1. The founder myth takes a battering

Tech founders have achieved an almost super hero status - think Steve Jobs - but this year we saw a number of them falter. Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg reportedly lost $15 billion in a year of controversies (see below). Elon Musk began 2018 with bravado by launching a Tesla into space, hit a low-point with injudicious tweeting, but has appeared to the end the year OK. Meanwhile Steve Jobs wanna-be Elizabeth Holmes is facing fraud charges following the collapse of her company Theranos.

2. #delete Facebook

It was an 'annus horribilis' for the social media giant after it was discovered that personal data from 87 million accounts was sold to Cambridge Analytica, which then used the data to influence elections. CEO Mark Zuckerberg found himself being questioned by the US Government , where Washington showed it can out-Hollywood Hollywood in drama, if not in tech knowledge. But many users concerned about the issues raised were left wondering if they could actually delete Facebook from their lives, given its enormous reach.

3. National CTO - not yet, maybe never

In opposition Labour MP Clare Curran campaigned for the appointment of a National Chief Technology Officer, and when she became a Minister it looked like it would finally come to pass. But the botched process, which resulted in the appointment of Derek Handley, and subsequent withdrawal of the offer, saw her leave Cabinet. And we're still waiting for a National CTO to be appointed. [UPDATE: Since this post was first published, Digital Services Minister Megan Woods has confirmed that the CTO position has been scrapped in favour of a "small group of people" to assist in guiding New Zealand's tech environment.]

4. Year of China

It was the year in which we really began to think about the fact that China has some of the best tech in the world and is deploying some of it in ways that might even surprise our old friend George Orwell. Facial recognition surveillance cameras in Shenzhen that name and shame jaywalkers, and a social credit system in which citizens are scored on their behaviour (with real-world consequences). But while governments like New Zealand are taking a hard line regarding Huawei being involved in the 5G rollout, many organisations are looking at ways to get closer, with Google rumoured to be returning to the land of over 772 million internet users.

5. Creepy tech

Not everything new development tech is met with universal applause, especially when it gets a little too human for comfort. Google unveiled Google Duplex at its developer conference, in which a voice assistant was shown to make mundane appointment calls (for example to the hairdresser, to the restaurant) and carry on a conversation like an Actual Person. Meanwhile Amazon's Alexa was caught out recording a family's conversation and sending it to the husband's employee.

6. Digital Divide

As broadband infrastructure reaches 99.8% of the population, discussions about the digital divide are coming to the fore. A couple of excellent reports this year, notably "Out of the Maze: Building Digitally Inclusive Communities", have highlighted just how necessary it is for all New Zealanders to have equal access to the internet, especially as more government services, including the education system, go online.

7. Robots stealing jobs

Dystopian futures got a real outing this year, with many studies, here and overseas, looking at the impact of new technology on the future of work. A report from Infometrics says 31% of current jobs are at risk of being automated, but rather than panic, maybe it's better to plan?

8. Smartphones reach $2K in price

While PCs might be reducing in price, smartphones are getting more expensive. The 2018 releases from high-end hardware manufacturers Samsung and Apple were around the $2,000 mark, with the iPhone XS Max 6.5-inch display at $2,099. This might explain why nobody queues for the latest iPhone anymore.

9. E-scooters arrive on our shores

New Zealand joined the latest tech craze when Lime unleashed 1000 e-scooters on the streets of Christchurch and Auckland in October, and more recently in Upper Hutt. Many were horrified that you could ride the footpaths of our cities travelling at up to 27kmph without wearing a helmet. While others saw the opportunity to join the gig economy and make up to $150 a night as 'juicers'.

10. Don't believe the hype

It's the story that in many ways sums up the tech year. If you are looking for a gripping holiday read this summer, then you can't go past Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Start-up by John Carreyrou, a journalist at the Wall Street Journal. It's a modern-day Greek tragedy in which the CEO, who modelled herself on Steve Jobs, drove the company's value up to over $9 billion peddling a product that was supposed to provide accurate blood tests with just the pinprick on your finger. Too good to be true? Turned out it was.

This Top Ten in Tech was discussed on Radio NZ's Nine to Noon show here.

This time, the company has admitted that it exposed photos taken by nearly seven million users to third party apps that weren't supposed to have access to them. This includes photos that were uploaded but then never posted - a practice that Facebook has developed to ensure users can change their mind about changing their mind about posting to the site.

The company says the problem arose from an API programming error that allowed such access for 12 days from September 13 to September 25 this year. The company has since fixed the problem and apologised to users, saying it plans to deploy tools to allow developers to figure out which users might be affected by the leak.

This is a different security problem to the one announced earlier in the month that was initially thought to have allowed hackers to gain access to 50 million user accounts. Facebook now says that figure was "only" 30 million accounts, and it is working with the FBI to track down the hackers.

The latest security flaw isn't a result of hacking, but rather of a problem with Facebook's own API deployment. That, coupled with Facebook's own business model, is just the latest in a series of own goals scored by the social media giant. =

The company still has to explain itself to a number of parliamentary hearings around the world that are concerned about the level to which Facebook has enabled fake news and propagandists to influence elections in several countries.

Facebook isn't the only tech giant coming under pressure. Closer to home, Google managed to not be informed about New Zealand's name suppression regime and named the man accused of murdering British backpacker Grace Millane in an email reporting on search trends.

Google suggests it is the court's responsibility to tell it about the suppression order, and key executives are coming to New Zealand to explain their stance to Minister for Justice, Andrew Little.

While a number of commentators are unsure as to how Google is supposed to know about every court case in the world so as to avoid similar situations in the future (perhaps it could use a search engine to monitor such things), the issue brings into sharp relief the issues facing legislators around the world. How do individual countries retain control of their legal powers if extra-territorial operators like Google or Facebook can avoid responsibility when things go wrong on the basis that they're too big to notice.

And what a year it's been? The collision of politics with tech, of users' expectations with providers' business models and of planning with reality has left us all reeling from the "GONGGGGGG" sound you get when you stick your head inside a bell just before someone hits it.

So let's take a look back at 2018 and see if there are any learnings we can take into The Future.

Politicians suck at technology

Ah, politics. I've met a lot of politicians over the years, and I've even been asked to be a politician, but my golden rule is never to join a club that would have someone like me as a member, so that ruled that out.

Politicians seem to have one thing in common, regardless of what side of the house they sit on, or indeed which house they're in altogether, and that is: they really don't understand technology.

Whether it's debating how Uber's service can best be regulated through close questioning of their ability to park on a taxi rank (take a bow that particular New Zealand parliamentary select committee) or keep everyone safe by introducing really bad legislation that will damage a nation's security immeasurably (hat tip: Australia) or fail to ask the obvious questions of Google's CEO because you really want to ask questions about the iPhone (US House of Representatives) or stuff up asking Facebook's CEO relevant questions about the destruction of democracy because you don't understand how the snap of chat works (America, stand up again) or ask politely for Facebook to show up only to have them say "no thanks" because who cares what you want (House of Commons, although bonus points for your committee getting stuck in boots and all despite Zuckerberg's lack of availability), politicians of every rank and colour simply fail to understand even the most basic tenants of this business, of the potential impact of the technology or how best to regulate it in a positive and fruitful way.

Until we have a generation of MPs who have grown up immersed in the technology world we will continue to have poorly thought out laws introduced to do rather obscure things that make little difference to the big picture.

In the meantime, perhaps we could hire some experts to advise us on how these technologies will evolve and what the risks are, but also where the opportunities lie… Oh wait, that didn't work out too well either. Our Chief Technical Officer is now languishing in "political hot potato limbo" and is likely to remain there, more's the pity.

Come on, politicians. It's not that hard. Technology is all around us and you yourselves use it every day. The era of the John Banks politician ("Why would anyone trust their banking to the internet? I just don't understand who could be so stupid" - a more-or-less direct quote from John during an interview I had with him on the radio) has passed and today's MPs and ministers should have a better clue about email, about messages, about copyright, about interception capability, about open platforms, about data sovereignty, about the right to be forgotten, and about how to turn it off and back on again.

Maybe we'll put that on our Christmas wish list for next year.

Techblog - Where to now for the CTO?

Techblog - Curran removed from Cabinet

Techradar - Australian anti-encryption laws will be in place by Christmas

The Hill - Google CEO responds to Steve King's iPhone concerns: 'Congressman, iPhone is made by a different company'

The Register - Britain approved £2.5m of snooping kit exports to thoroughly snuggly regime in Saudi Arabia

Tech companies suck at pastoral care

This is a term I've learned while working with a number of different schools and it's one I really like. Pastoral care. It's not, as I first thought, about looking after grass, but rather about looking after the wellbeing of your students.

We already know that tech companies in the US tend to be really bad at this when it comes to their employees (cough cough Amazon cough, and while I'm coughing Chorus and its sub-contractors) but locally they've been quite good at it, going so far as to get good scores in terms of job satisfaction.

But when it comes to customers, tech companies really drop the ball.

Not your tech company, of course. I know your company treats everyone really well. I'm talking about the other tech companies. The ones that ask for a customer's personal data, swear on a stack of bibles as tall as their mother that they'll do the right thing by them and then proceed to fail to do the basics properly.

I'm talking about the tech companies that want you to share your innermost secrets with them and then blab them to the world at large, or at least the nefarious dark net underbelly at large.

You know the ones. Yahoo (3 billion records stolen), Marriott Hotels (500 million stolen and yes, hotels are tech companies too), Under Armour (also a tech company and weighing in with 150 million stolen records), Quora (100 million), Facebook (50 million) and so on and on and on.

If they valued this information they'd treat it better. They'd treat customers better. But they don't and the reason is we're not the customers.

It's an old adage that if you don't pay for something you're not the customer you're the product, but sadly it needs repeating. All of these companies ask you for content (specific content that goes above and beyond what is needed to buy or use the service on offer) in exchange for which they will give you some stuff. But never forget, you're not the customer - your stuff is the product they then on-sell or use to make more money. Marriott wants all that information not because it needs to know your date of birth or mother's maiden name or whatever so you can have a better night's sleep in a hotel, but because it's of value to the company that it knows these things. You might get some kind of reward out of giving the information to them, but all too often that reward is lost in the crush and you see no upside at all, just plenty of downside.

Tech companies (and let's face it, I can't think of a single company I deal with that isn't a "tech company" in one form or another) need to get a lot better at this and fast. We can help with that. We can make it in their best interests to get better at it. We need laws that protect our data and insist that they care - call it health and safety for your private information. Sure, it's tedious that schools have to make sure their charges don't get hurt but frankly we expect nothing less - it's high time tech companies were incentivised along the same lines. Fail to keep our data safe and face massive fines, face jail time, face having your social licence to operate taken away.

We might not be customers but we certainly do have a vote.

Techblog - IT professionals happy in their work

The Verge - Amazon warehouse workers skip bathroom breaks to keep their jobs, says report

NZ Herald - Nearly all Chorus broadband subcontractors breaching labour laws, MBIE says

Associated Press - Marriott security breach exposed data of up to 500M guests

Techblog - Move quickly on mandatory data breach disclosure laws (from 2011 when the situation was simply urgent)

Facebook sucks at democracy

If there's one story that is yet to fully play out it's the tale of Facebook and the steady erosion of trust that is currently taking place in our democracy.

That's very grand as far as statements go but I do believe this issue cannot be overstated.

I had this conversation with my kids the other day - can you name the three branches of government (we were comparing New Zealand politics with US so were getting into the "why don't we have a president" section of learning).

We got monarch/president/executive/whatever you call it for the first, and parliament for the second, but the third took some time. The judiciary! Judges! Enforcing the laws of the land written by those pesky politicians in the first place.

So we discussed at length how important it was to have a totally independent judiciary that can act as a check and balance on an otherwise pretty unrestrained parliament.

Ah, said I, now can you name the fourth leg of this stool.

The media plays a vital role in our democracy and one that yes, I know it's hard to admit but it's true, goes beyond cat videos, crossword puzzles and clickbait.

The media has to act as a sanity check on the excesses of government or it's all pretty much for nothing. Media as entertainment is fine but I'd rather watch a scripted TV show (Patriot is excellent, by the way). Media as sense check is essential to a properly functioning democracy.

