The excellent New Zealand History online put up a comprehensive Wahine feature ahead of last night's TVNZ documentary marking the 40th anniversary of the disaster, including a timeline, photos, audio and video. Check it out here.

Te Ara - The Encyclopedia of New Zealand - also has some quite dramatic Wahine videos and personal accounts in its shipwreck section here.

It's good to see two Ministry of Culture and Heritage websites putting our history into digital, accessible form. I'm calling it an acceptable use of our tax dollars.

Posted by Chris Keall at 5:19 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )

Google's "do no evil" catch-cry didn't last long after it expanded into China as the search giant gained official approval through feeble self-censorship. Worse, during the Tibetan riots Google.cn and the Chinese version of YouTube mysteriously went offline. Similarly, Yahoo left its blue-jeans, rebellious image behind in California when it launched in China, immediately kao-towing to the government.

Sure, lots of Western companies do lots of bad, obsequious stuff when trying to break into markets controlled by undemocratic governments. But Google and Yahoo are supposed to be different, personifying freedom of information. I'd expected more.

Futher reading on those scores:
YouTube, Google blocked in China amid Tibetan riots
Yahoo forced to apologise to Chinese dissidents
At least Yahoo seems to be making an attempt.

To see Google as Chinese people might see it, I thought I'd conduct an experiment.

First I went to Google translate, and using a tool still in beta, translated "riots in Tibet" into Chinese. Then I cut and pasted the resulting Chinese script into Google.cn. The first page in the result was, of course, in Chinese, but Google's translate tool also lets you translate whole pages if you paste in a URL (try it with a French or Spanish newspaper's home page URL, it's pretty amazing stuff). Google translate came back with:

Google - Message 2006年4月14日 上午 08:00:00 4/14/2006 08:00:00 am

天街小雨润如酥，草色遥看近却无。 Street light rain days Run as cakes, grass Yaokan almost no color. 今天就是这样一个日子，春意盎然，生机勃勃。 Today is such a day, spring and vitality.

在这个耕耘的季节，Google 取名”谷歌„。 In this hard season, Google name "Google." 以谷为歌，是播种与期待之歌，亦是收获与欢愉之歌。 To Valley songs, and is looking forward to sowing song, and joy harvest songs.

我们希望，”谷歌„ 能为每一个人整合全球信息，让人人能获取，使人人都受益。 We hope that the "Google" for each individual to integrate global information, people can access for everyone to benefit from.

欢迎你到”谷歌„ 来，让我们为你搜索，给你收获。 Welcome you to "Google" Let us search for you, give you harvest.

一条条信息就像一株株小草，鲜活而充满生命力，汇聚起来，成一片新绿，无边无际。 A piece of information like a Zhuzhu grass, fresh and full of vitality, clustering, as a new green, boundless.

我们把每个网站当成一个选民，所有搜索结果的排名完全由这些选民相互”投票„ 公正决定。 We each site as a voter, all of the top search results entirely by these voters mutual "voting" fair decision. 因为我们相信，信息面前，人人平等，只有真正在网络上被大家公选、信赖的信息才是有价值的。 Because we believe that information before everyone is equal, only real people on the network by the election, and trust information is valuable.

Well, let's see if the information is fair and trustworthy and valuable, as chosen by the people - which I think is a fair paraphrase of the above, minus the paragraphs of idiotic harvest metaphors.

Typing "riots in Tibet" into Google.cn (in English) delivered a toady clip as the top result (although more balanced coverage followed):

Google.com (either extremely slow or censored if you access it from China) managed not one but two toady results at the top:

... while Google.co.nz managed to sneak one popular, much-linked to and valid news story its top 3. Still, pretty lame:

Compare that to the same "riots in tibet" query run through Microsoft's search engine, Live.com, and Yahoo (and dibs to Microsoft for including a more critical result from Google's YouTube):

Both make Google's results look, well, pretty dubious at best.

