project.
Read the rest of this entry »
Twitter Hacked
Posted by Dylan in General Ramblings on December 18th, 2009
A funny thing happened to me tonight.
I tried to log into Twitter, and got no response…
I tried a few minutes later and got this:
Then I tried a few minutes later and got this:
Did a litlte digging and it seems like at 01:26am EDT the DNS records were changed. New DNS servers are pointing the requests at a hosting provider with that page on it. So Twitter’s servers themselves don’t seem to have been attacked, but if the hackers are clever they could easily be capturing and recording attempts to login via Twitter plaintext API (used by most third-party applications and therefore potentially millions of users) – I haven’t tested to see if this is the case
Kiwiright and Copyright
Posted by Dylan in General Ramblings, Video/TV on November 14th, 2009
Some University of Auckland students have recently created a short documentary about copyright called © Kiwiright which has been fairly popular in NZ internet circles. The documentary includes interviews with geek-about-town Juha and CFF founder Bronwyn, but in addition to this it also features a whole lot of Disney characters and a reasonably identifying commercial music track – I think this detracts from the message of the video overall (which I otherwise support and appreciate). Read the rest of this entry »
The DVR Battle – TiVO vs MySky
Posted by Dylan in General Ramblings, Video/TV on November 9th, 2009
This isn’t a review – I don’t have a TiVo and I haven’t used one. This is my assessment of TiVo (and the other predominant DVR system available in NZ, MySky HDi).
When TiVo was announced I was fairly dubious – without access to Sky’s channels it seemed hard to see a product like TiVo really having enough to offer. However not long after it was announced that TiVo would support on-demand content delivered by broadband. Read the rest of this entry »
The Smacking Debate
Posted by Dylan in General Ramblings on August 2nd, 2009
There is currently a referendum in progress in New Zealand, it is in relation to a fairly recent law change that modified the Crimes Act with regard to smacking, basically. The referendum question posed is “Should a smack, as part of good parental correction, be a criminal offense in New Zealand” which myself and many others feel is an absurd question. Read the rest of this entry »