Slashdot Mirror

jerryatrix writes "Legends of the New Zealand Maori tell of giant man-eating birds. New scientific evidence proves that these birds did exist and were around the same time as humans in New Zealand. From the article, 'Scientists now think the stories handed down by word of mouth and depicted in rock drawings refer to Haast's eagle, a raptor that became extinct just 500 years ago.'"

tomachi writes "An accountant in NZ has been awarded $17,000 NZD for unfair dismissal after her boss fired her without warning for using uppercase letters in a single email to co-workers. The email, which advises her team how to fill out staff claim forms, specifies a time and date highlighted in bold red, and a sentence written in capitals and highlighted in bold blue. It reads: 'To ensure your staff claim is processed and paid, please do follow the below checklist.' Her boss deemed the capital letters too confrontational for her co-workers to read after they woke up from naptime."

Norsefire writes "A Parrot named Strawberry performed better than many humans in an investment competition. The human competitors were able to select any stock they wanted while the Parrot randomly selected the stocks with its beak. Strawberry had a 13.7% return, the human average was a 4.6% loss. Only two humans outperformed Strawberry."

Norsefire writes "A Japanese University is giving away iPhones to its students to use the phones' GPS functionality to catch students who skip classes. The University claims students currently fake attendance by having other students answer for them during rollcall, they also said that while this can be abused by giving other students the phone, they are much less likely to do this due to the personal information, such as email, a phone generally contains."

Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes "A New Zealand court has allowed a plaintiff to serve papers on a defendant via Facebook, following a similar ruling from an Australian court last year. But as these rulings do not necessarily mean, as Facebook announced in a press release, that the courts have endorsed Facebook 'as a reliable, secure and private medium for communication.' The trend could lead to abuses if courts start taking 'Facebook service' too seriously." For more of the many words written by Bennett, hop on that curiously named link right below.

A New Zealand court has ruled that a plaintiff can serve papers on a defendant via a message sent to their Facebook account. Last December, an Australian court ruled that a company could serve papers on a couple after failed attempts to reach them by regular mail and e-mail. Facebook responded to the ruling with a statement that said, "We're pleased to see the Australian court validate Facebook as a reliable, secure and private medium for communication. The ruling is also an interesting indication of the increasing role that Facebook is playing in people's lives." I think there are two interesting questions here: (1) Is that really how courts view service via Facebook? And (2) What will happen if courts do begin to view service via Facebook that way?

As to the first question — the court's endorsement of service via Facebook does not mean that they think the service is necessarily secure or reliable. Courts often let you serve papers on a party in a court case via means that are less reliable than normal channels, provided that you've exhausted the more reliable means first. When I was trying to earn my way into heaven by suing spammers in Small Claims court, some states allowed corporations to be served by serving the papers on the Secretary of State in the corporation's home state, but only if you could prove that you had tried and failed to serve the corporation at their registered address. In cases where I served the Secretary of State, it's unlikely that the defendant ever even saw the papers (since the only thing the Secretary of State could do with them was forward them to the defendants' address on file, where I'd already tried to locate them), but it still "counted" because I had exhausted the regular means of serving the documents. Sometimes when serving an individual, if the sheriff couldn't reach someone at home, a judge would sign an order allowing the legal papers to be stuck to their front door (which is neither "secure" nor "reliable"), but only after the sheriff had been unable to deliver it to them in person. So a court's endorsement of Facebook as a means of service doesn't necessarily mean the court thinks that the means of service is reliable. It just means it's a good last resort when conventional methods haven't worked.

Facebook is not, after all, secure or reliable, although these limitations are not the fault of Facebook itself. By "not reliable," I don't mean that it loses or mis-routes messages — I've never seen that happen — but that you have no idea whether someone has signed in to read a message, or deleted it by accident, or lost it among all the other messages that they received. As for whether it's "secure," like most services, the greatest weakness in Facebook's security is in the 'forgot your password' feature — if you compromise someone's e-mail account, then you can have a password reset link sent to their e-mail address and compromise their Facebook account as well. So your Facebook account is only as secure as your e-mail account, and e-mail accounts are usually vulnerable in their own "forgot your password" feature, which often lets you access someone's e-mail account just by knowing their birth date, their zip code, and the answer to an easy question like "Who is your favorite fictional character?" And in any case, obtaining "service" via Facebook doesn't preclude the possibility that the person you served on Facebook was an impostor, or another person who happened to have the same name.