Posted by Chris Keall at 11:03 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

PC World Readers' Choice Awards voting closes March 31. Have your say on whether you would buy any particular brand again, or recommend it to a friend, and you'll be in to win $2500 in prizes. Vote here. It's much more satisfying than voting in any real-life election, and probably more useful.

Year zero
This year, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will go live in Switzerland, smashing atoms together at tremendous speed about its 27km circumference, the better to to unlock the secrets of the early universe, and generally investigate subatomic weird stuff.

But according to NewScientist, two Russian mathematicians - Irina Aref'eva and Igor Volovoich, say there could be an unexpected side-effect: the ability to time travel (which could be better than other mooted consequences, such as creating mini black holes. I'm no physicist, but I'm guessing they could make the credit crunch look like a minor problem).

And since theorists say you can't travel back in time - if at all - before the year the first time machine was invented, 2008 could obviously go down as something of a banner year for wormhole wannabees. The pair preface their paper with:

We argue that if the scale of quantum gravity is of the order of few TeVs, proton-proton collisions at the LHC could lead to the formation of time machines (spacetime regions with closed timelike curves) which violate causality. One model for the time machine is a traversable wormhole.

Imagine the possibilities. Taking what you have now, you could actually travel back to January 2007 and install Vista with the correct drivers.

Read the Ruskie's paper at the Cornell University (home of the late Carl Sagan*) open online library here.

*fyi, even if you're not a natural with impressions, anybody can do a good Carl Sagan. Just hold your nose as you say "billions and billions".

Posted by Chris Keall at 5:51 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

If I may slip into public service announcement mode for a moment:

The deadline for entering the Computerworld Excellence Awards 2008 is drawing close, with submissions due by 11 April.

This year there are some new categories, including three categories for individuals (CIO of the year, young ICT talent and ICT educator of the year) as well as a new green IT category; Best Sustainable ICT Project.

PC World readers will want to check out the small and medium enterprise IT category. If you win, fame and publicity await your company (pictured above, with visitors from Hawkes Bay: last year's small business winner HM Associates).

Other categories include excellence in the use of ICT in fields such as government, health and customer service, as well as best mobile, wireless or telecommunications solution. Go to computerworld.co.nz/cwea for further details on how to enter.

Posted by Chris Keall at 3:01 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

Fate has recently seen me use three antivirus programs in quick succession.

My personal theory is that any major security software, if kept up-to-date, is going to stop any virus or malware outbreak, since all the companies share fixes within hours.

So: my focus is on useability, stability and speed.

When my new laptop arrived the other week, it was without our company's usual solution - the corporate edition of Symantec's Norton AntiVirus, which has always hummed away quite happily in the background. It never gave me any grief, and I never got infected. My Symantec problems were always related to sidelining the corporate edition and installing a suite - most recently Norton 360. That's when I started to get plagued by CCapp.exe crashes at shut down. Symantec said a fix had been pushed out in updates, and the problem became less frequent, but early this year it was still bugging me.

Anyhow, after a day's naked surfing, I installed a trial version of AVG 8 on my new laptop. As I've previously written, AVG - available in both premium and free versions - has always rated strongly in PC World group tests because of its low overhead. It's leaner use of memory means it slows your system by around 2%, compared to up to 10% for other antivirus programmes.

However, I did find that AVG's control panel was very slow to load. Most security programs are sluggish in this department, but Symantec's was a couple of beats faster than AVG, and Mirosoft's Windows Live OneCare (which I'll get to shortly) is actually pretty snappy.

I made constant trips to AVG's control panel to disengage its firewall, and was disappointed there only seemed to be the option (without a reinstall) to temporarily disable it, not switch it off.

The naked surfer
Why would I want to do that? Because I've never been able to get a straight answer from any security company - or any specialist security commentator or writer - about whether the firmware-updated firewall built into my DSL modem/router provides enough protection, or whether it's necessary to install a software firewall on my PC as well. Some say the router-level firewall is enough, and my personal experience - of no major malware or virus infections in years - says it is, too. Certainly, it's faster.

