Meanwhile, yesterday, Simon Young shared this link with me: a story on the live Taupo City Council stream. Yet another thing we should have done ages ago. Now, like Dunedin and free wifi, we find ourselves catching up and being reactive. When we should be rearranging the letters and being creative.

You agree to abide by any and all the related Chinese laws and regulations of the Contract Law of the People’s Republic of China, Copyright Law of the People’s Republic of China and its implementing regulations, Decision of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress on Preserving Computer Network Security (“Security Decision of the National People’s Congress”), Law of the People’s Republic of China on Guarding State Secrets, the Telecommunication Statute of the People’s Republic of China (“the Telecommunication Statute”), the Computer Information Security Protection System Regulations of PRC, INTERIM PROVISIONS GOVERNING THE MANAGEMENT OF THE COMPUTER INFORMATION NETWORKS IN THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA CONNECTING TO THE INTERNATIONAL NETWORK and measures for implementation, Administration of the Maintenance of Secrets in the International Networking of Computer Information Systems, Administration of Internet Information Services Procedures, MEASURES FOR SECURITY PROTECTION ADMINISTRATION OF THE INTERNATIONAL NETWORKING OF COMPUTER INFORMATION NETWORKS, Administration of Internet Electronic Messaging Services Provisions (“Electronic Messaging Provisions”). You also agree to be fully responsible for any behaviors and the any possible result due to the misuse of your account and password in this or that way. Any violation of Security Decision of the National People’s Congress may constitute a crime and you might be prosecuted for the crime. According to the Telecommunication Statute, telecommunication users assume liability for message contents and result transmitted via a communication network. In any case, should Ushi.cn have reasons to conclude that any of your behaviors, including but not limited to any of your words and other behaviors, have violated or may violate any of the above mentioned laws and regulations, the service offered by Ushi.cn will be immediately terminated at any time without prior notice.

   Mainland China has an awful lot of laws relating to the internet—not very Confucian.
   This scares me off, big time. I’m cool with contract law and copyright law, and I have the basics there when it comes to the PRC. The rest: I really don’t have time to look up the legislation and procedures.
   It is so tempting to accept the invitation, given the way the business world is heading, but until the People’s Republic can do something about cleaning up its legislative framework, it’s a no to Ushi.
   I’m sure that when browsing other Chinese sites, I have not been confronted with quite this much. Or maybe I just haven’t browsed enough in the dot-cn space?

Now, as promised, Google-dissing time.
   You’d think I’d have got most of it out of my system earlier this year with the privacy flaws I discovered around the time of the Google Buzz débâcle.
   But you’d also think that Google would have learned from that mistake. Apparently not.
   First up, here’s a screen shot of my old Google profile. I had deleted it once post-Buzz, but reinstated it because, ironically, it was the only way to remove Buzz. (Deleting my profile did not, as Google would have you believe, remove Buzz when the service was forced on me back in February.)
   I found an option in my profile (which had not been there prior to February) that claimed to prevent my name being found, if I unchecked it. It also said that by unchecking that option, one could not use Buzz and Latitude.
   I should also point out that I do not have a Gmail account.

I don’t know what that says to you, but I would have thought that that meant I would never get Buzz.
   Wrong.

   What part of ensuring that my name could not be found did Google not understand? What other US laws has it violated this time?
   It’s pretty rich for a company that did not have, the last time I looked, a privacy policy for Buzz.
   So, I went and deleted my profile again. This time, it did kill Buzz, though I still have 777 connections in my Social Search. How does it know, if I am no longer supplying data for that?

