2 October 2023
Personal VPN services are all the rage now, and you may have watched or heard a lot of “host-read advertising” for them on YouTube and popular podcasts. They purport to provide fantastic advantages, while also making alarming claims about who is out to get your personal data on the internet. Today I'm going to analyse some of those claims, using my 20-something years of Internet Service Provider (ISP) industry experience.
5 December 2022
It has been a while since I edited a newsletter, and what better time than near the end of the year to take on the mantle again.
21 February 2022
And now for something completely different…
13 September 2021
Billy Te Hakiha is in the news again. You'll recall that he was recently arrested, with his “partner in crime” Vinny Eastwood, for violating the lockdown, and holding a protest. Billy and Vinny spent some time in jail, but are now out on bail awaiting trial.
29 March 2021
This week has seen the news of the ship (the Ever Given) that's been stuck for days in the Suez Canal. Interestingly, having glanced at the headlines and pictures, in my mind the ship was called the Evergreen, but that's the name of the company that runs it (Evergreen Marine).
28 December 2020
What's the harm in viral conspiracy theories? This bbc.co.uk blog investigated the people who had been affected by and involved in the spread of misinformation in 2020. The piece touches on Covid-19-deniers who ended up contracting the illness, people who became internet sensations and ended up speaking to thousands about their conflicting and nonsensical notions, and the hurt of having newly estranged family members.
29 April 2018
There's been some interesting local research on people with health conditions doing their own research. The Southern Cross Health Society has looked into whether people look up their symptoms on google before visiting their GP. They talked to GPs about their patients, and found out that an increasing number of them are coming into their practices with knowledge taken from the internet of what is wrong with them.
13 December 2015
Up to 80 kids - 1 in 4 - at Brunswick North West Primary School in Melbourne have contracted chicken pox. The school is tolerant or even welcoming of parents who choose not to vaccinate their kids. Newsletters have reiterated this view:
1 November 2013
Matthew Willey recalls the days before the internet, and an old friend
1 May 2009
Linley Boniface is to be congratulated for her humorous take on the prevailing hysteria around alleged "white-tail spider bites" (Dominion Post 9 March).
1 May 1997
Britain's The Skeptic magazine celebrated its tenth anniversary with a Top-Ten survey of paranormal phenomena of the decade.