Like Symantec's Norton and others, AVG's Firewall throws up gobbledygook questions: Should I block the "spooling subsystem?" And do I want Bonjour Service to access the interent? It sounds like something I might have picked up on a porn site, but I have no idea, and I work for a publisher of computer magazines (a quick search reveals it's associated with an iTunes install; why can't any AV program know that, and put it to me in more plain English fashion?). What do the great unwashed make of it?

And so I uninstalled AVG and saddled up Microsoft's antivirus and security suite, Windows Live OneCare Version 2.0.

Reaction to Microsoft entering this market has been so hostile that it almost gave me a naughty thrill to install this program.

Certainly, I thought I could reasonably expect OneCare to be a stong defender. As has been noted before on this blog, Microsoft has cherry-picked developer talent from all the major antivirus software makers to create the still relatively new OneCare.

And I also figured that performance has got to be pretty good (I'm running it with XP) since the OneCare team have got to have the inside running in terms of working well with Windows. And it has been quick, and its central control console is very user-friendly (though all the majors are these days).

I also prefer OneCare's Firewall queries. While their language is no more accessible than rivals, you at least get a nice summary dialog box that provides more info than a program's name or file name (above), which is helpful for your DIY research.

Like Symantec's Norton 360, you also get tune-up and back-up options - not part of AVG - which is sensible since the ultimate defence against any virus threat is to keep safe copies of your files. The only feasible auto backup option is to an external hard drive, however. Symantec hasn't bothered enabling Norton 360's online backup option for NZ at all. Microsoft has, but only for a photo-only backup service that costs $NZ90 a year (for 10GB) on top of buying OneCare ($99) and on top of your annual virus update subscription (after the first 12 months included in the purchase price).

That's expensive, and with broadband plans mostly capped around 1GB, and speed still crappy in most areas, making OneCare's 10GB photo backup allotment rather academic - and at $90 it's not that attractive compared to the freebie - if manual - 2GB+ being offered by Google and others.

Another glitch: OneCare crashed soon after I installed it. The error message didn't say if I needed to restart to regain full protection, but an endless stream of repeated error messages meant I didn't have any choice but to reboot (AVG remains the only crash-free program I've used). I'll keep you posted about whether this remains a live - or should I say Live - issue.

Politically, OneCare has a hill to climb. Many see a fine line between Windows updates plugging security holes (which we naturally expect free), and paid OneCare updates. Microsoft, for its part, would no doubt like to incorporate OneCare into Windows, gratis, but given its antitrust history with the US Dept of Justice and the EU, it won't even try.

There are other, more minor issues too. Windows Live OneCare is an awkward name. With its plastic case festooned with "One" and "1" in various places, I actually had to make a phone call to ascertain whether I'd been sent an incremental upgrade of OneCare Version 1, or the new Version 2.0. It turned out to be V.2.0, with all those "One" and "1"'s standing for the One in OneCare.

And there was humour to be had around the office as various journos struggled - like three-year-olds doing a psych test on Child of Our Time - to simply open OneCare's plastic case, which features a clip on the side but actually opens in a gull-wing hinge action. Anyhow, I'll keep you posted how things go.

[UPDATE] Just got a call from a Symantec product manager who pointed out that since launch there has been 2GB of free online backup for Norton 360 customers, with 5GB or 10GB chunks of capacity available at extra cost. Blu-ray support has also been added for those who want to back-up to an external drive rather than online. He said he'd been unable to replicate my CCapp.exe error ... anyhow, 360 Version 2.0 is on its way shortly, so I'll let you know how that goes.

Posted by Chris Keall at 6:53 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 7 )

The Eliot Spitzer prostitute scandal has definitely taught me something - if only about a better music download model for aspiring musicians.

Previously I've written about sellaband.com, a site where a budding band can place their songs online. If 2500 visitors like it, and each chips in $US20 - then, like New Zealand's Maitreya, you'll get $US50,000 to record an album. Three songs from that album must be made available free via sellaband.com. The remainder are sold for $US0.50 each. Half the profit goes to you, the other half to your army of shareholders.

But that's all a little convoluted. The hooker who slept with former New York Governor Spitzer also had a music career on the side, pushing her wares through a site called Amie Street. The model there is that songs are priced according to popularity. When you first place a song for download, it's free - the better to encourage people to try your unknown songs and spread the word. But as your popularity increases, so does the price of your music, to up to $US0.98 a track - of which the artist gets to keep 70%. And there's no DRM. Nice model.

In the case of Spitzer's escort Ashley Dupre, a little instant tabloid celebrity has helped, too. The two songs she's had lurking on Amie Street for a while - both described as Britney lite - have both taken off, earning her an estimated $200,000 between them, plus a little mainstream radio airplay.

Against the day
My Nokia 95, which gains its intelligence from Vodafone's network, thought daylight savings ended today and duly tripped by phone's clock back an hour.

There's not much you can do about your phone's clock acting dumb, but if you want to inform your PC the end of daylight savings time has moved to April 6, you can download a patch from Microsoft's website here (which actually covers Windows Mobiles as well as PCs).

Posted by Chris Keall at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

This just in: Computerworld's Ulrika Hedquist spent the day charging down to Thames for the scheduled court appearance of 18-year-old Owen Walker, the alleged ring-leader of an international botnet coding group that attacked the University of Pennsylvania.

Walker didn't show, but Ulrika did become the first journalist to eyeball his charge sheet, and just filed a report here.

Posted by Chris Keall at 5:15 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

Yesterday, Orcon became the first ISP to launch plans around the govt's unbundling of the local loop, with 24Mbit/s plans announced for limited areas of Auckland.

Now Vodafone (whose brand now includes the ISP formerly known as ihug) says it is following suit for a mid-year launch of unbundled plans.

"We are currently installing 'super IP DSLAMs' from Huawei into the first 15 exchanges to be unbundled. We've already completed the first five of these," says Vodafone's GM of Technology for fixed line, David Diprose in a media statement.

Vodafone says its gear will be in 40 Auckland exchanges by the end of the year, and 20 exchanges in other centres.

"These DSLAMs are 'super' because in the one cabinet they translate the plain old telephone call into IP, deliver ADSL2+ broadband and deliver VDSL2 broadband. This truly is a next generation network," says Diprose

Those lucky enough to have access to VDSL2 - which will be offered to an estimated 20% of unbundled customers - and who live within 1km of their exchange, can expect speeds of up to 50Mbit/s download and 20Mbit/s upload.

[UPDATE]: Thanks to Michael Foreman and Jan Birkeland, we now have a slideshow revealing the guts of Telecom's Ponsonby exchange. If you want to see a snaking coil of cables to 7,371 broadband and 15,153 telephone connections, check it out here.

Posted by Chris Keall at 2:44 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

Finally. More than a year after the government decided to unbundle the local loop, on Thursday Orcon became the first ISP to allow you to set up a standard home phone line, and broadband connection, without having to deal with Telecom (another regulatory change means you can keep your Telecom phone number if you switch; Orcon says the process should take half a day).

The new plans are possible because, under the new local loop unbundling regime, Kordia-owned Orcon has been able to install its own ADSL2+ gear (made by Nokia-Siemens) inside Telecom's suburban exchanges - but so far only five of them, and all in Auckland (Glenfield, Browns Bay, Ellerslie, Mt Albert and Ponsonby).

Orcon says it hopes to add another 10 exchanges by the end of May, and "major cities in stages" over 2008 and 2009 (the slow pace is not Orcon or any other ISP's fault; rather that the Commerce Commission has required Telecom to unbundle exchanges only at the stately pace of 15 a quarter, meaning it could take 10 years to open all 650 to competition - and our dominant telco is in no hurry to open its local loop to competitors).