I also really don’t want to know the 285 friends-of-friends’ searching habits and Tweets. (It still insists I have four blogs with them—the actual number is zero. I wouldn’t trust Google to be able to do arithmetic correctly.)
   But here’s one big down side to not having a Google profile. Google suggests you can be contacted through the company by not signing up to a profile with them! In your Google account, there is now this:

You can’t have that box unchecked without creating a Google profile. What sort of a con is that?
   Some of you may remember when I whinged about Google saying I was signed up to a bunch of services I never knew about. Google goes one better now: it preempts new services and forces them into your account:

You are now a member of something that hasn’t even been invented yet! This is probably how, after all, it got all those Buzz users earlier this year. Google has “pre-consent”!
   Clicking on ‘New Service’ results in a 404. I don’t know what game Google is playing, but something is rotten in Mountain View.
   I can moan all I want, but I have acted and have drafted a letter asking Google to remove the unwanted services from my account. I would delete the whole account, but for a couple of services where colleagues have asked me to set things up (notably Analytics for the Medinge Group website—contrary to Google’s own claims, I cannot remove myself as an administrator).
   So why whinge? Hopefully it’ll have you checking your own Google accounts to make sure there aren’t unwanted things there.

With the first billboard going up in town, I’ve been asked about whether my free wifi programme will cost ratepayers.
   In a word, no. The wifi programme will be supported by selling the space on the home page.
   Upkeep of such a service, and I am looking at several alternatives, is in the low five figures, though considering the benefits to Wellington’s GDP is measured in the millions, it’s a sound investment.
   Where it could wind up costing Council is in the expansion of such a network. However, there are low-cost ways of doing that. The high figure is NZ$250,000 to roll it out to different areas, but lower figures have been proposed.
   I would like to roll out free wifi to more than the central city, targeting neighbourhoods that could benefit from the educational uses of the internet. Newtown and Johnsonville seem to be communities that could benefit most greatly.
   I’d do this after the central city programme was successful and I think the figures will support my intentionally conservative estimates. There will be rates’ gains to Wellington City thanks to productivity, improved businesses, and new businesses. If all indicators look good, then the rollout will continue to cost ratepayers the grand sum of zero dollars.
   There are other ways, too, to make free wifi pay. Last week, two of my supporters sent me an article on Starbucks’ plans to capitalize on its free wifi service.
   In Starbucks’ case, it’s launching a network that has premium content in news, entertainment, wellness, business and careers, and ‘My Neighborhood’.
   No money is changing hands: instead, the companies, such as Apple, are paying Starbucks for the opportunity to get new business.
   And if Starbucks can do it, why can’t Wellington City? The idea of opening up the home page to advertisers (incidentally, there is already interest, and we haven’t even launched) is the same principle, albeit in a limited way. Expanding it during year one to include premium content from Kiwi creatives can only be a good thing for how we see our city.

My friend Edward Talbot, and his friend and business partner Rowan Wernham, launched their Snapr (sna.pr) service today. It’s the ideal way to share geotagged photographs in the 2010s, and I expect these guys to do some great things as Snapr takes off.
   Snapr was the only Kiwi (if not southern hemisphere) venture to show at SXSW’s Accelerator competition this year, and is a perfect example of how New Zealand talent can take on and change the world.
   I foresee Snapr having a big take-up by netizens, especially as we move more into greater smartphone usage, mobile snaps, and augmented reality.
   In their release, Ed and Rowan state: ‘Snapr is a big public channel for people to share what’s happening in their life. We love the idea of a map with crowdsourced photos, you can look in anywhere, discover new people, and find neat things going on.
   ‘Mobile snaps are less about aesthetics, they are an immediate way to show what is going on where you are.’
   The release goes on to describe the service. ‘Photos on Snapr are viewed via a map based interface. Snaps from the same place and time are naturally brought together.
   ‘An iPhone application [a free download] allows users to upload photos, send tweets, and view the map on the go.’
   The founders have their favourite images already grouped on the site, and you can begin to see how it works. Here are Rowan’s, and here are Ed’s.
   While founded in Auckland, this is the sort of business I see starting in Wellington under my mayoral policies: high-tech, creative, even game-changing. It’s where the level playing field allows Kiwis to reach punch well above our weight.

Photograph by Sarah Burton.

Audi Sport Quattro. 1984 (prod. 224). 2-door coupé. F/A, 2133 cm³ (5 cyl. DOHC). Homologation special for Group B rallying, based on regular Audi Quattro but with 320 mm lopped from the wheelbase. Standard turbocharged engine producing 306 PS, though competition models tended to be up in the 450 PS-plus bracket. Carbon–Kevlar body, steeper windscreen rake (of Audi 80 (B2)) for greater visibility as demanded by rally drivers, wider tyres. ABS, four-piston caliper brakes. This all came at a price: 203,850DM when new.