So when a new media player comes along, decimates the existing media landscape, sucks up all the resources and then refuses to admit it's a media player at all, I get nervous. When it goes one step further and starts pushing particular ideologies I get more than nervous, I get angry.

And when that platform then refuses to accept any form of responsibility, but continues to give away data, to share information on a truly colossal scale and pushes out information designed to skew understanding of key issues that really do matter (the economy, the ecology, the political landscape) then it's time to act.

We already have problems with large international players ignoring New Zealand laws (I'm thinking in particular of privacy and just this week our legal system's right to decide who gets named and when) but when you add to that Facebook's willingness to allow mass manipulation of newsfeeds that are ostensibly driven by algorithms but are in fact driven by dollars, then we're all in big trouble.

Facebook is facing the music from a number of legislative bodies around the world and New Zealand should be added to that list. But so too should some of the other tech companies out there that simply refuse to abide by the law of the land. Google is happy to censor Nazi paraphernalia for the German market, happy to erase discussions about democracy for the Chinese market and apparently OK with blurring US army installations around the world for the US market, but they can't figure out how not to breach New Zealand's name suppression laws? Pull the other one.

Facebook has a huge challenge ahead of it. If it wants to retain that social licence to operate, it needs to be seen to address some of these issues head on. But if, as is increasingly the case, the company wants to tough it out, it's going to have to find a way to explain how it has handled data from a privacy point of view, which companies and agencies it has shared it with from an international point of view, and answer some very angry questions about its compliance with various countries' laws relating to political spending, and that is a debate that isn't going to end well.

Techblog - Facebook comes under blistering fire from all sides

Techblog - Facebook lambasted by UK parliamentary inquiry

Techblog - Facebook's 50 million user breach: Trump, Brexit and Cambridge Analytica

And, with apologies to the original Kiwi Landing Pad based in San Francisco which helps New Zealand companies gain a toehold in the US market, I raised the idea of transposing this concept for skilled migrants.

I called it the Wellington-based Kiwi Landing Pad for skilled migrants.

While it has been widely reported that there is an ICT skill shortage, and New Zealand promotes itself overseas as an attractive proposition; when they land up in the country, several skilled migrants and international students find it difficult to break into the local Wellington job market.

Many end up performing low level unskilled jobs, a few return back home to their country. Even those who are successful in finding a role and have been in the work force for several years, they are often performing at a level much below their skills and experience for a prolonged period.

On the one hand this has a financial and mental wellbeing impact on the individual and their families; on the other hand, the industry, and New Zealand suffers because of having a skilled, but un-productive workforce.

As I said in this interview with Stuff, it will be like a bootcamp, set up to help participants gain an understanding of opportunities, the local job market, key players, how the system works, job search strategies, networking, CV prep, interview and so on.

Recently, the Kiwi Landing Pad for skilled migrants became a reality of sorts. Weeks of each other, I ran two such sessions, the first one with support from the Indian High Commission, and the second one, held in conjunction with IT Professionals NZ.

There were many similar themes. An ICT professional. A recent graduate. An overseas student. A skilled migrant. A refugee. Their common question: Can you help me find a job?

In the first session, I approached the Indian High Commission. With minimum fuss and in no time, His Excellency Sanjiv Kohli agreed to host the session and his able Commercial Assistant Mamta Bhatt packaged it and promoted it through their social media channels.

We had eight to ten registrations, and it forced me to create a run-sheet. Came the day, we ran the session, and it became quickly evident that the one-and-a-half hours we had budgeted for was not going to be enough.

Fast forward, I made a chance comment on the lack of diversity and inclusion in an event hosted by the Wellington branch of IT Professionals NZ. I put it out there that should anyone be interested, I had material to run a session for new, skilled migrants.

Paul Heath and Kay Jones clearly saw the need, jumped on it, and an ITP workshop (free for members) was locked and loaded.

Paul Heath worked it so that anyone who attended the full workshop would be entitled to join ITP's popular mentoring programme.

The program nicely complemented the larger programme of work ITP is doing with schools, tertiary education, accreditation of degrees, recognition of overseas qualifications and becoming an effective CIO.

The use of warranties and warranty periods in on-premise software licences is long-standing. Typically, a supplier would offer a period after delivery (or, if the customer was able to negotiate this, acceptance of installed software) during which if the software contained major bugs or failed to meet its specifications, the supplier was in breach of the warranty and had to fix the problem - usually entirely for free. Negotiations often centred on the issue of whether, assuming the defect/non-compliance was fixed, the supplier had any liability for losses that might be incurred in the meantime - with many suppliers insisting that the fix was the customer's sole remedy.

Warranties in relation to tangible goods have obviously been around for a long time and a short warranty period often makes a lot of sense. You might expect a product that you buy in a shop to work as promised for a relatively short period of time before normal wear and tear impacts on its operation. But these historical justifications for warranty periods arguably makes less sense for software - while software wear and tear/'software rot' may indeed occur, it tends not to happen over a short period of time.

Rather, the key objective/purpose of a warranty period in a traditional software licence could alternatively be viewed as essentially giving the customer a benefit of a period of free support/maintenance to fix any errors - in turn incentivising the supplier to make very sure, at the point of delivery or acceptance, that the software is correctly installed and in good working order.

This benefit can fast be eroded in the terms of SaaS/cloud contracts. This is because the support/maintenance services and fees are often wrapped into the subscription service and are payable from day 1 - there is no period of free support or maintenance - and supplier standard SaaS terms often provide that fixing the warranty breach is the customer's sole remedy for the breach. 

From the customer's perspective, this approach doesn't offer any additional benefit for a period after delivery/acceptance - in fact the warranty period sometimes presents more risk to the customer than the ongoing subscription term once the warranty period has expired. This is because:

• The customer may be already paying for support/maintenance in the form of a bundled subscription fee.  In such circumstances, it can be unclear whether the customer is actually getting for free (as opposed, for example, to a situation where support and maintenance is charged for on a time and materials basis but time spent on warranty fixes may not be charged)
• If the warranty fix is expressed to be the sole remedy, then the customer can't recover additional losses in the form of damages (should it wish to do so) - although of course in practice additional losses may be difficult to prove and recover
• Often the supplier will argue that the service levels don't apply during the warranty period but rather the supplier has a 'reasonable' period to fix defects in breach of warranty.  The customer can therefore end up with less certainty about when a fix must be provided than when it is in the BAU support phase after the warranty period has ended.

We've been involved in projects where:

• The customer expects the solution to be near perfect at go-live so that if there are any problems in the warranty period, the supplier should bear the full risk of these (both the cost of fixing them and any losses the customer suffers as a result) and should meet all the service levels as it does so
• The supplier expects there to be bugs and problems in the period after go-live that need to be ironed out and, so long as they act to fix these in a professional manner within a reasonable timeframe from discovery, doesn't expect to have any further liability.

Clearly these are quite different philosophies. What is a reasonable position to take will often depend on the nature of the solution, the level and structure of the fees payable, the parties' appetite for risk, and the development methodology.

In our view, there isn't actually any right or wrong answer to the question posed in this article. The 'point' of a warranty period depends very much on what the parties negotiate it to be and how any warranty terms interact with the other clauses of the contract (eg termination rights and general performance obligations) and rights and remedies which exist at law (eg the right to damages).

What is important is that contracting parties realise that warranties in IT contracts don't necessarily have any 'magical' qualities - the benefits of warranty periods may be largely illusory. It is important to:

• Understand at the outset what you are seeking to achieve by having a warranty period
• Identify whether the parties are actually on the same page about this
• Ensure that the contractual provisions (including the interaction with other rights and remedies) actually achieve the agreed objective.

The Buddle Findlay legal team consists of Allan Yeoman, Amy Ryburn, Philip Wood, Renee Stiles, Alex Chapman, Damien Steel-Baker, Keri Johansson Reposted with kind permission.

This week I thought I'd rejoin Facebook just so I could quit again in rage. Something really needs to be done to rein in a company that has combined the utter decimation of the media landscape with the total abdication of responsibility for the content it pumps into people's lives.

It's billions of users, clicking through and seeing hundreds of millions of ads, don't appear to be enough for the juggernaut. Instead of being happy to serve advertising to the masses, the company has decided it needs to also serve up news and other forms of content and, instead of being happy with that, it would also enable wholesale sharing of propaganda and fake news stories.

And *then*, as if that and the tens of billions of dollars that all rakes in, the company decided to open up its borders to third parties and give them access to your viewing and reading habits, to your online lives, to every click and view and let them mine that data as well.

All this without anything beyond a cursory thought given to what this could mean for the democratic process, for accuracy, for ongoing relationships, for those people wanting to use the platform for its supposed intent - to stay in touch with friends and family and to share photos and stories.

The New York Times article linked below rips the scab off the the entire festering sore and makes it clear - none of this has happened by accident. Facebook has gone out of its way several times, and gone beyond its brief of neutral platform that simply provides space to being one of actively promoting deceitful information (and it would appear has also been making up some of the data about how many times people actually view videos or advertising to bolster its coffers even further).

I bailed out of Facebook some months ago although, as someone pointed out to me yesterday, the company still tracks users and non-users visiting sites that have ties with Facebook and so I'm still contributing to the coffers even though that literally is the last thing I want to do.

Facebook has long been the poster child of disruption, of online success, of dropping out of the career track to pursue your dreams, but it's also the poster child for 21^st century abandonment of ideals, of moral standards and of leading by example. Soon it could well become the latest casualty in a long list of companies and organisations that take both users and customers for granted and which fail to secure the social licence needed to operate.

I just hope that's sooner rather than later because with the scale of Facebook today, the damage another round of this manipulative madness could cause is too great to consider.

New York Times - Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook's Leaders Fought Through Crisis

Log off II

While we're speaking of the unspeakable, how about we revisit privacy and the exciting new world of giving all your data away for free whether you know about it or not.

I may have mentioned before that I have no problem sharing my medical health records. I've blogged about it, I've whined about it and if you're unlucky enough to be around when I have a head cold, you've suffered along with me as I list ailments, symptoms, quack remedies and why it is that I'm dying, etc.

But some folks detest the idea of having their medical records exposed for all to see and would fight it tooth and nail. Imagine their surprise to wake up and discover that DeepMind, a company set up to develop AI capability in the health sector, and which has access to huge amounts of UK's National Health Service data, is now being swept up into Google Health and will no longer be arm's length from the mother ship.

For some, this is just a consolidation, a branding exercise. The products will still exist, the company still exists, but it's now part of Google rather than Alphabet (the parent company to all Google and its ancillary organisations).

But for others it's yet more evidence of the ongoing move to commercialise a public resource that will then be sold back to the public for a fee, especially when you remember back (thanks, Google) to DeepMind's initial promise that it would never merge its products, and their associated data, into the Google parent company.

This is, of course, standard operating procedure for a lot of US companies. Acquire data based on one set of rules, slowly change the rules and then make a break from the old world order with nary a backward glance.

But of course it's not just the US companies that do it. Below you'll find a link to an amusing tale about the Australian telecommunications data retention regime and the way it has crept away from "we're using this to fight the worst crimes such as terrorism and paedophilia" and is now more a case of "give us your data or die in a ditch".

The Australian Communications Alliance has discovered that "scope creep" is now more like "scope landslide" with 80 different government bodies now asking for metadata on individuals' online movements.

Alongside the police and tax office we also find Australia Post's Corporate Security Group, a number of local councils, the Department of Agriculture, the Fair Work Building and Construction Commission and the Taxi Services Commission all of whom think it's OK to ask telcos for private data.

If only there were some rules, perhaps even laws, that were able to oversee such activity and ensure that private data isn't treated with a cavalier attitude. Some kind of Privacy Act or similar. Because once you've handed over the keys to your privacy kingdom, it's rather hard to get them back.

The Verge - Privacy advocates sound the alarm after Google grabs DeepMind UK health app

CNBC - The new Google Health unit is absorbing health business from DeepMind, Alphabet's AI research group

The Register - Oz telcos' club asks: Why the hell do Australia Post, rando councils, or Taxi Services Commission want comms metadata?

