coffee.geek.nz

Wired reports "Copyright Treaty Is Policy Laundering at Its Finest"
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/11/policy-laundering/

The language in the Sept. 30 memo shows the United States wants ISPs around the world to punish suspected, repeat downloaders with a system of “graduated response” — code for a three-strikes policy that results in the customer eventually being disconnected from the internet with the ISP alone deciding what constitutes infringement and fair use.

So, no trial - punishment apon accusation - and ISPs replacing courts.

(and remember, the ISP is liable themselves if they don't disconnect customer based only on accusation, and it turns out the customer were really infringing copyright - ISP have big incentive to just disconnect every time to avoid this liability)

A draft of the ACTA treaty has been leaked just as government representatives of the world begin secret negotiations in Korea today. This treaty originates in the USA, and is being negotiated with many countries including New Zealand.

Boingboing have some analysis of the leaked draft::

* That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn't infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.

* That ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. This means that your entire family could be denied to the internet -- and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications, and their means of earning a living -- if one member is accused of copyright infringement, without access to a trial or counsel.

* That the whole world must adopt US-style "notice-and-takedown" rules that require ISPs to remove any material that is accused -- again, without evidence or trial -- of infringing copyright. This has proved a disaster in the US and other countries, where it provides an easy means of censoring material, just by accusing it of infringing copyright.

Statusnet, the open source (agpl) microblogging platform is readying up to a 0.8.2 release this weekend.

Many of the world's cities have suburbs that are predominantly (and proudly) populated by gay or lesbian couples and their families.
e.g.
Melbourne : Northcote
Sydney : Darlinghurst
San Francisco: Castro

Are there any such suburbs in New Zealand cities?

Mike discovers there's a new CHEESE SHOP in Petone

Pamela the midwife has a blog post of thoughts and info on teenage pregnancy in New Zealand.

Mark Osbourne mentions Uruguay gave a laptop to every single child.

Vampire wannabies can buy bags of tasty blood fit for human consumption.

There's a Save Maranui fundraiser involving speedos.

Open office is spreading quickly all over Belgium according to The Open Source Observatory and Repository for European public administrations.

Someone invented a Robot that loads and unloads the dishwasher

Rachel Alpine talks about need for plain language and official information

Live scribe, the makers of that shiny gadget pen i use alot are opening an app store of applications that run on the pen.

from Melissa Draper:

The Toes Clause
If you witness someone stepping on someone else’s toes; do not harangue the person with the bruised toes for being hurt, simply because you did not feel the crush. If you step on someone’s toes; apologise for stepping on their toes. Resist the urge to point to an inconsiderate witness, or people whose toes you have not yet stepped on, as excuses for not apologising.

The prototype XO 1.5 laptops have arrived in Wellington - Some will be heading to Christchurch and Auckland in time for the weekend.

Grant with one of the XO 1.5 laptops

First thing we did - we pulled them apart. Inside in a new processor (faster), as well as a very different looking motherboard. We spotted 1Gbyte of RAM, and a 4GByte microSD card serving as the non-volatile storage.

They arrived with Sugar OS 0.8.4. This isn't a stable release, and the hardware is still being tested by people like us -- so finding a few things not working was to be expected.

We really like the new touchpad -- it's like you'd find on any "normal" laptop, instead of the fancy, kinda expensive one that the original XOs had. Now you'll notice the edge of the usable area if you stray too far.

There are some device drivers missing - such as the video capture - and the screen driver hiccups. But we did manage many hours of playing food force, which usualy crashes on the older hardware. Foodforce needs lotsa CPU and memory.

Some more structured testing will be this saturday's testing.

Auckland Saturday - 11:00 am @ The Windsor Castle 144 Parnell Road, Parnell - they have internet, Tabitha bring one of the XO 1.5 machines

he DigitalNZ API HackFest is making its way to Auckland. Telecom are kindly hosting this event for us.

10am-5pm, Saturday 7 November 2009
Telecom, Hereford St, Auckland
http://digitalnz.org

DigitalNZ Search aggregates information about NZ digital content from more than 65 content providers and makes them available via an API. You can get a glimpse of what's inside at http://search.digitalnz.org

Come along and

* Make nice stuff using the DigitalNZ API
* Whip up some code samples to help other developers kick-start their own DigitalNZ API creations
* Consume pizza, beer and sugary confections

Some examples of things that have happened at other HackFests: http://digitalnz.org/widget-gallery?type=applications

We're not just looking for developers. Other people we'd also love to come along are designers who can help make the apps look shiny or people with great ideas for apps.

Bring yourself and your laptop. We'll provide the WiFi. This is a low-key event - feel free to come along for however long you can, even just a couple of hours.

Numbers are limited, so please RSVP to jo.eaton@natlib.govt.nz
I'd love to see some Kiwi Foo Camp people there!

More info:
http://digitalnz.org/blog/news/article-digitalnz-api-hackfest-auckland-7...

Originally posted by laptop.org.nz by Tabitha Roder:

Wellington OLPC volunteers caught up with Ian Thomson, OLPC Oceania Coordinator today, and heard about the pilot deployments at Nauru, Niue, Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu.

There have been 3400 XOs deployed so far, with another 1600 to be deployed in the Pacific region. By working with ACER Australian Council of Education Research there is an evaluation being conducted of the Solomon Islands, anticipated publish date of November 2009.
As part of the pilots work has been done with teachers, parents and education ministries to ensure the best success of the pilots. Some of the lessons learned include reinforcements that the OLPC programme enhances, strengthens and aligns with regional and country education goals and plans. The communities have been supportive of the deployments.

Traditionally, in pacific cultures it is not typically acceptable that the children know more than the adults, however the pilots have shown that it is okay for children to know more than adults with regards to technology and literacy.

There is interesting discussions happening on how XOs can be used to support traditional knowledge.

Another lesson learned by the pilot groups is that a standing stock of XOs and hardware peripherals should be centrally maintained in the region to efficiently feed deployments in a timely and cost-efficient manner.

ZDnet story on developements today in the AFACT versus aussie ISP court case. http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/communications/soa/AFACT-bombarded-iiNet-wi...

Cobden [isp's defence lawyer] yesterday worked towards reducing the number of alleged breaches of copyright that had been collected by AFACT's two investigators, which were claimed by AFACT's barrister Tony Bannon to have reached 100,000 instances. Cobden told Justice Cowdroy that BitTorrent file-sharing were often pre-configured to be left open for sharing, meaning that many of the alleged breaches were actually single instances.

What's an ISP to do after recieving 100,000 allegations of coyright infringment? just do what hollwood says & disconnect every customer? All on one accuser's say so?

Or is the ISP supposed to spend the time and money investigating all these accusations as an unpaid copyright police force and justice system?

iinet chose to refer the complaints to the Australian police. - and now they're defending themselves in court for "allowing copyright infringment" to occur.

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/10/08/nicolas-copyright-sa.html

"The same French president who has for the second time brought in three
strikes to France has for the second time been caught infringing copyright
on a large scale. The presidential audiovisual services have produced 400
unauthorized copies of the 52-minute documentary 'A visage decouvert:
Nicolas Sarkozy.' This is quite impressive as the producer of the
documentary has only shipped 50 copies. adding insult to injury, the Elysée
replaced the original copyright notice on the dvd copies by "Copyright
presidential audiovisual service - All rights reserved"