Rant on Tony Andrew Meyer

Mobile Phones at Mahurangi College - Feedback

Sat, 02 Mar 2024 21:17:51 +1200

(Post theme: The Times They Are-A-Changin’ by Bob Dylan)

This is a copy of the feedback I provided to Mahurangi College in response to this consultation request:

The Government has introduced regulations that require all state schools to have student phone rules in use. Rules must be in use as soon as possible in Term 1 2024 and no later than Term 2.

Many countries around the world have successfully banned mobile phones in classrooms, or are in the process of doing so. A solid body of evidence is emerging that supports the banning of phones in schools.

Inconsistent public service efficiency

Sun, 25 Feb 2024 21:48:01 +1200

(Post theme: drivers license by Olivia Rodrigo)

I renewed my driver’s license last week (having turned 45 recently) and it was striking how different the experience was to the other common government-issued identification: a passport. New Zealand’s passport service, Te Mata Uruwhenua, (run by Te Tari Taiwhenua the Department of Internal Affairs) is remarkably efficient - everything from the application process through to delivery is handled extremely well. They promise reasonable process times, and almost always better them.

Open Letter to the Mahurangi College Board

Wed, 10 Nov 2021 11:42:18 +1200

Dear Mahurangi College Board,

Parents of students at Mahurangi College received an email from the principal on the 9th of November stating:

We would like to assure you that your child will not be discriminated against in any way by the school and we do not intend excluding students from any activities or trips that we have control over. However, in these ever changing times we have no control over the requirements that an outside organisation might place on us if we were to visit somewhere, eg. the museum. We also have no control over requirements that the government might place on us in future.

A better WannaCry advisory for schools

Sun, 14 May 2017 19:21:02 +1200

The Ministry of Education sent out a very poor advisory to schools about “WannaCry” today, based primarily (from what it seems) on the poor information coming from CERT-NZ. The advisory contains several factual errors, which the Ministry should not be spreading to schools. I’ve written an improved advisory (I’ll update it as required).

(An improved version of an) Urgent message from the Ministry of Education

The weekend media reported on a virus called WannaCry (also WannaCrypt, WanaCrypt0r, WCrypt, and WCRY) that infected many computer systems around the world over the last few days, including very prominent organisations such as the NHS in the UK. It appears that few infections have occured in New Zealand, but it is possible that your school may have been, or may be, at risk. We are writing to let you know what you should do, and what we are doing to protect schools.

Open source in government is not important

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 21:41:34 +1200

Labour’s “ICT” policy includes a statement on “Open software” in government, part of which is attempting to get two thirds of government agencies to use some sort of open-source software by 2015. This is basically what you expect from politicians when talking about “ICT” (or nearly anything, unfortunately) - they jump on whatever bandwagon/buzzwords are popular without any understanding of what should be done. Firstly, I would be shocked if more than two thirds of government agencies were not already using some form of open-source software already. For a start, it’s nearly impossible to use the Internet without accessing something running Linux or Apache. More importantly, it makes no sense at all to aim for governments to be using more open-source software. They should be using the software most suited to the job at hand, whether closed source or open source. What benefit is there in requiring open source? If they think it’s cheaper, then they should look more closely, because it’s often not. The same applies to being more secure. There are absolutely situations where the best choice is an open-source one - but there are absolutely situations where closed source is better. I don’t want government employees forced to use less than the best tools because of some ideological burden placed on them by someone wanting a cushy job for the next three years. They have a few other requirements: Software developed in-house will be made publicly available. A nice idea, but (a) I’m fairly sure that most of the in-house software is of no use to anyone else, (b) I suspect most of the software you’d assume was in-house was actually developed by non-government contractors, and, most significantly, (c) not all code is ready to be shared. If a government sysadmin writes a quick script to do a job, do we really want to add the pressure that it will be publicly available (and given that it’s the government, it’s reasonable to assume that someone will be looking at everything). As long as the software does the job, that’s good enough (in the “in-house” context). What would be worthwhile is ensuring that government agencies consider whether software should be released to the public - I’m sure that there is some that would be of general interest and where the quality is suitably high.