Big plans
Orcon's new plans, all under the Orcon@home+ banner, range from
$79.95/month for a 10GB data cap and no phone line to
$99.95/month for a 10GB cap, unlimited free local and national calling, voicemail, call waiting and caller ID, with unlimited international calls to 15 countries for $10 extra/month to
$119/month for a 25GB cap, unlimited free and national calling, all the calling extras mentioned above plus the option to call 14 more countries for $10/month, plus a free Orcon "Homehub" wireless router.

All the Orcon@home+ plans offer extra data at $1/GB, or slightly cheaper if you buy a bulk block, and all are ADSL2+ so, if you're close enough to your local exchange, with a clean enough line, you'll get up to 24Mbit/s download, and up to 1Mbit/s upload. Reviews Editor Scott Bartley has become the first PC World staff member to get his home connection via an ADSL2+ connection, and he reports download speeds of up to 12Mbit/s. No where near the theoretical maximum but, boy, I'd take it.

For people living in areas yet to have their exchanges unbundled, Orcon has released a range of unbundled bitstream (UBA) plans, which also add phone services, but without voicemail, call waiting and caller ID.

Posted by Chris Keall at 12:41 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

NZ PC World has made its decision: we're backing Barack Obama. Or at least his choice of font, Gotham Condensed, which is being used in all the presidential candidate's print and online material - and which we've adopted for NZ PC World's redesign, due to be unveiled with our May issue. You could say Obama's our type of guy. Read A Font We Can Believe In for more on Gotham, originally designed for GQ.

PC World Readers Choice Awards 2008
Don't forget to vote. Your voice counts, especially with our new qualatative voting system, which looks beyond market-dominance by asking whether you would buy a particular product again, or recommend it to a friend. Plus, you can win $2500 in loot. Vote here.

Achtung, Babies: Jerry is here
Keen followers of our Press F1 forum will have noted an invasion - if I can use so impolitic a phrase - of members from PC Welt (aka PC World Germany) who claim to be bored with their own forum. Hundreds of posts and thousands of page views have ensued, proving New Zilinders have no monopoly on free-ranging threads that more or less ignore IT altogether. But it's all good.

Posted by Chris Keall at 10:22 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )

Government departments have been exchanging people's personal data on unencrypted CDs, today's Computerworld reveals, exclusively naming the govt agencies involved:

The Ministry of Social Development, Immigration New Zealand and Land Transport NZ are among several government agencies found to have been transferring data about individuals on CD with neither encryption nor password protection.

Computerworld requested further information last week on the results of a review conducted by the Privacy Commissioner of the security of government agency data-matching programmes. That information reveals multiple instances of lax data protection, with data being transferred either totally unprotected or with low levels of protection.

Read Rob O'Neill's full report here.

It's shocking stuff. You would think government agencies everywhere would be tightening things up after the UK govt's November loss of two CDs containing the personal details of 25 million people.

And just on a day-to-day level, I've previously bagged Iron Mountain for some not very iron security. Over the holidays I was similarly unimpressed to see an Iron Mountain truck (one of the company's own, rather than a fill-in taxi truck, as per my previous picture), charged with removing shredded documents from Auckland City Council's main building, totally abandoned, with every door open. I guess the driver didn't want it to get all hot in the sun while he was off catching some lunch.

Posted by Chris Keall at 12:17 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

We have a changing of the guard today as NZ PC World Deputy Editor Ted Gibbons steps up to become Editor.

Ted - already being dubbed "The Teditor" - brings strong skills and authority to the position. His history of IT and consumer electronics writing includes the editorship of Tone magazine, and contributing to MacGuide, among other titles. You're in good hands with Ted, aided by our Reviews Editor Scott Bartley, Staff Writer Jan Birkeland and Art Director Miro Slabbert.

Me, I'll still be lurking in the background, having become Editorial Director across Fairfax Business Media's NZ publications (PC World, CIO, Computerworld and Reseller News). All already dominate their respective fields. I'll be working with their editors to sharpen print and add more - much more - to their websites.

