I'm willing to be challenged on this one, as I have only the basic details, but here's something that doesn't sound right going on in this tale.

Red Cross goes into Haiti following a massive earthquake - puts out the plea saying "send infant formula, we need it"

Across the Lactivist communities, (mostly) western white middle class women bloggers cry foul. Formula is evil, they need breastmilk, not formula. Don't send formula! boycott any charity sending formula!

and they're mostly right - the World Health Organisation STRONGLY advocates breastfeed exclusively because most of the world does not have access to a clean later supply. Haiti included

but - something feels wrong here. The Red Cross are there, on the ground, and they say that infant formula is what they need. It doesn't take much imagination to work out scenarios where formula is necessary. The mother being dead or missing comes to mind first.

Likewise, an island in Samoa recently asked for supplies, such as infant formula, to help them through the next cyclone.

I also ponder how much breastfeeding is a privilege. You need to be nearby a hungry child in order to successfully breastfeed, or have access to refrigeration, a breastpump, and sterilisation equipment. How many people in developing and impoverished nations have this access?

Today saw the biggest leak so far of ACTA info. Michael Geist has details on Internet and Civil Enforcement Chapters With Country Positions
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/4829/125/
(discovered via boing boing)

Nathan Torkington has a summary of New Zealand's standpoint on various issues within the leaked document:
http://nathan.torkington.com/blog/2010/03/01/nz-acta-negotiation

NZ's Ministry of Economic Development has asked the public for ACTA advice

Tech Liberty NZ asks "Why do NZ citizens have to find out the NZ position in ACTA negotiations from leaked documents?"

When i get some non-work non-baby time, i'll write a real blog post on it, promise :)

Meanwhile here's the press release calling for submissions:

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PA1003/S00028.htm

Submissions sought on Anti-Counterfeit Trade Deal
Tuesday, 2 March 2010, 2:50 pm
Press Release: New Zealand Government

Minister calls for submissions on Anti-Counterfeiting Trade
Agreement

Commerce Minister Simon Power is calling for submissions on a
range of intellectual property proposals in the digital arena to help
develop the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).
This is the third round of public consultations on ACTA, and New

ACTA is that inglorious treaty New Zealand is negotiating with the USA, that has been deemed a "National Security" secret, and involves stopping fake Prada handbags, as well as taking away our rights online.

Recent ACTA leaks include this juicy piece of shitting on ISPs:

ISPs to be liable under civil law for content uploaded and/or downloaded
by subscribers, unless they agree to terminate service to "repeat offenders".

This is sometimes called "Safe Harbour", meaning a set of actions an ISP must do to be safe from liability -- It's also the same smelly stuff that was in Section 92A of New Zealand's Copyright act. We managed to stop Section92A, but ACTA is the same thing dressed up as a treaty.

"Repeat Offenders" could mean only those convicted in a fair trial -- but even then, I am greatly opposed to ever laying the blame for copyright infringement on an ISP. Other than being unfair, it is another cost they'll need to pass onto all customers. It sounds very much like once again requiring ISPs to judge the merits of an accusation against one of their customers, with the implication that ISPs are required to spy on their users in order to gather evidence to verify or disprove accusations against their customers.

I say: If you break copyright law, you are the blame, and you should face the consequences. We all need to stop aiming legislation at the ISPs. The ISPs should never be liable for the actions of others.

ACTA resembles a poonami for the Internet. I just learned that word; ask a parent if you don't know what it means ;-)

should I be finding out the signs in Baby Sign, to teach Casey - or should i just use New Zealand Sign Language?

Does Baby sign vary from place to place, or is it somebody's trademark? My cursory look at a book in the bookstore didn't really explain much - the signs I saw appear simplified NZSL, but may be based on American SL for all i know.

I'd love for Casey to know NZSL from a young age - but my husband doesn't sign, so i'm gonna need to get my sister and mother to visit much more often (hint! hint!)

Please comment if you've done either - Babysign or NZSL (or other SL) for your hearing baby in a hearing household - I'm curious to know things like what age they start to work out the more complex two handed signs.

and now, a gratuitous Casey photo:

New Zealand's Ministry of Economic Development have released from documents on the ongoing ACTA negotations.
http://news.business.govt.nz/news/strategic/article/9761

Smarter people than me have read these, and found nothing new revealed.

The last round of negotiations was in Mexico - the next round of talks is right here in New Zealand.

quick recap:

ACTA (anti counterfeiting trade agreement) is a treaty currently being negotiated by the world's weathiest countries, including New Zealand. It is officially about things like stopping the fake prada handbags trade - but there's also been leaked documents showing that big media have been asked for their wishlist such as 3 strikes internet disconnection that we protested so loudly against in NZ's s92a of the Copyright act.

