Slashdot Mirror

PhoenixOr writes "New Zealand is now on the top of my list for cool governments. They've opened a wiki allowing the populace to craft a new version of their Police Act, the legislative basis for policing in New Zealand."

uh oh notes a story from Down Under where a police investigation came to a screeching halt as a man being investigated by the police found tracking devices in two of his cars, ripped them out, and listed them on an auction site. "Ralph Williams, of Cromwell, said he found the devices last week in his daughter's car, which he uses, and in his flatmate's car after the cars were seized by police and taken away for investigation."

jon_cooper writes "Air New Zealand, Aquaflow Bionomic Corporation and Boeing are working together to develop and test a bio-fuel derived from algae. Aquaflow Bionomic Corporation began operating in May last year after it met a request from the local council to deal with excess algae on sewage ponds. Boeing's Dave Daggett was reported this year as saying algae ponds totaling 34,000 square kilometers could produce enough fuel to reduce the net CO2 footprint for all of aviation to zero."

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers from the Nanomaterials Research Centre at Massey University in New Zealand have developed synthetic dyes that can be used to generate electricity at one tenth of the cost of current silicon-based solar panels. These photosynthesis-like compounds work in low-light conditions and can be cheaply incorporated into window-panes and building materials, thereby turning them into generators of electricity."

Gearu writes in with an article about a hefty refund coming to New Zealanders. It opens, "Telecom New Zealand has admitted it made an error with its Go Large broadband plan and is to credit customers of the service. An internal technical review of the service, launched in October, identified an issue with how internet traffic was being managed on the plan. The Go Large plan was promoted as having traffic management applied to certain applications, but since December the traffic management process had affected all forms of activity. With around 60,000 customers on the Go Large service, the refunds were expected to total $7.5 million to $8.5 million."

An anonymous reader writes "A fleet of icebergs is heading north from Antarctica and at least one has reached New Zealand, an event that has not occurred in decades. While not necessarily a consequence of global warming it is very cool!"

Korgan writes "A little over 3 years after their last upgrade, Weta Digital has just added another 250 more blade servers to their render farm to help with the final renderings of King Kong. From the article: "The IBM Xeon blade servers, each with two 3.4 gigahertz processors and 8 gigabytes of memory, are housed at the New Zealand Supercomputing Centre in central Wellington. They have been added to the centre's existing bank of 1144 Intel 2.8GHz processors, boosting its power by 50 per cent to create a supercomputer with the equivalent power of nearly 15,000 PCs. The servers run the Red Hat version of the open-source Linux operating system. The purchase means the centre is back among the 100 largest supercomputing clusters in the world." And all that computing power is still available for hire when Peter Jackson isn't using it."

kv9 writes "The new Mazda Sassou while being 'cool and promoting a positive state of mind' has a most important feature, that every geek will love. Instead of the classic key it uses a usb flash drive for starting up. The key can also be used to transfer things like driving instructions or music to the car's hard drive."

out_sp0k1n writes "Ryan Hamlin, head of Microsoft's Technology Care and Safety Group spoke out against New Zealand's proposed anti-spam legislation, warning that it could impinge on 'the amazing vehicle of e-mail marketing'. He also suggests that CAN-SPAM has been effective in deterring spammers. From The Article: 'Though often criticized as too meek, US anti-spam legislation - which relies on people opting out of spam - has proved effective in supporting prosecutions and deterring spammers.' Anyone else think that one message doesn't count as spam?"

nigelr writes "The New Zealand Ministry of Education has signed a deal with Novell New Zealand to provide SUSE Linux desktop licenses in schools. The article claims that while the price for a desktop license now matches what Microsoft charge, the new deal will significantly reduce the over all cost due to reduced charges for existing Novell products used in schools around the country."

Sabathius writes "Users have found a way to skirt copy protection on Napster Inc's portable music subscription service just days after its high-profile launch, potentially letting them make CDs with hundreds of thousands of songs for free...""

Spaceman40 sent in this ZDNet story. PeterPumpkin collects way too many links to Firefox stories: "According to SpreadFirefox.com , there were almost 3 million downloads of Firefox 1.0 in the 5 days since launch, which comes to over 500,000 downloads per day. There are news bites coming out about Firefox everywhere you could possibly imagine. According to a report on MozillaZine, Denmark's largest television channel, TV2, reported on the release of Mozilla Firefox 1.0. PC-WELT, the German equivalent of PC-World, is distributing their own customised version of Firefox to customers." Thomas Hawk writes "Rather than go outside for the past 48 hours, Scott Granneman prefers to burrow in his den and come up with one of the first definitive lists of Firefox links. Good geeking Scott. And way to overcompensate."

sushi writes "NZ's Stuff news site is reporting: 'Peter Jackson's special effects shop Weta Digital has teamed ... to establish a world-class supercomputing facility in Wellington which will be rented out to clients worldwide.' Currently comprising 504 IBM blade servers, each of which contains two 2.8 Gigahertz Intel Xeon processors, 6 Gigabytes of memory and 40 Gigabytes of storage, and ranked 80th in the top 500 supercomputers, they are intending to upgrade into the top 10. Also covered at the Australian Financial Review."

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."

Bloodrage writes "The New Zealand government is about to define a small part of the rights assumed by the 'fair use' clause in the Copyright Act 1994. Essentially they are going to protect the consumers' rights to convert media from one format to another for personal use, making it clearly legal to transfer tracks from a commercial CD to a mix-CD, MP3 player, PDA, PC, 8-track, or tuned array of hummingbirds. NZ law already makes it clear that gifting or reselling items includes a transfer all of rights, including copyright, warantee, and licencing agreements, so providing your original is the genuine article you're not a criminal. An article in the The Dominion Post gives an outline of the responses from the recording industry and why the government is considering it. It boils down to; this is 'fair use' and don't argue, and that the government can't see how the alternative could be (affordably) enforced."

An anonymous reader writes linking to this story at stuff.co.nz, excerpting: "Five hundred powerful computers used by Weta Digital to help create the special effects for the Lord of the Rings may be put up for hire.... The pizza-box sized IBM blade servers each incorporate dual 2.8 gigahertz Intel Xeon processors and 6 [gigabytes?] of memory." Update: 03/22 07:08 GMT by S : The linked story says 6 megabytes of memory, we don't believe 'em.

Danny Rathjens writes "Frozen bacteria from Antarctica, estimated to be between five to eight million years old, were brought back to life simply by warming them up! NASA folks also participated since they think this can give them better clues on where to look for life on Mars."

gxc writes "The world's first free national wireless grid is no longer with us, after waves from Cyclone Heta swept over Niue's thirty metre cliffs, destroying everything. Although only one person died, the damage is so bad that there is talk of winding up the country , meaning their fortuitous ccTLD could go the way of .su. Perhaps the easiest way for Slashdotters to help Niue would be to choose a .nu domain over the dull alternatives."

gxc writes "The world's first free national wireless grid is no longer with us, after waves from Cyclone Heta swept over Niue's thirty metre cliffs, destroying everything. Although only one person died, the damage is so bad that there is talk of winding up the country , meaning their fortuitous ccTLD could go the way of .su. Perhaps the easiest way for Slashdotters to help Niue would be to choose a .nu domain over the dull alternatives."

An anonymous reader writes "The topic of pigeons and modern technology has come up a number of times now. For instance, we have the Google pigeon rank method, and there have been several April fools hoaxes like this previous story and RFC 2549. Now the Waikato Times is reporting in this story about how pigeons are being used to transfer large amounts of data in a short amount of time. The pigeons have proven to be faster and more relieable than electronic means. However, as you will see from the story there is still the occasional packet loss. This is definitely a case of high bandwidth wireless networking."

donnz writes "Things are getting a little out of hand in Wellington today. For those of you who have not spent the night sleeping on the sidewalk CityLink have been wiring up webcams all over the place. Keep up with all the news and links on Stuff.co.nz. Just to show we are twice blessed, the sun is shining."

donnz writes "Things are getting a little out of hand in Wellington today. For those of you who have not spent the night sleeping on the sidewalk CityLink have been wiring up webcams all over the place. Keep up with all the news and links on Stuff.co.nz. Just to show we are twice blessed, the sun is shining."