The Register - Alexa, cough up those always-on Echo audio recordings, says double-murder trial judge

The internet of things that shouldn't be on the internet

To round out this week's "old man shakes fist at clouds" column, my electric toothbrush has died. 

But fear not for my halitosis riddled corpse - I have been using a manual one while we research, source and purchase a replacement. So I'm good.

The replacement (highly recommended by Consumer New Zealand) was really just an updated version of the old electric toothbrush, and was ordered on the basis that what is familiar is good (and we have some toothbrush heads that will fit the new handle, so why waste them).

Unfortunately, I did not read the fine print.

This toothbrush is Bluetooth enabled, and comes equipped with an app that you download which will provide you not only with a handy timer, but also a pressure/angle of attack sensor capability, a toothbrush tracking schedule tool, some toothbrushing games for the kids (sorry, "kids") and an unpleasant eagerness to tell me news snippets carefully selected for me by … well, I can only presume by my toothbrush. It will send out tweets on my behalf, presumably to a breathless-with-anticipation audience.

I am appalled.

I've turned most of it off - no gamification of dental hygiene for me. I can't turn off all the little messages the app will push (although I got rid of the weather, sport, amusing factoids and toothbrushing tips which is good) but it still irks me that this giant leap forward is nothing more than a complete waste of everyone's time.

The dead toothbrush came with an external unit that would synch with the toothbrush and tell me how long I'd been brushing for.

That was fine, because when I'm brushing my teeth of a morning, my phone is occupied. It's playing music, plus I'm scrolling through emails and potentially making witty and cutting quips on Twitter, so there's not really any scope for it to also connect to my toothbrush to update me on stuff I don't care about.

But the new toothbrush really wants me to pay attention, and so it doesn't have the external unit, nor will it talk to the old one.

And so it is that this new, improved (and more expensive) brush has a host of features that I neither want, nor will use, and which at best have been turned off and at worst will get in the way.

Welcome to the Internet of Things and our new world order.

Trusted Reviews - Oral-B Genius 9000 Review

Rhodri GIlber has a problem similar to my own

Minister for Finance Grant Robertson has this week provided an update, reporting on the second meeting of the Forum, which consists of himself, Business NZ CEO Kirk Hope and Council of Trade Unions President Richard Wagstaff. A major topic was that old chestnut - technology disruption.

The Forum heard from a McKinsey and NZ Tech, and the Minister summarised the discussion as follows:

"Globally we are seeing a massive growth in technologies that were once considered science fiction - things like robotic surgery, drones, artificial intelligence, cellular agriculture, inductive transfer and autonomous vehicles. All of these technological changes will make us more productive but they are also having significant impacts on the way we work," Grant Robertson says.

One sector that is grappling with the changes is manufacturing. With the term 'Industry 4.0' all the rage in the tech sector this year. Here's the Wikipedia definition, which is as good as any:

Industry 4.0 is a name given to the current trend of automation and data exchange in manufacturing technologies. It includes cyber-physical systems, the Internet of things, cloud computing and cognitive computing. Industry 4.0 is commonly referred to as the fourth industrial revolution.

Industry 4.0 fosters what has been called a "smart factory". Within modular structured smart factories, cyber-physical systems monitor physical processes, create a virtual copy of the physical world and make decentralised decisions. Over the Internet of Things, cyber-physical systems communicate and cooperate with each other and with humans in real-time both internally and across organizational services offered and used by participants of the value chain.

The term 'Industry 4.0' isn't referenced in Robertson's press release, but it does note that Forum has confirmed $250,000 of funding from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment towards supporting a Skills Shift in Manufacturing Initiative created and led by the NZ Manufacturers Network.

"A key element of adapting to this change is ensuring that we have the right skills for the future. We need to understand what measures will need to be taken to prevent technological unemployment and the aggravations of serious skills shortages in key industries such as manufacturing," says Wagstaff.

For those unfamiliar with the NZ Manufacturers Network it has, according to its website, been around for 137 years and was previously the NZ Manufacturers and Exporters Association. The first article in its latest newsletter is "Industry 4.0 as an Extension of lean - a local example from Germany", and is a report from the Chief Executive Dieter Adam on its equivalent organisation, called HTT, in Hannover. He notes that by looking at the workshops held by HTT in the past four years there is an "ever closer integration of Lean and Industry 4.0 topics."

"Just as we've come to realise in New Zealand, the group (HTT) sees and treats digital manufacturing technologies simply as 'a next step' in 'making the boat go faster'."

What would happen to New Zealand if there were no urban/rural divide in communications capability, if a basic 100/20 Mbit/s is available, wherever fibre is, at $46/month. What if work from home, for any employer on the globe, was available in our most distant and suffering regions.

Sports coverage, banking services, education, health and aged care and other services could achieve economies of scale over fibre while permanent bricks and mortar provision is shrinking.

Is 100% an unachievable aspirational goal? Perhaps. We have government to achieve what decision making by spreadsheet can't. Maybe 100% is too big an ask but we could at least do as well as previous generations in ensuring the same equity of connection for roading, electricity and landline telephony, none of which left 16% of New Zealanders to eke out an existence without these essential services.

There are economists who say this is possible. What is certain is that line companies have laid copper and carried generators' power further than Local Fibre Companies (LFCs) can carry other companies' light, and made good livings from it. Good enough to invest in wineries as a diversification.

While the 84% fibre footprint planned by 2022 was a risk in 2011, it is a triumph in 2018 with recent results showing one in three connections are now fibre. The business case assumptions from seven years ago have been well exceeded and the value to New Zealand of fibre connection is recognised.

The original conception of the UFB Project was an open access fibre network. This requirement was forborne due to the risk it would "impose significant costs and over-burden infant businesses investing in emerging technologies."

The active, bitstream product was given exclusively to the LFCs as a buttress against failure, an additional push during the early stages of the project.

Any need for exclusive grants to LFCs, who have all exceeded their business plan targets, has gone. Nevertheless the Telecommunications (New Regulatory Framework) Amendment Bill continues the forbearance on the open access regime.

While the bill is still in flux (improvements have been proposed in a SOP) there is time. We need to take the steps to make fibre a universal essential service. Fibre is one of the cheapest passive infrastructures, with the capacity to deliver an exceptional number of valuable diverse services.

Laying additional fibre is an economic development activity with exceptional returns, but not to the LFC. Their benefit is reliability and certainty of return. The exceptional gain is to the nation and will be reaped by us collectively. Happier people, lowered costs and increased economic activity all follow fibre's universal path.

We need regulation only in the laying, pricing, ROI and access to fibre. Competition at the active layer, bitstreams, will ensure efficient operation and the layer of RSP will provide the diversity of customer services of varying capabilities to serve the wide range of needs a modern information society and economy requires.

Persisting with the integration of passive and active layers exclusively in the hands of the LFCs, covered by a wholesale figleaf of RSPs will not deliver the optimum outcome for NZ. Open access will give a range of risk profiles and returns for investors, competition will drive out excessive margin, and retail will offer citizens a range of services at divide reducing prices and locations.

We've done better in the past, when the rewards were smaller. Let's get on and finish the job for all New Zealanders. Fibre, 100%.

Hamish is a long-standing ICT commentator, advocate for open access and former InternetNZ councillor. He is based in Wellington and can be reached on Twitter here.

Given Huawei is already well ensconced in the market - Spark and 2Degrees use Huawei to provide the backbone of their mobile networks while Vodafone use Huawei kit in its fixed-line network, and Huawei sells mobile phones and modems extensively in New Zealand - this would seem to be a big ask, but Minister of Communications Kris Faafoi says it is possible for New Zealand to ban Chinese equipment makers out of security concerns.

Both Spark and 2Degrees have come out swinging, with 2Degrees spokesman Mat Bollard telling Stuff that customers would end up paying more if the company was forced to re-tool using another provider.

"We have been with Huawei for the better part of ten years and it is important it remains around as an option because it provides quality network kit and brings price-competitiveness to the market," he told Stuff.

And Spark's CEO, Simon Moutter, also said unless the government had incontrovertible proof of any security breach, perhaps it had best stick to its knitting.

"We hope that our government would not preclude them from being considered without incontrovertible evidence their technology presents a security risk," he told the company's Annual General Meeting late last month.

Huawei has responded by suggesting it won't bid for "core" network assets should the issue arise, but points out that while US and Australian partners are unwilling to use Chinese equipment makers, both New Zealand and the UK have done so without concern for some time.

Meanwhile the Government Communication Security Bureau (GCSB) suggests Kiwi businesses should be giving cyber-security more emphasis.

In a survey of 250 "nationally significant organisations" by the GCSB's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) the government spy agency found only 19% of organisations have a chief of information security role, and that while many are increasing their spending on cyber security more than half felt they don't have the personnel to manage risks well enough.

The full report can be found here.

It must be about 16 years since we all gathered in Nelson to talk about the future. It was so long ago it hardly makes sense to talk about. Paul Swain was Minister of Communications. We almost had a Telecommunications Act (it might have just come into being) but the role of the Telecommunications Commissioner was so bright and shiny I don't think we'd seen a single decision.

Telecom was in charge of the phones. There was no competition. There was no Google! There wasn't even any wholesale - unbundling was for Communists.

Yet around 200 of us met in Nelson to talk about the future, to provide some inspiration for what we would hope the next steps would be.

The Telecommunication Users Association (TUANZ) put it together - ten industry sector groups, each with a facilitator and a journalist who would write the detail up in a chapter for the book ("The Survival of the Fastest" which beat out my suggestion, "The Haptic Hongi" and cost me a case of pinot noir. The book is still available at the Nostradamus School of Prognostication I suspect) which would then be waved around by futurists and the like.

My sector was tourism - a sector about which I cared very little but hey, it was a paying gig and although it was cold in Nelson it was beautiful.

But we didn't have time to muck about. We only had a weekend and there was a lot of ground to cover.

I've been thinking about that weekend a bit lately after I found a reference to the book when doing some research on something else entirely. Instantly I was transported back to a time when the Nokia 2110 was my phone of choice, my internet was broadband in name only (Thanks, Nokia, For the M1122 router delivering ADSL at 1Mbit/s down) but our minds were full of possibility.

The premise was simple: imagine what a world where internet access was ubiquitous and equitable - what impact would that have on your sector?

So we started imagining. How about an online service that would let us update our photo albums so the folks back home could see our holiday snaps and maybe even (whisper it) video? In real time.

Gasp! (we just invented Facebook)

Or what about goggles that would transmit pictures of what this particular tourist destination used to look like for places of historical importance? You could see Roman London or Victorian London or WWII Blitz London, or turn-of-the-century Nelson!

Gasp! (we just invented augmented reality).

I often wonder why none of us followed up on the work being done (other than Dr Mark Billinghurst, of course, who actually made a career out of doing just that) but we all put it down to youthfully exuberance and came back to earth with a thump.

Thinking about the future is really quite important, especially for a small nation at the far end of the world's trade routes. How we adapt and adopt this new fangled technology is important in many, not just tourism, but right across our lives and none more so than in government.

Pia Andrews is well known to many (probably more so as Pia Waugh but that's another story) and her move to Australia to head up the New South Wales government digital team left something of a hole in the New Zealand digital government landscape.

Of course, that hole was somewhat obliterated by the CTO comet of early 2018, but we've covered that at some length.

Pia has written about the work she's undertaking for the Aussies and her team's approach, with their five tangible goals, make a lot of sense.

For the record those goals are:

1. Delivery of measurable benefits to the people across the whole government ecosystem;
2. Modelling new ways for public service to work more openly and collaboratively;
3. All-of-service transformation including strategy, policy and importantly, culture;
4. Government to be a social and economic platform upon which "individuals, communities and businesses can thrive; and
5. To establish systemic levers to drive a holistic approach from public servants.

These are bold and useful goals that aren't pie in the sky "what if" dreams but should be quite attainable.

It's something we might like to consider for New Zealand's future as well.

Techblog - A better tomorrow requires change today

Beehive - Rocking Ahead With Fast Internet - TUANZ (2003)

Video is demanding

One of the things we foresaw in 2003 was the imminent demise of Sky TV.

