Public Address - Hard News (Home)

Paris Hilton too! | Feb 22, 2005 10:15

Why didn't they think to fit a kill-switch to the Brash droid before they sent it in? Now that the droid has gone rogue and is eating the electoral support of its designers, Mad Doctor Prebble has been forced to try and hack the system so that the Brashbot's hosts turn on it and the carnage ends.

Well, that's one explanation for Richard Prebble's pointed speculation about a "coup" in the Parliamentary National Party in The Letter yesterday: having yanked the National Party to the right, the mad scientists at Act have realised that what they really want is the room that would be created by shoving National back towards the centre. D'oh!

The stuff about Murray McCully not turning up to parliament or even to caucus meetings is interesting, though. Was the Katherine Rich business part of a plan by National centrists to isolate Brash so they can reclaim the party after he loses the election this year? And if so, who would they be lining up to lead them? It can't be Bill English again. Can it?

Whatever, it seems a funny time to be giving the One News team an unlikely angle (although not as unlikely, it must be said, as the slightly mad beat-up of the Jim Bolger story, which virtually gave the impression that our former PM had been personally laundering money for Augusto Pinochet).

Assuming that it isn't an elaborate publicity stunt - or even if it is - the T-Mobile phone service can expect to be sued out of existence as a result of Paris Hilton's phone being hacked. Actually, it wasn't her phone per se, so far as I can tell, but the T-Mobile website, via which the hackers have been able to get a whole bunch of stuff, including a slew of celebrity phone numbers (yo! Eminem!) and pictures of Paris snogging a Playboy model.

The cracking strongly suggests that T-Mobile has done little to shore up its Microsoft-based network since it was hacked to pieces more than a year ago by a man who was able to use flaws in the system to snoop on secret service agents who were already investigating him. And the "niggaz" who did the deed probably picked up their chops from this blog posting by security expert Jack Koziol.

NB: Sigh ... It now appears that hardcore content (stills from the young lady's porn film) have turned up on most of the links I provided in yesterday's post - they weren't there at the time of posting. I removed the first one yesterday because I didn't really start this blog to be a porn referrer - that's a different business altogether. I've now removed the other dodgy links. Feel free to find them yourself.

The upshot is that the private life of Paris is more public than ever. The phone booty is [[Link removed due the recent appearance of hardcore content I don't really want to be pointing to.] (PA readers in corporate and ministry offices should bear in mind that Paris's naked breasts appear on the page). Or you can jump straight to her notes to herself, her address book (two phone numbers and an email addy for Mark Philipoussis?) or the low-bandwidth text-only version of the address book. This blog has a thread of speculation on the significance of various notes and numbers, and whether the whole thing is indeed a publicity stunt (if it is, she's presumably got some mighty angry friends right now).

Anyone care to speculate on what kind of stuff of ours a successful hacker might be able to fish out from the Vodafone or Telecom networks?

Further on the theme of celebrity stuff that wasn't supposed to get out, The Smoking Gun has now posted the entire 2000-page transcript of the proceedings of the grand jury that indicted Michael Jackson 10 months ago. It's placed in context with an array of stories explaining the prosecution case. What I don't understand is, with all this leaking, how they can avoid this prosecution being declared unsafe.

GayWatch and GayNZ.com have received an interesting response from the BSA to their complaint about the handling of a phone poll on civil unions on Close Up @ 7 late last year. To paraphrase, it says: "Surely everyone knows these polls are nonsense?" Nice to get that in writing …

And it's getting a little scary being a secular young professional woman in the new Iraq, according to Riverbend. Recent posts here and here: "There was hope of a secular Iraq, even after the occupation. That hope is fading fast."