What would really change the game would be if courts started ruling that service via Facebook was valid even without first attempting to serve a party via mail or other means. I had my own experience with a case like this in 2000, when programmers Matthew Skala and Eddy Jansson released a program called "CPHack" which could decode the encrypted list of sites blocked by a program called Cyber Patrol, so that people who owned copies of the program could use CPHack to decrypt the list of blocked sites. (One of the more controversial aspects of such blocking software is that the list of blocked sites is hidden from purchasers of the program.) A judge granted Cyber Patrol a ruling forbidding the authors from distributing the program, and ordering anyone hosting a mirror copy of the program to remove it as well. That same day, I received a copy of the ruling via e-mail from Cyber Patrol's lawyer, ordering us to remove the mirror from the Peacefire site. I asked a lawyer if that was considered valid service (this was back when I still thought that a legal question like that always had an objective answer, as opposed to the question of "valid service" being an entirely subjective one that depended on what judge you happened to get), and he said that I shouldn't take any chances and should take the mirror down anyway, which we did. Dozens of other mirror sites, which had sprung up in anticipation of the legal controversy, were also served with papers, although the overseas ones mostly ignored them.

So this was very different from a ruling made by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals two years later, allowing a Las Vegas casino to serve an offshore company via e-mail because regular methods had failed. The court in that case wrote, "When faced with an international e-business scofflaw playing hide-and-seek with the federal court, e-mail may be the only means of effecting service of process." But I was a domestic scofflaw whose mailing address was publicly known (in the WHOIS registration for the Peacefire site). What was the rationale for allowing me to be served by e-mail?

Unfortunately I think it's probably just a case where the rules were vague enough that the judge felt entitled to bend them to achieve an outcome that he wanted. The 9th Circuit didn't leave much doubt as to the level of objectivity in their ruling on e-mail service either, in calling the defendant an "international e-business scofflaw."

And these are the two main reasons why I think that allowing electronic "insta-service" via e-mail or Facebook — in cases where parties have not first tried to serve papers via regular means — would erode the rights of the little guy. First, in most of the cases I can think of where a powerful plaintiff was playing "whack-a-mole" with multiple defendants by using electronic service of process to shut down new sites as fast as they were springing up, the goal they were trying to achieve was (a) futile, if half the mirror sites were overseas anyway, and (b) ultimately incompatible with civil liberties. (Why shouldn't people have the right to decrypt the list of sites blocked by Cyber Patrol? After the ACLU got involved on appeal, a higher court ultimately ruled that mirror sites could not be ordered to take down CPHack. The HD DVD encryption key controversy is another well-known example.) In cases where a plaintiff has a legitimate claim against multiple sites — for example, sites that are violating the plaintiff's copyright by hosting unauthorized copies of content that they own — most service providers already publish an e-mail address where copyright owners can send a DMCA takedown notice, and where the copyright owner is risking large statutory financial penalties if they send a takedown notice that turns out to be baseless. There are no similar protections to prevent abuses of the system through electronic service of other kinds of legal notices.

The other reason this trend could work against the average person, is that any vague rule that is not consistently followed by different judges, puts non-lawyers at a disadvantage in court. Partly because it may confuse non-lawyers who hear that e-mail service was allowed in one case, and think that's part of "the rules," and then find that e-mail service was disallowed in another case, and wonder how "the rules" could allow it in one case but not in another, all the while laboring under the mistaken impression that there actually are "rules" which unambiguously determine whether or not e-mail service is allowed, when the truth is that it's just up to each individual judge. But also because every ambiguity in the rules is another opportunity for the judge's prejudices to influence the outcome. I do not think that most judges are prejudiced against people based on race or gender, but I doubt you could find any legal professional who thinks that most judges would take a case equally seriously regardless of whether it was brought by a professional lawyer or by a layperson representing themselves. (At one point in my spammer-suing career, I had only about a 50-50 chance of my motions even being read.)

So, let's not get carried away applauding judges for being "hip" and "with it" for allowing service via e-mail or Facebook. And if they start allowing it more frequently, can we at least ask that they pick one rule and stick with it?

Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes "A New Zealand court has allowed a plaintiff to serve papers on a defendant via Facebook, following a similar ruling from an Australian court last year. But as these rulings do not necessarily mean, as Facebook announced in a press release, that the courts have endorsed Facebook 'as a reliable, secure and private medium for communication.' The trend could lead to abuses if courts start taking 'Facebook service' too seriously." For more of the many words written by Bennett, hop on that curiously named link right below.

