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.
8 August 2022
Highden Manor House (Source)
11 April 2022
Arise church is near to my heart - when I first arrived in New Zealand back in 2005, my wife joined the church while it was still small, and before it was even called Arise. Since then it has grown to be a behemoth - every so often I check on Arise's annual returns, and it seemed that each year they would expand enough to make about $1 million more than the previous year. At the moment that number stands at $13 million in income for the last year. They also own several properties worth a combined $21 million, including a church building in Wellington worth $10 million or more.
7 March 2022
The population of New Zealand is changing – and not just because there are more of us, including many new immigrants, or because people are living longer. The other great change is that fewer people are religious and New Zealand is increasingly secular.
16 September 2018
This morning I went along to two church services with a visiting academic, Hamed, who is over in New Zealand from Iran. He had never seen a Christian service before, and had been told to ask me about taking him along to a service. I decided to show him two extremes of what church can be. We started at the Cathedral of St Paul, and then went to Arise evangelical church.
23 April 2017
Last Sunday I went to church - not once, but twice. Arise is a large evangelical church that started in Wellington about 15 years ago, and has grown and spread to several other cities.
17 April 2016
Family First may be de-registered as a charity soon. They have been sent a notice of de-registration from Charities Services, but plan to fight it in court. They have previously defended against an attempt to be de-registered last year.