And another thought

Media reports have described Ira Bailey as the first person to discover the #wtfmsd exploit. That might be correct – but the department’s real problem is that they don’t know who else has discovered this. Maybe no one. Or, maybe members of a criminal organisation found out about this and have used the exploit to commit a massive benefit fraud costing taxpayers millions! MSD simply doesn’t know, and it’s going to take a multi-million dollar investigation and audit process to find out.

That possibility and the huge costs involved in resolving it seems more newsworthy than the possibility suggested by the PM that Keith Ng paid Bailey, or that Bailey asked MSD for a reward, or whatever.

Just a thought

Via the Herald:

Ira Bailey – one of 17 people arrested in the Urewera raids in 2007 – was the first to discover the major privacy flaws in Work and Income’s self-service kiosks but has denied claims he demanded money in return for the information.

Mr Bailey, an IT analyst, said he told the Ministry of Social Development last Monday that there was a security issue, before he tipped off blogger Keith Ng.

If Ira Bailey discovered he had Domain Admin access to the entire MSD network, and all he did was – allegedly – ask for an exploit reward and then tip off a blogger, then he might not have been quite the fearsome terrorist that the police and intelligence agencies thought.

Apparently the best part of the job is helping people

The Otago Daily Times breaks the story that the national parking warden conference is in Dunedin this weekend:

Yesterday association committee member Heather Miller delivered a presentation on the history of number plates and today there will be a parking enforcement photograph competition before the association’s annual general meeting.

I recommend the entire article.

Cui bono

Via the Herald:

Nearly 300 sacked port workers have won back their jobs after Ports of Auckland’s u-turn decision to drop moves to replace them with contractors and re-enter collective agreement talks with the Maritime Union.

The ports company, which had boasted a “bulletproof” legal case, made its surprise decision last night after an informal conference in the Employment Court.

The backdown follows a Herald investigation into a ports manager who was at the bargaining table with the Maritime Union and was also allegedly recruiting non-union wharfies for a private stevedoring company.

Emphasis mine. If this allegation is correct then it sheds a new light on things. Perhaps POALs management was merely acting opportunistically, but this raises the possibility that the decision to break the union was a commercial decision made to enrich POAL’s management – a decision that’s cost the citizens of Auckland somewhere in the region of a hundred million dollars.

If there’s substance to this – and why else would the company have reversed its position so dramatically? – then Brown’s decision to support the port over the wharfies looks even more ill-advised.

Taking the non-identity problem a bit too far

You can critique the idea of ‘after-birth abortion’ on a number of levels, but I always look to the practical. And my practical experience as a new father is that parents of infants suffer extreme sleep deprivation and this impacts in a number of ways, like putting new bags of frozen vegetables in the pantry, or leaving to work without your shoes on, or going to the supermarket, realising you’ve forgotten your wallet, going home and then returning to the supermarket and then realising you’ve forgotten your wallet again. It’s not a good time to make profound life choices. So anyone suggesting, ‘Hey, let’s give that guy with the tiny red eyes and vomit all down the back of his shirt the power of life and death!’ Is not onto a winner.

Death of retail watch

I don’t have any opinions or insights into the Trevor Mallard ticket scalping story. I just think it’s funny:

The tickets to Saturday’s sold-out Homegrown festival have a face value of $95 each.

Whitireia music student Laura Signal, 19, and her three friends were desperate to attend so they bid for four tickets on Trade Me, paying a final price of $656.

Miss Signal was surprised when the trader turned out to be the Hutt South MP, who used his parliamentary email address for the auction.

She and her friends went to Mr Mallard’s Naenae office to collect the tickets from him in person.

“He came out and gave us the package really quickly and he kept saying: ‘It’s not what it looks like; it’s not what it looks like,’ to random passers-by.”

Mallard must have multiple electorate offices, because we often go out to Petone for lunch in the weekends and he has an office on Jackson Street. Maybe they are all fronts for his vast mercantile empire?

Anyway. back when I worked at IBM in the early 90s, our main center was in Petone, and Jackson Street was something of a wasteland. It’s now a thriving, vaguely bohemian (not irritatingly so) bustling stretch of used book stores, antique stores and excellent cafes, with few – if any – empty shops. Compared with central Wellington – ruinous parking fees, empty shop fronts and international chain stores, mostly empty except for bored tourists – it’s really bustling. But it still seems odd to find myself suggesting, ‘Hey! Let’s go to Petone!’

Evil in return

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

- W H Auden

From one of the stories about the five-year old tourist attacked in Turangi:

A sense of shame runs strongly through Kiwi messages to the five-year-old girl savagely attacked in a Turangi campground.

“Most of the messages are saying please forgive us,” Waikato Hospital spokeswoman Mary Anne Gill revealed yesterday as the girl left hospital, smiling and hugging nurses as she went.

Her European family plan to complete their New Zealand holiday, and police believe she may never remember anything about the sexually motivated attack because of her “heart-wrenching” injuries.

“The theme running through is a sense of shame … that this has happened in New Zealand .. This is not normal for New Zealand.”

If the family’s view of New Zealand was tarnished immediately after the attack, it wasn’t now, she said.

“They see it very much as an isolated incident.”

Isolated incident? But . . . this is normal for New Zealand, isn’t it? I mean, I guess it’s unusual that the child attacked happened to be a tourist attacked by a stranger, not someone living in poverty brutalised by a family member – but isn’t an assault on a child basically a routine occurrence in this country? We have the fifth highest rate of child abuse in the OECD, a child murdered roughly once a month.

Now the Herald reports that a sixteen year old has appeared in court, charged with the crime. If he’s convicted I’ll make two predictions (1) that he’ll be ‘known to CYFS’ because his own family has systematically tortured and abused him, and (2) he’ll spend almost his entire life in prison, because the risk he poses to the public is now so grave.

This isn’t a new problem, and New Zealand politicians have spent a long time insisting that ‘someone must do something’ – well, there are actual, proven policy solutions to the problem of endemic child abuse. Our MPs are ‘someone’ and they have billions of dollars and incredible scope to do ‘something’. But so far as I can tell, no one in New Zealand is even looking at these solutions.

Pathos alert

Less weirdly, has any other urban centre gone through what Christchurch has, in the sense of being this seismically unstable for this long a period of time? Or is this a uniquely horrible experience?

Update: Apparently Sumatra still suffers from aftershocks since the 2005 quake.

RIP Hitchens

I haven’t read as many of his books as everyone else seems to have. I thought he was brilliant and fiery and witty and polemical, but when intellectuals and polemicists really counted – after 9/11 – he was swept along with the tide of anti-muslim terrorist hysteria. He was wrong on the great issue of the day: the invasion of Iraq – and he was so stridently, sneeringly, viciously wrong that his vanity never allowed him to walk it back. He spent a huge amount of time, energy and words railing against the existential threat of ‘Islamofascism’ when it turned out the great threat to the hegemony of the west was our own financial system.

He wrote some interesting, funny stuff – especially about religion. But he spent his youth being wrong about Marxist-Leninsm and his middle years being wrong about the War on Terror, and because he was also wrong about the health effects of smoking – brilliantly, cleverly, polemically witty, railing furiously against the ‘anti-smoking fascists’, but still completely wrong – he didn’t get an old age to be right or wrong about anything in.

I threw some flat-warming parties like this

Via Russell Brown on Twitter, Party Central during last night’s game: