It’s been a while since I’ve taken any sort of quiz like this, so when David Farrar from Kiwblog posted his results today it prompted me to give it another go.

My Political Views
I am a center-right moderate social libertarian
Right: 1.33, Libertarian: 1.97

Political Spectrum Quiz

I completed the quiz pretty quickly and felt the need to answer ‘it depends on the specifics’ to many of the questions, so take the results with a grain of salt. I think it is a reasonably accurate description of me though.

I was very pleased to wake up this morning to the news that National has delayed the introduction of S92A via an order-in-council. It’s a nice short-term victory, but I’ll save the champagne until the law is fundamentally rewritten.

The most pleasing aspect of the decision is simply that it was made at all. Within two weeks, a small band of protesters were able to harness the power of the Internet to direct international attention and place enough pressure on a Government, whose Prime Minister admitted to not having read the bill prior, that he then took the time to understand the issues and personally announce the delay in implementation of the law. We owe much thanks to the Creative Freedom Foundation for all the effort they put into co-ordinating the protest and ensuring that a single coherent message was presented. Just a little bit of my cynicism and belief that politicians never listen to public opinion outside of election campaigns was chipped away today.

The reason I’m not breaking out the champagne yet is that we’ve only achieved a temporary reprieve in the commencement of the law. While those present at the press conference seem somewhat confident that John Key didn’t like what he found in the law and would have repealed it if given the chance, all that has actually been done is delay it in the hopes of an agreement between the TCF and the “rights holders” (aka big media companies) on how to implement the still fundamentally broken law. The Government has given until late March for that to occur.

To put this into a more global context. My happiness as I took the bus to work after reading about the decision to delay the law was short lived as the front page of the local paper declared that Eircom (Ireland’s equivalent of Telecom) has “voluntarily” agreed to block sites such as The Pirate Bay upon request by the media companies (this comes a week after they also announced an agreement to, again “voluntarily”, implement a 3-strikes S92A style policy). Now, with the biggest ISP in their pocket (so to speak), the media companies have sent threatening letters to the remaining ISPs in the country demanding they implement the same procedure.

To me, this illustrates one of the fundamental problems with S92. The concept that an ISP is liable for the conduct of its users, or for policing where on the Internet users should and shouldn’t be able to connect to does not belong in our laws. Most ISPs already have provision to disconnect customers for illegal activity in their terms and conditions. If an end-user is doing something illegal, that is an issue between the rights holder and the end-user to take up in the courts just like every other sector of society must do when wronged, at which point the existing ISP terms and conditions can be invoked and access terminated.

The big media companies, having decided that it is too expensive/hard/inconvenient to follow standard legal procedures to resolve their grievances are launching multi-pronged attacks to shift the playing field in their favour. In countries like New Zealand, where our politicians yearn for a Free Trade Agreement with America, they use their lobbyists to ensure that S92 style laws are part of the conditions. In other jurisdictions, like Ireland, they use strong-arm, divide and conquer style bully tactics outside of the political and legal process.

I don’t support copyright infringement. I rely on copyright to protect much of the work I place on the Internet, I want strong laws that protect me when my rights have been infringed. I don’t believe that such laws should come at the expense of due process, our legal tradition and the basic principle of fairness! I don’t believe that copyright infringement is such a heinous crime that it demands punishments stronger than those we deliver to paedophiles, stalkers or any other class of criminal who uses the Internet to enable their crimes.

To me, today’s (yesterday’s – depending on your timezone) decision is only the first step in clawing New Zealand back from the dangerous path that the big media companies have been leading our law makers down. From here we need to press on and demonstrate to the Government over the next month that even if the TCF and rights holders are able to come up with some sort of workable code of practice, the law is still fundamentally flawed. It is based on premise that we are guilty by accusation.