It would be disastrous to have stopped such New Zealand laws that give out punishment (internet termination) without trial or appeal, like the s92a did, only to have it implemented anyway via a treaty that our parliament ratifies. Now is the time to make noise.

This need to stop fake prada is so important, it's been classed as "National Security", so none of us lowly citizens are allowed to know what's actually being negotiated. This also is not standard practice for treaty negotiations to be secret.

All Official information act requests, in several countries, have been unsuccessful in finding out what they're putting into this treaty - cos, you know, national security.

The next talks are in Wellington in April - standby for more info later on citizen action.

i was late to work today (food poisoning all night, not fun), so it was me that answered the phone at 9am.

background info: plunket is new zealand's non-government community support service for babies/infants.

them> I'm calling from plunket. we have a weekly mothers group starting up at [2 blocks from my house], for mothers with babies the same age as your Casey
me> I'm working fulltime right now, would it be at a time i'm likely to get there?
them> oh, no, it's in the middle of the afternoon. oh well, i can still add you to the mailing list.
me> well, my husband is a fulltime father, is he welcome at this group?
them> oh yes, it's for parents, even though i said mothers. we should change the name. infact i'm changing it right now. it's a parents group, not a mothers groups.

heh.

i've wanted one of these for ages -- a portable espresso machine that kinda looks like a bicyle pump.

add hotwater, tamp the coffee in, pump up the pressure, and then pull the shot

they're finally available in New Zealand
handpresso.co.nz

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?

New Zealand's Department of Internal Affairs has a "filter" that is intended to block access to pedophilic content.

It's currently optional -- meaning your ISP can choose to use it. I'm on cable and every single cable provider has opted in, so it's barely optional at all unless I switch to inferior more expensive DSL technology... but that's irrelevant as I have no doubt the end game is to make it compulsory.

What's the problem then?

1) This makes it trivial for future governments, or even public servants with a crusade, to start blocking / tracking other things. The Australian version is already blocking abortion info, and even a dentist's website.

2) it's trivial to circumvent for those that spend the time

I'm already needing to circumvent this filter - i need to connect to servers directly, not via a filter, in order to do my job. Also, at times the filter is unreliable and I can't connect.

Here's a simplified version of how these things work

Picture one: a normal internet connection, your computer talks to servers that contain the website you want to view. Website normally appear on port 80 (hence the :80 in the picture)

Picture two: The DIA filter in the way. Because websites are normally on port 80, your isp just redirects all port 80 traffic from your computer to a "transparent proxy" which then implements the filter.

as pointed out by Creative Freedom, NZFACT^[1] have finally admitted Section92a^[2] of the copyright act means "guilt by accusation"

NZFACT were quoted on stuff.co.nz:

[NZFACT] envisaged ISPs would act on infringement notices generated automatically by copyright holders, who would identify infringers by tracking traffic on file-sharing sites."

So, someone automatically generates an accusation, and ISPs were expected act on them. That's accusation, swiftly followed by punishment explained.

Why would ISPs do that? becuase the original S92a made the ISP themselves liable if they didn't disconnect the accused, thanks to some vagues wording of "reasonable circumstances" (the whole section 92 is entitled "ISP Liabilty").

[1] NZ front of USA based lobbyists for extreme copyright laws.
[2] The Guilt by Accusation Internet Termination clause in New Zealand copyright law that was thankfully stopped by the blackout protestors and our new National government.

WellyNZTesters have issued a Call For Papers for the education miniconf we're running at the LCA2010 conference on mid January next year
http://laptop.org.nz/content/miniconf

If you want to come visit us in New Zealand, and can't afford it right now, you may be eligible for funding to pay for the trip http://www.lca2010.org.nz/media/news/89

We're testing the full activity bundle for the upcoming Peru deployment
http://laptop.org.nz/test-request

An Auckland group has started!

Some kind folks in Sydney are rounding up unused dust-gathering XOs from the LCA2007 giveaway, to ship to Wellington.

We've got a school server running.

If you haven't heard David Lange's address to the Oxford Union, then here's your chance.
http://www.publicaddress.net/assets/sm/2424/79/DavidLangeOxfordUnionDeba...

It cames from an era where New Zealand was still debating nuclear weapons, and the debate was influential, and delivered by our Prime Minister.

David Lange eventually resigned over whether New Zealand should allow US nuclear powered war ships into our waters (amongst other issues).

David Lange died in 2005.

Transcript can be found at http://publicaddress.net/default,1578.sm#post

the goings on in Wellington, that i've heard of recently:

Tim McNarama is rallying a Sahana New Zealand cluster. Their online presence is at Launchpad.net. They've had hackfest and strategic planning meetings - there's been lots of great designs including distributed models (borrowing from laconca) and New Zealand customisations.

Don Christie, and the New Zealand Open Source Society have launched the Public Sector Remix, a desktop operating system specialising in government / public sector.

