Public Address: OnPoint

What Andrew Geddis Said, But Shorter and With More Swearing

Keith Ng — Mon, 20 May 2013 01:37:00 +1200

During the Budget lock-up last week, an old hand from one of the law firms said that I should ask Bill English about all the legislation that was going to get rushed through immediately after the Budget. I gathered, from what he told me, that a lot of bills got passed in the wake of the Budget with very little scrutiny.
Well. This happened:

You're looking at the Regulatory Impact Statement (RIS) for the Public Health and Disability Amendment Bill. Basically, the courts said that the Government had to pay family members who looked after people with disabilities (because not…

Budget 2013: Bringing Down the House (Prices), but not really

Keith Ng — Thu, 16 May 2013 00:52:00 +1200

Update: Tool is live!
"On track to surplus"
That's not really true. Revenue projections are down on the 2012 Budget, and the Government would be in deficit - except they cut the Operating Allowance for Budget 2014 by $200m.
I had a crack at Bill English about this during the lock-up; his argument was that money is money - I might as well be saying that of *anything* that saved the government more than $75m, and claim that the government only did that because it would bring them over the threshold.
The difference with changing the Operating Allowance is that…

#WTFMSD: "Damning"

Keith Ng — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 11:37:00 +1300

"Damning" was actually the word used in the MSD press release:

MSD Chief Executive Brendan Boyle says the report is damning around MSD's failure to separate public kiosks from a network containing corporate files.

And it is. The Dimension Data security review of the kiosks came out, and as expected, they were crystal bloody clear:

The most pressing security issue discovered is the lack of network separation of segregation within the environment... This introduces an inherent level of risk as it could allow for a member of the public to gain access to MSD network resources and services. Physical network…

H4x0rs and You

Keith Ng — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 16:02:00 +1300

"No good can come of a hacker talking to a TV journalist," my hacker friend said when I asked him to go on camera for a TV journo. He was goddamn right.
I gave Paul Craig's name to one journalist on Tuesday morning and to a few others after that. I thought it was pertinent that Dimension Data had one of the world's best kiosk hackers on staff, and therefore it was ludicrious to think that they could have missed the shit-simple security hole I used. In hindsight, I really should have paid heed to my friend's advice: No good…

The Source

Keith Ng — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 18:40:00 +1300

Update: A journalist called up earlier knowing Ira's name, and asked me to confirm him as my source. It was clear that somebody had given her the name, and the story was due to be published tomorrow. Sorry I wasn't clear about this in the orignal.
Update 2: *Obviously* I've been in touch with Ira this whole time. He was also contacted by the journalist yesterday, we discussed how to proceed and then I wrote this. I got his permission to write this and cleared the draft of this with him before I published this. Like, seriously - what kind…

MSD's Leaky Servers

Keith Ng — Sun, 14 Oct 2012 22:00:00 +1300

My jeans were torn, my hoodie was pretty ragged, and I hadn't shaved for a week. It turned out that bloggers are remarkably good at disguising themselves as unemployed, without even trying.
Last week, I got tipped-off that the parts of the MSD network were completely exposed to the public. You could go into any WINZ office and use their self-service kiosks to access their corporate network.
These locked-down kiosks are provided so you could look for jobs online, send off CVs etc. They've had some basic features disabled, which supposedly meant that you couldn't just open up File Manager…

Re: Education

Keith Ng — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 11:36:00 +1200

Hey Herald. So "children in bigger classes and bigger schools get better grades", hur?
"Children in bigger classes and bigger schools get better grades" implies a relationship between these two things. This kind of relationship, if it's strong, might look something this:

On the other hand, if it's a weak relationship, it might look something like this:

This is what your relationship actually looks like (courtesy of DimPost):

Note the R^2 value. What does it mean?

The closer the R^2 value is to 0, the poorer the fit. Your R^2 value is 0.137. If we take out the special schools,…

Because Statistical Rigour

Keith Ng — Sat, 22 Sep 2012 16:50:00 +1200

Hey John Hartevelt. Let me get this straight. A lot of people told you not to published this data. Some of them were dicks to you, others gave you very specific reasons:

Anyone who read the National Standards results as a proxy for quality would be quite foolish. We wouldn't do that and we don't suggest you do, either. For starters, they are not moderated, so one school's "well below" may be another's "at" or "above". There is just no way of knowing - yet - exactly how the standards have been applied across schools.
But even if they were…

Pants != Journalism

Keith Ng — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 18:00:00 +1200

Hey NZ Herald. Thanks for proving the point that professional dress and professional behaviour don't go hand-in-hand.
Today, they ran one news story and two opinion pieces on the unprofessionalism of Laura McQuillan's pants. Kirsty Cameron's piece had, as a pull-out quote:

"..your dress should reflect your credibility and acknowledge the environment."

"Credibility" is kinda ironic, because on that same page, they stole a picture off Twitter without attribution, said McQuillan worked for Radio NZ (actually the NZ Newswire, and previously for RadioLive), and said she was asked to leave the court by the judge (she was asked to leave…

To Whom it May Concern

Keith Ng — Fri, 18 May 2012 11:41:00 +1200

I am writing to heartily endorse Joshua Drummond for the position of Press Relations and Regulatory Affairs Manager at British American Tobacco.
I have known Mr Drummond for many years through our mutual association with the Freedom Importers Association of Hamilton. We celebrate enterprise and freedom by importing cigarettes into New Zealand though our underground tunnels with China and Belarus. Our non-fictional organisation, in fact, represents over 80% of the NZ tobacco black market as estimated by Ernst & Young. Mr Drummond's intimate knowledge of this sector will no doubt prove invaluable to your organisation as you continue to praise its…