Kiwicon – The government is your friend
The government is your friend and wants you to be happy.
This is the transcript of a speech given by Thomas Beagle at Kiwicon in Wellington on November 6th, 2011.
Interview – Cyberdodge VPN service
An interview with Ross from Cyberdodge, a supplier of VPN services that enables internet users to hide what they do on the internet.
What inspired you to offer the service?
People will always choose the easiest way to get the latest movies and TV shows and downloading off the internet is it. Unfortunately options are now limited to VPN tunnels not only for p2p but also for using an American IP address to get access to TV sites like www.hulu.com.
Are you getting many customers and what do they want it for?
Yes I am. VPN tunnels have a number of uses that include getting an American IP address to watch tv sites such as hulu.com, encrypt internet traffic when they are using a public WiFi point and of course hiding their real IP address.
How do you feel about the fact that some of your customers will probably be using your service to break NZ law?
No Comment.
What sort of information do you keep about your customers?
We only keep the email address.
What sort of information do you keep about your customers connections? (Such as when they connect, how long they connect for, anything they do through the service.)
We do not log what the user does or transfers over our network but we do log the time of connection and disconnection. We use this data to strategically deploy network resources. We also log the country the user is logging in from, this helps us to detect hijacked accounts and abuse. We do not log IP addresses.
Do you think your business has an obligation under the Telecommunications (Interception Capability) Act to allow the NZ police or other enforcement agencies to monitor traffic?
No, I am not a network operator. A network operator means a person who owns, controls, or operates a public telecommunications network or a person who supplies (whether by wholesale or retail) another person with the capability to provide a telecommunications service. CyberDodge does not provide anyone else with the capability to provide a service and CyberDodge is not a public telecommunications network. Public telecommunications network means a public switched telephone network and a public data network. CyberDodge is not a public switched telephone network nor a public data network. A public data network means a data network used, or intended for use, in whole or in part, by the public and includes, without limitation, the following facilities: Internet access and email access. CyberDodge requires that you have internet and email access already. This law applies to ISPs, which CyberDodge is not.
Do you think your business has an obligation under the Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Act to store customer IP addresses so that you can pass on notices?
No, I am not a IPAP. IPAP, or Internet protocol address provider, means a person that operates a business that, other than as an incidental feature of its main business activities, offers the transmission, routing, and providing of connections for digital online communications, between or among points specified by a user, of material of the user's choosing and allocates IP addresses to its account holders and charges its account holders for its services and is not primarily operated to cater for transient users. CyberDodge does not offer the transmission nor providing of connections for digital online communications. CyberDodge only routes digital online communications. This law applies to ISPs and CyberDodge is not a ISP.
1-Day finds that anonymity is hard
Update: 1-Day claims that they have tweaked the feature so that customers can choose to use aliases. However, there appears to be no way to enter an alias when signing up for an account or proceeding through checkout without an account (18/11/2010).
Update 2: 1-Day support are unaware of any new alias feature. They suggest entering an initial instead of your first name. The site continues to publish live customer data (18/11/2010).
Update 3: 1-Day have now added a checkbox for "Make my purchase public" to the sale process and have included a link that explains the feature. We think that this is sufficient notification and allows people to opt out if they wish, although it would be better if the checkbox was not ticked by default (23/11/2010).
1-Day is another of the many "deal a day" sites. An extra feature on this particular site is Watch People Shop - a dynamic map of NZ with "Sharon in Lower Hutt bought a Mistral Bread Maker 5 minutes ago" overlaid.
Changes to availability of car rego info delayed
The New Zealand Transport Agency has announced that the changes to public access to the Motor Vehicle Register have been delayed until April 1, 2011.
Current law
Currently, the names and addresses held on the Motor Vehicle Register are publicly available to any person who provides the registration plate number of the vehicle and pays the prescribed fee. It is possible to request a confidential listing.
This means that anyone who knows the registration number of your car can find out where you live.
Privacy and Technology
A Tech Liberty representative spent two half days at a group discussion about privacy and technology.
Here are some of the things that were discussed:
Technology unveils past secrets
You're probably aware that Google has been mapping the location of everyone's wireless network access points. You may not be aware that other companies, such as Skyhook, have been doing the same thing for quite a while. They both use the information to help work out where you are so that their mapping applications work faster and more accurately.
ACTA: Bad for Civil Liberties
We've been writing about the ACTA (Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) treaty for a while. We believe that copyright law and enforcement will need to change but also believe that everyone should participate in creating new laws, not just big business and their proxies. As such, we strongly objected to the secrecy around the negotiations and called for New Zealand to withdraw. We also made a submission to the Ministry of Economic Development about the digital enforcement provisions section.
The secrecy around ACTA caused problems for critics because, while much of the contents had been leaked, it was difficult to analyse the draft treaty without solid information. This all changed after the last meeting in Wellington, where global public pressure forced them to release the current draft (pdf) of the treaty.
Now we have the text to look at, were our fears justified? In this article we concentrate on some of the ways that the draft ACTA treaty encroaches on our civil liberties.
Customs testing body scanners
New Zealand Customs have been trialling body scanners at Auckland Airport and are now working on plans to implement them.
Green Party MP Keith Locke says that using such equipment is illegal as they are banned by the Aviation Crimes Act.
We also had concerns about both the desirability and legality of this body scanning technology and wrote to the Minister of Customs, Maurice Williamson, earlier this year expressing our concerns. He responded (PDF) that while it was illegal to use body scanners for the purposes of aviation security, it was allowed under the Customs and Excise Act 1996 for the purpose of searching for contraband.
However, Keith Locke responds that the language used when the Aviation Crimes Act was amended in 2007 very clearly showed that Parliament's intention was to "...prevent any production of an unclothed image ... there was no hint of any exception."
Maurice Williamson says that he is not aware of any plans to further amend the Aviation Crimes Act.