Thanks to Forbes for their distinctly acerbic look at new scientific surveys that make claims linking videogames and addiction. The piece suggests: "Pick a popular consumer technology and there's probably some overpaid academic expert somewhere who's calling it addictive", and goes on to query definitions of addiction, suggesting: "...pretty much anyone who uses the Internet in the course of their work day... could meet some arbitrary early-1990s standard of [Net] addiction." The article concludes: "When was the last time you heard of a case of 'newspaper addiction?'"

SoupIsGoodFood_42 writes "A company called GeoVector has come up with a system that lets you point out a location. They say it could be used to get info on buildings and objects. E.G. pointing your mobile device at a movie theater could tell you what's on. They've also developed a "real world" version of Doom. So don't be surprised if you're in Japan early next year and see people running holding their cellphone/PDA like a gun."

small but... writes "A six-meter long specimen of a species of squid [Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni] previously only known by the stomach contents of sperm whales has been caught by a fishing vessel in Antarctic waters, and brought to the national museum of New Zealand. It has a huge beak, sharp swivelling hooks on its suckers, and is believed to be a juvenile. Adults of the species are thought to grow to as long as twelve meters. No reports indicate the presence of lasers; or, for that matter, anything I would consider a forehead."

sigh71 writes "Stuff.co.nz is running a story on Peter Jacksons next big project, remaking the original King Kong. To be written by the same guys who wrote the scripts for Lord of the Rings. Google for more info."

sigh71 writes "Stuff.co.nz is running a story on Peter Jacksons next big project, remaking the original King Kong. To be written by the same guys who wrote the scripts for Lord of the Rings. Google for more info."

Justin Macfarlane writes "From Stuff: 'Net surfers use the back button more than any other key. A computer scientist has made the command more useful, writes Will Harvie.'"

Slashback tonight with several updates and amplifications, starting with a nice report on the current state of the effort to put Linux into the heart of the German government, but also bits on Starcraft, cleaning up UNIX config, and Kerberos.

This deserves a hearty 'Jawohl!' DocSnyder writes: "Since the Bundestux campaign started collecting votes in favor of putting Free Software into the German parliament (Bundestag), more than 25000 people have done so. A lot of online discussions - in addition to Heise News and Linux-Community.de, even some Bundestag parties have put up their online forums - are very active to share user experience about GNU/Linux and Free Software. (Sorry for most of the linked sites speaking German, it's simply too much to translate at once.)

After several open letters and press releases have been exchanged between lobbyists and politicians, some information about a research performed by the German company Infora appeared on Heise News (english version), recommending an all-Microsoft infrastructure with the exception of some security-critical services like e-mail. The detailed paper is still not available.

An internal test (english version) between the Bundestag administration, SuSE, IBM and Microsoft confirmed that GNU/Linux and Free Software are in fact ready for the Bundestag's IT infrastructure, yet the testers don't like the copy&paste method used by KDE and recommend Windows for the desktops.

Last week, the Bundestag members (MdB) Jörg Tauss and Hans-Joachim Otto have been invited by Heise for an online chat with the community. While Jörg Tauss is a clear supporter of open standards and Free Software, Hans-Joachim Otto takes the internal test as well as Infora's research as primarily relevant for the coming decision.

On Saturday, MdB Uwe Küster summarized some details in an interview. He considered the decision - officially due Feb 28 - as almost finalized. The solution would show GNU/Linux on most servers, Windows XP and Office XP on the desktops, keeping proprietary data formats and lock-in interfaces up to the next upgrade cycle, which in fact would have been problem number one to solve.

All in all, the community has provided lots of experience, ideas and solution paths which finally seem to be largely ignored in the decision finding process towards the successor of a homogenous Microsoft Windows NT4 infrastructure, which has to be replaced until 2003 when Microsoft will no longer provide support for NT4."