Even if guilt were to be proved by a competent legal body (eg. court or copyright tribunal) we don’t need laws placing further liabilites onto ISPs (and remember the definition of ISP under this amendment act includes businesses who provide Internet access to staff, libraries, schools and hospitals) when their existing terms and conditions already prohibit illegal activity.

Finally, and most importantly of all, we need to remember that laws exist to serve all sectors of society. Yes, copyright infringement is against the law and rights holders are reasonable in expecting the law to protect their content and allow them to make a fair profit. On the other side of the fence, average New Zealanders are not being unreasonable in their desire to have media available electronically, on demand and non-inhibited by DRM following a legal purchase. The failure of the media businesses to adequately cater to this change in market demand and usage of technology is obviously a contributing factor to the widespread copyright problems that they are facing today.

Obviously, I’m not condoning copyright infringement simply because the media companies are failing to address demand. Even stupid laws must be obeyed (and the concept of copyright is far from stupid). What I want to see is the Government acknowledging that the problem is not solely with consumers infringing copyright for malicious purposes, and therefore that the solutions do not lie solely in increasing the enforcement and punishments available.

Copyright has always been a balancing act between the rights of content producers and consumers. S92 and the act it is contained within are taking us far too far down the road of catering to big business and their outdated business models with far too little concern for the rights of the individual consumer.

Despite the many submissions made on this act last year when it was first passing through parliament, there was no comprehensive debate on what copyright means and how it should balance the rights of content producers and consumers in our digital century where copying is a zero-cost, zero-thought activity. Without such a debate we’re doomed to continue wasting time arguing over the symptoms of the problem, like S92.

So, I’m saving my champagne for the day when we as a country address these issues and come up with a fair and workable interpretation of what copyright means today.

If you’re reading this post via the website rather than a feed/planet then you will notice that the site has gone completely black in support of the Creative Freedom Foundation’s campaign against S92A of the NZ Copyright Amendment Act which is due to come into effect on 28th February 2009. I’ve also joined the wave of people blacking out their “avatar” on Facebook/Jabber/MSN, etc.

S92A introduces “Guilt Upon Accusation” whereby if you are accused of copyright infringement (downloading music and movies, etc) “repeatedly” (likely 3 or more times) you are at risk of being disconnected from the Internet by your ISP. The law does not require any proof or substantiation of the accusations and the entire process would occur outside of the courts and the established legal system. Not only does it place every user at risk, the wording is very unclear on exactly what type of organisation is considered an ISP and there is significant concern that schools, businesses, libraries and hospitals will be placed in the difficult position of determining whether their users have broken the law and require disconnection.

Opposition to the law is not an attack on copyright, or a statement that we should be free to download all the movies and music that we desire. Those sorts of activities are clearly wrong, and I don’t have any issue with copyright holders wanting to enforce their rights when their content is illegally copied. However, disconnecting people upon accusation, with no proof or formal legal process to prove guilt is not the right way to go about it.

The fact that the law does not require proof of guilt is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of problems with it. For further background on the problems it causes for ISPs by placing them as the middle-man in copyright disputes you should refer to the following posts:

• Russel Brown of Public Address, points out that among other faults the law “stipulates a penalty that no court would impose in adjudicating a copyright complaint“
• David Farrar of Kiwiblog, has a guest post at the NZ Center for Political Research explaining how the law affects businesses
• Creative Freedom Foundation Background on S92

Finally, I think it is worth pointing out that S92A was removed from the proposed Amendment at the select committee stage, but was later reintroduced by Judith Tizard during the final reading of the bill. Mark Harris has an excellent post on the history of the amendment which includes facts such as the official report on the amendment also recommended removing S92A as it was unecessary given existing ISP terms and conditions which forbid illegal activity. The fact that the select committee (based on public submissions) recognised the problems with S92A and removed it, only to have it added back in again at the last stage when we no longer had any say on it really hacks me off and I cant’ help but feel the influence of the “big money” American media companies pressuring our politicians to pass a law that they don’t really understand the full consequences of.