A New Zealand court has ruled that a plaintiff can serve papers on a defendant via a message sent to their Facebook account. Last December, an Australian court ruled that a company could serve papers on a couple after failed attempts to reach them by regular mail and e-mail. Facebook responded to the ruling with a statement that said, "We're pleased to see the Australian court validate Facebook as a reliable, secure and private medium for communication. The ruling is also an interesting indication of the increasing role that Facebook is playing in people's lives." I think there are two interesting questions here: (1) Is that really how courts view service via Facebook? And (2) What will happen if courts do begin to view service via Facebook that way?

As to the first question — the court's endorsement of service via Facebook does not mean that they think the service is necessarily secure or reliable. Courts often let you serve papers on a party in a court case via means that are less reliable than normal channels, provided that you've exhausted the more reliable means first. When I was trying to earn my way into heaven by suing spammers in Small Claims court, some states allowed corporations to be served by serving the papers on the Secretary of State in the corporation's home state, but only if you could prove that you had tried and failed to serve the corporation at their registered address. In cases where I served the Secretary of State, it's unlikely that the defendant ever even saw the papers (since the only thing the Secretary of State could do with them was forward them to the defendants' address on file, where I'd already tried to locate them), but it still "counted" because I had exhausted the regular means of serving the documents. Sometimes when serving an individual, if the sheriff couldn't reach someone at home, a judge would sign an order allowing the legal papers to be stuck to their front door (which is neither "secure" nor "reliable"), but only after the sheriff had been unable to deliver it to them in person. So a court's endorsement of Facebook as a means of service doesn't necessarily mean the court thinks that the means of service is reliable. It just means it's a good last resort when conventional methods haven't worked.

Facebook is not, after all, secure or reliable, although these limitations are not the fault of Facebook itself. By "not reliable," I don't mean that it loses or mis-routes messages — I've never seen that happen — but that you have no idea whether someone has signed in to read a message, or deleted it by accident, or lost it among all the other messages that they received. As for whether it's "secure," like most services, the greatest weakness in Facebook's security is in the 'forgot your password' feature — if you compromise someone's e-mail account, then you can have a password reset link sent to their e-mail address and compromise their Facebook account as well. So your Facebook account is only as secure as your e-mail account, and e-mail accounts are usually vulnerable in their own "forgot your password" feature, which often lets you access someone's e-mail account just by knowing their birth date, their zip code, and the answer to an easy question like "Who is your favorite fictional character?" And in any case, obtaining "service" via Facebook doesn't preclude the possibility that the person you served on Facebook was an impostor, or another person who happened to have the same name.

What would really change the game would be if courts started ruling that service via Facebook was valid even without first attempting to serve a party via mail or other means. I had my own experience with a case like this in 2000, when programmers Matthew Skala and Eddy Jansson released a program called "CPHack" which could decode the encrypted list of sites blocked by a program called Cyber Patrol, so that people who owned copies of the program could use CPHack to decrypt the list of blocked sites. (One of the more controversial aspects of such blocking software is that the list of blocked sites is hidden from purchasers of the program.) A judge granted Cyber Patrol a ruling forbidding the authors from distributing the program, and ordering anyone hosting a mirror copy of the program to remove it as well. That same day, I received a copy of the ruling via e-mail from Cyber Patrol's lawyer, ordering us to remove the mirror from the Peacefire site. I asked a lawyer if that was considered valid service (this was back when I still thought that a legal question like that always had an objective answer, as opposed to the question of "valid service" being an entirely subjective one that depended on what judge you happened to get), and he said that I shouldn't take any chances and should take the mirror down anyway, which we did. Dozens of other mirror sites, which had sprung up in anticipation of the legal controversy, were also served with papers, although the overseas ones mostly ignored them.

So this was very different from a ruling made by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals two years later, allowing a Las Vegas casino to serve an offshore company via e-mail because regular methods had failed. The court in that case wrote, "When faced with an international e-business scofflaw playing hide-and-seek with the federal court, e-mail may be the only means of effecting service of process." But I was a domestic scofflaw whose mailing address was publicly known (in the WHOIS registration for the Peacefire site). What was the rationale for allowing me to be served by e-mail?

Unfortunately I think it's probably just a case where the rules were vague enough that the judge felt entitled to bend them to achieve an outcome that he wanted. The 9th Circuit didn't leave much doubt as to the level of objectivity in their ruling on e-mail service either, in calling the defendant an "international e-business scofflaw."

