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Boing Boinged! | May 05, 2006 12:17
So we found out what happened to our US-based server yesterday - and although it was terribly inconvenient, now that I how cool the reason was, I really can't feel bad about it. We share a box with another CactusLab-hosted site, Misshapen Features, which belongs to Bruce Ferguson.
And out of the blue on Wednesday, Bruce's site did 72 gigabytes of traffic. The American hosting company, noting the site's customary traffic levels, figured that the box must have been compromised and throttled its bandwidth. What the hell, you may be wondering, happened there?
Well, Bruce got a link from the world's most popular blog: Boing Boing, where Cory Doctrow enthused over "Starlords ... an incredible, funny mashup of the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings movies, featuring a Wookie/Orc war, a Gandalf/Yoda disco-fight, and some of the slickest, sharpest editing I've ever laughed my ass off at."
And as you might expect after such a review, a hell of a lot of people promptly went to download Starlords, from the same box as us. Normally, this wouldn't have been a problem, but because the traffic came all at once, it filled up all the slots that the Apache server makes available - hence the crushing slowdown in all the other services on the same box.
So we got Slashdotted by BoingBoing. Would is it correct to say we were BoingBoinged? We checked with Cory, and he said that "Boing Boinged sounds about right." So "Boing Boinged" it is.
Once Karl had got off the plane, CactusLab did a really swift job of installing a more appropriate server for Bruce (Boa) and things are basically back to normal now.
Starlords is, indeed, an absolutely amazing piece of work; oodles of Kiwi pride and all that. And better yet is the backstory. The original idea came from Matt Gibbons, who proposed it to Bruce at a party, and subsequently spent hours in Bruce's studio putting it together (Bruce crafted the animation elements). The extraordinary thing is that Matt - a dancer/choreographer in real life - is a novice who taught himself to edit video by doing it.
The link to the mash-up is here. The big version is a 37.5MB download. It'll be slow, but get in there.
I'm not in the mood to further discuss unbundling and the like for now, save to note that the call by Bill English (Bill English?) for David Cunliffe to resign over the leaking of the Cabinet paper to Telecom would seem to be National's desperate attempt to distract public attention from Maurice Williamson.
It would seem more germane to insist that Telecom tells the inquiry exactly what it knows. NB: Telecom said this morning that it did not destroy the paper - that is, the evidence - as reported in today's papers, but rather destroyed copies it had made. So it made copies of a paper it wasn't supposed to have? Was that before or after it told the government what it had?
Some Daily Show - a great little clip on Bush's petrol price moves, and recent Iraq news.
Meanwhile, YouTube has taken down its clips from Stephen Colbert's White House Correspondents' Association Dinner performance, after a complaint from CSPAN, the broadcaster. But oddly, Bush's turn at the same event (which was actually pretty good - the guy has comic timing if nothing else) was not subject to notice and is still there on YouTube. How odd.
So will YouTube be undone by its own escalating success - and embittered former uploaders?
It's all on - eventually | May 04, 2006 11:08
Unbundling ain't the half of yesterday's unexpected announcement on telecommunications regulation. The real curveball - one that will force Telecom to get a new business model - is a mandate for naked DSL. That is, a line without a dial tone, leaving consumers free to use their line only for broadband data, and choose their own voice solution. That's huge.
That solution might be a voice-over-IP product on the data line (and Ihug already has one of those sitting around) - or the kind of fixed-mobile substitution lately being championed by Vodafone (and now likely to be pursued with great vigour by Telecom Mobile, where they won't be at all unhappy with the news).
The upshot: a shift to a more consumer-centric market with better, more flexible services, and away from easy and guaranteed fixed-line revenue for the incumbent.
The pro-reform camp got just about everything it wanted - the exception being an enforced wholesale-retail separation of Telecom, and the incumbent is on notice that that's not out of the question either.
Telecom's share price nosedived seven per cent on the Australian market after the news broke yesterday, and it will take a drubbing here today. This was inevitable: Telecom has been priced on its ability to derive monopoly rents (and David Farrar has a startling example of that this morning).
But that doesn't mean it's all over for the big guy. What it means is that Telecom won't be able to collect monopoly rents while it forces the rest of the market to walk at the pace of its choosing. There will be new investment, new products and services and probably new entrants to the market. Eventually.
