SuperHappyDevHouse

Coming soon to TVNZ 7, InternetNZ - and a dedicated page here on Geekzone. If you plan to tweet about this please use the tag #TVNZ7:


Broadcaster TVNZ 7 and online policy leader InternetNZ (Internet New Zealand Inc) are proud to announce the TVNZ 7 Internet Debate on Wednesday 11 August at 9.10pm, LIVE from Avalon Studios in Wellington and hosted by experienced journalist Damian Christie.

The TVNZ 7 Internet Debate will be broadcast on TVNZ 7, streamed online and will incorporate online chat and polling to debate one of the most contentious topics surrounding the Internet today – “Who is responsible for safety and privacy online?”

The Debate will investigate three contentious areas of the Internet age – the safety of children, government intervention such as Internet filtering, and the industry’s responsibility to keep our data private as use of social media grows.

The public can watch on TVNZ 7 (available on Freeview/TiVo channel 7 or SKY/Telstra channel 97, www.internetnz.net.nz/tvnz7debate, or www.geekzone.co.nz. Online conversation leading up to and on the night will be established on Twitter, Geekzone and Facebook.

An expert range of panelists has been assembled including NetSafe Executive Director Martin Cocker, InternetNZ CE Vikram Kumar, Family First National Director Bob McCroskie, Telecommunications Industry Group CEO Rob Spray, Watchdog International founder Peter Mancer and Taylor Shaw lawyer Kathryn Dalziel.

The show is part of TVNZ 7’s Spotlight on Science and Technology month and is produced by Wellington production company Top Shelf.

TVNZ 7 Channel Manager Philippa Mossman says “TVNZ 7 is all about discovering, discussing and debating and we’re pleased to be working with InternetNZ to bring this thought-provoking debate on a topic that affects each of us in a far-reaching way. It’s a logical fit with our focus on science and technology in August, but it’s as much a debate about contemporary society and culture as it is about technology.”

InternetNZ CEO Vikram Kumar says the online world has become an inextricable part of most New Zealanders daily lives.

“As more New Zealanders connect and the Internet continues to grow, issues of online safety and security, use and abuse of social media, government filtering and censorship are coming under the microscope.

“The TVNZ 7 Internet Debate focuses a lens on these issues, asking who is responsible for online safety and privacy in the context of parents & children, individuals vs. government and individuals vs. the internet industry.”

On the day of the TVNZ 7 Internet Debate a series of public workshops will be hosted by InternetNZ in Wellington and NetSafe in Auckland.
For more information see:

facebook.com/TVNZ7
internetnz.net.nz/tvnz7debate

It seems my previous posts on the iPad 3G coverage in New Zealand have hit something - a lot of people thought I was supporting one network operator or another. Not at all - it's just to let people know where they would get more from their new mobile device and why.

I urge people to read the first post in the series "Where can you get 3G coverage for your new Apple iPad in New Zealand" for a complete picture of 3G coverage and to understand what's at play here.

Now the good news: if you have plans to buy an iPhone 4 when it hits the local market this Friday, then you will have 3G almost everywhere, regardless of which mobile operator you decide to go with.

That's because the iPhone 4 works in all 3G frequencies currently available in New Zealand: 850MHz (Telecom XT), 900 MHz (Vodafone 3G Extended) and 2100 MHz (Vodafone 3G).

As per my previous posts, Telecom XT runs a single 850 MHz network.

Vodafone runs two 3G networks, complementing each other. Combined, Vodafone 3G (2100MHz) and Vodafone 3G Extended (900MHz).

Bot operators claim to cover 97% of the New Zealand population (or as they say "where people live, work, play").

Here is a comparison of 3G coverage you will get when using the Telecom XT (left) and Vodafone 3G/3G Extended networks (right):

Click the map for a bigger version. Make sure you visit both Telecom New Zealand 3G coverage map and Vodafone New Zealand 3G coverage map to see for yourself. When looking the Vodafone New Zealand map remember to check the 3G and 3G extended boxes to get the complete view.

In a previous blog post I explained where you can get 3G coverage for your new iPad in New Zealand.

Because the images I sourced had different resolutions I had to post one map for Telecom New Zealand and multiple maps for Vodafone New Zealand.