But enough company news. It's time for some company bragging. Figures just in from Nielsen NetRatings show pcworld.co.nz has consolidated its position as the nation's number one magazine site, and number three site across all newspaper and magazine categories. Thanks for dropping by everybody (and yes, my Mac.com friends, you can now start to wonder: Did he just whip us up into a Vista hate frenzy to goose PC World's Nielsen ratings? But of course):

Posted by Chris Keall at 2:06 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )

Recent press has been brutal for Woosh. Some themes are familiar: top-level staff jumping ship; the red ink (the little ISP that couldn't lost $21.7 million for the year ending June 2007, bringing its cumulative losses to a staggering $117 million); and the technology merry-go-round - from wi-fi to proprietary IP Wireless technology to throwing in a little plus DSL, to now a move back to wi-fi via WiMax spectrum bought for $549,000 during the govt's Dec auction, and apparent plans to ditch the DSL business it gained when - to the consternation of everybody - Woosh bought landline ISP QuickSilver.

But now a much darker note has been added to the conversation: can Woosh survive?

Woosh CEO Kevin Wiley hasn't helped things with his not-entirely-upbeat-language, telling the National Business Review's Amy Williams that it is not time to write his company's obituary yet - an unfortunate phrase that triggers memories of Auckland's excruciatingly over-defensive "Who says this city doesn't have a heart?" campaign.

Now Wiley says Woosh is in talks with several potential "partners" (or "saviours" as the NBR calls them), including CallPlus. But I'm not sure what Woosh would bring to the party. It's balance sheet is dire, as detailed by Computerworld here, and in transitioning to WiMax it's essentially conceding that it's backed the wrong technology, and start much of its network from scratch.

Woosh there it is:
Computerworld: Woo$h
NBR: Woosh looks for its saviour
DomPost: Woosh ponders DSL pull-out
Even Keall: I told you so

No idea
Keen readers will have noted former NZ PC World stalwart David Pomeroy recently appeared on Trinny & Susannah Undress the Nation, sparking Trinny to scream at one point during his makeover, while pulling at the top of Dave's jeans, "Oh my God, you're not wearing any pants".

Dave, now back in NZ (the episode was filmed last year) phoned me yesterday to claim that he was indeed wearing underpants during the incident in question.

Moreover, Dave - ever the hustler - wangled a reunion with T&S during their visit to Auckland's Westfield St Lukes shopping mall last weekend. Dave arrived with an entourage from New Idea who covered the hook-up (why was I not invited?), so watch out for it in their next issue.

Trinny is certainly making herself at home on Dave's shoulder, providing apparent confirmation that he is indeed the sort of gentleman given to wearing pants. Not sure about that shirt though, Dave, with its Predator sheen.

Going into labour, Facebook-style
Checking in on Facebook this morning - as you do when you're the editor of a tech magazine that must keep up with the latest developments in social networking - I saw that a former PC World account manager had just changed her Status to "gone into labour - exciting". It's certainly very 2008 to slip a soc-net update into your birth plan. Good luck, Kerry.

Posted by Chris Keall at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )

A couple of weeks back, I covered how A-list fantasy author Neil Gaiman was running a poll on his website. Visitors were asked to vote which of his books would best suit a newcomer to his work, with his publisher, HarperCollins, promising to make the winning novel free online.

Gaiman's American Gods was duly elected the winner, but HarperCollins has not made it free to download, save or print. Rather, you've got to wait for the text to stutter - sorry, stream - onscreen, not-quite one page at a time in a "beta" player called Browse Inside. I defy anyone to read more than three pages. Give it a go here. The best you can say is that it's a properly formatted document file, not one of the wonky, crooked scans that constitute Amazon.com's book previews.

No Matter
What else am I grumpy about this morning? I've just finished Iain M Banks' Matter, and I was disappointed. It seemed dashed off. Leave that sort of writing to me. More discussion about Mr Banks in my original Gaiman post here.

Free Shorty Street
TVNZ continues its move from its mind-numbing $2 and $4 points system to free, ad-supported downloads. From tonight, each episode of Shortland Street will be availabe as a free-download "catch-up" the following day on tvnzondemand.

Posted by Chris Keall at 10:23 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 2 )