So what is to be done? The Blacked Out campaign, being run by the Creative Freedom Foundation is gathering steam and international attention. Peter Dunne of United Future (who originally voted for the amendment) has declared that the amendment is wrong, and doesn’t do what they thought they were voting to do, we need to convince National and the rest of the house of the same. Time is running out for this to happen before the amendment comes into effect on Feb 28th, but there is still time to write to your local MP and sign the petition against S92A “Guilt Upon Accusation”. The Creative Freedom Foundation site has a nice easy list of what you can do to register your protest.

It’s been a while since I last acquired new gadgets but I think I’ve made up for lost time with my last weeks purchases.

You may remember that I’ve had my eye on the Openmoko phones since early 2007, but in between shifting across the world and starting a new job I never got around to purchasing one of the first versions. The second version, the “Freerunner”, was released in June this year and I placed an order with Pulster, a local distributor, shortly after. The phones have been in hot demand, so I only received my phone last week, a wait of of almost 2 months, and it turned up missing one of the cables that was meant to come with it. Still some distribution kinks to be worked out.

Distribution kinks are the least of Openmoko’s worries at the moment though. As advertised, the phone is definitely not ready for primetime distribution yet. I’ve tried three different software images on it: the original “stable” 2007.2 image, the current “devel” 2008.8 image and the latest completely rebuilt SHR release which is the most promising yet. With the SHR image I’ve been able to send and receive calls and text messages, although the interface is somewhat arcane. I’m most interested in the GPS which looks to be working reasonably well at this stage.

After almost a week with the phone I’m glad I purchased it, and I’m having fun hacking on it, but there is a huge way to go before I’ll be able to use it as my primary phone. So that’s gadget #1.

The second gadget is a new Digital SLR camera. I’ve been thinking about getting back into photography for a while (I last took photos seriously in high school) and when I saw how affordable digital SLRs had become I couldn’t resist. There isn’t much between Canon and Nikon when comparing mid-range SLRs these days, so after about a week of deliberation I decided on the Canon 450D, primarily because most of my workmates also have Canon SLRs!

I only got the camera on Friday, and spent half the weekend playing with the GPS on the phone (I want to set them up so I can geo tag all my photos), so I haven’t had quite as much time to play with it yet. I expect to spend plenty of quality time with it on our holiday in Malta next week. First impressions are favourable, although I’m fast discovering camera viewfinders were not really designed for people who wear glasses. I may have to consider wearing contacts again.

Once we get back from Malta I’d like to find a local (or online) photography club with some good weekly assignments to fire my creativity and motivate me to get the most out of my new toy.

In just a few hours, I’m hopping on Emirates flight EK433 from Auckland to Singpore, to start the first leg of my trip to Dublin. I’ll be travelling for pretty much the next month, so if you’re trying to get hold of me please don’t be offended if I take several days to reply.

Kat and I have setup another blog to detail our travels, and I’ll try and keep this blog free of too much personal stuff so as to not clutter the various planets that it is syndicated to. If you’re interested in our travels and what we are up to then head over to http://www.mattandkatbrown.com.

There is also a calendar at mattandkatbrown.com if you’re wanting to try and meet up with me for keysigning, etc.

Is thunderbird smarter than it thinks?

Click image to enlarge.

Wow!

It’s out. The government has finally gained the courage to force Telecom to unbundle the local loop. Possibly the most interesting part of the whole announcement is the circumstances of it. Cabinet signed off on it this morning, by midday it had been leaked to Telecom and the Government was forced to scramble to announce it to everyone to avoid regulatory problems from the Sharemarket. No doubt whoever leaked it is feeling very very worried about their job security right now! The Cabinet briefing paper and minutes that accompanied the original press release are a bad quality scan and have obviously been prepared very quickly with hand written corrections to the page
numbers in the latter half of the document. The document has now been removed from the website, which I guess means that it is being touched up. Email me if you want a copy.

[Update 1am: It's now back, but has had information redacted presumably because it is meant to be commercially sensitive!]

