Blog : label 'technology'

We've all heard and use VPNs to either 'hide' our traffic or, more commonly, to pretend we're in another country so we can watch that movie - well Tor is a bit like that, but way more so and built-in to the network it uses. As Wikipedia says,  Tor is: ... a free overlay network for enabling anonymous communication. It is built on free and open-source software run by over seven thousand volunteer-operated relays worldwide, as well as by millions of users who route their internet traffic via random paths through these relays. This technique is called onion routing . Using Tor makes it more difficult to trace a user's internet activity by preventing any single point on the internet (other than the user's device) from being able to view both where traffic originated from and where it is ultimately going to at the same time. This conceals a user's location and usage from anyone performing network surveillance or traffic analysis from any such point, protecting ...

Not sure with my secure and private BNZ bank app and 2FAS password manager needs to know all these things about me, apart from they are interested and wanna track stuff. BNZ Google, Facebook, and Microsoft are to be expected, but ByteDance, owners of TikTok, inside my banking app - what's the deal Bank of New Zealand? 2FAS Pass

Anyone that spots a lump of bureaucratic bullshit AND ties that to a common human desire is great in my books :) The second story just tickles my Carry On 'poos and farts are funny' mind - it's not big, it's not clever, but HA HA HA HA. The Bureau of Minor Sufferings (BMS) is a satirical AI-powered certificate generator that creates hyper-formal US government-style complaint documents for everyday petty grievances. Users describe a minor complaint — a stolen lunch, a Netflix betrayal, being left on read — and receive a personalized bureaucratic certificate complete with an official case number, two findings of fact, a severity grade on the Bureau’s DEFCON scale, a forensic emotional-impact calculation, a fabricated legal precedent, and a formal ruling. The service is free to use with no account required. Both findings and the Official Ruling are included free; an optional Official Filing ($4.99, one-time) adds a clean, watermark-free HD download. The Bureau is a parody...

Who doesn't want their tech platforms to be open, sovereign, and built to last? A question aimed at everyone in AoNZ but especially and directly to the NZ Government / government. It's well known that the NZ government is an almost totally closed ' Microsoft shop ' with Microsoft's wide ranging contracts for all agencies, use of the ( flaky ) Microsoft stack from offshore* AI / SAAS to the desktop operating systems and apps. It's Microsoft all the way down baby. Fantastic if you're Microsoft (based in Washington, United States) or a New Zealand Microsoft employee. Shit if you have any sense of being open, sovereign, built to last, which every Kiwi assumes the government is being. Catalyst , a Wellington (NZ) headquartered tech company and proudly NZ owned has fought the good fight for so long they must be bruised from all their banging of heads against the brickwall.  We're Catalyst, the technology partner backing some of New Zealand's most ...

I spent a happy few evenings last month going through all my passwords in my password manager and, for any accounts that I never use, I visited the website to delete the account. It turns out there are 4 types out of methods to delete: Big button on the website, push the delete, and it's done Fill in a form, wait for a response Send an email to an 'admin', wait for a response Call a phone number Steps 1 - 3 were fine, and around 90% of my requests were, eventually, actioned. Making me do a phone call is SHITE and I now hate the company. Here's 4 articles all about data, and the last link talks about what really happens when you 'delete' something. The danger when a metric becomes a target by Kat Greenbrook, August 2, 2026 There are many things that organisations care about that are hard to measure directly. Instead, they measure something else that correlates with what they care about. Test scores are measured to represent student learning. Emergency department ...

Wow, Microsoft seem to be hanging on to their AI platform (Azure) by their fingertips - as I've always said, Apple makes great hardware, Google makes great software, Microsoft does neither. “Surfing the edge”: Tim O’Reilly on how humans can thrive with AI by Tim Cooper, December 2, 2025 A society that uses automation to build shareholder value while impoverishing everyone else will not be successful. Plan scenarios and develop a robust AI strategy that can survive in multiple circumstances. Surfing the edge of change today requires balance and responsiveness. How Microsoft Vaporized a Trillion Dollars by Axel Rietschin, Mar 29, 2026 This is an absolutely fascinating and detailed read, if you have any interest in technology, Microsoft, and pulling up the curtain hiding the wizard then this series of posts is for you! This is the first of a series of articles in which you will learn about what may be one of the silliest, most preventable, and most costly mishaps of the 21st century, ...

