Public Address - Hard News (Home)

Busted editors | Aug 17, 2007 10:28

Has anyone found any tasty New Zealand stuff with Wikipedia Scanner?

I looked up some IP addresses logged against dodgy edits of New Zealand Wikipedia articles -- the old-fashioned way, rather than with the scanner -- but didn't find anything of interest. Part of the problem is that addresses here tend to resolve to third parties: so there's a bit of vandalism on the Helen Clark article from an IP address in the same block as the National Party's mail server -- but it's also the same block (controlled by dts.net.nz) as the Parliamentary web server, which doesn't tell you much.

I did also run Fonterra's address block (202.50.185.0-255) through the scanner, but it could find no Wiki-fiddling from that quarter. [Update: I screwed that up - here's a list from the Fonterra block. Nothing controversial, unless you object violently to pro wrestling.]

Any readers with Friday on their minds and more knowledge of where the netblocks are than me is more than welcome to have a play and let us all know about items of interest.

If you didn't understand the above, read this and this, and then feast your peepers on the Fox News roll of shame -- vanity editing, infantile vandalism of articles about Fox News critics -- which would damage Fox's reputation if it had one left to damage.

Wired's wikidgame page has a burgeoning list of entries -- including one from an ExxonMobil employee who changed the article on the disastrous Exxon Valdez spill to attribute a native tribe's bankruptcy not to the effects of the spill but to "bad luck and poor investments."

See also how some clown from Amnesty International deleted the entire "criticism and rebuttal" section on AI's article. People at Diebold have been even more assiduous about deleting criticism of its voting machines. Electronic Arts has tried to rewrite the history of gaming. There's a lot more like that.

One thing that many media reports have missed is that this has always been possible on Wikipedia, which records both the IP address of anyone who makes an anonymous edit, and the edit itself. Virgil Griffith just pulled down the data and mashed in a few public tools. It's an interesting example of how many small pieces of information be come much more interesting if you can consolidate and index them. It should also be noted that that nearly everything picked up with the scanner has long been recitified.

Griffth's stated aim for the project -- to make his site the top Google result fore the query "virgil" -- doesn't seem to be going too well though.

Moving on: so farewell then, Karl Rove. Most interesting analysis, James Carville in the Financial Times. Most hilariously sucky-up ("the greatest political mind of his generation and probably of any generation" -- so, like ever, then?): this guy.

And does anyone get Ann Althouse? Allegedly, she's a "formidable" legal blogger, but every time I look at her blog she seems to have having some stupid adolescent blogfight going with someone. She strikes me as a bit of a noob. The reliably amusing Instaputz has been keeping score.

Hugo Chavez: tomorrow's Mugabe? Quite apart from his proposed abolition of term limits, his purge on local government structure in Venezuala is pretty much the same thing as the Thatcher government's dissolution of the Greater London Council and the Republican Party's Texas redistricting: an abuse of power.

On another topic entirely, the Herald's world pages had a story this week on the discovery that Bronze Age Irishmen not only knew how to make beer around 1500 BC, but made it in quite some quantity. The story noted that archaeologists had replicated the method and made Bronze age beer - but neglected to include a surely important piece of information: what did the sodding stuff taste like?

Fortunately, other organisations did think to tell us:

Three hundred litres of water were transformed into a "very palatable" 110 litres of frothy ale.

"It tasted really good," said Mr Quinn, of Moore Archaeological and Environmental Services (Moore Group).

"We were very surprised. Even a professional brewer we had working with us compared it favourably to his own.

"It tasted like a traditional ale, but was sweeter because there were no hops in it."

And there is in fact extensive detail on The Great Beer Experiment. If you do try this at home, be sure to send me some.

And finally, one more pitch for episode one of the Public Address Big Stereo Bundle - a batch of 10 top downloads from Amplifier for the price of, er, seven and a half. We've had hundreds of tyre-kickers, not quite so many buyers.

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The meaning of a Banana | Aug 14, 2007 10:45

I don't know how many registered users SkyKiwi has these days -- it's certainly well over 100,000 -- but it represents a place of news, gossip and cultural ferment that is invisible to most of us, simply because it takes place behind a screen of language. It appears almost entirely in Chinese text.

This press release on this weekend's Bananas NZ: Going Global conference sparked a vigorous debate on Chinese identity and the place of 1.5ers, Chinese international students and Bananas (a reclaimed term signifying "yellow on the outside and white on the inside") in New Zealand.