And these are the two main reasons why I think that allowing electronic "insta-service" via e-mail or Facebook — in cases where parties have not first tried to serve papers via regular means — would erode the rights of the little guy. First, in most of the cases I can think of where a powerful plaintiff was playing "whack-a-mole" with multiple defendants by using electronic service of process to shut down new sites as fast as they were springing up, the goal they were trying to achieve was (a) futile, if half the mirror sites were overseas anyway, and (b) ultimately incompatible with civil liberties. (Why shouldn't people have the right to decrypt the list of sites blocked by Cyber Patrol? After the ACLU got involved on appeal, a higher court ultimately ruled that mirror sites could not be ordered to take down CPHack. The HD DVD encryption key controversy is another well-known example.) In cases where a plaintiff has a legitimate claim against multiple sites — for example, sites that are violating the plaintiff's copyright by hosting unauthorized copies of content that they own — most service providers already publish an e-mail address where copyright owners can send a DMCA takedown notice, and where the copyright owner is risking large statutory financial penalties if they send a takedown notice that turns out to be baseless. There are no similar protections to prevent abuses of the system through electronic service of other kinds of legal notices.

The other reason this trend could work against the average person, is that any vague rule that is not consistently followed by different judges, puts non-lawyers at a disadvantage in court. Partly because it may confuse non-lawyers who hear that e-mail service was allowed in one case, and think that's part of "the rules," and then find that e-mail service was disallowed in another case, and wonder how "the rules" could allow it in one case but not in another, all the while laboring under the mistaken impression that there actually are "rules" which unambiguously determine whether or not e-mail service is allowed, when the truth is that it's just up to each individual judge. But also because every ambiguity in the rules is another opportunity for the judge's prejudices to influence the outcome. I do not think that most judges are prejudiced against people based on race or gender, but I doubt you could find any legal professional who thinks that most judges would take a case equally seriously regardless of whether it was brought by a professional lawyer or by a layperson representing themselves. (At one point in my spammer-suing career, I had only about a 50-50 chance of my motions even being read.)

So, let's not get carried away applauding judges for being "hip" and "with it" for allowing service via e-mail or Facebook. And if they start allowing it more frequently, can we at least ask that they pick one rule and stick with it?

An anonymous reader writes "Campbell Smith, CEO of the RIAA equivalent in New Zealand, has written an opinion piece for one of New Zealand's largest daily papers, in which he tries to justify the new 'presumed guilty' copyright law. This law allows recording industry members to watch file-sharing activity and notify ISPs of users who are downloading material. The copyright holder can then demand that an ISP disconnect that user — without the user ever having a chance to demonstrate their evidence."

vik writes "According to local media, multiple eye witnesses are reporting that a meteorite crashed into a warehouse in Auckland, New Zealand last night, setting it on fire. The warehouse roof was destroyed but no nearby buildings were damaged and there was only one minor casualty — a man who happened to be inside the building at the time. The fire service have not yet made an official announcement."

musther writes "An Australian airline Qantas Airbus A330-300, suffered 'a sudden change of altitude' on Tuesday. "The mid-air incident resulted in injuries to 74 people, with 51 of them treated by three hospitals in Perth for fractures, lacerations and suspected spinal injuries when the flight bound from Singapore to Perth had a dramatic drop in altitude that hurled passengers around the cabin." Now it seems Qantas is seeking to blame interference from passenger electronics, and it's not the first time; 'In July, a passenger clicking on a wireless mouse mid-flight was blamed for causing a Qantas jet to be thrown off course.' Is there any precedent for wireless electronics interfering with aircraft systems? Interfering with navigation instruments is one thing, but causing changes in the 'elevator control system' — I would be quite worried if I thought the aircraft could be flown with a bluetooth mouse."

sloit writes "Most people spend more than 25 per cent of their time online at work on personal activities. And 80 per cent of emails sent by volume in the workplace are personal. Bosses often have no way of tracking Internet activity or policies to define what staff can and cannot do. Paul Hortop, who reviews company network security for consultancy Voco, said the most common websites visited by personal web surfers were online trading sites, instant messaging/chat services and peer-to-peer sharing sites (allowing movie, music and software sharing)."

The Master Moose writes "A judge in New Zealand has banned the press from reporting online the names of two men accused of murder. The names of the men will be allowed to be reported in print as well as through Television and Radio broadcast. It would seem he has taken this step to prevent someone 'googling' these peoples names in the future and finding them linked to a crime if found innocent."

bsdewhurst sends along an interesting article about how MediaSentry and the RIAA identify file sharers. Since 2003, while the RIAA has been filing 28,000 lawsuits, the percentage of US Internet users using P2P for downloading music has dropped from 20% to 19% (there is no knowing how much of a factor the lawsuits have been). The list the RIAA uses for ISP takedown notices is about 700 currently popular songs that are updated based on the charts, so not liking the top 40 could save you. The list of songs tracked for the user-litigation program is said to be larger.

