Ever-decreasing dial-up
Every year a curious statistic is published by Stats NZ - the number of New Zealand residential dial-up internet connections. This year it's down to 18,000, a 25% reduction on last year.
There are…
UFB contractors breach employment standards: MBIE
Nearly all of the sub-contractors working on the Ultra Fast Broadband project for Chorus have been found in breach of employment standards, according to a media release from the Ministry of Business I…
New R&D regime to increase spending, but is it enough?
The new research and development tax regime has been announced with a few tweaks following the consultation period.
The threshold of $100,000 spending per annum on R&D has been lowered to $50,000 m…
Brislen on Tech
Facebook falls foul of the EU... Cometh the hour, cometh the man... Cometh the hour again...
International connections
A map of international telecommunication cables across the globe shows a disparity between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. News service ZDNet lists only 17 subsea cables across the globe and wh…
Blockchain more transformative than internet - researcher
New Zealand should look to become a blockchain and financial technology hub, argues a team of legal and financial experts in a report based on research funded by the New Zealand Law Foundation's Infor…
Netsafe shines spotlight on safety
Online safety is quickly coming to the forefront of conversations around digital services and products here in New Zealand and Netsafe is a key component in the battle to keep us all safe online.
…
90 million reasons to unsubscribe
Fifty million Facebook users have, apparently, woken to the news that their profiles have been breached and they have to change their passwords.
Brislen on Tech
It's 2025 and your auto-drive car slews sickeningly across a dark and rain-drenched road. You scrabble at the wheel as the car slides across the wet tarmac and disappears into the bush and scrub and i…
ICT marketplace opens for business
The Government's new digital procurement channel, Marketplace, is now open for business, with suppliers invited to register on its website.
The first channel is Public Cloud Services (Saas), and in…
Fixing government IT procurement - Part II
Part II: A modest proposal
Having described a problem so pervasive in the status quo of government software procurement - which has led to a situation I have characterised, without hyperbole, as a…
Comparing broadband pricing - pre-LLU to post-UFB
The latest stats on Ultra Fast Broadband uptake showed some good results for the network - with 74.8% of the fibre network complete - but what are the end-results for end-users? Have prices risen as s…
Fixing government IT procurement
Today in New Zealand, local and central government procurement of IT services and software uses a model which, it is widely thought in the domestic IT industry, produces unsatisfactory results. Despit…
Brislen on Tech
A few weeks ago we talked about the EU and its plan to introduce new copyright laws in the shape of Article 11 and Article 13. I suggested the EU would be stupid to do so because they don't understand…
SKY TV boss on content wars, satellite vs UFB
In his 17th and final letter to SkyTV shareholders in the company's annual report, departing CEO John Fellet spells out why the content game is one of the hardest of all the play. The internet may be …
CERT quarterly report: incidents up but losses down
CERT has released its latest quarterly report and while the number of reported incidents is up from 506 to 736 in the quarter, financial losses are down by 24%.
Top marks for broadband, still room for improvement
Here's a good news story. The Ultra Fast Broadband build is 74.8% complete. It is 7% ahead of schedule. To date, uptake is 44.1%. Currently 70% of New Zealanders can access fibre.
No AirPower for Apple at this point
A year after buying New Zealand wireless charging company PowerbyProxi, Apple is apparently no closer to launching a consumer product on the market, despite announcing it would in 2018.
Brislen on Tech
Telephones used to be such simple things. You grabbed them by the nose and turned the dial around and lo! You could talk to someone.
Then they became terribly complicated beasts. They were portable…
Derek Handley: The CTO role
The government's CTO role process has ground to a halt, but throughout it all, the man chosen for the role has been silent. Now, Derek Handley himself speaks out for the first time.