Even then it seemed clear that broadcasting television signals over a dedicate set-top box was a mug's game, destined for the rubbish tip of history. TV was just another series of bits and once broadband was fast enough and those Nokia goggles were cheap enough, we'd all be watching TV beamed into our eyeballs from the internet.

We might not have quite got the goggles bit right (although I have high hopes) but we certainly got the beaming bang to rights.

Last month saw a turning point in New Zealand - for the first time more customers watched Netflix than watched Sky TV. The average household in New Zealand uses around 150GB of data a month - equivalent to 60 hours of HD video being streamed each month. No word on whether that figure includes uploading but either way, that's a lot of binge watching.

Today, TVNZ regularly puts its TV shows to air first via its On Demand app and then over traditional broadcast TV.

In our house we watch a lot of television, but almost none of it is in real time delivered by broadcast capability. I'd say somewhere around 99% of it is delivered online and the only time we watch broadcast is when the All Blacks are playing (assuming I haven't gone to the pub). In fact, the biggest problem we face is the kid not liking that she has to wait a week (sorry, "a WHOLE week") for the next episode of Vanity Fair because she's just not used to it. Poor thing.

There's talk now of Sky TV being sold (possibly along with MediaWorks) to US broadcaster, NBC, but frankly it's almost as if we're discussing the buggy whip union annual gathering after Ford launched the Model T. They're still seen to be powerful and controlling but these days most folks just don't pay them much attention.

Where to next for Sky? Well, content has gone digital and that's an area they need to really beef up. But in order to do that they'll have to stop treating it as an add-on feature that mustn't cannibalise the existing customer base and realise that the existing customer base is no longer theirs for the taking. Digital first must be the company's new mantra and given they're starting a long way back, they really need to get a wriggle on. The future isn't going to wait for ever, you know.

Techblog - SKY TV boss on content wars, satellite vs UFB

NZ Herald - Sky TV buyout rumour as AGM looms

NZ Herald - Netflix now bigger than Sky: Kiwi broadband habits reveal growing hunger for online content

NZ Herald - Comment: Five ways to save Sky TV

The Guardian - Netflix and Amazon become more popular than pay-TV services (July 2018)

Broadband TV News - Netflix overtakes Sky Deutschland in customer numbers (October 2018)

NZ Herald - Fog over Sky Television's financial forecasts as it takes shots at Spark

NZ Herald - Derek Handley under fire at Sky Television AGM

Goods and Services

I shop online quite a lot. Much like watching TV, I like my real world goods chosen from my couch, delivered to my couch and I don't want to wait while someone thinks about bringing the product to a local market near me.

Generally speaking, I buy from international websites and there are a number of reasons for this but in my top ten reasons, avoiding paying GST has never been one of them.

However, the retailers of New Zealand have assured the government that the imbalance in shopping behaviours is exacerbated by the lack of GST and the government has responded by introducing a new GST threshold for imported goods.

If the plan goes ahead, the changes will be introduced from 1 October next year, giving everyone plenty of time to get used to the idea. Prices will naturally go up for goods bought overseas, right? That'll need some managing.

But not so fast, because why the government is introducing GST on all goods, it's removing tariffs and border costs on goods that sell for below $1000, so that will also have an impact.

And goods that are between $400 and $1000 have a different treatment again… so they might be cheaper than they currently are.

It's all very entertaining and the Interest.co.nz story below has a handy chart to explain it all.

At the end of the day two things will happen:

1. People will continue to shop online, both locally and internationally.
2. Retailers in New Zealand will continue to complain about customers buying from the wrong source.

The reason for that is because, as I mentioned early, GST is not the largest factor in purchasing decisions.

I was in a bookshop the other day and saw a book I'd quite like to read.

I like bookshops. I want to live in a community where bookshops exist. I like the smell of them, the off-putting sniff of superiority from the staff member when you ask about some trash novel, the whole thing.

I turned the book over for the sticker price -  $38 (including GST).

I put the book back and went home bookless, wherein I picked up my Kindle and bought the book for $7.

The price differential is just too great. I could justify spending double or even triple on a paper-book but more than five times the rate? No.

I still buy paper books, but I buy them from international providers as well, because somehow they can send me a large format hardcopy illustrated edition of The Hobbit to my house at far less cost than I would pay if I bought it locally, and that's assuming I could find the same edition to buy. Typically, I can not.

I shop online because it's convenient. I shop online because the goods are delivered to my door. I shop online because I can buy stuff that's not yet available in New Zealand and I shop online because the same goods are usually vastly cheaper than they are in New Zealand.

I couldn't give a fig about GST. Add it on. Add on another 15% if you like. It's all good. It's still cheaper and quicker to buy online from an international store, and that means this change to a "fairer" system won't make a blind bit of difference.

Interest - Govt proposes law change to require overseas retailers selling goods to New Zealanders online to start paying GST

Stuff - Tax-free internet shopping to end next October

NZ Herald - Government changes tack on online shopping GST to avoid price hikes

IRD - Summary of Proposals

The 108-page Research, Science and Innovation System Performance Report is the second in what is intended to be a regular series that began in 2016. It provides a number of interesting graphs that show where the R&D spend is occurring and benchmarks New Zealand's progress against small advanced economies, OECD and Australia.

While the focus of R&D spend is changing slowly, the graph below shows that Manufacturing and Primary Industry are still the largest sectors to benefit (the percentages in brackets show changes in value since 2014).

This is also reflected in the composition of research papers that are produced, with the least amount in areas such as computer science, mathematics and engineering.

Meanwhile the proportion of male to female researchers to shows that the former continues to dominate in areas such as mathematics, physics and engineering & technology.

Only 20% of New Zealand graduates studied STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) subjects, and when comparing New Zealand's performance against other similar countries, we appear to be running in the mid to low-end of the pack.

When it comes to business expenditure on R&D (BERD), New Zealand is at the bottom when compared to other small advanced economies, with just 0.63% spent on BERD as a percentage of GDP. As a result, the proportion of New Zealand firms reporting innovation is 49%, compared to top ranking Switzerland at 75%. BERD is increasing, however, with the report noting that BERD increased by $356m (29%) between 2014 -2016.

The report notes however that New Zealand's economic productivity "continues to lag its peers."

"According to the OECD and the Treasury, low R&D investment and innovation rates appear to be important factors behind New Zealand's low economic productivity. Strong business R&D investment coupled with a developing start-up ecosystem suggests system-change in this area. Increased business R&D was driven by higher average investment per firm in computer services and manufacturing."

Which is illustrated in the following graph that measures productivity by comparing New Zealand's GDP per hour worked against similar countries. (If you are wondering about Ireland, the report notes that its spike "reflects financial restructuring of multinational companies to take advantage of tax rules.")

Future growth may lie partly in the start-up community, and the report notes that start-up investment has quadrupled over ten years - from $21 million in 2006 to $87 million in 2016. It quotes the Start-Up Genome Ecosystem Report, which claims start-up activity here is gaining in momentum but currently lags behind similar countries and is characterised as being in the "activation phase". 

You can check out the full report here.

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it." Alan Kay

Digital government means many things to many people. It could be about digital channels for service delivery, process automation, perhaps even emerging technologies and trends.

In the New South Wales government, "Digital Government" is so much more. It is about understanding and embracing the social and technological changes of our times, moving from centralised to distributed systems, from closed to open and more. It is an ambitious, optimistic and inclusive agenda to co-design a better future where all people can thrive.

We want to tackle the necessary transformation of our public services for a better future, from policy to services and everything in between. We also want to model more collaborative, open and inclusive ways for how public services can work with the sectors, communities and citizens we serve.

After all, if we don't actually change anything today, how can we expect a different tomorrow? More urgently, if public sectors don't embrace change rather than just respond to it, how can we be resilient in the face of exponential change, or effective in serving the public?

This is an open invitation to the people and organisations of NSW as well as our Local, Federal and international colleagues to join us in the journey to collaboratively create a better tomorrow. We want to work with you and show what is possible.

So, who are we? Apologies in advance for the acronyms. We are the Digital Government Policy and Innovation (DGPI) Branch in the NSW Department of Finance, Services and Innovation (DFSI). We report to the Government Chief Information and Digital Officer (GCIDO) Greg Wells, and we are led by Pia Andrews, our Executive Director for Digital Government. We also work closely with other NSW Government functions including the Office of the Customer Service Commissioner (CSC) and Data Analytics Centre (DAC), and across all NSW Government agencies. We also collaborate closely with all the other GCIDO Branches, namely the CISO, ICT Procurement, ICT Investment, Government Technology Platforms, ICT Assurance, Spatial Services and the NSW Telco AuthorityDFSI as well as with our colleagues in Service NSW.

Our Digital Government strategic goals are:

1. Delivery of measurable benefits & service improvements for the people & communities of NSW across the entire gov system.
2. To model new ways for modern public services to innovate, collaborate & work more openly, empathetically and effectively across agencies, jurisdictions and sectors.
3. Demonstrate & enable meaningful all-of-public service transformation of strategy, policy, systems, services & culture.
4. Establish government as a social & economic platform upon which individuals, communities and businesses can thrive (GaaP)
5. Establish systemic levers to drive all-of-government behaviours from our public institutions.

We have five teams, each focused on a key aspect to support and lead digital transformation across NSW Government. Let us know what you think:

• Policy Lab our policy team is focused on modernising our policy practice, working across policy communities, Ministerial support, and of course, the policy areas that underpin digital government: technology, emerging trends, data, information (in collab with the data team). We will be exploring and demonstrating more innovative, collaborative and open approaches to policy development.
• The DNA (digital.NSW Accelerator) - our accelerator and service innovation lab has three key functions. Firstly to work with agencies to support and accelerate digital transformation and design led service initiatives. Secondly to collaboratively map and understand the holistic life journeys of NSW citizens to inform areas for service improvements and all of system transformation initiative, and finally to explore and prototype the reusable components and digital public infrastructure we need for the future.
• Data Policy & Practice - this team is the heart of our use of data for evidence drive driven policy and work across our Branch, but also provides all-of-government support, policy, leadership and collaboration for dMarketplace, the NSW Government program for unlocking the potential of data for better social and economic outcomes.
• Innovation (Partnerships & Pipeline) - this team coordinates and engages with cross sector partners in innovation and digital transformation, and will maintain and all of government CX Pipeline to help agencies and all of government prioritisation and investment. This team is based at the StartupHub in Sydney, so please drop in to say hello :)
• Digital Transformation - this team will develop and maintain the NSW Gov Digital Design System as a mechanism to support greater digital transformation across government, and will use system thinking, prospective design and collaboration to co-design better futures for NSW, which helps us understand some of the levers, digital public infrastructure and transformation opportunities we need to explore.

More generally though, we invite you to please discuss, support and constructively contribute to the public services you engage with to be what you need them to be. A little better isn't going to scale to the exponential needs gap emerging in our communities, and an effective public sector is an important part of a modern democracy. We believe it is important to build up the expertise and capability of public sectors to build better public services.

Comments welcome below. We are collaborating with our HR folk to announce a Digital Talent Pool in the coming weeks which you can apply for. Contact us on policyandinnovation@finance.nsw.gov.au if you want to talk to us about collaborating, if you are interested in coming to us on secondment from another agency, or if you want to chat about what we are trying to do :)

We believe the public sector can and should be a social and economic platform upon which society can thrive. A node in a network, not a king in a castle. Please help us make it so.

Pia Andrews is the Executive Director Digital Government, Policy & Innovation Department of Finance, Services and Innovation in New South Wales. Cross-posted with kind permission.

The report, put together by economist Shamubeel Eaqub, is the first in New Zealand that puts a financial figure on the social cost of cyber-bullying and uses international research alongside a UMR survey of 1000 people in New Zealand.

While the figures suggest cyber-bullying is widespread, most of the impact is felt most sharply by the young, women and people of colour.

The report suggests cyber-bullying is most common among teens and people in their early twenties - almost half of all 18 and 19 year olds have been subject to some form of cyber abuse.