TallGuyRacer writes "German police are unable to decipher the encryption used in the internet telephone software Skype to monitor calls by suspected criminals and terrorists, Germany's top police officer, Joerg Ziercke, said. "The encryption with Skype telephone software ... creates grave difficulties for us... We can't decipher it. That's why we're talking about source telecommunication surveillance — that is, getting to the source before encryption or after it's been decrypted.""

An anonymous reader writes "The New Zealand Ministry of Education has declined to renew a licensing deal for MS Office on 25,000 Macintosh computers in the country's schools. The Education Minister has suggested that schools use the free alternative NeoOffice. The article quotes a school principal who pointed out that the NeoOffice website warns users to expect problems and bugs: 'That's not the sort of software we should be expecting kids in New Zealand to be using.'" Schools are free to buy their own copies of Office. A blog on the New Zealand Herald site argues that the Ministry should have paid Microsoft this time, but not renewed the deal and instead developed a transition plan to open source.

An anonymous reader writes "The New Zealand Ministry of Education has declined to renew a licensing deal for MS Office on 25,000 Macintosh computers in the country's schools. The Education Minister has suggested that schools use the free alternative NeoOffice. The article quotes a school principal who pointed out that the NeoOffice website warns users to expect problems and bugs: 'That's not the sort of software we should be expecting kids in New Zealand to be using.'" Schools are free to buy their own copies of Office. A blog on the New Zealand Herald site argues that the Ministry should have paid Microsoft this time, but not renewed the deal and instead developed a transition plan to open source.

An anonymous reader writes "Why pay $20,000 for a commercial link to run your television station when a $10 kitchen wok from the Warehouse is just as effective? This is exactly how North Otago's newest television station 45 South is transmitting its signal from its studio to the top of Cape Wanbrow, in a bid to keep costs down."

Jake96 writes "A judge in Wellington, New Zealand, declined to convict a man who ran an unrequested security audit on a bank's phone systems and was charged with 'intentionally accessing a computer system knowing he was not authorized to,' according to an article in the New Zealand Herald."

Audent writes "Otago University researchers are concerned by U.S. plans to protect satellites from solar storms... "The approach, which is being considered by the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, involves using very low frequency radio waves to flush particles from belts and dump them into the upper atmosphere over either one or several days". The plan could disrupt GPS signals and high frequency radio over the Pacific for up to a week. "The disruptions result from a deluge of dumped charged particles temporarily changing the ionosphere from a "mirror" that bounces high frequency radio waves around the planet to a "sponge" that soaks them up.""

tito writes "A New Zealand company has successfully turned sewage into modern-day gold. New Zealand Herald is reporting that a Marlborough-based Aquaflow Bionomic yesterday announced it had produced its first sample of bio-diesel fuel from algae in sewage ponds. It is believed to be the world's first commercial production of bio-diesel from 'wild' algae outside the laboratory - and the company expects to be producing at the rate of at least one million litres of the fuel each year from Blenheim by April."

An anonymous reader wrote to mention a New Zealand Herald article about a pterosaur that has been discovered to have an almost 18 meter wingspan. From the article: "A Spitfire has a wingspan of 11m and has to be powered by a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine. Pterosaurs did it on a diet of fish and a superb ability to utilise air currents, thermals and ground effects. There is nothing close to pterosaurs alive today. Pterosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago, they left no descendants and we don't know quite what their closest relative was."

Unloaded writes "In the New Zealand Herald, Adam Gifford has written an article blasting Microsoft for burying the New Zealand Intellectual Property Office in paperwork. One example is Patent 525484, accepted by the office and now open for objections until the end of May, which says Microsoft invented and owns the process whereby a word-processing document stored in a single XML file may be manipulated by applications that understand XML."

Antarctic Lemur writes "At the Powerhouse Museum LOTR Exhibition in Sydney, Peter Jackson has said a film version of The Hobbit is three years away at least. Reasons for the delay include the sale of MGM, which part-owns the movie rights to The Hobbit, and Jackson's recently filed suit against New Line Cinema, the other part-owner. Jackson is currently filming King Kong at his new facility in Wellington, NZ. Slashdot readers will also be interested in the high security planned for King Kong's pre-release screenings."