If you don't know about  Sarah Wynn-Williams and her book, Careless People , then I urge you to get a copy for a number of reasons. Let's start with the opening chapter where an early teenage Wynn-Williams, a New Zealand lawyer, public policy advisor, and author, was attacked by a shark as a teenager while on holiday in Tukurua, Golden Bay / Mohua. It's quite the harrowing event and after which I imagine she wasn't afraid of bastard sharks she worked alongside at Facebook (now Meta). Of course the book is now famous for giving the low down on the internal processes, culture, and 'leadership' at Facebook (Meta), especially around: Internal guidelines on content moderation Parscale’s team also ran voter suppression campaigns. They were targeted at three different groups of Democrats: young women, white liberals who might like Bernie Sanders, and Black voters. These voters got so-called dark posts—nonpublic posts that only they would see. They’d be invisible to ...

I am a cook, not a chef. A cook needs a recipe, all the ingredients, and a good clean run at it in the kitchen without anyone giving advice. A chef can fling open a cupboard, scan what's available, and announce what they will be creating for dinner. I'm a cook, not a chef. Over the years I have collected recipes in many formats, scraps of paper, books, electronic notes, links to websites, and even YouTube videos. Everywhere and anywhere - not my favourite way to keep info. During lockdown, or maybe just after , I stumbled upon* Cooked.wiki At the time it was a hobby site from Eduardo Gonçalves , a software engineer, entrepreneur, and teacher from Lisbon. I believe it was Eduardo's attempt to learn how to code with AI and boy was it useful! It's still run by Eduardo but it's now a fully fledged website with excellent mobile apps AND it's ad-free and hosted in Europe which I adore , of course. Like a million other recipe sites/apps it organises, displays, an...

A mate pinged me saying that the Nothing phones are pretty good, so I will be checking that out later this year or next depending upon when they release the next top level device. In the meantime I have been working through the list from my last update : Google Maps, giving    Organic Maps a go Google One, uninstalled Google Passwords PhotoScan, uninstalled Google Clock to Fossify Clock (beta) Google Recorder,  uninstalled Snapseed, uninstalled Google Weather Organic Maps is pretty good once you've downloaded the parts of the world you're interested in. It's not quite as feature rich or dynamic / up to date as Google Maps but that's one of the reasons I want to get off US technology, so they don't have all my data. I am still using Google Maps, especially in the car as the options are only iCar (or whatever it's called) and Android Auto. Fossify Clock is grand, does clock stuff. Would like a widget that shows the time in all the cities I have listed, that w...

I've had a brief run of "getting off US servers", specifically for me that means mostly Google, here's the latest update with plenty to still go. As I always say, this is not about Google per se but about getting off US company infrastructure and onto either European (not UK), Australia(ish), or Aotearoa New Zealand company machines. And before you ask, no, I am not interested in self-hosting anything. Replaced - uninstalled from my hardware/services - the following Google things with ... Gmail to   Proton Mail Drive to   Proton Driv e Calendar to   Proton Calendar Keep to    Joplin and Cooked.wiki Tasks to Todoist ,    Standard Notes   Keyboard to Futo (Android) Chrome to    Vivaldi Calculator to    Fossify Calculator Authenticator to    2FAS Authenticator File Manager to    Fossify File Manager Ah, I've made a mistake with Todoist as it's made in the US and ones data is stored on AWS , can't always be...

I'm a bit all over the place with the Screens theme but hey, who cares! Here's the Connecting set of 7, along with Celebrity , and Watching . I think it's Computers  next and then we're done with this theme (sounds like a chore, but it's not really). Lot easier just to join the albums tbh: 🖼️ Mike's daily photo - From Then To Now 🖼️ Mike's daily photo - Themes Connecting (via screens) Celebrities (on screen) Watching (screens)