The cost associated with cyber-bullying is based on a number of factors including cost of providing support services, any intervention by health workers or authorities (including Netsafe), and even the cost associated with loss of life. By far the biggest burden falls on family and friends in terms of time costs associated with helping the victims of such attacks.

Typical bullying ranges from name calling and flaming through to threats of physical violence, sexual violence and even death threats and of course with our connected society, the medium for such threats range from online chat forums, social media and even text messages to mobile devices.

Netsafe says the report gives New Zealand "a starting point to begin to understand the full impact of this behaviour here".

"It highlights that cyberbullying has a much wider affect than the individual person being targeted and that more could be done to address the risks."

Netsafe provides online safety education, advice and support for people in New Zealand. and was appointed as the approved agency to receive, assess and investigate complaints of harm caused by digital communications under the Harmful Digital Communications Act in 2015. 

We're not going to take it

When the news broke that Cambridge Analytica had been using data gathered through Facebook to pitch ideas and propaganda at users, I realised it was time to switch off my Facebook account once and for all.

Facebook has become the worst of both worlds - a mono-cultural publisher that adopts a "no care, no responsibility" approach to the content it displays.

That would be bad enough - simply being a home to the worst ravings of humanity this side of talk-back radio is fine and easily ignored. But Facebook took it further and began to tweak its settings so users (not customers, users) of the site wouldn't get the content they were looking for but would instead get served up a new feed based almost exclusively on how much money Facebook was paid to deliver that content.

Forget Aunty Mary's posts about how her garden is going - they're still there but you're unlikely to see them because they're buried under a series of ads and posts designed to do everything from sway your opinion on which brand of shampoo to buy.

And again, if Facebook had stopped there I would have been reluctantly happy to carry on using it. Advertising is fine and I have no problem with ads, even "targeted" ads (which never appeared to be targeted terribly well).

No, Facebook decided to sell our data to the highest bidder for political use. Instead of ads, Facebook allows its real customers to place content in the user's feed that is designed to sway political views, to reinforce prejudices and to gain clicks - angry clicks work just as well as positive supporting clicks - and so we have spawned a monster.

That was it for me. The idea that content I wanted to see would be available to me only after I'd waded through the morass of anti-vaccine, climate-change denier, politically tinged madness that was being pumped into my feed was just too much. I deleted my account finally (after much effort) and got rid of Messenger as well.

Now it turns out Facebook has also been a bit lax with its users' security and 40 million accounts have been exposed to the world for a period of time that suggests some ratbags have managed to secure a lot of personal information from a lot of accounts.

I'm a big fan of personal information and I like to keep mine personal. I'll share it where I have to but once shared it's very hard to get it all back in the bottle should it leak out.

Date of birth, mother's maiden name, your IRD number - some personal information is used to identify you to very specific organisations in a very specific way and is the sort of information that is almost impossible to change. Try ringing IRD to ask for a new number, or Births, Deaths and Marriages to ask for a new birthdate because someone online has stolen your details and see how far you get.

Now Facebook is staring down the barrel of yet more questions in the US Senate not to mention a more pressing problem in the form of the EU's new GDPR legislation which has quite a bit more of a sting in its tail. Fines of up to US$1.6 billion are enough to make any company sit up and take notice and that's precisely what Facebook should be doing.

Techblog - 90 million reasons to unsubscribe

Stuff - Facebook faces $1.6b fine after huge data breach

The Guardian - Facebook faces $1.6bn fine and formal investigation over massive data breach

Washington Post - The Cybersecurity 202: Facebook hack compounds the company's woes in Washington

We don't need another hero

Speaking of dumpster fires, the GCSB is warning that it has clear evidence of Russian government ties to a campaign of "malicious cyber activity" targeting international political institutions, businesses, media and sporting organisations.

While none of the named organisations are in New Zealand, the GCSB is happy to confirm work done its UK counterpart.

The head of the GCSB told Radio New Zealand:

"We have seen indicators, if you like fingerprints of types of malware, which the GRU is using, that is Russian Military Intelligence … we've seen those same indicators in New Zealand."

The Russians, of course, insist the software wasn't theirs and in fact was on holiday, visiting the saw mills in Tokoroa.

But I jest. Just.

And so with a background of mayhem, anarchy and dogs sitting in houses in flames, the internet seeks its hero, hoping against hopes we can find a way through the madness and back to the relative sanity, presumably of the dot com bubble era of 1998.

Enter Tim Berners-Lee.

Tim, you may remember, is the man credited as the "father of the world wide web" and while the usage of said WWW appears to have fallen mostly by the wayside, Tim remains a staunch advocate of a more open, accessible world and with that seemingly impossible rescue mission in mind, Tim has been hard at work on Solid, a new way to wrestle back control of your personal data from the nefarious porpoises of the internet as we know it in 2018.

Solid, the name of the product, apparently gives users an "unprecedented control of your data. Create, manage and secure your own personal online data store (POD). You decide who accesses it. We call this 'personal empowerment through data'" and it's one of the founding principles of Tim's new company, Inrupt (built to promote and develop Solid) and indeed of the internet itself.

But isn't this genie out of the bottle? If we've already shared our data, and if government-level actors are also keen on manipulating our feeds, isn't a new way to store information somewhat moot?

Not so, says Tim. It's not too late. Solid will provide all the office tools (calendar, email etc) and all the social media tools (Facebook, Twitter etc) and ultimately will provide the kinds of personal assistants that are coming to the fore (Siri, Alexa) but without losing control of your own data.

Developers are being invited to learn and to start work on the Solid equivalent of apps and services, all built with privacy first and foremost in mind.

It's a bold move - going up against the might of the FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) conglomerate, but if anyone knows about taking on the empire and subverting it to his own ends, it's Tim.

Fast Company - Exclusive: Tim Berners-Lee tells us his radical new plan to upend the World Wide Web

Stuff - How Sir Tim Berners-Lee's alternative to traditional internet would work

Solid - What is Solid

RNZ - Govt 'very concerned' about malicious internet activity - GCSB

Stuff - GCSB cites links between Russian government and series of 'malicious' cyber activities

Holding out for a hero

Speaking of subverting and taking on the might and all that jazz, the Green Party has come up with an interesting solution to the problem of our missing CTO.

You may recall the year-long search for a Chief Technology Officer which started with a hiss and a roar and ended with a resignation, an apology and quite a lot of Reckons from, well, people like me.

Now Green MP and tech-literate politician-about-town Gareth Hughes has come up with a suggestion. Instead of hiring one person to do the job of futurist for the government, why not give the job to InternetNZ?

InternetNZ was formerly known as the Internet Society and has, for the past 20-odd years, been one of the leading proponents of the internet to a largely uninterested New Zealand public. With its programme of work around the country under the NetHui brand, InternetNZ has helped shape some of the country's policy and legal activity, represented "the internet" in formal settings and has generally done quite well at educating MPs along the way (sometimes literally - it famously ran a Tech 101 class for MPs in a previous regime).

Giving the role of cheerleader and champion of innovation to InternetNZ makes some sense, because the organisation exists outside the reach of both corporate and political New Zealand - InternetNZ, you see, has its own stream of revenue in the form of the domain name registrations in the .nz namespace.

It's also largely bi-partisan. Current CEO Jordan Carter did stand for Labour in a long-forgotten election, but various key advisors and organisational leaders have worked on both sides of the House and generally speaking they put technology and the internet before party politics on most occasions.

It hasn't always been plain sailing for INZ. Some years ago the organisation went through some dark times and many thousands of words were wasted in the pursuit of a clearer understanding of what was going on, who was responsible and why we should care. In short: a peaceful coup, led by someone who wanted more control over the cash was defeated by an army of grumpy tech-heads (and there was never a reason to care really).

But that was many years ago and today the organisation has worked peacefully alongside other lobby groups, political parties of all colour and persuasion and has a broad church approach to its membership where hardly ever do the members threaten to sue each other any longer.

I can think of worse solutions to the problem, to be honest. And if not one organisation, there's always the option of a consortium including (for example) IT Professionals and NZTech to cover off the tech side, InternetNZ on the general internet society, and 20/20 Trust to cover off digital inclusion.

NZ Herald - Greens' left-field suggestion to resolve CTO mess - and unsuccessful candidate says she backs the idea

Most of the reported incidents are for relatively small amounts - typically less than $500 each - but there are a handful of big ticket losses, due primarily to phishing attacks. Four incidents were reported for more than $100,000 each.

Phishing makes up 455 of the reported incidents and around 75% of the losses are in the older age bracket - the 55 and over - suggesting there is still some work to be done around informing and educating the older set.

Of the incidents, 112 were referred to police for follow-up action.

CERT NZ is a specialist cyber security unit and part of the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) and is tasked with gathering information on cyber security threats and incidents in New Zealand and overseas, advising organisations and the public on how to avoid and manage cyber security risks. 

Set up in April last year, CERT reports quarterly on activity, and works alongside other agencies, including Netsafe, Department of Internal Affairs anti-spam unit, the National Cyber Policy Office (NCPO), the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC - part of the Government Communications Security Bureau) and the Police.

It was good for email and text messages and voice calls but that was it.

Or you could have a Blackberry which was good for email and text messages and voice calls but again that was it.

Basically, they were work devices with little appeal outside the corporate environment.

This was just as well because they were mighty costly to buy and even more expensive to run.

Enter the iPhone and everything changed.

One big button on the front, one huge screen and that was about it. You could buy apps, you could install music, you could watch video. Forget buttons, a clean screen was where it was at.

And so we have stayed since then and while we've seen huge growth in the number of units world-wide, and a huge growth in the size and capability of the devices, that basic model has stuck.

Today, Nokia is a novelty item and BlackBerry may as well not exist at all. If it's not Apple, with around 50% market share, it's a device running Google Android, also with around 50% market share.

What is evident is that network operators are also on a hiding to nothing.

They're expected to buy spectrum rights, build a network and offer faster connection speeds for … less money than they currently charge!

It's an entertaining model for sure but that's what they do and long may it continue.

I now pay about $70 a month for a service that offers unlimited local calls, unlimited mobile calls, unlimited text messages and a fair swag of data to boot. I don't think about my usage, I just make calls.

A decade ago I was paying the same and checking my balance like a student every time I used my device. It was ghastly.

The telco market has changed out of all recognition since Apple launched the iPhone and it's going to change some more, but I wonder if it's ready for it.

Ten years from now I suspect the customer won't have a clue whose network they're connected to. They won't know or really care - so long as it functions, it's all good.

This week's announcement from Apple about the launch of eSIM cards is the start of the end for the telcos. Once we're used to having an electronic or virtual SIM card, an app will appear in the store that lets us migrate our phone from one provider to another on a whim. Wake up and your phone may tell you "I see you're off to London today on the direct flight so I'll port you to PomTel for the day, and then when you come back we'll see which offers the best price" or similar. Or you could chose to always have the best quality network. Or the one with the best data price. It's up to you.

Of course, the telco number portability process won't cope with such agility, but that's not the user's problem. No no, far from it.

Apple has already driven a wedge between customer and telco. In the old days you were a network's customer and happened to use a device from Alcatel or Ericsson or Nokia or whomever. You could swap devices as easily as you could underwear, but swapping networks was hard. Today you're an Apple customer or an Android customer and swapping networks is simple but swapping operating systems is hard.

The telcos that survive are the ones that jettison their marketing departments, their fluffiness, their consumer-friendly content marketing schemes and who move swiftly to becoming a quality network operator. The telco of the future is a commodity and is a dumb pipe and for the consumer, that's a good thing.

Techblog - Apple launch snooze fest oh hello, what's this?

Techblog - Broadband now seen as essential service: UN

Techblog - Telcos mark Te wiki o te reo Māori

Reseller News - Why the new iPhone XS series may struggle in NZ

CIO - Vodafone upgrades rural internet connections for Pāmu

RNZ - Mark Pesce review the new iPhone

Gizmodo - Apple's Totally Being A Jerk About The Dongle

Disruption

It comes for us all and while the telco sector is still feeling it, as is the media, disruption is bound for other sectors too.

Fonterra could, I feel, benefit from a bit of disruption. If they'd like to employ me as CEO with a remit of "not losing $200 million in a year" I feel I could give it a serious go for roughly half of what the current chap is on. Cheap at half the price I say!

But of course the next CEO won't only have to deal with restructuring the 6000 staff who earn more than $100,000 a year (not to mention the 24 who earn more than a million) but also the move to artificial protein that is about to come down the pike towards Fonterra's bottom line. Why buy in milk powder when you can build your own?

But let's not be too smug, you bankers, with your billion dollar profits and your closing of the local branches. Sure, you make sure everyone's dosh is secured safely, and our houses are all mortgaged up the wazoo, but what are you going to do when my kids arrive at your door asking for a mortgage but don't have a single income model for you to assess? How will you cope with a client base that has half a dozen part time roles, owns a company and is invested in a lifestyle that is alien to your actuary tables?

And that's before we all move our accounts online and decide not to bother with a bank at all, but rather some kind of online service that lets us get a loan from a provider in Uzbekistan, which is delighted to offer us money at a low rate, and put our savings in a bank in Bermuda that offers a great return.

And while we're pointing at the banks and their impending disruption, what about politicians? Do I really need to chose a geographically-bound representative who doesn't have a clue how the internet works, thinks breaking encryption is a boffo good idea and who hasn't even met me to be my representative in a parliament of like-minded folk? Can I not join another club? I'd rather influence the UK or US elections frankly, and on top of that, I've got no idea how you're going to raise taxes when I "reside" wherever I want and work in just as many jurisdictions.

As the digital world becomes more important than the physical world - as we move to a model where we buy goods in from other countries, have laws thrust upon us by providers of services and generally lose our ability to influence the world via our laws, do we really need politicians who can only rattle their sables and mutter "now see here" instead of leaders who can deliver on a promise?

If only there were someone in government who could talk about these issues and their potential impact on the country, on the economy, on our society and on our culture.

If only, eh?

Stuff - Derek Handley was offered CTO job before it was put on hold, says source

NZ Herald -Juha Saarinen: Does the government want a techie CTO or not?

Pōhēhē

Māori language week is upon us and this year it's been bigger than I can recall it ever being.

In years gone by it's been something of a quiet affair, but this year we've got newspapers finally using macrons, mastheads changing to Māori versions, we've got petrol companies telling us how to order coffee in te reo, and we've got apps, like Spark's Kupu offering, which lets you point your phone at an object and get the Māori word for it.

It's exciting to see because language really is the heart of culture and having grown up in a culture that had saved its language (Welsh) I'm delighted to see another culture having a crack at keeping it real.

This is the future we were promised, or at least the future hinted at in James Burke's Connections TV series (for those of you as old and as English as I am). In the future, he opined, we'd either settle on a culture we all shared, where a hotel in Bangalore is pretty much the same as a hotel in Los Angeles or Auckland or London or Karachi, or we'd build our own cultures and ensure they stand the test of time. I'd like to think we can take all the upside of being so remote from the world and put it to work in the digital space as Kiwis and stand apart from the homogeneity we see around us.

The Americans might have tried to colonise our subconscious, but with some effort we can reclaim it and go our own way. And that's as good for our economic future as anything I've come across.

Kia kaha.

Stuff - The words in te reo Māori that English doesn't have

Stuff - Māori Language Week 2018: Shortage of Māori language teachers 'only going to get worse'

Newshub - Kupu: the app you need this Māori language week

Stuff - English, te reo Māori, and the world-wide threat of 'digital extinction'

NZ Herald - Where to learn te reo Māori

RNZ - Māori Language Week

Access to broadband is becoming an essential form of infrastructure.

"The importance of broadband Internet for sustainable development is clear, as our societies continue to grow and develop. Broadband infrastructure is now vital infrastructure, as essential as water and electricity networks, but it is also becoming more invisible and integrated in utility networks in 'smart' infrastructure. According to ITU, nearly 4.4 billion active mobile broadband subscriptions are expected by end 2018, strengthening the power of the mobile digital economy," says the report.

Artificial intelligence comes under scrutiny in the report, but thankfully 15 countries now have strategies in place for the safe deployment of AI, including New Zealand.

New Zealand scores well in terms of the number of fixed broadband customers per 100 inhabitants (33.6) but really stands out with 101.6 users of mobile broadband per 100 inhabitants. More than 88% of us regularly use broadband internet.

The report spells out a series of policy goals that the Commission feels are essential to a well developed national strategy.

• Making broadband policy universal (Target 1)
• Making broadband affordable (Target 2)
• Getting people online (Target 3)
• Acquiring minimum digital skills and literacy (Target 4)
• Using digital financial services (Target 5)
• Getting businesses online (Target 6)
• Achieving gender equality in access to broadband (Target 7)

The Commission has introduced a new target for 2025 in terms of affordability, reducing the affordability threshold from 5% of monthly gross national income per capita to less than 2%.

"This new target will particularly assist lower income groups in developing and least developed countries to gain connectivity."

Unfortunately, the digital gender divide has grown slightly - up from 11% in the 2013 report to 11.6% in 2016. Women are 26% less likely to use mobile internet than men.

The full report can be downloaded from the UN Broadband Commission's page.

The speed at which a mobile page loads became more important since Google began including it as a factor in organic search in July. The message to businesses with an online presence is to speed-up because Google claims that the longer it takes to load your mobile site, the more likely you are to lose customers, here are their stats:

Rainsford's message to the capacity audience at the SkyCity theatre was threefold - if you want to stay ahead of the game you have to provide the following customer experience - fast, relevant and seamless. 

Another tip is be personal, apparently customers are ahead of the curve when it comes to wanting a personal experience, and Google data shows that 66% of customers expect brands to know their history. Rainsford has noticed an increasing use of the words "for me" appearing in search results.

While consumers might be quick to adopt new ways to interact with brands, unfortunately New Zealand businesses are lagging. Rainsford cited a survey which showed only 2% were in the top category for digital competency.

The example that is often cited of a New Zealand company that "gets it" is Air New Zealand. Enabling Koru Club members to order their coffee via the mobile app and have it ready for them when they arrive at the lounge is an example of how technology can provide "human experiences".

Internationally, an example is the Hilton Hotel chain which has digitised key aspects of the customer experience. Customers can check in, select a room via and even open the door to their room with their mobile phone, without once having to speak to the receptionist.

In the video shown by Rainsford, the hotel chain was gearing up for 'voice applications'. So too is Google in New Zealand, with Rainsford hinting that Google Home is close to launching here. This follows Amazon's launch of its Echo earlier in the year.

Both Google and Amazon are promoting the ability to buy goods with verbal commands, known as 'voice shopping', with some analysts forecasting it will be worth as much as $40 billion a year globally. But media reports last month showed that only 2% of people with the Amazon Echo speaker have actually made a purchase with it in 2018.

Many see having a voice app as more of a marketing exercise, than a sales tool. Even so, it would make sense for New Zealand businesses to get familiar with Voice apps, as it's inevitable that they will become an increasing presences in e-commerce. In the meantime, you can take another step towards digital competency by checking out how fast your mobile site loads here.  

Not really. Sadly, the Lucky Country is in the middle of a monster drought which shows no signs of letting up any time soon. It's also apparently willing to elect a man who can't accept that calling for a "final solution" to migration could be taken at least two different ways, and it's also a country where the government is so pig headed it won't accept that it can't legislate its way out of encryption.

This government, you may remember, is the same one that thought it was OK to not pay too much attention to personal health records and made a bit of a pig's ear out of that process.

Well the same people have brought you a new law (the Assistance and Access Bill) that ensures the government doesn't just have a back door into your private data, it has the front door as well.

IT providers, ISPs and oh pretty much anyone you can buy a service off has to conform to the law and hand over anything you might have stored there if asked for it. They also face fines if they tell anyone that the government has asked for the data.

Still, if you've got nothing to hide you'll be fine, eh?

The law presumes that anyone who wants to secure (or "hide") data must have some reason for doing so and those reasons don't extend to "it's none of your business" or "it's my client's data" or "it's personal" but rather start and stop with "I'm a criminal, come at me".

The upshot is, anyone doing business with a company based in Australia should be very cautious about what materials it shares with the Australian business because as it stands they may well have no recourse but to hand it all over to an Australian government official with little or no regard for the real ownership of that data.

And just to reiterate the main point: it's not about having something to hide, it's about having control over your own personal information.

I don't have anything to hide, but I also don't share my bank account number online. I don't have anything to hide but I close the blinds when I go to bed. I'm not hiding anything, I am enforcing my right to privacy and to decide what I will share and when.

In Australia, you aren't quite so lucky.

The Register - Australia's Snooper's Charter: Experts react, and it ain't pretty

The Register - When's a backdoor not a backdoor? When the Oz government says it isn't

CNet - Facebook, Google, WhatsApp in the firing line as Australia reveals encryption laws

Reuters - Australia plans law for tech firms to hand over encrypted private data

Australian Legislation - The Assistance and Access Bill 2018

Bot begone

Speaking of rights, last week's discussion about what is and isn't free speech isn't getting old any time soon.

Twitter has yet to figure out quite what it's doing about polarising accounts that may or may not abide by the social media company's terms and conditions, but that hasn't stopped it ditching a whole bunch of robot accounts.

Many users have noticed the number of accounts that follow theirs has dropped sharply (this editor kissed goodbye to 85 such followers) but it's not a sudden chilling effect brought on by the communists in charge. No, it's a clean out of fake accounts that have been set up for various reasons.

Some are pretty benign - they beg you to click on a link to see some product or other that you might wish to purchase.

But others are more of a problem. Spouting fake news, lies, defamation and other indignities, or worse, offering you content that is illegal or contains viruses or other security breaching baddies just to keep you on your toes.

Twitter is also in the throes of working out just what it is and how it will operate and that's proving to be something of a problem for any third-party apps that connect with Twitter because the parent company is clamping down on how these apps connect with the mother ship.

The problem is, these apps generally offer the kinds of functionality that users want to see. Chronological ordering. Advanced search capability. The ability not to see the ads that Twitter believes are its lifeline.

That's lead to Twitter acting and instead of saying "these are all features users want, we shall embrace the user and build this features into our own offering" they've said "these are features users want but which we don't want to offer, we shall ban them" and that's pretty counterproductive.

Twitter is different from Facebook and Instagram and all the other social media platforms and there's a reason why that's a good thing. Making Twitter into Facebook Lite isn't going to work as a service because the users don't want Facebook Lite - they want Twitter.

The problem is that Twitter has no business model. Nobody will pay for ads if the users can avoid them and so Twitter feels obligated to force users to watch them. And we're not just talking "Buy Burma Shave" ads - those I would actively seek out - but rather paid, placed tweets that may or may not look like advertising.

Propaganda, in other words.

Users do not want this disruption to their timelines. They don't want to see materials from people they don't follow pushed on them. They do want to see tweets from those accounts they do follow and they want to see them in chronological order, but sadly that may not go on for much longer.

All of which is a crying shame because Twitter is incredibly useful, and is a source of great amusement to me. But if it goes, it goes and there will be something else I am sure.

Nothing is forever, whether it's a bot or a service, and life carried on for many years before the advent of social media - I'm sure we'll do just fine without it.

Washington Post - Twitter is sweeping out fake accounts like never before, putting user growth at risk

Twitter blog - Tweet updates

TechCrunch - Tweetbot loses several key features

ViaGoneGone

Alleged dirty rotten ticketing shysters, Switzerland-based Viagogo has been the bane of many people buying tickets online for some time.

The site has done a great job of securing the top spot in just about any search for tickets to shows and manages to lure in unwitting customers, many of whom subsequently complain of being fleeced, charged more for the tickets than the venue charges, added on hidden fees, not had GST or other duties disclosed until too late and often they allegedly don't even actually have the tickets it says it's selling you.

I've just gone online to buy tickets to see Bill Bailey next month and got suckered in by Viagogo's top spot listing, but thankfully my ESET firewall said "thou shalt not click" and stopped me from doing something stupid, like giving them money.

I'm not alone - the Commerce Commission has revealed it has received more complaints about Viagogo than any other company in New Zealand - even the telcos! And on top of that, it's also going to sue the publicity-shy company, and has launched proceedings in the High Court for breaches of the Fair Trading Act.