Noel Bourke sent in a pointer to this story about northern nations maneuvering to claim land in the Arctic. Fossil fuels, shipping lanes, and fishing are among the economic interests at stake, in an opportunity opened up by the melting Arctic ice.

An anonymous reader writes "The New Zealand Herald has an interview with Ben Goodger, lead engineer for Firefox at the Mozilla foundation. In it he describes how he got started, his reasons for Firefox's existence and what the future may hold for the little browser that could."

usefool writes "After the U.S.'s first extradition request against an Australian man was denied, the U.S. appealed that decision and has now won the right to try Hew Raymond Griffiths in the U.S."

JC writes "It looks like Tolkien fans will get one of their biggest dreams with Turbine's Middle-Earth Online. Originally expected about November, we're now looking at a Northern Hemisphere Autumn release date. The New Zealand Herald has a good article."

ukcollin writes "NASA successfully launched the Aura satellite today after several previous failed attempts. The Aura satellite was launched by a 12-story Delta 2 rocket, at 6:01am (EST) from Vandenberg AFB in California. The satellite is reported to have cost in excess of $785 million dollars, and its main mission will be to study the Earth's ozone to try and determine if the ozone hole is shrinking or increasing. Although it will be focused on the stratosphere (the ozone layer), it will also be tracking pollution, climate changes, etc. by scanning and analyzing each of Earth's atmospheric levels all the way down to the troposphere."

sn00ker writes "In this story in The New Zealand Herald, we learn that the NZX stock exchange has moved their database systems to Oracle running on RedHat Linux, running on commodity Intel-based hardware. What's really impressive are the performance numbers they're claiming. Quoth the article, "One key query - searching the data on historical trades to identify maximum trade values - has been cut from 36 seconds to 0.03 seconds." An improvement of over 1000 times is spectacular in anybody's books, and is one hell of a boost for the proponents of Linux at the back-end of the financial world."

freitasm writes "The New Zealand Herald and Stuff are reporting on a 1.3kg, four billion-year-old rock that fell through the roof of a house in suburban Auckland, New Zealand. Their insurance company will pay for the hole in the roof and couch and two holes in the ceiling. The meteorite itself, a chunk of an asteroid, could have been basketball-sized when it impacted Earth's atmosphere at 15km a second. By the time it hit the house, its velocity had probably slowed to 100-200m a second."

Suhas writes "The New Zealand Herald and many others such as Yahoo/AP are reporting that Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King has swept the Oscars by winning in all the 11 categories it was nominated in. Good to see Peter Jackson finally got the Best Director award! The official Oscar site has a full list of the winners."

Makarand writes "According to this article in The New Zealand Herald scientists at Massey University (NZ) are using GPS to monitor racehorses during their training programme. GPS technology is being used to follow horses around a racetrack and measure how far and fast horses gallop each day. This GPS data along with heart rate measurements is transforming racehorse training into a science."

rh2600 writes "The New Zealand censors have banned Rockstar Games' controversial stealth action PlayStation 2 game Manhunt, making it the 'first [ever] video game banned by the Office of Film and Literature Classification.' The New Zealand Herald has a story about it, including some pretty interesting comments from a usually liberal Censor's Office: 'Unlike the Grand Theft Auto series, which... had an element of humor in its depiction of police chases, Manhunt has none of that whatsoever.'" The censor concludes by saying: "You have to at least acquiesce in these [in-game] murders and possibly tolerate, or even move towards enjoying them, which is injurious to the public good."

lump writes "A notorious spammer, based in New Zealand, who had his name and other personal info released first in a national newspaper, and then on the web, has shut down his operation, citing harassment. What interests me about this case is that, in the 5 or 6 days since he has supposedly stopped operating, I personally have had one (1) spam email, to an address which had previously averaged around fifty per day. Colleagues report a similar reduction in spam. All I can say is 'excellent.' Hate to say it, but in this case, vigilante type action seems to have had the desired result. This needs to be publicised, as anything which slows down spam can only be a good thing."

rabidgremlin writes "The New Zealand Herald has an article about a NZ based spammer who has shut up shop after being at the receiving end of an anti-spam campaign. Good riddance I say, but some of his comments ("never intended to break any regulations" and "I'll just stick to search engines and web sites - that's still plenty of fun and money.") had me wondering if he and other spammers are as really naive as the article makes out."

Anonym Feigling writes "For your consideration... An article over at the New Zealand Herald discusses some of the challenges a japanes team faces as it attemps to develop a system to create a clone from 20,000 year-old mammoth tissue samples discovered in Siberia. It seems to me that shortly after death, any animal's/plant's "cellular repair mechanisms" (for the lack of a better...) will fail, and thus the probability of finding a single cell with perfectly intact DNA from which to create a clone is pretty well zero. Interesting stuff, but it seems that practical considerations (think code rot) would make it difficult."