This legislation won't be in place until early next year. From there, the international experience is that unbundling takes time to unfold. In the interim, there will be much scope for opponents of reform to declare that it's not working - and you can count on them doing so. Computerworld has a timeline for the various announcements in the package. The first benefit apparent will be a change to existing UBS arrangements requiring unconstrained DSL to be made available - meaning you'll never have to suffer 128k upstream again.
But TelstraClear has already said the announcement has changed the investment environment in New Zealand, and it's safe to assume that it will be placing gear in exchanges as soon as it is able. Slightshot, Ihug and Orcon will also be in, and I wouldn't be too surprised to see a new entrant. The timing's not great for Ihug - although it has been performing to expectations in New Zealand, its Australian sibling iiNet has had its shares suspended for the past two weeks and has been obliged to issue a profit warning - but it will simply have to find the capital.
What the newly-enabled competitors need to be careful about is proving the critics right and all piling into a handful of lucrative urban exchanges. Without colluding in any anti-competitive way, they will probably need to talk to each other.
While Telecom's top brass are obliged to be outraged at the news, the response among the ranks at the company is rather different. There is, naturally, some relief that the cards are finally on the table. But the reaction was coloured, as one person put it to me, with "a frisson of excitement": they know that the market will become more dynamic and more interesting. And I'm sure they're also keenly looking forward to no longer being the ultimate destination for all customer complaints. In a year's time, Mr Angry of Mt Eden may well be complaining to a new company.
I would also expect this news to act as an incentive for Telecom to bring forward its never-never plans for cable to the home. (The potential downside being that the company leaves its copper to rot.)
As everyone is doubtless aware, the government did not intend to make this announcement yesterday, only hours after Cabinet committee sign off. It was meant to be the trump card in this month's Budget. But its hand was forced by the leaking of the paper to Telecom. This is troubling, but ironically, the timing was worse for Telecom than anyone else, because both Theresa Gattung and PR chief John Goulter were in Australia.
So I was cooking dinner last night (the new Asia Home Gourmet sauces in a jar are really very good) and enjoying a glass of wine (Delegats 2005 Hawkes Bay Chardonnay - an improbably cheap $9.95 at Woolworths this week) when Close Up called to ask if I could come in urgently and talk about the announcement live on air.
Slightly less than 45 minutes later, I was sitting at a desk with Annette Presley and Ernie Newman being interviewed by Susan Wood. (I subsequently discovered that Close Up had spurned a David Cunliffe interview on learning that Campbell Live had grabbed him for the top-of-the bulletin slot, so we were the Plan B.) The video is here. I thought it came off rather well in the end. Given the short notice, it was very helpful to have already explored the arguments in A long post on telecommunications .
Maurice Williamson was, to the potential embarrassment of his party, slamming the decision on Morning Report today. And he even said this: "The reason we have low broadband is because we're a poor country." That is - how can I best put this? - complete crap. The alleged relationship between GDP and broadband penetration has been thoroughly debunked since the Business Roundtable's Rob McLeod plucked it out of thin air in a column earlier this year. Williamson needs a new argument before National gets a new spokesman.
And as a final perspective, Throw Theresa! is a little bit mean but very clever indeed …
PS: Apologies for the lack of availability of Public Address this morning - we've had server problems in the US and our server guy stuck on a plane back from Wellington, having been diverted there en route from Sydney last night because of fog in Auckland. Great day for that to happen …
Various Informations | May 03, 2006 10:52
The Listener column on Wikipedia that I mentioned last week is now online. I should note that I've been very supportive of Wikipedia in the past, and I still am - but I don't think the problems with the project can go unremarked, or that what we see there now is the last word on free content.
I though it would be a show of good faith to have a little edit myself, so I spent a few minutes updating and amending the 95bFM entry, and I'll do some more work on it as time allows in future. There's a little more discussion on the Helen Clark article.
There's some worthwhile comment on this week's SH/Fran O'Sullivan/Investigate/Doonegate bunfight in the less frenzied atmosphere of NZBC, most notably from NBR's Rob Hosking:
… although I'd support the view that there is a leftish bias in the mainstream media I don't think there was a cover up of the sort alleged by Investigate and Sir H.
Don't forget: its not just 20 or 30 odd journalists who decided there wasn't a story in it. So did both National and Act.
And National and Act had more reason than anyone else to believe the documents on Sir H showed something new. But there wasn't anything new there. As I said above, Sir H thought they had a scoop. They didn't.