The company faces similar action in parts of Europe and even in Australia.

This is not a concerted effort to block Viagogo's right to say whatever it likes either, by the way. This too is not a free speech issue but is, rather, about not telling lies when you advertise products (or when you talk about vaccines or the Holocaust for that matter) and so yes, I'm all in favour of them being taken out and slapped around until they start to behave in a civilised manner.

Given they're based outside New Zealand, this is also going to be an interesting test case of the Commerce Commission's powers to regulate a company that is outside New Zealand but selling into our fair land.

Now if only we could get Ticketmaster to deliver a website that just let you buy tickets...

NZ Herald - Commerce Commission sues ticket reselling site Viagogo

NZ Herald - Bay of Plenty woman 'one of the lucky ones' to get $1700 refund for fake Adele tickets from Viagogo

Stuff - Viagogo heading to court, but Kiwi ticketing horrors continue

NZ Herald - Revealed: New Zealand's most complained about companies

Luckily talking about algorithms lends itself to many film references so I was able to provide context for the non-technical in the audience - although only quarter of the room had seen Prometheus, so my example of distribution to the medical industry didn't land as well as expected. Below is an overview of the talk.

How do we solve the problem of algorithmic bias?

Algorithmic bias occurs when a computer system behaves in ways that reflects the implicit values of humans involved in that data collection, selection, or use.

We are only just beginning to discover how extensive this bias may be. AI and Machine Learning technologies can all analyse and process your data, predict outcomes, make decisions and operationalise processes in a cost effective accessible way. These platforms are increasingly becoming accessible to operators who are not educated or trained in methodologies or statistical sciences. There is a risk knowingly, or unknowingly, prevalent biases will be baked into decision making and actions taken. 

US Examples include - systems used to rank teachers, criminal sentencing algorithms, gender bias in pre-employment tests. 

How do we solve this? how do we identify whether a programme or algorithm contains bias? how do we ensure invisible programmes don't impact the way we live and work?

Are dystopian future novels on the right path?

"It's a misconception that AI is objective because it relies on mathematical computations; the construction of an AI system is an inherently human-driven process. It is unavoidable that such systems will contain bias." WEForum

Dystopian future novels and movies have painted a range of hypotheses where humans are either segmented by status/wealth (what constitutes wealth changes), race or gender; or where humans are marginalised by machines. In both of these scenarios computers of various forms are involved in the profiling, identification, segmentation and enforcement activities depicted.

Recently we read an article about a man who was fired by a computer, followed up by the supposition "better AI could have saved him". In 2016 an investigative journalist found the sentencing recommendation software used by courts and judges in the USA predicted black offenders as more likely to re-offend twice as often as white offenders - this article spells out some shocking examples and evidence this bias was overriding other factors including past convictions.

"When the data we feed the machines reflects the history of our own unequal society, we are, in effect, asking the program to learn our own biases". Guardian. 

What can be done?

At a high level the concepts I discussed with the students are listed below, they asked great questions about what society can do to avoid bias in our everyday lives, I pushed them to think about what technology companies can do including: 

• being attentive to context;
• consciously understanding the purpose for which data is collected;
• clarifying the questions we are asking of data, auditing and explaining algorithms;
• testing assumptions and features for referencing behaviour;
• ensuring teams who are developing technology are inclusive and diverse;
• and incorporating equitable, ethical and just into the core values of systems.

None of this touches on everyday operational activities so I will continue with a series on capability development and bias awareness for analysts and teams.

Victoria spends much of her time focusing on Digital Inclusion, Digital Literacy and Digital Rights.

You can read her other blogs here.

Reposted with kind permission.

While some are truly innovative, and can lead to huge improvements in technology and the lives of those who use them, some patents are clearly rather odd, pie in the sky, hopeful attempts to cash in on the work of others or even of half-baked dreams that seemingly occur during a fever.

And then there are others that really are quite alarming.

Google has its own share of patents on all manner of thing - it's latest is "A method and system for automating work pattern quantification" which seems pretty straightforward until you read that it will deliver "the process of quantifying work patterns and provides feedback on worker focus". That's right, the next Google app might tell your boss you're "slacking off".

Amazon has also famously been granted a patent over the "one-click" shopping experience, which surely must beg the question of what is patentable and what is simply a series of instructions (such as sheet music or software) and has also gone down the path of managing workers with its vibrating bracelet. Staff in the giant Amazon warehouses will be guided towards goods they need on a shelf via a bracelet that buzzes as the user moves the hand in the right direction, much like the kids game of "getting warmer". But as a byproduct it also lets management know when you're taking too long to get stuff done. No word yet on whether it will up the dosage and give you a bit of a slap if you're really playing hooky.

New Zealand has, thankfully, avoided the trap of software patents but these real-world contraptions are still on the books and may be coming to a warehouse, or computer, near you.

The report, entitled Machines can learn but what will we teach them: ethical considerations around artificial intelligence and machine learning provides a summary of the issues that have been brought to forefront in recent times. These include:

• The impact of AI on employment - the OECD predicts around 66 million job globally are at risk of automation.
• The effect new technologies are having on cognitive learning functions as users spend more time on devices and "no one yet fully understands how they are shaping our ongoing human social and physical evolution".
• Fake news, hate speech and the manipulation of data having real-world political consequences. In April 2018, a Pew Research Centre report analysed 1.2 million tweets and discovered that two-thirds came from suspected bot accounts.
• Potential bias by AI designers and programmers as there is a notable lack of diversity in tech - "women and ethnic minorities, for example, are greatly under-represented in the coding arena; will this result in a gender or ethnic bias in how AI reaches its recommendations?"
• Absence of transparency around the algorithm in use - the idea that it becomes a "black box" so that no-one knows exactly how it is arriving at its decisions

As a profession, accountants are well-placed to understand the effects of AI, having had to pivot to become trusted business advisors as accounting software is "getting more intelligent, performing automation as well as analysis previously done by humans". Therefore it's interesting to see how its industry body CAANZ is tackling the issue of AI in a report that grapples with the idea of creating an ethical framework around how AI is applied.

"If we fail to build the ethical dimension into each stage of our AI journey, an alternative route that perpetuates the current polarisation of wealth and resources within and between societies seems inevitable. The academic world has put in place an ethics regime around research with humans which may be the appropriate starting point in considering the type of ethical framework necessary to guide ongoing AI developments."

The report notes that despite the widespread use of drones, fingerprint technology, facial recognition and driverless cars, there has been no commonly agreed accountability framework, although governments and regulators are looking for ways to deal with the increasing use of AI. "Most national governments understand that over-regulating AI would be a simplistic reaction rather than a strategic response to AI advances and that if they over-regulate, AI projects and further investments in AI will simply be moved to more relaxed regulatory regimes."

Increasingly businesses and organisations are expected to be mindful of their socially responsibility when designing products and protecting customer data, and this may require them to create AI ethics code. Individuals too will need to understand the impact of AI, as the report notes: "The anonymity provided by the internet is not ethics free and brings with it the same ethical personal accountability to knowingly "do no harm" to others."

You can read the full report here.

That's according to a report put out by NZPost called, "The Full Download" which aims to provide, "a deep and forensic analysis into the state of eCommerce in New Zealand".

Online shopping in New Zealand is somewhat different to the rest of the world, says the report. The amount we spend online has increased by 13% since the previous year, but the number of transactions has jumped a remarkable 23% year on year.

That's despite the survey excluding items such as transport, lottery tickets, cafes, restaurants and bars and online content providers, such as Netflix.

The good news for local retailers is that we spend around two thirds of our online money with local providers. The bad news is, international spending has increased by 23% with the number of transactions with international providers jumping 37%. This is despite the introduction of the so-called "Netflix tax" which targets GST on items of lesser value and is aimed at capturing tax from more online purchases.

Four out of every ten Kiwis describe themselves as "regular" online shoppers.

Interestingly, the survey also says that internet use from mobile devices has passed that of fixed-line devices in the past year. It quotes a report from statista.com claiming 51.2% of global web traffic now originates from a mobile device, crossing the half way mark sometime in the past 12 months.

As New Zealand retailers struggle to hold their own against the international market, it is interesting to ask how many of them have a mobile-first e-commerce solution.

The full report can be downloaded here, at no cost (aside from some demographic information).

In its latest research, professional services consultancy Grant Thornton shows business confidence has fallen from 76% to 60% in the last quarter.

But the report also suggests businesses are investing more in research and development and will continue to increase that percentage.

The number of businesses looking to increase R&D investments in the next 12 months has jumped from 26% in the first quarter, to 50% in the second, and that's before the government's R&D tax regime kicks off, in April next year. The government has itself said it will invest $1 billion in R&D and that, coupled with near record levels of employment, is driving businesses to look to alternatives for growth.

Unemployment rates across the country are around 4.6% and expected to fall to 4% this year - the lowest they've been for some time. This puts pressure on businesses to find a new way to increase business outputs and R&D and "working smarter" is surely one way forward.

New Zealand's productivity is reportedly extremely low when compared with other countries' outputs, and our lower-wage economy does tend to reinforce that model, so turning to R&D for development makes sense.

However, Grant Thornton does warn that the new tax regime will exclude small businesses that can't invest a minimum of $100,000 a year (the threshold for the new tax breaks) and that will shut out a large part of the start-up community.

For that sector, alternatives are still required.

There's a cycle that major brands go through that's often entertained me. They start off as the challenger. The new kid on the block. Hey look at us, they say, we're hip. We're trendy. We're on point.

(Being hip, trendy and on point, they probably don't say anything of the sort but I am none of those things so that's how they speak in my head)

And so they enter the public consciousness, seemingly from nowhere, and the upend the apple cart and cause no end of consternation.

There are plenty of examples of this. Uber is the flavour of the month. Tesla is another. They come in, they disrupt an industry, the shake things up and everyone loves them.

Then the wheel turns.

Suddenly they're at the top of the S-curve. People love them, but… there are questions. Why don't they do This Thing that I want them to do? How is it they haven't thought of That Problem they're creating?

The public by and large still support them but they've gone off the boil. They're Pixar, when they realised Cars 2. Suddenly they're no longer fresh and exciting but instead they've become somewhat predictable and staid.

And then the wheel turns again.

Now they're the incumbent. Now they're The Man and someone else is coming along to ask questions of them, to demand answers. They might even get regulated by a grumpy regulator who thinks they've now amassed too much power, too much control and too much money. Suddenly, their success has become their weakness and they're likely to be taken down a notch or two.

We've seen this before. IBM introduced the Personal Computer and lo! it was good. Audacious. Bold. Innovative.

Then along came Microsoft that did it better and IBM was the dullard, the laggard, the mouth breather who couldn't cope.

So then Microsoft was king but then along came Google and blam! Microsoft was on the ropes and everyone was all "yay, Android, yay Chrome, boo Internet Explorer" although to be honest we were always a bit that way inclined anyway.

Vodafone has had to endure this. It started out as the challenger brand in the New Zealand market. Telecom was a former government monopoly, favoured by everyone's mum and dad, unable to even cope with a new model of "text messages" and unable to compete so resorting to alleged dirty tricks and walking backwards slowly fending off regulation.

Then Vodafone did the unthinkable - it won! It actually beat out the incumbent telco and became not only the provider of choice for the cool set but the provider of choice for everybody! My god, now what do we do?

What we do in that situation is we become the incumbent and popular interest turns against you before you know it the cool kids are off with the other guy doing other stuff and hey, you were It once but now you're not.

Which brings us, eventually (sorry about that) to Google.

Google was it. Google revolutionised search. Pre-Google it was a mess. Post Google it just works. Google made a fortune and then Google introduced other things. Android took on Apple in the mobile operating market and now dominates, depending how you measure it. Google introduced email to the home user and made it work and work well. Google took on Microsoft in the browser wars and won. Google took on Microsoft in the office stakes and introduced capability Microsoft only dreamed about. Google introduced Chromebooks and revolutionised a huge segment of the market, bringing browser-based access to the world and giving educators and low-income users a viable platform.

Google won the war.