Siriaan writes "DE Technologies, a company based in Montreal, has hit a number of web retailers in the U.S., New Zealand and Singapore with patent infringement claims covering such things as purchase histories and online currency conversion. A small wooden model kit firm my company does business with is amongst those hit; they received a demand for a US$10,000 'signing fee' and then 1.5 percent of all transactions ongoing. "

Jonathon writes "Seems a Microsoft imposed restraint of trade agreement and concerns about the SCO suit have prevented a New Zealand company duplicating 500 CDs for our upcoming installfest. The installfest was mentioned on /. just days ago."

An anonymous reader writes "Three days ago I accepted Linux into my life and while I'm not yet a convert, the experience has shaken my faith in Windows. It's hard to reconcile because for nearly 20 years I've mostly stayed on the one true Windows path."

angkor writes with a link to this article about "How SMS messaging in China forced the government to acknowledge the 'fatal flu in Guangdong.' And the steps the Chinese government is taking to make sure it does not happen again."

Dee Arsmith writes "Peter Jackson's special-effects company Weta Digital has just taken delivery of 588 IBM blade servers, each with two 2.8 gigahertz Intel Xeon processors. Seven racks of IBM blade servers have been added to Weta's existing 15-rack server cluster to make up the largest Intel-based high- performance computer site in the world with more than 2000 linked processors. The cluster will be used to render the frames drawn by the animators to complete the final installment of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Return of the King."

kiwimate writes "This article discusses an executive order issued yesterday which delays the release of millions of historical documents until the end of 2006. Apparently, the relevant agencies need more time to study the affected papers, even though it only affects papers more than 25 years old. Evidently a quarter of a century is not a sufficiently lengthy review period. For a slightly different version of the same story, see here." For further news on the classification of "critical infrastructure" see Declan's story. In related news.. Phybersyko writes "Declan McCallagh at cnet.com(website) reports (story)that "President George W. Bush has signed an executive order that explicitly gives the government the power to classify information about critical infrastructures such as the Internet." Do we chalk this up to the cost of "freedom" or are we repeating the same mistakes the Catholics made in the Middle Ages (keep em' ignorant and our rule is secured)...."

pidge-nz writes "Hmmmm. Does a country own the rights to its name? Looks like the WIPO thinks not. Here's the New Zealand Herald short article on the decision. My Personal opinion is that they all are a bunch of plonkers - all three partcipants. NZ Govt for not bothering to register the name earlier, Virtual Countries for not bothering to ask to use/"license" the name, and the WIPO for setting a stupid precedent."

wonton_mein writes "The New Zealand Herald is doing some daily coverage of the LOTR - TTT. Can't wait for Dec. 18."

wireless junkie writes "NZ Herald has an article about a 3 sq km wireless network. Roaming, seamless handoff, VoIP, and its only the demonstration network. 100 sq/km coming soon (according to the RoamAD site) MiniStumbler on an iPaq shows a whole heap of signal on and near downtown Queen Street. All I want for Christmas..."

wireless junkie writes "NZ Herald has an article about a 3 sq km wireless network. Roaming, seamless handoff, VoIP, and its only the demonstration network. 100 sq/km coming soon (according to the RoamAD site) MiniStumbler on an iPaq shows a whole heap of signal on and near downtown Queen Street. All I want for Christmas..."

Headspace2 writes "Weta Digital (The graphics company behing LOtR computer effects) has just purchased 220 2.2GHz dual Xenon machines, each with 4GB of ram, to add to their current render wall of 350 1 Ghz P3 systems. They have also placed an order for another 256 Xenon servers. And it's all running Linux. My favorite quote is 'it is thought the server farm will be the most powerful processing site in the Southern Hemisphere'. They should use that in the FotR ad campaign... 'Rendered using the most powerful processing site in the southern hemisphere' Congrats the guys that get to play with all those clock cycles. Make more movies.

mumkin asks: "I have been shopping for a new domain and am considering going with a more obscure ccTLD for my namespace needs. I like the thought of my lan being a virtual extension of a tropical isle or wind-swept steppe, and generally looking weird in people's logs :) Ideally the NIC would lack a full-on whois server, for that extra degree of anonymity. It is important to me that the registry be doing something worthwhile for the country whose TLD it's hawking, and not just ripping them off. Oh, and I want nothing to do with VeriSign, so .TV and .CC are right out (sorry, Tuvalu! sorry, Cocos Islands). So, the question is: what tiny ccTLD registrars allow non-resident registration, are trustworthy, inexpensive, preferably privacy-conscious, and give something truly meaningful back to the countries whose domains they sell? Here's what I have so far -- who else should I be looking at, or what have I got wrong?" Read on for mumkin's ccTLD listing.