What are people saying? I've been provided with translations of some of the comments, as follows:

- "I am not a banana - NEVER! I am heir of Dragon, I am son of MOTHER CHINA."

- "Always support the International Student cause. Don't let your side down!"

- "Despite how fluent you are in English, in white people's eyes you will always be Chinese. Even though you have come here to study, don't forget that you are Chinese!!!"

- "I think the fault lies with the parents. Why do they (parents) not send their kids to Chinese kids or speak Chinese at home. That's why the Bananas have lost their culture. I completely blame the parents."

- "Look at the Mäori, even those Mäori who don't speak Mäori are proud of their heritage. Another example is NZ born Koreans - they speak Korean and are proud of being Korean. So there are some 2nd generation NZ born Chinese who are ashamed to be Chinese or don't consider themselves Chinese? I think those who think that don't have the right to be Chinese."

- "So these Bananas are ashamed to be Chinese? That's because they don't understand Chinese. It's the same as Koreans: they look down on everybody who is not Korean because they don't understand others."

- "It doesn't matter if I go overseas or not, values around identity, culture and society, do not shift. If Bananas want others to accept them, they have to educate themselves around how to be Chinese first and then they will be proud of who they are. Respect from others follows after that."

- "Living in New Zealand as an international student allows me to see China and New Zealand from the outside in. I believe that Chinese culture needs to stamp its mark in NZ society. That's the only way we can rid any trace of this "rubbish" (ie Banana thinking)."

- "If the world and life change, then experience and knowledge change too. They are all interconnected."

- "I reckon no matter how long you have been overseas, you're still Chinese. Just get on with life. Don't worry - others will accept your ethnicity."

- "Nothing stays the same. Stretch your imagination and widen your vision."

Like I said, lively.

I'm playing a part in the conference this year, as moderator of a geek session on Sunday afternoon, featuring SkyKiwi founder Justin Zhang; Antony Young, the president of Optimedia; and Singapore's pride, Mr Brown.

See also, my Listener column about Mr Brown, today's podcast interview with Wong Liu Sheung -- and Tze Ming Mok's report and speech from the first Banana conference in 2005, landmarks the both of them.

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Friendly Fire? | Aug 13, 2007 09:28

In a story (not online at the time of writing) on page seven of yesterday's Sunday Star Times, Don Brash complains to Jenni McManus about what he regards as Police "inaction" over a complaint about the alleged theft of his emails in 2005. He echoes any number of friends of the party.

It's wholly understandable that Brash wants to know who knifed him, and how.

But yesterday's lead in the same paper, also by Jenni McManus, headlined Diane Foreman breaks silence on burglaries at her apartment, tends to suggest that some of the most vociferous complainants might not really want the big reveal:

Given the timing, and the fact nothing was taken, Foreman says she believes Brash's political enemies may have been behind the break-ins, including people seeking evidence of a romance between the two.

Expensive art and money in the apartment were not touched.
Foreman says she is not "beating up on the government" or accusing Labour of any involvement. "There are a range of possibilities. I think the culprit is closer to home." She would not elaborate.

Foreman presumably isn't saying so lightly, and she certainly isn't a fan of the present government, as the story goes on to note:

Foreman says she was so incensed by [The Hollow Men] and its references to her that she laid a complaint about the burglaries with the police at the beginning of this year.

She says she is speaking out now because of her "absolute disgust" that the government, through arts funding organisation Creative New Zealand, has chosen to fund a play purportedly based on the Brash emails, which is due to open at Wellington's Bats Theatre later this year.

This is tosh, of course. "The government" has not "chosen" to fund the play, which is not based on the leaked emails themselves, but on Nicky Hager's book. A public arts funding agency has granted funding to a proposal. If either Foreman or McManus want New Zealand governments to start applying a political hygiene test to works of art, they're getting into some pretty strange territory.

But that's not the point. The point is that someone who clearly knows (or suspects) more than she's telling, is saying that whatever did happen was friendly fire.

So perhaps we could expect some relief from fevered claims about the Parliamentary email system being "hacked" by dirty lefties, at least until there is a single shred of evidence that there was any hacking at all.

The leakage (or theft, if you prefer) of the Brash emails always looked more like an inside job, whether of political or personal motivation. Stories about super-hackers defeating secure systems and stealing away without a trace generally belong in the movies.

No one would envy Foreman in suffering the intrusions she did -- it must be terrifying. She also says in the story that one of the intruders was subsequently identified as a private investigator. The only people we actually know to have indulged in dodgy investigative subterfuge in 2005 were not exactly social liberal liberals.