Bad Analogies

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 13:58:35 +1200

NetHui 2011 is currently in progress, so there’s a lot of discussion about Internet usage in New Zealand, and - of course - the controversial amendments to the Copyright Act. TUANZ’s Paul Brislen tweeted something I’ve seen and heard (in various forms) a lot recently:

Cf electricity. Won’t cut me off because I look at something I shouldn’t on my PC so why is it ok to cut off my Comms if I do? #nethui

Why "3 tries and you're locked" weakens security

Tue, 03 May 2011 20:04:11 +1200

Some organisations have a security policy that after three failed authentication attempts an account is locked (requiring manual unlocking by an IT support person) - the goal is to strengthen security, but this actually decreases the security of the organisation. The intent of a policy like this is to prevent brute-force attacks - if you’re limited to three attempts per account before intervention by a human is required, then brute-forcing an account is no longer practical. However, there are better ways of preventing a brute-force attack, for example:

Why the Government should ignore the People

Wed, 13 Apr 2011 15:03:27 +1200

The infamous “Section 92A” that so riled people up, was this (in full):

92A Internet service provider must have policy for terminating accounts of repeat infringers (1) An Internet service provider must adopt and reasonably implement a policy that provides for termination, in appropriate circumstances, of the account with that Internet service provider of a repeat infringer. (2) In subsection (1), repeat infringer means a person who repeatedly infringes the copyright in a work by using 1 or more of the Internet services of the Internet service provider to do a restricted act without the consent of the copyright owner.

An actual problem with the Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Bill

Wed, 13 Apr 2011 14:32:11 +1200

The most glaringly wrong part of the Amendment is this:

122PB Application of section 122C to cellular mobile networks (1) An IPAP need not comply with either of the obligations in section 122C(1) in respect of the services it provides by way of a cellular mobile network. (2) Subsection (1) is repealed with the close of 31 July 2013 (but see subsection (3)(c)). (3) The Governor-General may, by Order in Council made on the recommendation of the Minister, do all or any of the following: (a) repeal this section: (b) repeal subsection (2): (c) amend subsection (2) by replacing the date specified in that subsection with any other date, whether that date is earlier or later than the one it replaces: (d) revoke or amend any Order in Council made under this section (the principal order), but only if the repeal, amendment, or revocation effected by the principal order has not taken effect. (4) The powers in subsection (3) may be exercised more than once.

Guilt if not denied, not guilt on accusation

Wed, 13 Apr 2011 14:17:24 +1200

Once again, many New Zealanders are saying incredibly incorrect things about copyright law - most of them because they are parroting other people in a twisted Chinese whispers style of journalism. People are calling the latest changes “guilt on accusation”. All you have to do is actually read the amendment (which is not something that many do) and you can tell that is not the case. The relevant part of the amendment is this:

Latest MySky (HDi) update

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 17:51:37 +1200

The latest (and heavily publicised) MySKY (HDi only?) update was released today. Oddly, our update was applied around 2 p.m. - the currently showing program was replaced by a very ugly notice that the system was being updated. I can’t understand why the update wasn’t deployed during the night (e.g. 4 a.m.), when the number of viewers must be significantly lower. What if I had really cared about the program that was showing? My initial reaction was very negative. After it was pointed out (via Twitter) that many of SkyTV’s mistakes are correctable via new options in the settings back, I’m slightly less negative, but it’s still not an improvement. This is especially frustrating considering that the UI is so terrible, and has been ever since MySKY was introduced about five years ago (I’ve had MySKY since just after the launch). Being told that they know about the many problems and fixing them isn’t possible until the hardware is revved doesn’t inspire any confidence at all, since the problems existed with the original MySKY and certainly were not fixed when the hardware was revved (with HDi). Someone at SkyTV is responsible for selecting the hardware - if the platform doesn’t support creating a decent UI, then they should choose something else. (Has anyone on the MySKY team used an Apple product? Or even Windows 7 or a Zune product? Would they recognise good UI when they saw it? Do they have anyone that has any UI talent or experience? If so, perhaps they could give that person a bit of power to fix things?) The “what’s new” page has a feedback form where you can comment on the recent changes. I encourage you to do so. My comments were:

Dr? No.

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:10:21 +1200

I finally withdrew from my PhD today (probably many people thought that this had happened some time ago).

