In a quirky take on disease awareness, and to mark the official national launch, Crohn's and Colitis New Zealand (CCNZ) in association with Abbott are publishing a "Toilet Map".

RNP is a form of Performance-based Navigation that ensures the aircraft follows a carefully designed path that can provide navigational flexibility, such as custom-tailored, curved paths through mountainous terrain or congested airspace.

Sony Ericsson's ex-CTO Ron Louks and Sony Ericsson's ex Head of Products Kouji Kodera join HTC.

Kindle's wireless delivery and content is now in a 21 percent smaller and 15 percent lighter design, with better contrast, faster page turns, up to one month of battery life, double the storage, and available to New Zealand users.

Apple has released Safari 5.0.1, turning on Safari Extensions and introducing the Safari Extensions Gallery.

The debate will be broadcast live and streamed across the Internet as part of TVNZ 7's Spotlight on science and technology month, and will analyse and discuss online safety, privacy, use and abuse of social media, government filtering, and censorship.

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

The 13,600 km cable will land in Sydney, Auckland and Los Angeles, and will also offer the most direct route between these landing points, delivering the lower latency connections that are being demanded by core customers.

It's a hot selling point for broadband.  Take the most popular sites (such as TradeMe, Stuff, TVNZondemand as examples) that people visit and let them go at it, all-you-can-eat, without having to worry what the final bill will be.  The forums here on Geekzone have plenty of discussions around ISPs offering unmetered traffic to customers.

Steve Waddington, one of the director's of Exetel (an Australian ISP), recently blogged about a customer's suggestion on adding more sites (that are external to Exetel's network) to their unmetered offerings:

I can tell you one thing; unmetered content certainly isn't 'free' to the ISP. Today, (and Exetel almost certainly can't be buying at the best price for global Internet) the past-our-border portion of the total cost to supply an Internet service is in the order of 7-8%. If other people buy better than we do, it would only mean that for them, the ratio is even lower, say 5%.

What that means is the so called 'unmetered' content, apparently 'free' to the end user, costs the ISP around 95% of the full per Mbps of global Internet access anyway.

So, you either believe your perpetual motion machine was a good deal, or, you have to accept that the unmetered content so generously offered by your ISP is paid for somewhere else in the total amount you pay.

Steve continues on about how this all came about:

Thinking back, it seems to me this is a fundamental error in the cost of service supply that was made by 'someone' years ago (around '98-'99 I suspect), and has been duplicated (or mindlessly followed, however you want to look at it) by others ever since.

In those days, global Internet access accounted for around 1/3 of the operating cost of an ISP, and domestic backhaul added another 15-20%. So by supplying traffic from a local source, such as peering or caching, was an enormous benefit to the ISP's bottom line. Ignoring the cost of peering, the proxy server cost, the engineer/sysadmin time etc, etc is easy to to, as in most case they are considered necessary anyway, or treated as sunk costs. Therefore at some point, on someone's spread sheet to financial management, that content delivery would have shown up as zero. And the marketing guy that saw that would hardly have to be a genius to realize he could be a hero by designing a promotion that offered content that cost zero to the company for 'free' to their customers.

One deception leads to another, and a decade on you have people really believing unmetered content is actually free. No wonder that word is considered the most powerful in marketing. That, and peoples unerring propensity to believe what they want to believe.

Unmetered traffic isn't free - you are still paying for it, it's just hidden as part of something else in your monthly bill.

Even though I have quoted a good chunk of Steve's blog post, I still highly recommend reading the entire thing here.  His blog is a good read for those interested in what happens behind the scenes at an ISP.

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:

Intel creates world's first end-to-end silicon photonics connection with integrated lasers. Impact on computer design, with dramatic increase in performance and energy savings.

NZICT membership is nearing 100 New Zealand technology firms and related organisations with collective revenue of more than $10 billion and staff of around 10,000.

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?

TrueNet is a joint venture between open source IT company Catalyst IT and broadband report analysis company Jonette Consulting.

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.

Performance USB 3.0 flash drive at a performance USB 2.0 Price

Since 1997 Microsoft and ARM have worked together on software and devices across the embedded, consumer and mobile spaces, enabling many companies to deliver user experiences on a broad portfolio of ARM-based products.

IBM zEnterprise is the most powerful, scalable mainframe server the company delivered, up to 60% faster than System z10, with same power consumption. More than 100,000 virtualized servers can be managed as a single system.

Unisys-hosted solutions give ClearPath clients new, cost-efficient options to source IT infrastructure for application development and modernization.