DPF offers some measured comment on the story. As usual, some of his readers are less than measured.

Meanwhile, Newsweek has an interesting backgrounder on the climate change denial industry. Meanwhile, this discussion on a genuine -- but ultimately inconsequential -- flaw in NASA's climate calculations is something of a triumph for the Slashdot moderation system. Read the modded-up analyses by people who know what they're talking about and you'll get a pretty good sense of the issue.

There's also quite a good discussion in this thread about a new essay by Freeman Dyson about the need for heretics in science, with particular respect to climate change sceptics.

Money quote? Via a Slashdot reader, this one from the late Carl Sagan: "They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."

PS: Don't forget the tasty buffet of digital music that is the Public Address Big Stereo Bundle.

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The Big Stereo Bundle | Aug 10, 2007 06:00

It's one thing to grouch about the state of the music industry; another to try to move it along. In the interests of the latter, today we kick off something called The Public Address Big Stereo Bundle. We'll be making regular selections from the download catalogue at Amplifier.co.nz and presenting them as bundles for Public Address readers.

Here's the first one, as chosen by me. It's deliberately eclectic: some old, some new, a little bit indie, a little bit dancefloor:

1. The L.E.D.s - Electric Light
2. Sheelahroc, Rhian Sheehan - If I gave U Th' Mic (Phat beats down mix)
3. Phoenix Foundation - The Drinker
4. isunray - Icebergs Off the Coast
5. Fetus Productions - What's Going On
6. Epsilon Blue - So Many Times
7. Solephonic - What's Your Style?
8. Bannerman - Shoot Away
9. Cabbage Bomber - My Life in Retrograde
10. The Reduction Agents - Couldn't Anymore

That's 10 MP3 tracks, with a face value of $19.90, for only $15. In the case of the older tracks, I've chosen tunes with which people might be familiar without owning in digital form. If you already have one or two of them, you're still getting a bargain.

For those interested, the money works like this: the artist takes 60% of the retail price of an Amplifier sale. After transaction costs are taken out, Public Address and Amplifier share the balance equally. Nice and simple.

I'll let the other bloggers have a flutter as we go on, and we'll work on some themed bundles and getting certain things added to Amplifier especially for the purpose. Also, next week, we'll take advantage of some nice functionality at Amplifier and reskin our Store page there so that it presents as part of Public Address.

I'm also fortunate enough to have been able to persuade elusive Pt Chevalier celebrity Colin the Cat to appear in a promotional campaign for our new thing.

More LolColin here.

And given that I'm away talking to students in Christchurch today, perhaps readers could amuse themselves by posting YouTube URLs in the discussion forum for this post (you just need the URL for YouTube, Google Video and some other Flash movies and our killer technology will embed it automatically).

PS: Did I mention the bundle enough?

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Evil | Aug 09, 2007 10:00

It's a strange road to justice, but the conviction of former Rotorua CIB chief John Dewar on charges of obstructing the course of justice certainly provides some vindication for Louise Nicholas.

The most striking finding is that Dewar deliberately gave inadmissible evidence to abort successive trials in the so-called Murupara case, which heard charges that a policeman in the timber town had raped Nicholas when she was 13.

This Dom Post story lays it all out. Dewar procured two mistrials, then, horrifyingly, in the third, persuaded the prosecutor to call as witnesses Bob Schollum, Brad Shipton and Clint Rickards -- who had already been the subject of a rape complaint to Dewar by Nicholas. The failure of the Murupara case would subsequently be used to call into question Nicholas's credibility.

What happened here, and what was going on in Rotorua in the 1980s, was evil. And I know one thing: Clint Rickards not only should not be one of our most senior policemen, he should not be in the force at all. He is lucky to be at large.

The What are some of the facts? blog archiving the original news stories in which this sordid time came to light is still online if you want to leaf through some of the back pages.

On another grim matter. David Slack and I have interviewed Mikaere Curtis, the cousin of William Curtis and uncle of his two sons, Wiremu and Michael -- all of them defendants in the Nia Glassie case. Mikaere has posted several times in our discussion thread about the action being taken by the whanau, and I'm truly impressed by their openness and determination to address what happened. The interview will air on Public Address Radio, 5pm Saturday on Radio Live, and I'll put it promptly on the podcast thereafter.

The happy stuff I was going to unveil today seems inappropriate under this sort of news, so I'll save it as a Friday treat.

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