A reader sent me in a single large image showing side by side the Telecom XT and Vodafone 3G coverage. You can click the map to get a large version:

Everyone heard about the Hell Pizza database leak, but what is only now showing up in the media is a story that seems to be developing for more than twelve months. Back in August 2009 some Geekzone users reported receiving spam on email addresses used only with Hell Pizza's online ordering system.

At the time someone posted in our forums on behalf of Hell Pizza saying "we don't sell email addresses (very bad), nor have we been hacked (our web servers are behind dedicated, monitored firewalls). We use software from interspire and I'm not aware of any security vunerabilities in the latest version we have installed."

Fast forward thirteen months to this week and blog Risky.Biz published "I know what you ate last summer" where it reveals that "multiple intruders have compromised Hell Pizza's 400mb (sic) database. While it does not contain any credit card information, it does contain in excess of 230,000 rows of customer entries."

It continues "When contacted by Risky.Biz, Hell Pizza co-owner Stuart McMullin said he was unaware of the data breach. He offered no comment when a list of questions was e-mailed to him, beyond acknowledging the contact from "concerned customers" in 2009.

"I have spoken to my IT staff and they are not aware that our site was hacked or any records lost," McMullin wrote in an e-mail to Risky.Biz. "There were a couple of 'customers' that thought it was the case last year who emailed us - perhaps these are the sources you are referring to - but not to our knowledge."

The New Zealand media found the story, and the NBR published "Hell Pizza: customer database could have been hacked". Chris Keall contacted Hell Pizza director Warren Powell who said "Everybody gets hacked into, even the Pentagon." He also added "The potentially stolen data was "of no value to anyone."

That's the problem. The data is valuable to spammers and for anyone who would like to try any of those 230,000 passwords in other sites - it's a known fact that many Internet users simply reuse the same password in different sites. This can potentially lead to identity theft. This is serious business.

According to a story on Stuff "Hell's director Warren Powell told NZPA he is unaware of any breach in security, and IT staff have so far found nothing proving information has been stolen."

Now comes the interesting part... Mr Warren Powel said to Stuff "If there is breach of security it will appear, data would have been removed and therefore it would appear as a download. We'll be able to find out the day and the computer it was downloaded to and we'll be able to prosecute this person if they exist."

They won't find anything. If Risky.Biz is correct, the old Hell Pizza ordering system was developed with poor attention to security, and the application running on the user's browser was communicating directly with the database.

This means any connection to the database would be considered valid, therefore those "dedicated, monitored firewall" wouldn't do any good.

It also means anyone could issue commands to the database and receive a response with that data - in which case it wouldn't appear as a download at all, but as a normal web request in the web server logs.

I tried contacting Hell Pizza via email but received no reply.

People on Geekzone noticed the Hell Pizza Ireland website could still be running the old, apparently vulnerable version of the ordering system. Currently both Hell Pizza Australia and Hell Pizza UK are returning server errors, with messages that lead us to believe they too were running the apparently vulnerable site version until recently - perhaps taken down to prevent further access to data?

I was alerted by one of the Geekzone users of further evidence that there was a vulnerability on the old Hell Pizza ordering system, and a Google search reveals the existence of a script that was there only to execute SQL commands - so vulnerable in fact that even Google found it and cached a result:

In an email sent to customers this week, Stu McMullin, Hell Pizza Director says "Whilst we are still investigating the matter, we can confirm that the information was obtained without our knowledge and we have approached the New Zealand Police with a view to lodging a formal complaint.  Hell recognises the importance of protecting customer information and additional security measures were implemented earlier this year when our new website was rolled out (again, we reiterate that this is not an issue affecting the new website). As a further security measure your may wish to consider changing your passwords on other sites if they were the same as the old Hell Pizza website."

Juha Saarinen reminded us, via Twitter, of the Privacy Commisioner's Privacy Breach Guidelines.

How long since Hell Pizza had knowledge of this security breach? Or did they only realise something was happening after Risky.Biz contaced them? If they did have knowledge, why wasn't it disclosed before? Will we see other New Zealand companies working to improve their IT security practices after seeing this happening?

The Apple iPad was launched today and I've seen some comments on Twitter about 3G coverage. First thing to understand where you will get 3G coverage is to know which "type" of 3G the iPad can "see".

The Apple iPad (first generation) works on 850 MHz and 2100 MHz WCDMA bands. We have two mobile operators offering 3G in New Zealand, with a third one coming very soon.

Telecom New Zealand operates a 3G network in the 850 MHz band. Telecom does not operate a 2G network - wherever you get coverage it will be 3G.

Vodafone New Zealand operates a mix of 2G and 3G networks. It also operates a 3G network in two different bands, that is 900 MHz and 2100 MHz. Vodafone deployed 2100 MHz 3G in the main centres and larger towns, covering 70% of the population. The 900 MHz 3G band is available elsewhere.

This means that if you have an iPad and use Telecom New Zealand then you will have 3G access wherever you have Telecom XT coverage, because Telecom operates a 850MHz which is compatible with the iPad 850MHz 3G.

If you insert a Vodafone New Zealand SIM on the same iPad you will have 3G coverage only in its 2100 MHz 3G network. It means that where Vodafone offers the 900MHz 3G flavour you will be out of luck. Depending on coverage the iPad may operate in the much slower 2G (GPRS) network. How much slower? Think dial-up speeds, with much higher latency.

The maps below tell the story:

Telecom New Zealand 3G coverage page:



Vodafone New Zealand 3G coverage page (remember to check only 3G, not 3G extended):









Obviously coverage changes over time, so make sure you visit their coverage pages to check the current status.

If you are using Orcon Mobile, your 3G coverage will be similar to Vodafone New Zealand, because Orcon uses Vodafone for their network.

When 2degrees Mobile launch their 3G service, total coverage will be similar to that of Vodafone New Zealand, because while 2degrees has their own network in Auckland, Christchurch, Queenstown and Wellington, the rest of the country will be serviced by a roaming agreement with Vodafone New Zealand.

UPDATE: you can see both 3G coverage in a larger image here.

Our Geekzone forums have been very busy this week with reports of 2degrees making their new 3G network available for public use throughout New Zealand the last week or so. 2degrees is New Zealand's third mobile operator, with its own mobile network in the main centres and elsewhere using Vodafone New Zealand's network.

Today I met with 2degrees and was briefed in what's happening. This is the summary:

3G network is lit in most places, for testing. Their own technicians have been around the country doing their tests but they wanted more accurate usage patterns to start - so they have it running.

For example Wellington CBD was lit yesterday and they noticed 13% of the connections automatically switching to 3G. This is interesting because they currently don't sell 3G handsets.

The sad part is... 2degrees will be locking it down from end of next week. And we don't have a date for when the service goes live.

Their 3G network is paired with their current 2G network (meaning where you have a 2G site there will be a 3G site). Obviously different loads will make coverage different.

The 3G network is available in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Queenstown, covering 48% of the population. Other areas, as we know is going to be covered by a roaming agreement with Vodafone.

There are plans in progress for additional network coverage, with Hamilton and Tauranga town planning in progress. Due to resource consent times and 3G release this won't happen until next year though.

No commercial details are available - plans, packs, national roaming.

New 3G handsets will come out (surprise) and Android devices. Micro SIM will be available "soon".

I was given a Huawei USB modem with a SIM card to test, but it will stop working when the network is locked again next week.

And that's all I have to say - nothing else was disclosed.

In a previous blog post I presented some of the video advertising Microsoft is running in the UK. Here are some new videos, from Microsoft Tech Days. Jason Zander (GM, Visual Studio, Microsoft) gives a tour through some of Visual Studio 2010's new features, and building Windows 7 apps: Mike Ormond, from Microsoft's Developer and Platform Group, gives a session on the top 10 items that developers might be interested in learning more about in Visual Studio 2010 and ASP.net: Jason Zander as part of his presentation for Visual Studio 2010 demos how to build Windows Phone 7 mobile apps for Azure: Ian Griffiths of Interact Software unveils new and useful features in Visual Studio:

John Cleese explains the difference between those two sports, in an excerpt from The Art of Football...

A new video clip released by Vodafone Group PLC, about the mobile trend in the EU, access to Internet through mobile devices and policy making/lobbying. There are some interesting statistics in this video.

For example 83% of European households have a mobile handsets, but only 56% access the Internet regularly. Also 33% of European citizens have no Internet access (which I assume refers to landline Internet connections).

So what's the solution? "[Vodafone] have the potential to deliver the digital revolution to 500 million European citizens".