In the beginning…

The story really starts in 1999. I started working consistently while studying, and also got rather bored with the study that I was doing. I also got involved in the Students’ Association - first lightly, then pretty heavily. As a result, at the end of 2000, I was about 1.5 papers short of finishing my BSc and BBS. I needed to do half a semester of work, and so I decided to go those at the same time as a Postgraduate Diploma in Science (these went along with running for ASA President). The ASA job didn’t work out, but I did finish the last undergrad stuff I needed to do, and rather unexpectedly found that I really enjoyed the postgrad study. I was able to do all the papers for the postgrad diploma along with the undergrad work, except for the double-paper research project, in that year. That meant that the next year started off with finishing off the research project - normally half of a semester’s load, but since I didn’t have anything else to be doing, I poured in a whole semester’s effort into it. That left me at the middle of the year with everything complete.

Google Voice? Who really cares?

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 21:26:46 +1200

I really enjoy listening to Jason Calacanis when he’s on TWiT, and I think he generally makes a lot of sense (and considering his success, he clearly knows more than me). However, his anti-Apple rant (like so many others) is really off-base (I’m not the only one that thinks so).

There is no technical reason why the iTunes ecosystem shouldn’t allow the ability to sync with any MP3 player

The iTunes ecosystem does allow the ability to sync with any MP3 player (even more so now that music is DRM-free). You can build an application that uses the XML library description that iTunes creates to figure out where all the music/video is, and do what you like with it. The way I see it, there’s no reason that iTunes/Apple should be forced to support any MP3 player with their software. Apple clearly makes some money from the iTunes music/video sales, but it’s clearly not the main profit generator is the ecosystem - the high-margin iPods/iPhones are. Apple has spent a great deal of time and money building a store and an application to make the players more appealing. Why should any other player get to piggyback on the top of that? If (e.g.) Palm wants to create an online music store and develop an application that works with it and the Pre, then they should be able to (and I see no reason they can’t). I like iTunes more than other media applications I’ve used, but it’s certainly not perfect, and it shows that it started out as a music player and is now a great deal more. I love the iTunes Store, but Amazon completes with it (I can’t tell how well, since they won’t see to me in NZ) as does the Zune Store - which even offers a subscription model (no idea if this is available in NZ - it’s too Windows-centric for me). There’s absolutely room for someone (e.g. Palm) to build a better store (or interface with an existing one like Amazon) and built a better application. Do that, and build a better device, and you’ll get customers. Don’t expect that Apple should have to help you compete against them.

My 2GB, 4 day 0.0.1 iPhone update

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 11:24:26 +1200

A few days ago, Apple released version 3.0.1 of the iPhone OS, which addressed a pretty major SMS vulnerability. When Olyvia tried updating her 3GS to 3.0.1, something went wrong. The iPhone entered “Recovery Mode”, which means that it displays an image indicating that you need to connect it to iTunes, and you can’t do anything else (no phone calls, no iPod, no applications - absolutely nothing). Connecting the phone to iTunes prompted a message indicating that the phone needed to be recovered - doing so downloaded the 3.0.1 update, and then got stuck on the “Verifying Restore with Apple” step for a long time, until it would finally fail with error “3104”. This process could then be repeated, with the same results. What this meant in practice was that the phone was bricked as of last Friday. An update should never be able to brick a (legitimate, not jailbroken) phone! Even more, failing to verify a restore with Apple should never leave the phone in a broken state. I tried many thing to resolve this:

Go raise your own children, please!

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 20:39:12 +1200

It really bugs me when I’m told how to raise my child, whether by the government, by people I know, or random people off the street. If you have children, then you get to decide how you raise them (I have no desire to interfere with that at all). If you don’t have children, then it’s nothing to do with you, and you don’t know anything about it anyway. For better or worse (and it does seem a lot like worse, these days), any man & woman can have a child, and if they make that decision (or a decision that leads to a child that wasn’t expected), then they are responsible for making sure that, to the best of their ability, the child is brought up appropriately. ‘Appropriately’, of course, is completely up to them (the things insane people do, like violence and abuse, don’t count - if you’re so badly disturbed that you can deliberately injure your own child, then you don’t belong in society). I have no problem with people offering advice, or asking for it. But that’s where it stops. I really don’t care in the slightest what you (where “you” covers everyone but my wife) think about how I am raising my child. It’s our business, not yours. When he’s my age, then he can make his own judgement about it as well (but while he’s a child, he doesn’t get to decide, either). That means the government shouldn’t interfere, past ensuring basic rights (preventing the aforementioned violence, requiring schooling, etc). That means that if you’re someone that knows me, you’re welcome to have any opinion you like about how we are doing it, but you can keep any non-constructive criticism and negative judgements to yourself. If you’re a random person on the street, then feel free to give me a passing compliment, but you can save anything else to discuss with your own friends, if you have any. I imagine it would be extremely annoying if grandparents did this (they’ve had their chance, it’s time to let the kids have their turn). Thankfully, my parents are great, and let us do things however we like, even if it differs from what they would do (or did), all the while supporting us as much as they can. One of the annoying things is that (as people who know me know) I really don’t care in general what people think about what I do. I act as I believe I should, and am happy to discuss things with people, but I’m going to do what I think is right, not what other people think I should do. So other people’s judgements wouldn’t bother me, except that it does bother my wife, and her opinion, of course, does count. So, please: if you’re someone that does this, stop. Next time you feel you’re going to criticise someone else’s parenting to them, remember that it’s their kid, and their decision, and save your comments for a water cooler discussion another day.