.AS : American Samoa. American Territory. Pop ~68,000. The registry is based in New York City and makes no mention its relationship to American Samoa, or what if any benefits accrue to the people of AS in exchange for the sale of their TLD space. Cost: $45/year. Whois: limited.

.CX : Christmas Island. Home of the dreaded goatse. Part of the Indian Ocean Territories of Australia, pop ~ 3,000. Recently shafted by the bankruptcy of Planet Three, nic.cx is now (according to its website) "a community owned Christmas Island non profit company." $9.60 of every reg. fee goes to the "Christmas Island Information Economy Development Trust," underwriting the cost of internet service on the island. Service which is currently really limited (2 hours/day of dial-up for $25/mo). Cost: $37.40/year. Whois: yes

.HM : The Heard and McDonald Islands. Australian External Territory, Pop: 0. An antarctic island group, mostly covered in glaciers, generally off-limits to visitors. A UN world heritage site. The nic is managed by an Australian guy, and the reg fee pays for the costs of running the registry. All [surname].hm addresses are unavailable, as those have been sold to the mysterious www.my.hm email service. Probably the most morally neutral ccTLD to grab a domain in, since there are no residents to disenfranchise. Cost: $35/year. Whois: none

.PN : Pitcairn Island. British Overseas Territory. Home of 44 descendants of the Bounty mutineers (half of whom are currently under investigation for more recent unsavory acts). Supposedly the sale of domains will help to bring internet access to the island, (they currently have limited, $3.50/min satellite connection, courtesy of a seismic monitoring station on the island. Cost for a domain: auction. Whois: broken

.PS : Palestinian Territories. With only 50 domains registered, the .ps namespace is wide open. It's the only NIC I can think of that's likely to be bombed/raided/otherwise reduced by a military force, since it's located in beautiful Ramallah. Given the US Govt's current mindset, owning a .ps domain could also make you a Person of Interest to any number of three-letter agencies. Cost: $45/year. Whois: limited

.SH : St. Helena Island and .AC : Ascension Island. British Overseas Territories with a population of ~6,000 and ~1,000 respectively. Jamestown, St Helena is the capitol from which the islands of St Helena, Ascension, and Tristan da Cunha are governed. The NIC is run out of London and provides free name service and registration for anyone with residency. Ascension is an an incredibly well-networked island for its size. Cost: $100 first year, $50/year thereafter. Whois: yes

.TJ : Tajikistan. Central Asian nation, pop ~6,250,000. NIC is run by two guys in Fresno who also run one of the two Public Registrars for Tajikistan. No information about their relationship to Tajikistan, or what if any benefits the country may receive from their registry fees. Site last updated in '98. Cost: $25/year ($8/year within .com.tj, .web.tj, etc) Whois: yes

.TP : East Timor. Big news a while back, the media seems to have forgotten about them once the shooting stopped. Their TLD is managed by Connect-Ireland as a public service to the Timorese diaspora. There is little documentation on the site, and it's unclear where the $35/year registration fee goes. Xanana Gusmao, former resistance leader and current president, is the Administrative Contact! Note: on May 20th, the ISO 3166 list changed East Timor's alpha-2 designation to TL (Timor Leste). Presumably the IANA will soon change their TLD accordingly. Cost: $35/year. Whois: none"

mjl writes: "It seems that Time Warner is not the only ISP that limits bandwidth of residential customers. In New Zealand, Telecom is also blocking the use of well known P2P applications. What Telecom fails to recognise is that these people are pushing the envelope of what the Internet can do, and will drive the technology economy in years to come."

Kryptonomic writes: "New Zealand's marine experts are puzzled by the parasitic sponge-like animal that could threaten NZ's aquaculture industry. Apparently the animal, which so far has not been identified, kills all other sealife by embedding itself on the victim and slowly feeding on it. The parasite also reproduces asexually and could end up dominating the ecological niche it occupies."

angkor writes: "'A German court has ruled that oil giant Shell has more right to the www.shell.de internet domain name than an individual named Shell who had already registered the name.' It's like the old saying: your name may be McDonald, but you can't open a restaurant named McDonalds ..."