The interesting thing here is that Europe is probably the second biggest battleground (after China and India) in the mobile competition. Vodafone is up against O2, T-Mobile, Telefonica of Spain, all fighting for a share of those 500,000,000 customers.

What I would like to see though is what is Vodafone New Zealand's take on this aspect? Competition here is not as strong as in Europe. Does it make it less likely we could see such initiatives, or see price drops coming from the local operators?

Any insight you want to share in comments?

A friend of mine sent an email asking to point my readers to a survey on SMB purchasing habits. If you could answer that, it should take only a couple of minutes...

"... We have reason to believe that SMB owners/decision-makers act much more like consumers in their choice of the online information resources that subsequently affect their purchasing decisions.  Further, we want to expose important new insights into how SMBs' habits differ from those of general consumers, defining and understanding them better.  The expected outcome is to help ourselves, our clients and you create more effective marketing campaigns targeted at SMBs, and also to boost your value as a blogger by providing evidence of your influence on this critical segment. "

They are aiming for a minimum of 400 complete responses. And respondents fully completing the survey and providing a valid email address will be eligible for a prize. Seeing they expect to close the survey at 400 complete entries, there's a good chance to win something.

The prizes are:
1. Grand prize:  One Lenovo A70z all-in-one PC
2. Second prize:  Five prize packages, each containing one of each of the following three devices:
o One LG Bluetooth headset (HBM-210)
o One LG Bluetooth stereo headset (HBS-250)
o One LG Bluetooth Solar Car Kit & Emergency Charger (HFB-500)

I am told email addresses will only be used to contact eligible winners and WILL NOT be retained once prize selection has occurred.  Contact data will not be shared, neither any respondent will be contacted as a result of this survey.

The link for the survey is http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/SMB_purchase_decision-making.  Have in mind this is a U.S.-based survey when answering any questions regarding money (which are optional anyway).

Prizes are valid worldwide... Good luck!

Earlier today I was informed by ICONZ that our IPv6 addresses have been added to their firewall and routing configuration.

I have now added DNS information that allow users to visit Geekzone through an IPv6 connection. We decided to keep it simple and continue to use the current www.geekzone.co.nz URL for both IPv4 and IPv6 connections.

If you visit Geekzone through an IPv6 connection (native or tunnel) then you should see this logo:

If you want to make sure your connection can "see" our server, visit http://ipv6.geekzone.co.nz/ and the default page will show your IPv6 address. The ipv6.geekzone.co.nz test server does not accept connections from IPv4 addresses and it's only a test page.

Also note, this is probably one of the first New Zealand sites in the top online properties to go IPv6.

The movie trailer of the year: "Java 4ever" is a journey of discovery for a young hacker who questions his family use of .Net technologies. From the director of "Javatar" and ".Not":





One of the best geek jokes I've seen...

We run some video advertising on Geekzone, mainly in the UK, AU, and the US. While going through the list of ads currently being shown in the UK I came across a few Microsoft sponsored videos that I thought it would be interesting to share - not there's no ad revenue from these videos when seen outside the UK. The next two videos are extracts from an hour long documentary that takes you behind the scenes of Microsoft's "Visual Studio". We go back to the very beginning when Alan Cooper sold Visual Basic to Bill Gates in 1988 and take you into the future of the yet to be released Visual Studio 2010. Featuring conversations with those that were there since the very beginning including: Scott Guthrie, Dan Fernandez, Jason Zander, Tim Huckaby, S. Somasegar, Dave Mendlen, Dee Dee Walsh, Mardi Brekke, Jeff Hadfield, Alan Cooper, Anders Hejlsberg and Tony Goodhew: In the next video David Sprott talks on the evolution of SOA architecture: And finally, with the growing interest in "cloud computing", the subject of Identity is moving into the limelight. Kim Cameron is currently the chief architect for Microsoft's identity platform and a contributor to the field at large. This video comes from the Microsoft Architect Insight 2010 UK:

Today we found out Telecom New Zealand settled in a misleading broadband advertising case. This paragraph caught my eye:

"Telecom has also agreed to pay $75,000 to Consumer New Zealand Inc to assist in the funding of a telecommunications Price Comparison Project which is intended to provide an internet-based tool for consumers to compare the prices of different telecommunications products."