If you want the hard facts the following are good sources:

• David Farrar’s Analysis
• The Government Press Release and Summary

So, is this a good a thing?

I think it is in the long term, but the best part of today’s announcement is what goes alongside the LLU decision, not the LLU itself. More on that in a minute. The Cabinet paper (60 pages) appears to be a very thorough summary of the detailed analysis that has obviously been performed over the previous months. What I think is a fairly reasonable argument is made for why the action is needed and why the chosen course of action is the best option. I’m very impressed with David Cunliffe’s handling of the portfolio and I hope that he continues to work to the high standard that he’s set himself in the few short months since the election. He’s certainly going to face some opposition now!

One thing to keep in mind in reading the paper and analysing the information available is that the Government’s hand was forced and there is probably a lot of implementation detail that they would have planned to release with the offical announcement on the 18th. So theres not much point in nit-picking details at this stage.

The meat of the announcement is that the Government has chosen a two-stage approach to increase the regulation in the sector. The two stages are basically short and long term actions designed to be complementary. The long term action is the LLU itself and promotion of investment in alternative infrastructure. Because this will not be completed and ready to use in any shape or form until 2008 at the earliest there are also a series of measures to beef up the current wholesale offerings to tide us over and improve the market in the interim.

What we get in the short-term:

• UBS without the 128k upstream limitation
• UBS that can support real-time services (VoIP, Games, etc)
• Naked DSL – no Telecom phone service required

With prices and access terms for all these services to be set by the Commerce Commision, which is directed to ensure that the pricing is applied to protect investment incentives.

There are a few juicy paragraphs that suggest the Government has considered opposition and is ready for it, such as 113 that warns that is Telecom does not invest quickly enough then full structural separation will be considered. However there are also suggestions (para 113) that Telecom is going to be thrown a bone in the form of a recalculated TSO that will provide higher levels of compensation to support the necessary network upgrades in rural areas.

Rodney Hide and no doubt other right-wing groups are already bleating about the “stolen” property rights. But as I see it thats not the case. Telecom still owns the local loop. ISPs do not get to use the copper for free! They must pay Telecom a market rent. LLU is about regulating that price and forcing Telecom to offer the service where there is no incentive for Telecom to do otherwise given their vertically integrated monopoly.

Secondly, Telecom was given a chance to avoid this scenario with the 2003 decision not to unbundle. At that point Telecom and its shareholders were warned that if they didn’t invest appropriately and provide a competitive wholesale market the situation would be reviewed. These warnings increased in frequency over the past year. Telecom cannot say that they were not warned. They may have massively misjudged the government, but they were warned. The simple fact is that over the last three years Telecom has played games and stalled as much as possible. In many ways I feel they are the authors of their own misfortune.

Overall, I’m very happy and excited. Its a great time to be involved in the Internet industry in New Zealand. The government has churned out an excellent paper that shows that they have carefully analysed the issues and decide on a course of action that I think has an excellent chance of improving the state of broadband in New Zealand. LLU is not viewed as a magic bullet, other measures have been put in place to ease its introduction and investment incentives to build the next generation of access infrastructure are mentioned and regarded as important. The big risk to watch is how the Government goes with the implementation. It is a hugely complex peice of policy to implement, with lots of potential for mistake and they are fighting against a well resourced company with lots to loose.

No doubt this will not be my last post on the issue.

[Update 8/5/2006: Fixed typo 128k vs 512k, thanks for spotting Juha]

I think I finally have broadband Internet at home that I’m reasonably satisified with!

This afternoon, thanks to the excellent team at WorldXChange my DSL line was upgraded to 2M/512k. Despite the fact that we always want more than we can have I think this combination will actually be very useful and worthwhile for me. 2Mbps is more than adequate for the amount of downloading I do and increasing the upstream to 512k means that I can have an outgoing file transfer running without my SSH sessions locking up every few seconds. There is still a 10G international traffic cap, but I don’t do more than about 6-7GB of International traffic a month so that doesn’t bother me, and I’m really pleased that WorldXChange offer free national traffic.