I've commented there too, and I disagree with Rob on the odd point: his reasoning for his view that Clark was the go-to-whoah sole source for the SST's Doone story doesn't stack up - after all, this is a story that had already been broken by the Holmes show the week before, and other journalists have said that leaks were gushing out of the police force itself (and furthermore, he's effectively accusing Oskar Alley of perjury) but I think he's largely on the mark. (NB: NZBC's direct links seem glitchy, so you may have to go to the main NZBC page and scroll down.)
Update: Rob has been in touch to say he wasn't fully aware of the contents of Alley's brief of evidence (which lists more than half a dozen sources spoken to before the call to Clark), and "unreservedly" withdraws anything that would imply perjury on Alley's part.
The website to watch for the inside story on Jock Anderson's apparently very shabby treatment from his former employers at NBR is here. It's a bummer for him, but good news for us: I think Jock might be good value as a free agent on the Internet. So is Jock also the vendor of the barrycolman.co.nz domain currently on the block at Trade Me? Well, it's registered to Lorraine Craighead at a Waiheke Island address, and Jock lives on the island, but who knows?
Update: Lorraine Craighead is Jock Anderson's partner. So that's that one settled.
Anthony Trenwith had some comment to make on the Star Times story about the imprisonment rate of foreign citizens in New Zealand:
The irony of the rent-a-quotes referred to is that they all seem remarkably unaware that what they're calling for is already happening and has been for some time. Immigration, on their lengthy highly inquisitive and not to mention intrusive) forms want to know if those wishing to come to this country have ever even been as much as charged with a criminal offence. If the answer is yes, they then demand all the gory details.
For those already here, they get all the fun of experiencing a repeat performance of the above exercise each time they go to renew their permit. Again, any sort of brush with the law - even as minor as something like careless driving - can be fatal to an applicant's chances. In more serious cases, Immigration won't wait for the renewal application but will revoke the permit of its own initiative. In other words, one strike and you're (probably) out.
Finally, it's worth remembering that a large number of those who are in prison were caught committing their offence at the border - that is, drug smugglers. Nothing wrong with the screening there!
Oh and by the way, is Ian Wishart really asking other media to not do what he did???
Two readers, Hamish and Trix, noted another friendly legal download site beside eMusic: Magnatune.com. Among its virtues, Hamish listed:
You may also want to check out Magnatune.com - MP3 and uncompressed WAV downloads, no DRM, and 50% of what you pay goes straight to the artist. All independantly signed artists, with a wide range of styles and free 128K MP3s of the entire catalogue. Their motto is the best part - "We are not evil"
It doesn't have anywhere near the catalogue of eMusic, but it's interesting to see that its bestsellers chart is dominated by classical and opera music.
Neil Young's Living With War is streaming from his website.
Lyndon Hood has a great post on the culture wars in Australia, and allegations of "dumbing down" from people who want intelligent design to be taught in schools as science.
Is this a record? The Thank You Stephen Colbert blog now has more than 28,000 comments to its sole post. The site also has links to the video from the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner on YouTube. There is also an interesting 60 Minutes item on Colbert, and on the Daily Show Jon Stewart applauds Colbert's "ballsalicious" performance.
Foreign hordes etc | May 01, 2006 11:05
Most depressing story of the weekend: Tony Wall's Page 3 lead in the Star Times on an increase in the number of foreign citizens in our prisons. Not because of the increase - frankly, the story provides almost no context which would allow us to work out what that even means. But because it's cheap and shallow.
How does the increase relate to the change in the respective populations? How much of it is an increase in the rate of imprisonment as opposed to an increase in the number of crimes committed? What kind of crimes are being committed? By whom? Is there reason to believe that many obvious "bad apples" got through immigration screening? What's the actual crime rate in those populations as opposed to the general population?
I understand, for instance, that the Asian community's crime rate is lower than that of the general population; and on the figures given in the story - 64 out of 7500 - Chinese nationals account for a whacking 0.85% of the current prison muster.
All this, of course, would have been a bit more work than simply soliciting rent-a-quotes from Garth McVicar and Simon Power and then leading with the claim that the figures have "sparked calls for better screening of immigrants at our borders and a 'first strike and you're out' policy for immigrants who break the law."
But it would have been much better journalism.