Finally, it seems - logically, actually - that Stuff's peering problems are having an impact on the branch offices. Staff at Fairfax papers outside Wellington are having the same trouble reaching their own website as the rest of us, it seems. And Robert Harvey highlighted a hitherto, er, unhighlighted implication of Xtra's refusal to peer at the Wellington Internet Exchange: "as I understand it, Telecom's contract to supply telecommunications services to the New Zealand government mandates that no inter-governmental traffic shall go outside NZ. Don't know exact terms, definitions, conditions, etc, but it seems to me something of a problem." Comments?

Digg this Scoopit!

And onwards ... | Feb 21, 2005 11:08

"Right - now drink piss." As famous parting comments in journalism go, John Campbell's words as he fished out his glass of champagne from the desk where he had just read his last 3 News bulletin weren't likely to be inscribed in any learned text, but they certainly had the common touch.

Carol Hirschfeld had her moment a couple of minutes earlier when, suddenly realising that she had said "absa-lootely Clint!" for the last time ever, her eyes welled up. They now hand over to a pair who, in purely technical terms, are probably better newsreaders, but their accidental seven-year partnership did no less than put TV3 on the map as a serious 6pm contender. One News always had the edge in resources, but people liked John and Carol. As someone - well, me, actually - once said, they were TV personalities who didn't look like they would dissolve into dust if they got caught in direct sunlight.

Now, they will be tasked with doing the same trick on Campbell Live, with John out front and Carol, apparently gratefully, retiring from the glare of the lights (and the lights in the 3 News studio are really bright, much more so than the modern ones at TVNZ) to produce the 7pm flagship.

It seems to me that mere practicality is going to hurt Paul Holmes here: a politician, sports star or momentary celebrity who wants maximum coverage might just pull off appearances on both Close Up and Campbell Live. But all the way to Albany to talk to Holmes? Forget it.

If you were after evidence to support the theory that umpires are unconsciously cowed by the might of the Australian side, and tend thus to give them the better of 50-50 decisions, Saturday's game may have provided it.

The Australians copped one tough decision - an appeal declined after Macmillan (I think) made an extravagant swing and got the faintest of edges through to Gilchrist, who did not himself seem sure of the dismissal. The Black Caps, on the other hand, had to wear at least three plain old shockers.

The first two were the work of Brent "Billy" Bowden, who has spent the summer officiating in Australia and earning the plaudits of the commentators there. First, Bowden missed Matthew Hayden plainly gloving one to McCullum down the leg side (Hayden went on to get another 40 runs to top score with 71). Then he declined an LBW appeal from Vettori (with Hayden again the batsman) that could hardly have been more plumb. (Vettori probably also had a strong case in his final over, when Bowden turned down another very good leg-before shout and the two had terse words.)

Ironically, for all the fuss about Bowden, the worst decision for New Zealand was that made by his colleague Aleem Dar, who gave Stephen Fleming out LBW to Brett Lee. Fleming was struck in line with leg stump by a bowler bowling around the wicket, wide on the crease. If that was going to hit the stumps then I'm an opening batsman. With the captain gone so soon, the New Zealanders went into such a funk that Glenn McGrath was able to finish his opening seven-over spell with one wicket for seven runs.

In the end, it was McGrath's magnificent bowling at the death that snatched the result, but in the interim, the Black Caps were able to fight their way back into the game to such an extent that the Australians actually lost their composure (and don't we all love to see that?). Such is the nature of cricket that you can't say that any one of the rough decisions denied the Black Caps a result, but when you're playing the world's best team you don't really need those things going against you.

In the current issue of Ngai Tahu's swish magazine Te Karaka, there is a useful feature on the Maori Party, in which Pita Sharples makes his familiar comments about being a party for all New Zealanders and Tariana Turia says something, well different: "We are a proud, noble race of people. We can be self-determining, we can look after ourselves, and that is our message to our people. Do they [Maori] want to continue to be underneath tauiwi structures? Is that how they want to live their lives? If they do, I feel incredibly sad."