Tabitha Roder continues to lead a group of OLPC testers who meet every Saturday at the Southern Cross.

Nigel McNie, and the rest of the mahara team released 1.2.0beta1.

Who have i missed out? Who's doing Open Source mighty deeds in Wellington?

I wanted more info on how provocation partial defence is used in New Zealand - it was used to horrible (and failed) effect on the Clayton Weatherston trial, but is it used appropriately elsewhere?
My initial reaction was that murdering cannot be justified by any sort of provocation, but i didn't know of enough cases where this was used to be sure of my opinion. Perhaps it is used for legitimate reasons.

Here's some research carried out by the NZ Law Commission [pdf]

In order to assess the way in which the defence of provocation is currently operating – that is, how often it is relied on, by whom and in which circumstances - we collected data from all of the homicide files held by the Crown prosecutors in Auckland and Wellington concerning trials that occurred between 2001 and 2005 (inclusive).

There were a total of 87 cases in this sample. 6 were retrials, so the original case was excluded and only the retrial taken into account.

As you will know, there is a lot of anger at the Government's decision to cut funding to night classes by 80% - a cut which will effectively mean the end to affordable, life-long learning in local high schools around NZ after the end of this year.

We have been fighting these cuts and thank everyone who has signed the petition, sent a postcard, written a letter or email and even visited their local MP to discuss the issue.

We are now marching to Parliament to show the Government the strength of feeling against the cuts and again ask for your support.

Please join us this Tuesday 4 August. The march will leave Wellington High School at 2.15pm, aiming to arrive at Parliament by 3pm.

The route will be from Gate 4 on Taranaki Street (by the pedestrian crossing next to the school gym - please assemble around the gym outside area), then down Taranaki Street, along Dixon Street to Victoria Street, then down Manners Street to Willis Street and along Lambton Quay to Parliament. If you can't be at the start, just join us along the way or meet us at Parliament.

Please spread the word - we need to show the Government that this is a short-sighted decision that will have an impact on all communities around New Zealand.

Please feel free to contact me if you need any further information - and apologies if this email has already been sent to you.

Regards
Robyn

Robyn Hambleton
Coordinator
Wellington High School ACE Centre
Ph: 385 8919
www.cecwellington.ac.nz www.stopnightclasscuts.org.nz

I read books electronically - i have since circa 1996 on a Philips nino, later many palm pilots.

The illegal trade in ebooks exists - can be found in the same place you'd find music and video shared. (torrents, p2p, irc). Some call this fair use as they already own the book. They just want the digital version now. I'm sure some are reading without buying the book.

I once had a guillotine (sp?) and scanner set up - chop the spine off a paper back, feed through document feeder and OCR into an electonic text. These I still read on my slowly failing Palm TX.

Of course I'd never do this with out copyright holder permission. (New Zealand copyright laws allow format shifting audio, but only audio - nobody can tell me why this is law). But the question remains, who is losing out from this? The author/publisher won't sell the books electronically. I bought the damn book already.

There are also excellent authors who give away books for free, and there are many more who sell their books- some for a reasonable $1 to $3, others for much more than the paper version costs.

Last weekend the weekly Wellington Friends in Testing group changed location to the National Library to join in the Digital NZ Hacktest.

Here’s the blurb explaining who DigitalNZ are:

DigitalNZ is a collaborative initiative led by the National Library of New Zealand. We work

with a wide range of contributing institutions and organisations. Without these content providers and their content, DigitalNZ would not be possible.

We did the usual test of the latest build of Sugar, and some general playtime testing contributed applications. Some of us tried out the Digital NZ open data API, and thought creating a OLPC app that queries this API would be great, especially if it caches the data locally somehow, or turns into a collaborative activity.

There was coffee, pizza, lollies and beer. Thanks Digital NZ!

Photos by Jo Eaton:

Last weekend I attended the Digital NZ hacktest. A large group of hackers getting together to try out the new Open Data API.

Here's the blurb explaining who they are:

DigitalNZ is a collaborative initiative led by the National Library of New Zealand. We work with a wide range of contributing institutions and organisations. Without these content providers and their content, DigitalNZ would not be possible.

There was coffee, lollies, pizza. And a good group of people making mashups. I had a few ideas for mashups so i reached for good old reliable perl. Before long I had a perl module completed, which I've shared with the world on cpan:
http://search.cpan.org/~shiny/Net-DigitalNZ-0.15/lib/Net/DigitalNZ.pm

For now there is only the search method, but i've started the get-metadata methods and soon some more for images etc. This can be found in my Git Hub repo.

and the mashup? coming soon.