NB: Tze Ming, having determined that respectful disagreement won't get her fired, has also posted on this issue.
The test match in Cape Town will almost certainly end in a draw, but that should not detract from Stephen Fleming's wonderful innings of 262. After Vettori went on Friday night I thought I'd watch until the end of the New Zealand innings. Then I thought I'd watch until the Fleming-Franklin partnership was broken. But dang me if they didn't just bat all day.
Anyone who follows cricket will know that Fleming's record stands in contrast with the grace of his batting. So many times he has eased his way to 20 runs and then nicked one to slip. Or, famously, got within sight of a ton and then got out. But for almost all of that mammoth innings he timed the ball beautifully to all parts of the ground. Gee it was good to watch. Nice to Franklin get his first hundred too.
I popped over to rec.sport.cricket to see what people were saying there - an option that, as John Holley points out today, will very soon be denied to Xtra customers. This is wrong and contemptuous. Usenet has been part of Internet service in New Zealand since before I got online in 1993 and I simply don't buy Xtra's contention that hardly anyone was using it. And if usage was falling, just scale down.
A couple of readers directed me to Stephen Colbert's amazing turn - in character - at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. You can almost hear the sound of teeth grinding in the audience. Editor & Publisher has a follow-up report.
Meanwhile, PZ Myers notes that Ann Coulter appears to have jumped the shark with her latest book, which, according to the publicity guff, "exposes the essential truth about Darwinian evolution that liberals refuse to confront: it is bogus science." Coulter's main squeeze on this one is intelligent design booster William Dembski, who has been quite well sorted out by actual scientists.
I spent enough time debating Ian Wishart last week, I have work to do and I really don't want to get into some silly feud with him. But it seems reasonable to report that on Friday he sent the following email to editors and senior journalists at The Herald, the Herald on Sunday, the Star Times, Newstalk ZB, Radio Live, Radio New Zealand, The Press, The Dom Post, The Listener, Allied Press, the ODT, the Waikato Times, TV3 and possibly others:
Subject: ON NOTICE FOR DEFAMATION: NOT FOR PUBLICATION
MESSAGE TO ALL EDITORS
FROM IAN WISHARTWITHOUT PREJUDICE, NOT FOR PUBLICATION, AND OFF THE RECORD
Bearing in mind the events of this week in the Parker affair, and the Government's powerful spin on those events, I have had cause this morning to haul one media commentator over the coals by way of an email below. I have decided to forward this email to all of you however because undoubtedly your own op/ed commentators will be working on columns for the weekend papers, and it is important for their sakes and yours that they don't fall into easily avoidable traps and so cause defamation actions.
This email is, in effect, a legal heads-up, and I suggest you either brief your columnists/commentators as to the legal issues, and/or cast an eye across what is written yourselves.
I'm not trying to quench legitimate expression of opinion, I'm merely trying to make sure people realize that while Crown law has given an opinion clearing Parker, other opinions exist to the contrary and Investigate magazine is absolutely confident its case against Parker is rock-solid and watertight, so don't assume that the Companies Office clearance provides carte-blanche to attack me or the magazine, unless you are very sure of your legal position and the facts.
Regards
Ian Wishart
He really needs to calm down a bit.
And, finally, thanks to the nice people at New Zealand MacGuide. The new issue includes a feature on ways to get legal downloads that actually work on your iPod. There is of course the fine service provided by our friends at Amplifier for local product. But MacGuide also recommended eMusic.
I did a little research, then plunged in. It's really good. eMusic's service runs on a subscription basis (starting from $US9.99 a month), but if and when you cancel your subscription, you keep your music. And the tracks are high-quality LAME-encoded MP3s completely unencumbered by DRM. Best of all, they have a free trial offer for new sign-ups: 50 free tracks! I could, in theory, cancel my sub in 12 days' time and keep the music, but I won't be doing so.
The content is almost exclusively from independent labels, but it ranges very widely, from Folkways heritage recordings to the Naxos classical catalogue, dance music and, impressively, two of the new albums (The Streets and Neko Case) that I actually bought at Real Groovy on Saturday morning. I spent the afternoon listening, checking out other people's playlists and having fun downloading music with a clear conscience.
I was a little concerned about how good a deal eMusic represents for the artists. And then I read this, about how much Sony BMG pays its artists for each 99 cent sale on iTunes - 4.5 cents. Right.
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