Posts by Russell Brown
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Comment from NetSafe:
NetSafe chief technology officer Sean Lyons says in the past, such bragging would have been limited to the men's immediate social group, but social media allows them to reach a much bigger audience.
"You have an idea and you want to spread it – that's fine if you're talking about the student army down in Christchurch, it's not so good when you're talking about the outcomes that these guys were intending," he said on Firstline this morning.
"You think about being a victim of something and only a few people knowing, that's bad enough. But when suddenly you start to find out that people you hardly know… or just huge numbers of people randomly are seeing it, that's got to be an even more distressing position to be in."
This does rather make a case for the Harmful Digital Communications Bill.
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Note that given the subject matter, I will be moderating any discussion tightly. Don't be a dick.
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Hard News: Friday Music: I like your old…, in reply to Kumara Republic,
I like how he can still cram in his usual grievances even when he likes something ...
Does this mean country music has finally overcome the sneering of New Zealand’s self-ordained cultural priesthood, who reflexively snigger at the very mention of the genre? As tempting as it might be, I wouldn’t jump to that conclusion. I know too many musical bigots, mostly masquerading as liberal sophisticates, who still associate country music with cheesy songs about horses and dogs. They make the mistake of confusing country music – a genre as wide and varied as pop, jazz or classical – with what is now often referred to as country and western, a sentimental, mutant sub-genre which grew out of the great American cowboy songs of the 1930s and 40s and survives mainly in New Zealand and Australia (and to some extent, oddly enough, in Ireland).
Not that Karl himself ever makes ignorant generalisations about music he doesn't understand. Oh no.
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Hard News: The Future of Television, in reply to Jason Kemp,
Lets go one step further – what would it take to get PAS as a Freeview channel? It seems like this is a media savvy community that creates content as well as thinking about what and how we all consume – who knows how to set up a freeview channel?
If only it were that accessible.
There are currently no Freeview terrestrial slots available in Auckland. that's the main reason Stratos had to rebrand and go to Sky. The last slot to go was the one taken by Choice TV.
The government has buggered up spectrum allocation to the point where it can't meet its commitments with respect to community and non-commercial licences and is beholden to Sky, which will leave everyone else waiting until December to see what it does with the legacy UFF spectrum it's been allowed to keep on a "use it or lose it" basis.
And once you're past that, Kordia's transmission fees would run to about a million dollars a year. The Freeview license fee is $100,000 annually for large broadcasters, but comes down to $2500 for small broadcasters serving a single region.
Oddly, the easiest way onto a Freeview EPG is likely to be via the internet. Quickflix will launch as a "channel" on Freeview early next year
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Hard News: Friday Music: I like your old…, in reply to Alec Morgan,
That is interesting Simon, no wonder VU sales were low! Some few people used to get airfreight NMEs–post office order or overseas funds
I think it must have been about 1979 when it all changed and the first album became quite widely available. Just in time for New Zealand punk rock and what followed. From memory, I think Simon knows the details on that.
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Mike Dickison made the interesting observation on Twitter this morning that some of us have been on the internet longer than some millennials have been alive. I've been publishing to the internet for 20 years.
But there is something different about it always having been a reality. My younger son, 19, has never lived in a house without an internet connection.
But they've both also always lived in a house with a VCR (or PVR). Their relationship with media is profoundly different to mine in that respect. For them, the ability to copy and repeat is just a given.
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Hard News: Friday Music: I like your old…, in reply to Robert Fox,
Life is indeed too short to read the curmudgeonly outpourings from the meat and two veg world view of the likes of Du Fresne and pretty much anyone who writes for the Daily Mail, no matter how unintentionally hilarious they are.
I confess, my delight in du Fresne's utterances on music (this isn't the first time) is undoubtedly perverse. His extended outrage here about Chris Knox's appearance on Kim Hill's Playing Favourites segment is absolutely precious:
Knox, who is considered a founding father of the punk movement in New Zealand, chose as his first song the Beatles’ Baby You’re A Rich Man, and made the comment that the Beatles were a punk band themselves in their Hamburg days.
With all due respect to Knox, this sort of revisionist bullshit can’t be allowed to go unchallenged. Attempts to confer musical legitimacy on punk by claiming that the greatest pop band in history were precursors of punk won’t wash.
Punks raged against the status quo, but there was nothing in the music of the Beatles to suggest they were remotely interested in bringing down the “system”. The most they did was mock it in a good-natured manner, as when John Lennon famously told the audience at a Royal Variety performance in 1963: “Those of you in the cheap seats, clap your hands. The rest of you, just rattle your jewellery”.
And again, he manages to tie his outrage to to Radio NZ. You couldn't write this stuff.
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Hard News: Friday Music: I like your old…, in reply to Robert Fox,
Also are the Fall the only band in the world who’s fans look forward with enthusiasm to their latest release? Smith’s borderline insanity, prodigious output and policy of regenerating his band more often than Dr Who keeps Fall anoraks constantly craving new material.
When they played here last year, a number of my friends insisted it was yet another great Fall show.
Having seen them six or seven times previously, I thought it was rubbish.
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Hard News: The Future of Television, in reply to Yamis,
The Block gets 637,950 out of 4,430,000 for it’s finale.
= 14% of the population, and maybe about 10% for it’s regular mid season stuff.The Herald is now saying this:
The final of The Block, which screened from 7.30pm to 9.30pm, was the most watched programme in that timeslot on Wednesday, with an average of 995,800 viewers, and 1,185,300 tuning in in total.
Edit: No, checked it again TV3's release. The 1,185,300 overall is correct, but lord knows where they got the 995,800 average. It appears to have come out of thin air.
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Hard News: The Future of Television, in reply to Finlay Macdonald,
The ones I know watch a tiny bit of event TV, often ironically, but mostly don’t watch at all. They are incredibly creative and communal, too. I believe they are what is known as “the future”.
I guess the question is how representative are the ones we know. But I think that’s not a bad characterisation of the kids who’ll create the culture.
I suspect they’d be more likely to have watched X-Factor than The Block, which is basically for squares.