Wow! $75,000 is a lot of money.

Telecom, may I suggest instead you hand this money (or a good chunk of it) to James (Geekzone manhinli, Twitter @manhinli) a student who single-handledly (ok, with the help of a few other Geekzone users I know) has created New Zealand connections, a website that is (using your own words, Telecom) an internet-based tool for consumers to compare the prices of different telecommunications products.

I suspect he would be more than happy with some of this money, plus perhaps some hosting in a good datacentre, and links from your main corporate site. He could even spend more time in improving the awesome New Zealand Broadband Plan Finder page with all this.

Telecom, do the right thing. Consumer New Zealand is good, but there's someone out there who would do much better. I know. And you would be giving a young developer well deserved recognition.

PS. I have the impression Consumer New Zealand won't like me after this post.

It's incredible but TelstraClear does it again. Looking at their status page I see this:

But right now many sites such as Bing.com and Xero.com (both distributed through Akamai), plus Amazon AWS and others are unreachable through TelstraClear's network. Why would that be? TelstraClear tells me everything is fine!

Wait a minute... Look at the events pages at Xtreme Networks and you can read:

"TelstraClear DoS Attacks
Date: 26 May 10 16:13 - 27 May 10 00:00
Affected services: Cable, CityLink, Wireless, DSL, Hosted, E-Mail

Over the last week TelstraClear has been the target of DoS attacks coming out of the Asia region which in turn, affects all TelstraClear international traffic. When we become aware that an attack has commenced we are dropping our TelstraClear international BGP advertisements which forces all international traffic (after BGP advertisement propagation) through our Telecom international circuit. TelstraClear are keeping us up to date regarding mitigating the effects."

Why is it so hard for TelstraClear to come clean and provide information to its customers? 

It seems all my latest posts are about TelstraClear, New Zealand's second large ISP, previously voted "Best ISP" on Netguide People's Choice Web Awards (and asking for votes again, which I think will be difficult to win this year). But really TelstraClear seems to be making all the right moves to annoy its users. And I am one of them.

And TelstraClear is not a cheap ISP compared to others (I pay $149 a month plus the occasional excess use for their 80GB/month plan). Premium costs should provide premium service. And with that premium responsibility.

I have been with TelstraClear for more than ten years, way before it was TelstraClear. The cable service was called Saturn, and even before that it was Chello.

I always told everyone TesltraClear had the most reliable, consistently fast service in the country, but in the last nine months things are going downhill from where I see it.

I will try to look at some of the latest developments here, and it's going to be a longer post than usual (well, not when it comes to this topic).

First, there was their YouTube problem, which dragged for more than nine months, until they decided that yes, it was time to deploy a Google cache. I won't go into much details - read my previous posts on TelstraClear YouTube problem.

So now we have a Google cache deployed on TelstraClear. Things are looking a bit better but I am to be convinced they did provision an adequate sized cache. But that was a positive move.

It's a good move, and I believe they did well, seeing Google's policy seems to be to get as much free bandwidth as possible, by having large ISPs putting their caches, bringing content closer to consumers, but also guaranteeing Google an advantage in terms of content distribution at low cost.

This brings me to the next problem. For a few weeks now I have read lots of complaints about TelstraClear slow international traffic. I have experienced this myself. Every single day. It seems the YouTube problem was solved, but another one came to fill the vacuum created.

TelstraClear uses a transparent proxy. It means when we customers connect to a website we are actually connecting to their server, which in turn will cache the content to make it available later to other users requesting it again.

This works great, if the transparent proxy is actually transparent and doesn't show its ugly head to the users. Every now and them (it seems it's always in the morning) websites stop loading, or won't load completely. It always comes right after an hour or couple of hours. I wonder if the transparent proxy is being overloaded and something needs to be done there?

Then there's the international traffic in general. It looks like TelstraClear international pipe is being saturated. For example iTunes movie downloads that used to take 30 - 45 minutes to download now take 4 - 6 hours. Access to content hosted at Amazon services (such as Amazon AWS storage, used by many companies to distribute images for example) has been slow or simply not connecting at all. Twitter avatars for example.

TelstraClear doesn't "peer" in New Zealand with smaller ISPs. This means they don't exchange some of this traffic locally, with some of this local traffic on TelstraClear's network going overseas and then back into New Zealnd just to reach a server on another side of town.