Vodafone subsumes ihug: can't handle Internet or phone

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 12:33:49 +1200

Vodafone, who I used to think was an ok company, bought and then subsumed ihug, who once was a good company (but had previously sunk to terrible depths). Ihug did all sorts of nutty side ventures, but generally was a company specialising in Internet access and phone calls. I called Vodafone yesterday, and got a “sorry, we are experiencing high call volume. Please call back” message. And then it hung up! No queue, no way to set up a call from Vodafone back to me to help. Just hanging up on me. Today, I go to the Vodafone website (because it appears that their DNS servers are dead; thank goodness for OpenDNS) and I get: [caption id=“attachment_95” align=“alignnone” width=“300” caption=“Vodafone”][/caption] If an ISP can’t handle serving up their own homepage, are they really a good choice? If you’re a business, would you even consider talking to them at this point?

0759 for the hidden Sky menu

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 21:30:10 +1200

This really falls under the “just so I know where to look next time I forget” category. With MySky, the “setup” menu is hidden from casual use (IIRC in both UTF Sky and Sky Digital it is not). To get to it, you go to the system settings menu and type 0759 (0SKY) and then select, and it takes you to the menu where you can change the satellite settings, do a fresh installation, and so on. When we moved house, the theory was I could just pick up the MySky box and plug it in (there was already a satellite) and save $50. Unfortunately, this didn’t work. I was told that I could call their helpdesk and they would be able to help get past the “poor reception” error (which is indeed what I got). Unfortunately, the technician I spoke to couldn’t do much - in fact she had to put me on hold while she looked up the MySky settings (she started out trying to fix Digital - do they not have an indicator on the customer record that shows I have MySky?) and was clearly reading from a sheet - and a slightly inaccurate sheet at that (it missed a couple of menus, although I knew where to go). At the end of the day, the tech on the phone couldn’t help. Although I could again get to the hidden menu, I had forgotten that MySky doesn’t offer a nice simple “choose the satellite” menu - instead you get to enter the frequency and angle yourself, which is information I don’t have. I’m so busy with work and unpacking that I figured that I’d just not bother trying anything else and let the tech fix it. It turned out that it was a cable around the wrong way. However, this isn’t totally my fault - the satellite cable gets split and plugs into the MySky box twice. One lead is white and one is black. There are no indicators at all on the MySky box or the splitter that indicates that there is any difference between the two (no #1 and #2 or ‘white’ and ‘black’ or any markings at all). I’ve unplugged and re-connected MySky many times, and must have luckily picked the same place to plug each cable in, since apparently if you get them the wrong way around you get no signal. Couldn’t the tech on the phone have mentioned this? Even just a “try swapping the black and white cables” would have sufficed. If I’d had more time to play around with things I would have disconnected everything and tried again, and might have randomly selected the right way around, but I didn’t have time for that. Even suggesting that, though, would have been something. I guess they really want their $50 moving fee. For about 5 minutes of technician time. Bah.

iPhone works fine on prepay

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 20:20:54 +1200

The Vodafone NZ website clearly states that the iPhone (3G) will not be “available” on Prepay. For various reasons, I swapped the SIMs in my prepay Vodafone phone and our on-contract 3G iPhone last night. The iPhone worked without any problems at all with the Prepay SIM. Phone calls and SMS worked fine, as did (as you would expect) all the non-phone features of the phone. I didn’t sync the phone, so it’s possible it’s disabled there, but that would be easy enough to work around if you had two SIMs as we do (and I doubt it actually is disabled there anyway). I didn’t try getting data (no plans are available for any Prepay customer, but the casual data is available) since we’re in a non-3G area, but I expect that also works. Possibly by “available”, they mean “available to buy” - i.e. unless you have a contact with them they won’t sell you one. However, we bought ours outright and they didn’t even get my phone number IIRC, so they had no idea if I had a contract or not. I guess they want to sell more contracts, but being honest wouldn’t really hurt that much, would it? They might even sell more phones, although maybe they don’t make much from that (I’m much more likely to get one if I can stick with my Prepay access).