In today's Herald, she defends the charge of nepotism against Te Wananga o Aotearoa:

"When you are running a Maori organisation you know you are always under scrutiny so you are going to put people into positions who you know that you can trust and who are going to be loyal and who can do the work.

"You certainly wouldn't put a relative of yours into a job you knew they couldn't do.

"But I would be looking not only for the expertise but the loyalty and I would be looking for that trust."

But the issue here isn't about employing someone you trust: if the present allegations are accurate, it's about repeatedly diverting big chunks of someone else's money to friends and family. If iwi wish to reward "loyalty" within their own organisations, that's their business. With public education money, it's different.

There is much to praise about the Maori Party. At the community level it operates better than any other political party. It will win some or all of the Maori seats this year - and then the heat may start to come on. Conflicts of interest become more acute, the comments of leaders are far more closely scrutinised. The party will be in the position of having to justify the direction of taxpayer dollars to more than one MP's relatives. If it doesn't think hard now about this it will be very easy meat next year.

Oh, and the bit where George W. Bush pretty much admits to taking drugs is here.

Digg this Scoopit!

A stand against the surrender of taste | Feb 18, 2005 10:06

You go Helen! The nation owes the Prime Minister a debt of gratitude for nixing an Australian plan to have the ghastly mullet-headed Australian soft-rocker John Farnham play at Anzac Cove. If the duty of leadership means anything, it means making a stand against the surrender of taste. It means saying no - enough.

It has long been our role in this enduring comradeship in arms to save our Australian brothers from their own gaucheness. Sometimes it's not easy, but we do it because it's right. Because if we tolerate this, next year it'll be Savage Garden. Because when we remember our old soldiers, we do not want so see this.

So Mr Farnham's manager is upset. Hah! Do we take instruction from a man who played himself in Neighbours? No, my fellow New Zealanders, we do not.

Of course, there are those among us - a sort of axis of the insipid, a militia of the mawkish - who do not see it that way. The Act Party's Rodney Hide told the Herald that younger visitors to Gallipoli wanted the anniversary to reflect "contemporary tastes". Ahem. "Younger", Rodney? "Contemporary"? Yo mama! Literally!

And Don Brash described the Prime Minister's attitude as "elitist". Well, so be it. Somebody has to set a standard and stick to it. Ask Trevor Mallard.

This is not, I must emphasise, a dismissal of the idea that song can carry our spirits. The claim that the Finn brothers were in line to play the 90th anniversary commemoration appears to have been exaggerated to the point of fabrication, but that might have been alright. I can imagine the pure, level tone of Neil Finn's voice drifting poignantly across the waters of memory, joined in harmony and solidarity by that of his big brother. But Mullet Man? No, no and thrice no.

Besides, if we're going to surrender taste, we should do it at the cricket. Last night's 80s-themed Twenty20 international caught alight from the moment that Hamish Marshall's extraordinary afro entered the arena (indeed, so high and fluffy was his hair that his actual head must have been a fire risk). I'm undecided on the merits of the new quickie format as actual cricket, but as a Thursday night out for 30,000 Aucklanders it was tremendous. Every time Marshall and his afro neared one of the boundaries, the crowd roared in salute. It was the Sevens of cricket, and Ricky Ponting was its batting star. I wore the beige.

Anyway, further to this week's discussion about telco sillybuggers. If you want an illustration of what Telecom's de-peering (and, any moment now, TelstraClear's) actually means, take a look at this traceroute from a Telecom JetStream connection to a server connected to the Wellington Internet Exchange:

1 <10 ms 15 ms <10 ms xxx.xx.x.xxx
2 47 ms 47 ms 47 ms xxx-xxx-xxx-1.jetstream.xtra.co.nz [xxx.xxx.xxx.x]
3 31 ms 47 ms 47 ms 210.55.205.249
4 63 ms 62 ms 47 ms fid-int.tkbr4.global-gateway.net.nz [202.50.245.198]
5 63 ms 62 ms 63 ms vlan-283.tkbr4.global-gateway.net.nz [202.50.245.197]
6 46 ms 47 ms 62 ms ge1-0-0-3.tkbr1.tkbr1.global-gateway.net.nz [202.37.245.138]
7 78 ms 94 ms 94 ms ATM9-0-0-50.sn1.optus.net.au [202.139.128.97]
8 219 ms 219 ms 218 ms SPRINT.sn1.optus.net.au [202.139.18.38]
9 219 ms 219 ms 218 ms sl-bb20-syd-14-0.sprintlink.net [203.222.32.37]
10 235 ms 250 ms 250 ms sl-gw1-auk-5-0-0.sprintlink.net [203.222.33.23]
11 93 ms 94 ms 110 ms 203.222.63.186
12 94 ms 93 ms 94 ms 203-109-156-97.ihug.net [203.109.156.97]
13 93 ms 110 ms 109 ms tig-nz-akl-dr-3.ihug.net [203.109.156.157]
14 110 ms 109 ms 141 ms atm-6-0-1-tig-nz-wlg-1.ihug.net [203.109.156.30]
15 Request timed out.
16 125 ms 109 ms 109 ms xx.xx.co.nz [xxx.x.xx.xx]

For non-technical readers, let me explain: because Telecom de-peered from the exchange, all traffic between the two points (physically about a kilometre apart in Wellington city) goes via Australia. And, so far as I can tell, whoever runs the target server will be paying international transit rates.

There are various other niceties of local peering relationships that I won't go into here, in part because I struggle to get my own head around them. But if you want to know more, there are video presentations on the topic by Bill Norton and Joe Abley from the 2005 NZNOG conference.

What it comes down to is this: Telecom's position last year was that better broadband services would have to wait on better broadband content, to drive demand. Unfortunately, Telecom's practices make providing broadband content in New Zealand look like a mug's game.

An excellent parody of Apple Computer's marketing - thanks to Andy Pickering for the link. Hey, I can laugh at myself ...

Meanwhile, the Dog Biting Men waka pushes out into a sea of irony. Kids, please check with the bill-payer first.

And finally, whilst not disagreeing with a recent Public Address guest blog expressing the view that changing the flag is hardly the most compelling use for our present energies, I did find the flag design suggested by Chris Knox in a Max Media cartoon more appealing that any of the candidates touted around the press lately:

Chris also claimed to have the new national anthem in the bag, but I think the way 30,000 people can swing in behind 'Victoria' and 'Why Does Love Do This To Me' rather strongly suggests that that gig goes to Jordan Luck ...

Digg this Scoopit!

Proper Opposition | Feb 17, 2005 10:57

It has been heartwarming - well, for everyone but the government - to see some quality Opposition politics emerge, most notably in the work of Bill English. English has not blathered meaninglessly about "political correctness" or the "Sisterhood". He hasn't tried to set New Zealanders against each other, or spouted faux moral outrage. He has not got hysterical, or paraded someone else's grief for political advantage. He has simply dug deep into his portfolio, become its intellectual master, and identified genuine problems in the policy of the government of the day.

English, you might also note, is not calling for NCEA to be dumped after 10 years in the making (nearly five of them under a National government), but to be overhauled. He might be over-emphasising its problems - there are many people dealing directly with the system who regard it as a distinct, even exciting, improvement over what went before - but that's the job of the Opposition.

The Herald has a sensible editorial on the matter, which notes that (hallejujah!) a key reason that inconsistency of results has emerged is that we no longer handily erase such inconsistencies as a matter of policy, through scaling. (Without wishing to underplay the problem with the Scholarship exam, there has been something faintly ironic about certain people complaining because an exam wasn't easy enough.)

The Act MPs have also apparently got their ducks fairly well in line with the attack on Te Wananga o Aotearoa, whose success in getting hitherto hard-to-reach people into tertiary study must be said against a way of doing business that is, at times, frankly unusual. It's not hard to see why Trevor Mallard got himself an associate in the Cabinet reshuffle.

I've been less convinced by the charge led by Ron Mark over police emergency resourcing - not while the debate seems to turn so much on a handful of marginal decisions. I'm hoping one of the weekend papers will have put in the spadework and look at the issue over time - in the meantime, Colin James' commentary on the 111 flap ("what does the lather about 111 calls and the trigger-happy recourse to 111 say about us as a people?") is worth reading.

Anyway, speaking of faux moral outrage, someone kindly forwarded me Murray McCully's reply to Jordan Carter's letter regarding McCully's attempt to declare a moral panic over the fact that two men kiss in one of the Hubba Hubba ads:

My article acknowledges that homosexuality is a reality and also approves of the fact that it is legal. Using taxpayers' cash to offend a significant number of viewers is an entirely different matter. If it was private sector money it would be different. Regards, Murray.

So a public health campaign about condom use should on no account refer to physical intimacy? Because it might cause offence to, er, someone? That looks a whole lot like political correctness gone mad to me …

I find the flap over the new Auckland City Council's budget, which necessitates an average rate rise of 11%, falling more heavily on the most wealthy residents, unconvincing. Isn't this pretty much what the people involved said they were going to do? In comparison with what the last council did - campaigning on a pledge not to put the rates up and then putting them up most for the least wealthy ratepayers - it seems to fall a long way short of outrage to me.

That didn't stop the Herald bitching about "fiscal laxity" in an editorial yesterday. I don't recall so much fuming and farting when the council under Banks let unbudgeted expenditure run away in its first two years. And I'd be more sympathetic if Banks or the CitRats had ever explained how they were going to pay for their multi-billion dollar roading plans. The Herald editorial damns the new council's traffic-flow plans as both too expensive and too modest. That seems more than a tad rich to me.

I was wrong this week about TelstraClear not peering with the Wellington Internet Exchange. They haven't pulled the plug on the WIX yet - but it seems they'll do so in the next few days - at which point the local Internet will promptly get worse.

If you're on an ISP on TelstraClear's network, every time you connect with a content provider that connects to the WIX (Stuff, Radio New Zealand) or its counterpart, the Auckland Peering Exchange (TVNZ), the content will reach you via Australia. Can anyone confirm for me whether such traffic to Xtra customers is already taking such a route?

Looks like Radio New Zealand is starting to get hard-nosed about the problem. The new text accompanying its Enzology web programmes reads:

Please note that if you are an XTRA customer then these programmes may not play. This is not due to a fault on your machine or a fault with our audio server.

This is due to XTRA not 'peering' with our NZ content audio server at the Wellington Internet Exchange (WIX). Our international content server is not affected.

You will need to contact the XTRA help desk and lodge a complaint.
We also understand that another ISP may soon remove access to this content by 'de-peering' from WIX. If you previously could access the programmes and now cannot please contact your ISP's help desk and lodge a complaint.

You might think that when you pay your Internet bill, you're paying to connect to the rest of the world. That, unfortunately, is not how the big two see it. They want to bill you and charge content providers for delivering the traffic you have requested. It is, I am afraid, bullshit.

PS: Heard the one about the gay hooker from a fake news media organisation who was mysteriously granted White House press accreditation (despite having been denied admission to the Congressional press corps on grounds of a lack of credibility, and despite his other services still being advertised online) and then, under a false name, immediately started being called for ridiculous patsy questions at conferences, pasting White House press release into his "stories" - and was shown secret documents tied up in the malicious outing of an undercover CIA agent? No? Scoop has all the links.

PPS: The marketing chaps at New Zealand Cricket have sent me a couple of tickets to the inaugural Twenty20 international against the Australians at Eden Park tonight, so I'll head along with Paul and report back on that. And by all means, chaps, keep me on the list …

Digg this Scoopit!