Always wondered why using www.speedtest.net from Wellington and testing against the Wellington server gives you bad results? Because of this "international traffic". Look at these results (I am based in Wellington):

Try using one of the CityLink servers to download a Linux install file and see how slow that goes... And they are just around the corner (so to speak) from here!

Now, don't take my word, but that's what I think anyway - and I am not sure we will ever hear a confirmation from TelstraClear, but I think Google requires dedicated bandwidth for their cache. And TelstraClear forces a lot of "local" traffic over international links. It could be that international bandwidth has now some reserved bandwidth used by the new Google cache, without any additional bandwidth being provisioned for the existing use.

This comes also with a rumour I heard about TelstraClear having some problems with one of its providers of international traffic, Reach, which just happens to be a sister company, also owned by Australian telco Telstra.

TelstraClear promises to be deploying DOCSIS3 anytime now (which in TelstraClear terms means "in the next five years), but what good would it be for users, if the rest of the structure doesn't support higher speeds?

According to a Nielsen Market Intelligence ranking sent out today, there's a good reason to advertise on Geekone: our audience is not afraid of engaging online. A quick look at the table below and you'll see why (click for a larger version):



Remember this is for New Zealand domestic traffic only. Nielsen explains the methodology:

"The rankings do not show which websites have the actual highest traffic numbers (ie total number of unique browsers) of this demographic, but instead show which sites have the highest percentage of their traffic consisting of people who have purchased online from any website, for the month of April.

For example, techday.co.nz is the number one ranking because 55.4 percent of its unique browsers meet the demographic requirement, but their total number of matched unique browsers equals 6,025. geekzone.co.nz on the other hand, in third place, has 51.7 percent of its unique browsers that meet the demographic requirement but their total number of matched unique browsers equals 54,132."

For some public demographic information you can check our Geekzone information on Quantcast and select different countries from their list.

This comes from Vodafone Italy... A bit smarter than those annoying "ZooZoos" created by Vodafone India and currently causing brain damage to TV watchers in New Zealand. Don't get me wrong, Telecom New Zealand also had its silly moments, with those old "Clever Toys" ads showing stuffed animals being silly on the screen and paper.

Media Center users in New Zealand are faced with an interesting situation: the Freeview|HD service (our free-to-air DVB-T digital TV broadcast in high definition) transmits an electronic guide in two formats: the one, more common EIT which is limited to only the current and next TV program and the new MHEG5 which presents the whole week, allowing series link, etc.

The problem with the MHEG5 for most media centre users is the lack of support for this standard in the current software releases. What most people have been doing until now was to grab a special XML file from one of many sources online and apply it to their media centre.

However most content publishers (TV channels, satellite and cable services) say the contents on that file could be subject to copyright, and Sky even issued a takedown notice affecting the most well known website in New Zealand distributing that content. Surely a strange move, because I would assume in their business they want the most eyeballs as possible...

Anyway, two developers (SJB and giggles) decided to start a project that seems to be a different take on this: instead of downloading a XML file from the Internet, you can run a program on your Windows PC that will automatically collect the electronic guide from the broadcast and simply reformat it for loading on your media centre software. There's no distribution involved, only a translation, and it's obvious the resulting file is for personal use only.

The program, EPG Collector, can be run as a scheduled task to create the XMLTV file, and you can then run any other software to load it into your media centre. I am for example using Big Screen EPG to load this into Windows 7 Media Center. It can create the XMLTV file from your DVB-S or DVB-T tuners and it's easy to configure.

EPG Collector is currently being tested by some users on Geekzone, and it's available for download now from SourceForge. There's an ongoing discussion about the project on Geekzone, and the plan is to make it an open source project once it's stable.

Also note that as of now (late April 2010), the developers are looking for some more testers. Currently most testers are using Freeview sources but the program should work with other EPG sources in New Zealand. Please join Geekzone and post in the discussion about the project.

Freeview broadcasts the full week guide on DVB-S and Media Center can grab this without any third party software. If you have a DVB-S and a DVB-T tuner on your media center you can easily map the channels and watch HD content, with the guide from the non-HD source. But some people don't have both DVB-T and DVB-S tuners. Or rather have a different solution. This is for you.

UPDATE: There's also a Linux project version now.