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I don't understand your post. This law was brought in by a Labour Party minister, and supported whole-heartedly by the National Party ministers. Meanwhile, a more socialist party, the Greens, would repeal section 92A of the Act.

So... are you full of shit?

In New Zealand the minister responsible for this, Judth Tizard, was kicked out the parliament after losing in the recent NZ election. Many people in the IT community worked against her.

Getting kicked out didn't stop her from going on a radio tirade about how it was necessary to remove due process and oversight by cutting off people who *might* be infringing. Yes, she even says "might". She actually believes she's doing this for the good of New Zealand and many other people in power do too.

The law will come into effect in February 2009 after a parliamentary vote so we've got until then to change minds. People against these parts of the law should join the groups working against this such as Internet NZ and the NZOSS.

The Labour party (which she was part of) lost the last election and now the National party are in power. It remains to be seen whether they're going to do better but we can only try.

ACTA is DMCA style legislation wrapped up into a Treaty. This treaty wishlist includes making ISPs liable for any copyright infringement that passes through their network.

Think about that... If you ISP lets copyrighted material through to your computer, without knowing for sure you're allowed to get that content, then your ISP is the one who will face prosecution as secondary-infringers.

How are ISPs to respond to that? By only letting you talk to sony.com etc? By blocking all encrypted communication where they can't see what you're sending? It's either shows a huge misunderstanding of how the internet works, or intentional malice to line the pockets of copyright collecting companies.

So while the treaty remains secret, several media companies (Time Warner, News Corp, Sony, Walt Disney Co) has been consulted.

The result of the treaty is to hand the worlds ISPs to Time Warner, News Corp, Sony, Walt Disney, etc. If you're indebted to another company just to be in business then you are owned by them.

Internet New Zealand has responded with this: Internet NZ submission and there are many other responses here Coffee.geek

Did a little searching and it looks like New Zealand may well be ahead of you. To quote from InternetNZ .

"Clause 19 introduces a new computer offence of intentionally accessing a computer system without authorisation; commonly known as "hacking" (new section 305ZFA) (the unauthorised access offence). However, the offence will not apply to everyone because clause 19 provides qualified exemptions for the following State agencies:

1)the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service (the SIS) (new section 305ZFB)
2)the Government Communications Security Bureau (the GCSB) (new section 305ZFC)
3)"law enforcement agencies", such as the police (new section 305ZFD)."

Etc...Can't find if it has been passed yet though. That was in 2001. Would look more, but I'm supposed to be studying.

Great post. How long did that take!

Currently in NZ we are looking at this approach. Basically combining an ENUM implementation with a Universal Communications Identifier (UCI) and personal proxy (PUA) for handling all IP and PSTN communications. Note, it can apply to all IP comms, not just voice.

Could have a profound impact on spam from a technoliogical *and* economic perspective. Does not require the degree of co-operation of other spam "solutions".

The feasibility study, which our company was commissioned to undertake is worth downloading if you are interested.

Great post. How long did that take!

Currently in NZ we are looking at this approach. Basically combining an ENUM implementation with a Universal Communications Identifier (UCI) and personal proxy (PUA) for handling all IP and PSTN communications. Note, it can apply to all IP comms, not just voice.

Could have a profound impact on spam from a technoliogical *and* economic perspective. Does not require the degree of co-operation of other spam "solutions".

The feasibility study, which our company was commissioned to undertake is worth downloading if you are interested.

I think if I bring it back in a roundabout way it isn't off topic. I don't think we discussed patents much tonight, but we have the NZ patent watch site up for techie-related patents. Why it's not off topic? A lot of this format shifting stuff is to do with the intellectualy property people use to stop us format shifting.

(Context for other people: I'm physically at an InternetNZ members' consultation meeting right now in Wellington.)

I think if I bring it back in a roundabout way it isn't off topic. I don't think we discussed patents much tonight, but we have the NZ patent watch site up for techie-related patents. Why it's not off topic? A lot of this format shifting stuff is to do with the intellectualy property people use to stop us format shifting.

(Context for other people: I'm physically at an InternetNZ members' consultation meeting right now in Wellington.)

After all, xtra.co.nz was also the ISP that wrongly sued ORBS out of existence. It comes as no shock to me at all that they'd try anything they could to benefit themselves as a company, and screw their users in the process.

It is because of such deplorable practices that xtra.co.nz, as a domain, enjoys permanent residency in Blue Feather's 'Deny Access' list. I'm sure I can't be the only admin who's done that.

Bank.nz was the most recent new 2ld proposal. It failed at the voting stage; 56% of voters supported it, but 70% is required.

Voting results are here.

It's actually the second time the NZ Bankers Association has proposed it - it didn't make it in 2000 either. There's an IDG article about it here.

Not sure why the "12th second level domain" phrase surprised you. The New Zealand Domain Name Structure describes the current structure and processes surrounding the creation of new second level .nz domains. It mentions that the general form of NZ domain names is name.domain.nz where name is the user chosen name, and domain is one of .ac, .co, .cri, .gen, .govt, .iwi, .mil, .net, .org and .school.

The fact that that document only lists 10 second level domains surprises me as this would make .geek.nz the 11th...

I'm not expecting many comments on this, but there is the .nz domain SRS project. There's been a lot of discussion on it. From InternetNZ:

The SRS will, as much as possible, be built on an open source platform, particularly software meeting the licence approval conditions of the Open Source Initiative (see http://www.opensource.org/licenses/index.html ), So long as the security requirements of the system are not compromised, this means that the source code of the system will be available to all and with no licence fees.

I'm interested to see how this pans out. - Jonathan

I'm not expecting many comments on this, but there is the .nz domain SRS project. There's been a lot of discussion on it. From InternetNZ:

The SRS will, as much as possible, be built on an open source platform, particularly software meeting the licence approval conditions of the Open Source Initiative (see http://www.opensource.org/licenses/index.html ), So long as the security requirements of the system are not compromised, this means that the source code of the system will be available to all and with no licence fees.

I'm interested to see how this pans out. - Jonathan