I didn’t want a repeat of 1,100 when the Nissan Cherry was the landmark model. (There actually was a miscount, but I won’t go in to that.)
   And in the 1,100–1,200 cycle, I managed to find yet another likely error (about a Ford development code) in Wikipedia which I harped on about over at my Tumblog.
   As I said in the 1,100-car post, Autocade is not perfect and I find errors in my own work. However, I don’t intentionally put wrong information in, and the Wikipedia error with the Ford CE14 code is like saying, in car-nut terms, that Margaret Thatcher was a member of the Labour Party. This error has now propagated all over the internet so that, if Wikipedia editors were to check, they would find plenty of pages to support a mistake of which their site could have been the source.

Network A: 98 per cent
Network B: 2 per cent

On computer one running Windows XP, the above was working.
   On computer two running Windows Vista:

Network A: 0 per cent
Network B: 100 per cent

   I’ve a fair idea of how geo-targeting works and two computers on the same network going through the same router with the same (outward) IP address do not, in theory, behave differently.
   But, as Homer Simpson once retorted, ‘In theory, communism works.’
   I hope the boffins can explain this one, because usually I have gone against expert advice to get computer hardware working. (The network was hooked up many years ago by yours truly, doing the exact opposite of what the instructions said—after, I might add, the instructions failed. My personal laptop and its Bluetooth connection were hooked up by finding the most illogical method possible.)
   Surfing to the OpenX forums (Pete had been on the chat earlier, but no one was around), I tried to log in. Unfortunately, this proved impossible and errors followed:

No one was there at all, presumably due to the database error shown at the bottom of the page:

   So, if any OpenX experts are out there and can answer our geo-targeting question, please give us a shout in the comments.

Despite fiddling around with all these online ads, there’s one company I know I will never deal with. And it’s not as though the online ad industry has come to us with clean hands, either, so this sullies them further.
   After surfing on July 10, I found I could no longer get on to Facebook. Every time I typed www.facebook.com, I got the screen below (excerpted):

Which led me to here:

   Somewhere along the line, I must have got to a web page that hijacked my web browser. It didn’t alter the hosts’ file, and I was eventually able to correct this by deleting all cookies and clearing the browser cache, but it left me with one clear message: I will never deal with Mediaplex.
   Based on the above, this conduct is highly unethical and is nearly as bad as planting a trojan or a virus on to a user’s computer. And Googling the incident, I found that many others had encountered the same, sometimes when typing in other sites.
   I was saddened to find out that Mediaplex is part of Valueclick, a company I dealt with for years. We eventually ended our contract with Valueclick. I don’t recall the reason exactly, but I suspect it was down to the low advertising rates the company delivered. There were no concerns over its behaviour.
   When I was on the Mediaplex site, I noticed that Commission Junction was part of the same group. We have been asked to join CJ many times during the 1990s and 2000s but always read the terms and conditions. It had something similar to this clause (which is in its current agreement):

Dormant Accounts. If Publisher’s Account has not been credited with a valid, compensable Transaction that has not been Charged-back during any rolling, six consecutive calendar month period (“Dormant Account”), a dormant account fee at CJ’s then-current rate shall be applied to Publisher’s Account each calendar month that Publisher’s Account remains an open yet Dormant Account or until Your Account balance reaches a zero balance, at which time the Account shall become deactivated. Transactions will not be counted if the Transaction subsequently becomes a Charge-back.

In English: if you don’t make a sale over six months, they have the right to charge you. When you pay it all back, they kill off your account.
   There’s nothing illegal about that, but considering every other affiliate programme we have seen does not do that, then I bet a few people who were less careful about reading their agreements would have been taken by surprise. I found it questionable, and refused to deal with the company. (It seems, if you believe some of the links on Google, that we got off lucky.)
   This latest stunt tarnishes the entire group: Commission Junction, Mediaplex and Valueclick. Caveat proponor.

You might want to rethink that memo.