gracefool

Last week official sources confirmed two of the main things I've said about the COVID-19 pandemic since we entered level 4 lockdown in March: 1. COVID-19 has a similar fatality rate to influenza: The World Health Organization (indirectly, putting their own numbers together - see note for sources and discussion) 2. The effect of lockdowns will be disastrous for increasing inequality: The World Bank . The other main thing I said, but that the WHO and governments who enacted lockdowns have every incentive to never admit, is that lockdowns were always out of place. They were out of place from the perspective of the actual deadliness of the disease (as opposed to the media hype), and out of place from the perspective of healthcare economics. In other words, that lockdowns were a policy born of fear (and political calculation) more than proceeding from healthcare calculation. Governments had essentially already determined an acceptable level of risk regarding flu, as well as other illnes

The photo above shows the marketing campaign for plastic bag alternatives that confronted me, directly inside the doors at my local Countdown supermarket. It raises an obvious question: if these bags are being replaced for free, do they really have less environmental impact than plastic ones? Common sense reasons that since they’re selling for a dollar with a low profit margin, as opposed to given away free, the cost is far higher - at least a hundred times higher. Indeed common sense based on prices is supported by the experts. Using less plastic looks good, like you're doing something helpful - but you're probably not. Usually, contrary to the common belief, going out of your way to use less plastic bags is bad for the environment: 1. Plastic pollution is not a significant problem in countries with good waste disposal. 2. A UK government study showed that in order for one of those cotton carry bags to have less environmental impact than plastic bags, it has to be used 131

A summary of spying in New Zealand, 2007-2014 Peter Dunne recently asked on his Facebook: Do you think there is freedom of speech in New Zealand? I said no, thanks to you (by the crimes of the GCSB and your vote to reward them with more power). Someone replied saying "I have no doubt that the GCSB has not the slightest interest in what I say unless my saying it poses a threat to my fellow citizens." This is a very common response, unfortunately it’s also very ignorant. This is understandable: surveillance is a complex issue that has to my knowledge never been covered in the NZ media in overview, let alone anything approaching a summary that could make sense of years of news on the topic. So here's my attempt. 1. Privacy To be unconcerned about the GCSB recording you, is to misunderstand privacy. Privacy is not about hiding bad things; rather it's essential to being human , and fundamental to democracy . If every time you picked up the phone, you had to listen to a pr

Stuff article from Monday: “ Big brother CCTV cameras and sensors to help solve Wellington's begging issues ” Big Brother is right. Justin Lester, our current Big Brother The loving hand of Big Brother Firstly, the Wellington City Council is spending at least $125,000 on creating a system to more effectively police at-risk people: beggars , the homeless, drunks, and addicts. It could have spent that money providing services that would actually help some of those people so they wouldn't be on the street in the first place, but no, true to form with its "don't give to beggars" campaign, it would rather hide the problem through increased security. The poster campaign didn't work, so perhaps where propaganda failed, authoritarianism will succeed, they think - authorities now have the ability to respond to begging "in real time". a street terrorist At best, this is treating symptoms instead of causes . More likely, it will further stigmatize these people,

My response to this Stuff article: New cyber-defence system for NZ 1. "If there is a cloud hanging over public trust in the GCSB it may be its involvement in the Dotcom saga." Well yes, there is that thing of GCSB's illegal actions during the illegal targeting of a New Zealander, but most of the distrust is rather based on internal documents leaked by Edward Snowden showing what the GCSB has been doing: illegal mass surveillance, there is no doubt at all. And how private contractors in the US have casual, unaccountable access to the data gathered in New Zealand. Data including phone calls, emails and web browsing habits of ordinary Kiwis unsuspected of any crime. It's also based on the Kitteridge report that found the GCSB had illegally investigated at least 88 Kiwis in the past decade, evidence which Prime Minister John Key called "pretty damning", but who then went on to pass the GCSB bill, which made those investigations retrospectively legal, and increas

This is my introduction to privacy, why it matters and why it's hard to grasp. When it comes to privacy in the modern age , your intuition is wrong. This leads to some huge problems that will only be fixed by changing the way we think and talk about privacy. TL;DR: This TED talk is a great introduction to the issue. Introduction A friend posted another TED talk about how liking the "Curly fries" Facebook page is an indicator of intelligence (by correlation), as an introduction to the counter-intuitive ways in which our online data is used. Big Data - the modern world of massive amounts of data and computing power - means *everything* you do online can be analyzed in this way, not just likes and public posts. Increasingly, what you do offline is also recorded and analyzed. This video from New Scientist is a better one to watch as an introduction to the topic. There's no way to live and contribute to society without giving away data - you can't really opt-out wi

Read NSA as including the rest of the "Five Eyes" signals intelligence network: UK's GCHQ, NZ's GCSB, Australia's ASD, and Canada's CSEC. For over a decade the NSA has advised not to buy networking equipment from Huawei or ZTE (the top two Chinese telecoms) because the Chinese might be using them to spy on you - but they didn't provide any evidence. They blocked these telcos from access to the US market and those of their five eyes allies as much as possible, and Huawei abandoned the US market as a result. Yet the NSA has long been actively developing exploits of Huawei products to spy on people! Additionally, the NSA regularly inserts spy hardware into network equipment bound for export and repackages them so they look untampered. The NSA has always maintained the danger of leaking top secret material (such as evidence of the Army targeting civilians in Iraq released by Chelsea Manning, and the Snowden leaks). One of the prime reasons they give is that &q