That's a lot of cleaning up to do! maffew writes "A lot of feedback and ideas have been flying around since my article How to fix the Unix configuration nighmare was featured on freshmeat and slashdot. So we've created an ongoing web site and mailing list for people to continue discussing, organising, and hopefully in the end coding. It's all at unixconfig.sourceforge.net.

Meanwhile here's a link to the permanent home for the nightmare article. This is where I'm making revisions and adding links."

Raise your hand if this would mean seeing it for the 4th time ... Chris Brewer writes "In case you've been living on a different planet, The Fellowship of the Ring picked up Five Baftas, the British equivalent of the Oscars, including Best Director, Best Film, and Peoples Choice. During a live interview (Real only) after the awards, Peter Jackson announces that a preview for The Two Towers will be shown from the March 22 screenings of The Fellowship."

At long last ... something? If you've followed the strange relationship Microsoft has had with Kerberos, you may feel grateful to the anonymous coward who writes: "It would seem that Microsoft is granting the world a royalty-free, non-exclusive license to implement their Kerberos extension."

Here's some comfort for Starcraft players. An Anonymous Coward writes "As stated on Blizzard's battle.net service, the latest Starcraft patch supports UDP play, so some of the compelling reasons to use bnetd have been addressed. Whatever you may think of Blizzard and the DMCA, at least it shows Blizzard is listening to its fans."

sushi writes: "Another LoTR article: this one focusing on the technology used at Weta Digital (the CG shop). Interesting that they are undertaking "major" R&D into running more Linux, and that Linux "delivers about two times the price performance compared to systems running proprietary operating systems". I've been lucky enough to have seen inside this place, and it's cool to see a render-wall of linux boxen. Full story from a New Zealand newspaper." We linked to another good article about WETA a month ago.

Paul Egell-Johnsen writes: "All the Norwegian news papers, and some Swedish ones, are raving about the forthcoming "Lord of the Rings" movie after a 25 minutes screening at a chateau near Cannes. BBC reveals why the reviews are that positive, all those who atended had to sign a declaration of goodwill. A New Zealand report spins it differently, apparaently the audience was genuinely impressed. A quote from the end of the article: 'I don't think it will be a film for children. One of the big monsters was genuinely terrifying.'" The stills which have trickled out have been impressive to me, but it's sad if a positive-news-only policy is needed to hype it.

An unnamed correspondent writes: "It's census night tomorrow in New Zealand, and an email is doing the rounds asking all Star Wars fans to enter their religion as JEDI :) Should be an interesting experiment to what sort of momentum email can make over just a couple of days. It will take a few months to garner the results though." As the story says, though, "this could land potential Jedi in hot water as those who record false information, don't fill out census forms, or destroy them, can be prosecuted."

Repton writes "The New Zealand government is to give the Police NZ$1.1m, to pay Vodafone to modify their mobile network so the police can intercept calls. Previously, they had complained that, because Vodafone encrypts calls, preventing the cops from combatting "organised crime". Telecom (the other mobile network in NZ) has already made similar changes."

Repton writes "The New Zealand government is to give the Police NZ$1.1m, to pay Vodafone to modify their mobile network so the police can intercept calls. Previously, they had complained that, because Vodafone encrypts calls, preventing the cops from combatting "organised crime". Telecom (the other mobile network in NZ) has already made similar changes."

Greybeaver writes: "News story (10 January 2001) about the future of privacy in New Zealand. Where it seems that today's news from tomorrow is that the honest citizen need not fear the government. But, of course, that only holds until they make it illegal. Here's the story." Lots of countries have passed new laws to deal with "computer" crimes. That's not really news. New Zealand's proposed law actually allows police to hack into your computer system remotely to look for evidence, which I think is unique.

lim-bim-tim-wim writes: "The New Zealand government is planning to introduce powerful legislation to enable the Police, GCSB and Security Intelligence Service to hack into computers without the knowledge of the owner. Owners will also have to give up cryptographic keys and passwords on demand. ISPs and telecom companies will have to provide backdoors for government agencies. So how does this affect you? It appears this has been brought about by pressure from the FBI. So maybe your country is next. There is a short story at www.stuff.co.nz "