There is no question that the threat of regulation has done wonders for the state of broadband in New Zealand over the last 18 months. It’s still a pretty tough market for the ISPs and Telecom’s wholesale bitstream product (UBS) is nowhere near the equivalent to unbundling that they promised it would be, however for the average consumer things are certainly a lot better they were. Which is good, because I think whatever the Government decides to do in June (assuming its not nothing) is going to set the Industry back a fair bit as everybody readjusts to the new landscape and works out where they fit. Having a semi-decent set of plans to tide us through that period is going to be great.

If you’re looking for a DSL provider I highly recommend that you use WorldXChange. I’ve not yet found an aspect of their product or service that is below par. They answer the phone on the first ring, the customer service reps are friendly, helpful and always know what they’re doing and best of all they give you free national internet traffic! So don’t delay, swap today to WorldXChange and put mkbrown down as your reference so that I get some credits on my account.

I made it back to Auckland from NZNOG this evening. We drove to Wellington and back to save on airfares seeing as there were four of us attending. The drive didn’t seem quite as long as I thought it would. It took about 7 hours from Hamilton to Wellington and vice versa, although the roadworks every 5 kilometres from Cambridge to Bulls were getting very tedious.

Without a doubt the most interesting part of the drive was seeing some activity around the vicinity of Palmerston North where there were trenchers and tractors and some big loops of blue fibre lying on the ground. Very nice to know that progress if finally being made!

The remainder of the conference was also very positive. During the conference dinner on Thursday night we talked to many people about the idea of setting up a NZ routeviews project. There seems to be lots of enthusiasm for it, so hopefully we’ll be able to get something underway promptly.

I also did a very short lightening talk on dhcparpd. The software that we used to spoof ARP replies based on the DHCP lease database at LCA. Its a very nifty little utility and we’re hoping some more people will find some use for it. I’ve written up a page with some information which you can find in the WAND research software repository.

NZNOG’06 is currently on at Victoria University in Wellington and we’ve been down here since late Tuesday.

Wellington must have the most dismal and disgusting weather in New Zealand. Since we arrived, I don’t think we’ve seen the sun at all, and its been raining almost continuously. Gray, dark and dismal.

The conference started yesterday with the tutorial day. Dean Pemberton and Joe Abley’s tutorial – “IPv6 Deployment – Theory and Practice” was well attended and very useful. They started off with a brief refresher on the basics of IPv6 before starting to deal with some of the issues that are preventing more widespread adoption and finishing with a great audience discussion about why we even need IPv6 at all.

The two key points that I got out of it were:

• We don’t have any real pressing driver for IPv6 deployment at the moment, other than we all want it as geeks. The only real justification that anyone could come up with for a NZ organisation to deploy IPv6 is future proofing – that is gaining experience so that once we actually find a reason to use it we already know how.
• Many people see the lack of ability to multi-home as a significant problem preventing IPv6 deployment by organisations. Its not a problem for carriers, they can multihome just as they do not, it’s a problem for organisations like universities that don’t resell connections, but have a desire for multihoming. The point that Joe made was that there is no technical reason why you can’t multihome with IPv6. The lack of ability to multihome as an end-site is based no policy, and that policy was designed and implemented by the proponents of IPv6. Once the carriers and others who are still happy on v4 start to migrate to v6 its entirely possible that we’ll see some of these policies loosened as people ignore the policy and start multihoming anyway.

The conference network has been handing out v6 addresses with native connectivity provided by TCL. Kinda nifty, but again, I’ve got an IPv6 address to play with, I can look at the dancing turtle, now what…
The rest of the program is looking interesting as well, lots of talks on peering this morning and an intruiging talk by Bill Woodcock from PCH about building global content distribution networks (basically anycast for TCP).