Here i'm quoting from Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore, but i wonder how much different New Zealand's members of parliament are:

The average age of a Member of Parliament is 55. And I point that out, only to underline the fact that the average Canadian watches about 26 hours of television a week. Those under the age 25, it's about 12 hours a week. But they're consuming more media than ever before. But, they're consuming it where they want it on their iPhones and on their Blackberries and on their PVRs and on their laptops. And they're doing it through mechanisms that didn't exist.

And you'd be surprised the number of Members of Parliament who have never held an iPhone, who couldn't tell you, functionally, how a Blackberry works and have no idea how these things integrate. And when you ask the average member of Parliament "How do you consume your music?" They'll say "well, maybe I'll go out and buy a CD and drop it in the thing or maybe I'll hear something on the radio on the way" and you say "How do you watch movies" and they'll say "Well, I'll go out to the theater when I have the time on a Friday night or maybe rent a DVD at home" and you say "How do you listen to radio or get your news?" and they'll say "Well, I'll sit at 6 o'clock after the meal, finish a steak and watch the news, or get the paper in the morning."

The old way of doing things is over. These things are all now one. And it's great and it's never been better and we need to be enthusiastic and embrace these things.

on twitter i made some jokes, that if you read a story aloud to your kids, you are STEALING from the publisher. You are performing the work, without permission, and need to obtain a licen$e from the publisher.

Alas i was only half joking. The move from paper to digital has meant software reading aloud text, and has opened a world of literature to the blind, the dyslexic, those unable to turn pages, or some other reason they cannot read from a traditional dead tree book.

Some forces in the world think that reading text aloud is different to reading, and therefore requires permission and maybe a fee paid to the copyright holder.

DRM isn't dead yet. Very weak DRM protects most pdfs you'll find published on the internet, in that they flag the document with "Read aloud not available". The PDF reading softwrae is then required to no allow the user to use text-to-speech to then read the document aloud.

This is often enforced by law - meaning only a very brave software writer would allow circumvention of this requirement.

A WIPO treaty seeks to allow those who physically cannot read visually to legally circumvent this artificial restriction.

quoting an anonymous representative at the treaty negotiations:

The proposal for a treaty is supported by a large number of civil society NGOs, the World Blind Union, the National Federation of the Blind in the US, the International DAISY Consortium, Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic (RFB&D), Bookshare.Org, and groups representing persons with reading disabilities all around the world.

time to announce on my blog, that... ta da... i'm pregnant.

let the "congratulations" comments ensue (it's traditional)

It's a strange world i've found myself in -- in New Zealand everything is free in the whole pregnancy and birth stuff.. except it's overloaded and thus unavailable. free, but you can't have any.

Midwives are free - isn't that awesome?? except that they're all booked up, none available. I can hire an obstetrician, but, guess what, they're all booked out too.

Antenatal classes are free -- but they're all full. (and curiously: contact is via a hotmail address)

The GP should have been free, but my GP choose not to enroll onto the system, so it wasn't free. The nurse mentioned this was because the amount they get re-embursed dosen't make it worth it.. so FREE! but not available.

I have since changed GP, less convenient but free (except for the taxi ride). However, GPs won't do antenatal care like a midwife does -- I'm guessing this is because there's not enough money in it due to government setting the price.

Parts of the medical world runs like the 19th century. To get the list of midwives to ring (i rang them all) you need to ring a phone number run by ministry of health, then talk to a human, who snail mails you their "database" I asked if they had a website, but was told "no, nothing fancy like that". I asked if they could email it to me instead "no, we're not allowed to use email at work". - I almost expected it to turn up on horseback. or a morse code telegram. Might have been faster than waiting 4 days for mail.

The NZ government is in the process of negotiating supply of software from A SINGLE VENDOR. NZOSS calls for an immediate halt and investigation by the Auditor-General.    

Press Release from the NZOSS - STOP G2009 | The New Zealand Open Source Society

The New Zealand Open Source Society (NZOSS) is calling for an immediate halt to the G2009 “All of Government” negotiations currently being completed with Microsoft. The Society will be seeking a complete review of the G2009 procurement process by the Auditor-General.

“Government procurement prac...

:: New Zealand Sign Language Week :: Home PageSource: www.nzsign.org.nzNew Zealand Sign Language, New Zealand Sign Language Week, NZ Sign, NZSL Week, NZSL, NZ Sign Language

Computerworld > NZ’s S92A failure linked to Aussie ISP copyright case

While New Zealand’s government, internet service provider industry and copyright owners contemplate their next move following the withdrawal of Section 92A of the Copyright Act, a legal action currently awaiting hearing in the Australian Federal courts is set to revolve around a strikingly similar p...

NZ On Screen - New Zild - The Story of New Zealand EnglishSource: www.nzonscreen.comOft-derided across the dutch for its vowel-mangling pronunciation (sex fush'n'chups anyone?) and too fast-paced for tourists and Elton John to understand, is New Zealand's unique accent. Presented ...