Posts by Matthew Poole
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frankly I find the initial reaction to this to be a bit of a surprise
You shouldn't, really. He dared to suggest working with religious organisations, and Island ones at that, which in here is just short of suggesting that the Fire Service be compelled to hire arsonists as fire fighters.
I think he may underestimate the difficulties of trying to ensure the same levels of transparency are met by Islander-centred community groups as are currently met by the likes of Red Cross or Oxfam. As someone else observed, part of the reason for the complexity of organisation of "real" charitable aid is the transparency involved.
As an aside, when NZ Red Cross says that "every cent donated to this appeal will go to <insert special appeal cause>" they actually mean it. They're one of a very, very small number of Red Cross national societies in the world that has sufficient funding from other sources to be able to subsidise the administrative costs of special appeals. So giving cash to Red Cross special appeals is a sure-fire way of ensuring that all of your donation ends up with the relief effort.
And reiterating David's point about giving cash, not goods, too.
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closing all ports other than;
Port 80 for http traffic
Port 110, 25, 995, 465 for eMailSo you've already blocked all HTTPS traffic, meaning people cannot use web banking, or make purchases online. Strike one, in that you, the advocate of this system, missed out one of the fundamental "legitimate" ports. How much harder for Joe "Clue-bie" Public to get it right?
Strike two: you can pass pretty much all P2P systems over TCP:80 and/or TCP:443. Unless you're doing some very fancy inspection, using equipment that costs considerably more than the local pub will be prepared to spend, you have no way of knowing what's inside that packet. You just have to trust users not to pass traffic over non-standard ports. Toss in the encryption wildcard, and suddenly even deep-packet inspection loses the game of trying to determine if what you're sending over TCP:443 is HTTPS or encrypted P2P.Still think that "it can't be that hard"?
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you don't feel as if there's enough solid evidence to justify some form of reasonably balanced intervention, and I do. That's cool, we can agree to disagree.
I already said way, way back that we were going to have to agree to disagree. For one thing, we can't even agree on what constitutes "reasonably balanced."
My objections are not just to the "We must do something now" position, where I feel there's insufficient evidence to justify anything other than the copyright reforms that many in this thread agree are necessary, but also the position that says that "something" must involve traffic monitoring and extra-judicial responses to whatever that monitoring may find.It's not that I fear the internet "going away", because the internet's design makes that pretty much impossible, but that I fear ham-fisted, poorly-considered "solutions" that impinge on the internet experience of all consumers as well as potentially damaging future innovation. YouTube would never have happened in the world envisioned by big media. FaceBook and most other forms of social media would never have got off the ground either, because they would be too risky.
Excessive control does not foster innovation, but rather stifles it. The internet doesn't need to go away to become a place where ideas cannot thrive. -
The courts have historically been quite good at slapping limits on the cops' misuse of "good cause to suspect". The old "I think I smell pot" has been turfed in cases where nothing was found, or where whatever was found was in no way related to drugs, and that's likely to be applied to this new law.
If we start seeing cases that look like "We stopped them because drive-thru BK at 3 on a Saturday morning is indicative behaviour", I can see some court rulings to the effect of unlawful detention. -
By that token, Family Fist (sic) and For the Sake of Our Children have also crossed, or are otherwise dangerously near, the dividing line between charity and political lobby group that the Sensibles have crossed.
FF claims that it "Provides advice / information / advocacy" and "Sponsors / undertakes research". It would certainly be interesting to have their registration put under the spotlight.
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I like it, a very positive out look, anyone can give it a go, but you will be judged accordingly.
Being a charity is a very broad brush. If what you do is in some way about bettering the lot of society, you probably qualify. But you can't be doing it for pecuniary gain, and you can't be doing it for furthering political ends.
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How on earth they are currently getting charitable tax status is beyond me.
If they originally gained it as a "group to provide support and advocacy for the victims of crime", that would be entirely unremarkable. That they're now a "group to advocate for the victims of crime" is where it gets messy. They do precious little support work that anyone sees, but plenty of political advocacy.
I'm not outraged that they managed to register as a charity, but it would be a farce if they were to retain that status now that it's been brought to the attention of the Commission.
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Looks like it's not a tease. Multiple returned stories about how SST is facing the loss of its status as a charity, because it's deemed to be primarily a political activism body.
From TV3:The Charities Commission has told the SST that its primary role appears to be political advocacy, and as such is not eligible to be officially recognised as a charity. Without charitable status, the SST would have to pay tax on donations received, and supporters' contributions would not be tax-deductible.
“We have already been advised by one generous sponsor that funding for next year’s victims’ conference will stop if we are denied charitable status,” says SST founder Garth McVicar.
Obviously not such a generous sponsor after all.
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RNZ had something about Sensible Sentencing Trust complaining they're gonna be denied Charitable Status.
Maybe it's just a tease but I'm smiling
No, based on my understanding of charities law that's an entirely reasonable denial. The primary (only?) function of Insensible Sentencing is political activism, which is not a charitable activity.
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This also puts makes obviously false the claim that they would not start privatising functions of the state in their first term.
That was never what they said. They said there would be no asset sales in the first term. Totally different things.