But the wheel has turned again and now Google is being hit by regulators in the EU keen to understand why it is Google thinks it's OK to force its products on mobile users. Google is being tackled on issues of privacy and the "right" to be forgotten. Google is seen as a problem as much as it is a solution and the era of "Google's mandate is 'don't be evil'" has long since passed by to be replaced by quarterly performance results and the kind of soggy mid-life crisis that hits most big ticket brands.

Google is no longer the poster child for innovation, for solutions, for doing the right thing by your user. Now, it's a corporate monolith that has been found, in the EU at least, to abuse its position of responsibility and is unwilling to play by the rules - and so has been slapped with a whopping NZ$7 billion fine.

Even if the company paid it (which it won't. It'll fight to the bitter end) the problem won't go away. For Google the wheel has turned and it's going to be mighty tough to regain the love of the people, even if they wanted to.

Stuff - Europe slams Google with a record $7.4 billion antitrust fine

The Verge - Google's European fine is a flashback to Microsoft's ugly antitrust battle

Wired - Don't expect big changes from Europe's record Google fine

The Register - Fork it! Google fined €4.34bn over Android, has 90 days to behave

OK Computer

The PC game isn't what it used to be, that's for sure.

When I started as a tech journalist (in the year of our lord nineteen hunnerd and ninety six or so) it was all about the PC. Intel would launch a new chipset (now with MMX) and we'd go crazy writing up the specs, talking to the PC makers (including Compaq and PC Direct) and generally causing a kerfuffle.

I'd missed the halcyon days of the Windows 95 launch with the midnight queues at Whitcoulls (remember them?) but I was in plenty of time to see every PC in the office reporting "It is now safe to shut down your PC" long after the humans had left thanks to Windows 98.

These days, it's hard to drum up much enthusiasm for a new PC. I have one on my desk now. When I say new, I mean it's about three years old. There was nothing really wrong with the one it replaced (for the love of god don't tell my wife) but Windows XP was getting a bad rap and frankly I couldn't play any of the newer PC games on it so I put in a procurement request for an upgrade and eventually it was signed off. Of course, my carpal tunnel syndrome and my dodgy eyesight means not only can I not compete on the PC gaming front in a timely fashion (I have inbuilt lag) but the way my eyes now work I get motion sick as well, so that's me done. Maybe I need an upgrade.

But beyond that, there's really no business need to get a new PC and if I do get one, it'll be a laptop. Most of my work is spent on a laptop - a MacBook Air to be precise - and I have little need to get a better one. The upgrade path for that box of tricks is a MacBook Pro which costs a bomb, has nothing to sell me on it other than the fact it's practically two dimensional, and has a keyboard that doesn't work too well. The new model should fix that but really, do I have any great burning desire to buy another one?

No, no I do not.

And I'm not alone. The PC market is stagnant at best and there's a very good reason for that, after all this time. We used to buy PCs to do all the computing things and now we have other devices to do most of them. The consumer market is dominated by iPads and tablets, by smart phones and by set-top box gaming stations of all ilk. There's no need for a PC to do the things they do and only luddites like me bother with a desktop these days.

Even the corporate market has gone to laptops, but even there we're seeing a real push towards BYOD.

So it's no surprise to read the stats that say we're in a flat, commodity-based market on a global scale and despite this quarter's leap (sorry, that should read "leap"), the computing market is pretty much the walking dead.

The era of the computer on every desktop is over. Today, we're looking at a computer in every room and probably every pocket and, sadly, the PC is too unwieldly for that.

TechBlog - New Macbook line-up

Reseller News - Early indications show PC shipment growth for first time in six years

The PwC report China's next retail disruption: end-to-end value chain disruption, points out that China has eclipsed the US as the largest retail market in the world. In Q1 2018 total retail sales of consumer goods reached USD 1,436.8 billion - up 9.8 per cent year-on-year. In China 50% of consumers buy products online weekly, compared to the global average of 22%, and 86% have used mobile payments to make a purchase, compared to the global average of 24%.

According to the PwC report, the sector is evolving from Digital Retail to New Retail: "Over the last five years China's retail market has experienced a digital growth miracle but its impact has mostly been on the front office: sales channels and marketing. We are now entering a period of new retail in which there will be far more transformation, digitising the entire value chain."

Here are some examples of what this looks like in practice:

• Transaction orientated shopping to entertainment-led experiences (eg Alibaba's Singles Day which has evolved from a discount-led shopping season into an entertainment festival, raking in USD $25.2 billion in 2017),
• Endless choice to curated choice,
• Online and offline separate to integrated online and offline formats,
• Demographic segmentation to hyper personalisation,
• In-house R&D to Co-creation (eg Mars collaborated with Alibaba to co-design and develop a chilli-infused Snickers bar),
• Compliance as a hygiene factor to traceability becoming a differentiator (eg Alibaba, Fonterra and Blackmores create a blockchain food traceability solution to enhance consumer confidence).

According to the PwC report there are two internet ecosystems in China - Alibaba, and the Tencent and JD alliance. "While each have evolved from different core competencies they have built independent ecosystems that span the entire value chain of online consumer experiences." In practice this means that customers have to pick their ecosystem because the "seamless consumer experiences" only exists if they stay within the 'walled gardens' of the internet giants. For example, US retailer Walmart is no longer accepting Alipay in Western China because it favours WeChat Pay, in keeping with its alliance with JD.

The report goes on to speculate about Retail as a Service created by the Chinese internet giants in vertical-specific (Grocery, Fashion, Home etc) business models. "In this scenario, brands and retailers plug into cloud-based solutions to enable next generation applications in: supply chain, product development, and production and sourcing."

Retail as a Service could turn out to be the only way forward for retailers - large and small - as they try to cater to the rising expectations of consumers. PwC surveys show that 29% of Chinese consumers expect online purchases to arrive the next day, as opposed to 6% of US consumers.

Personalised service is also expected, even though it requires consumers to share their data. In China almost two-thirds (61%) of those surveyed are "comfortable for a retailer to monitor my shopping patterns and purchases". Of course, China is also experimenting with a social credit system in which points are added and deducted for behaviour, with reports about people being banned from public transport and certain jobs because of low social credit scores. The growing prevalence of personal data collection in China may have an influence on the results around the retail experience, for example in the US only 34% of consumers were comfortable with retailers monitoring their purchases.

Problems with the new keyboards, designed to allow the laptops to be built ever thinner, appeared very quickly with users complaining of sticky keys and new laptops failing far earlier than expected.

Apple says the new line up, a refresh on the two year old product set, isn't about fixing the problem, but it has included a rubberised "skirt" between the keys and underlying mechanism, presumably to catch any dust or other debris before it gets caught up.

Apple describes the new third-generation keyboards as its quietest yet. Users in New Zealand will be able to find out for themselves shortly - the new devices are on sale at Apple's website, ranging in price from $1300 to around $2800.

Meanwhile, PC sales in general have grown slightly for the first time in almost six years.

Gartner says global sales totalled just over 62 million in the second quarter of 2018, up 1.4% year on year.That's the first quarter of year-over-year global PC shipment growth since 2012.

That's just one of the take-homes in a day of ideas at ITx, the tech industry's biannual conference, hosted by IT Professionals. It began yesterday and will run for the rest of the week with the highlight being the NZ Excellence in IT Awards Gala Dinner this evening.

Fletcher, an Associate Professor at the University of Canterbury, was one of the keynote speakers. Her presentation had an ambitious title: AI, Robotics, Ethics and You.  She only had 40 minutes, but instead of attempting to solve those issues she did what the best presenters do - raised a whole lot of questions.

She noted that while the audience will likely be familiar with concepts such automation, machine learning and AI, this is not the case with the general population. The technology topic in which people are most interested in is the future of work. There is a massive transformation taking place, as many of the skills required to thrive in the last two centuries are becoming obsolete. And while she is optimistic that humans will find new ways to be creative and productive in the "fourth industrial revolution", the transition could be tough.

Education is, as it should be, primarily focussed on preparing the younger generation, the so-called millennials and Generation Z, for the future workforce. But Fletcher says the person who might need the most support is the "42-year-old single mother whose job has been automated away".

Earlier in the day Communications Minister Clare Curran talked about the Future Work Forum in her speech. This is to be led by Grant Robertson with Business NZ CEO Kirk Hope and CTU President Richard Wagstaff. "It'll examine the big challenges ahead and help shape the policies we need so workers and businesses can adapt to the rapidly changing nature of work," Curran says. "We want to work with you, this isn't just something happening on the side."

Also challenging the audience to use its skills and expertise, was Ernie Newman, a digital economy consultant based in Whakatane, who has worked on consumer issues around online personal electronic health records, and implementation of telehealth. He says the health system has not embraced digital transformation in a way that other sectors have - such as banking and aviation - and as a result it is not serving New Zealanders.

"Consumers aside, the people who best understand the opportunity are those professionals working in health IT. They are the people in this room," he said during his presentation entitled: Health - A Digital Laggard - Diagnosis and Treatment Plan.

"So, my challenge to the health IT profession is to lend active support to establishing a consumer action group tasked with envisioning a re-engineered health customer interface. One that reflects the changed needs of today's society and the massive potential of the digital age. Are you up for it?"

The first day ended with recognition being given to the IT Professionals CEO Paul Matthews, to mark his 10^th anniversary in the role. Matthews has himself led a transformation in the New Zealand tech sector - changing the New Zealand Computer Society into the IT Professionals, and ensuring it is an important and relevant voice in the sector. Technology is more than just zeros and ones, software and hardware. It is the contest of ideas, and this is well on display at ITx.

User turnout at the latest census is down by 5% over previous years', and that's something of a blow to those proponents of a "digital first" approach.

Around 90% of the individual forms were filled out in 2018 compared with 94.5% in 2013. The 2011 census was cancelled because of the Canterbury earthquake, but the turn-out for earlier census' was far higher than this year's.

As a result, StatsNZ is using a "revised methodology" to compensate for the missing data - something that may skew the results, but which will certainly lead to a revised approach to the next Census, due to be held in five years' time.

According to the StatsNZ website, it is quite normal for some people to not fill in census forms, or for forms to have some unanswered questions. To compensate for this, the department uses "a statistical process called 'imputation' to improve the quality of census data. Imputation involves inserting a value when a respondent has not provided a valid response".

"Given the interim position of individual response rates for the 2018 Census, we are looking at expanding our imputation approach. We are investigating how we can impute households, and cases of item non-response. Both item and unit imputation will improve data coverage and, occasionally, data quality, but not for all census variables. If we do not impute, there will be large amounts of missing data that will affect the overall quality of the dataset."

The question of whether the engagement rate is reduced because of the digital-first approach is yet to be answered, but it is sure to reignite concerns about any move to online voting, particularly in elections that typically have lower turnout rates.

While general election turnout rates in New Zealand remain quite high by international standards, there is considerable variation between age groups, with those over the age of 50 far more likely to turn out than those under 50. Māori voting has increased in recent years (up by 3.5% between 2014 and 2017) but is at a much lower rate than non-Māori voting.

Any move that could reduce turnout further is likely to be considered a backward step. Of course, until we know for certain whether the move to a digital-first Census is at the root cause of the decline or not, this all remains academic.

According to the website, "ITx brings IT professionals, decision-makers, leaders and academics together under one roof. This is a conference like no other: where industry, academia and government come together to network, learn and engage."

Speakers include Dr Amy Fletcher, talking about AI and ethics, Kaila Colbin speaking about the singularity and "riding the exponential wave" and Alexia Hilbertidou, the founder of GirlBoss NZ, speaking on what's really going on inside the minds of the next generation.

The 12 work streams encourage participation from those interested in each of the 12 different ICT organisations to have their day of discussion. From the well known, like ITP, InternetNZ, NZTech and TUANZ, to the less well known, such as Agile Day, Health Informatics New Zealand (HiNZ) and newcomer TechCommNZ, there should be a work steam to suit all levels of interest.

ITx opens with a keynote presentation from Minister of IT and communications, Clare Curran, and includes the now-legendary NZ Excellence in IT Awards Gala Dinner, which celebrates the best of the ICT sector in New Zealand.

ITx 2018 runs from 11-13 July 2018 in the TSB Arena and Shed 6 in Wellington.