Hardly news, but: Vodafone NZ sucks

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 11:54:48 +1200

They finally (hard to believe they waited this long) released their iPhone plans (the website is barely up at the moment - they own the second largest ISP in NZ, and can’t handle a bit of load!). I knew that the data would be expensive here, although I had a little hope when I saw the costs in Australia. This is much worse than I thought it would be, though. Are people really going to pay $250 per month?!? I guess so, but you’re excluding vast numbers of people that would be otherwise interested in this month. My guess is that the cost is indirectly Apple’s fault. At the WWDC keynote, Jobs pointed out that the cost around the world would be as low as (or lower than) the new US price - no doubt Apple enforces this in their contracts with the providers. Vodafone NZ doesn’t want to sell the phone for $199, but has to, so simply raises the contract price until they get what they want out of it anyway. This is twice as expensive as the US or even the complaining Canadians. And we have a reasonably decent 3G network, so the phone would have been useful here. The “250” plan costs $2,619 for 24 months. For that, you get the phone, 120 minutes, 600 txts, and 250MB of data a month. I’d pay that, but 120 minutes isn’t enough (we used about 200 minutes last month), and 600 txts are barely enough (580 last month). It’s the data that breaks the deal - 250MB is about 8MB a day. IOW, barely enough to check email and use the map occasionally. My Zabbix status page is about 3MB. I could check it twice a day. Ridiculous. The “500” plan costs $3719 for 24 months, and gives you the phone, 250 minutes, 600 txts, and 500MB of data a month (16MB a day). Perhaps enough data to use the phone as long as you were really careful and around accessible wifi a lot. But that’s a big jump in price. The “1GB” plan (I can’t believe that’s the largest!) costs a whopping $6349 for 24 months (3 and a third brand new iMacs!). 600 minutes, 600 txts, and 1GB of data (32MB a day). Too many minutes, and still not enough data, although it’d be useable. But $250 per month? There’s no way that I can justify spending that, even as a business expense (I would be using it to check the status of servers while out). A 2GB plan (paying the overage cost) costs $7069 for 24 months. 600 minutes, 600 txts, 2GB for $280 per month. The other option is to stick with our current plan and add a data pack. We currently get 60 minutes, 600 txts and also have three “best mates” (unlimited txts, pxts and calls) for $46/month. With the 200MB data plan added, the cost is $2950.75 for 24 months. That’s only just more expensive than the iPhone 250 plan, and would suit us much better (the best mates make all the difference). The difference between 8MB of data a day and 6.45MB of data a day is the difference between barely using the data and barely using the data. With the 1GB data plan added, the cost is $3430.75 for 24 months. Less than the iPhone 500 plan! Twice the data for less money! What are they thinking? More importantly, what are the suckers that sign up for this thinking? Sure you get 120 minutes with the iPhone plan, but we have three best mates that account for vastly more than 60 minutes of call time. Given that most of the calls and a large proportion of our txts are to those three people, we get better value for exactly the same usage for close to half the price. So: is it worth another $50 per month (and $1129 upfront) to have the iPhone? That’s a large chunk of money. It’s a great device, and we absolutely would use the GPS/mapping/data functionality that our iPod touch lacks. Lots of thinking in the next couple of days! A final note: the iPhone itself is $1129, the iPod Touch is $449. $680 for GPS, calls, txts, and (for lots more money) data while not connected to wifi. Pretty steep.

Meterage

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 17:00:55 +1200

There was a lengthy discussion on this week’s TWiT about bandwidth metering; the topic was discussed on the Daily Source Code for a few episodes a while back too. Although Dvorak is often excessively inflammatory and I don’t always agree with what he says, this was a case where he was clearly right and everyone else (well, Leo really did all the talking) is wrong. The biggest problem is that Leo is confusing two separate issues: