The T2 Driving Schmucks Club

Each morning I access the motorway at Karaka to join many others for a while on the way to my office.

The  on ramp is divided into three lanes, all clearly signed for purpose. Two of them are for folk like me, one person per vehicle. We have to queue up and our access to the motorway is controlled by a set of traffic lights which moderate the traffic to hopefully improve traffic flow. A third lane on the left is reserved for heavy or commercial vehicles (over 3.5 tonne) and vehicles with 2 or more passengers. Their flow onto the motorway is not hindered by traffic lights.

I have noticed that apparently there are some exceptions to the T2 rules. Some vehicles which have only one driver, or are a ute under 3.5 tonnes, have the right to use this lane they would not otherwise qualify for. Using this lane puts them up to 20-30 vehicles ahead in the queue. Use doesn’t seem to be universal though, for example, not all utes with one person on board get to use the lane.

This would be a club worth belonging to.

It is frustrating when you have observed all the rules, worked your way to the head of the queue, to have a vehicle like AKA6**, with one person, come swooping up on your inside to nudge their way ahead of you into the next queue.

So how do I get to belong to this club? Initially I assumed they were some kind of emergency worker required immediately somewhere to save a life or prevent a domestic flight hi-jacking, but apparently not.

In a community like ours, if you don’t know something you do not have to ask too many people to get the right connection. And I know a person or two who know stuff. But to my complete surprise I could find not a single person who knew how to get membership to this special and privileged club.

I had contemplated hopping out of my car and asking the driver of AKA6**., after all he had a sign on the tailgate window of his station wagon which read ‘Intelligent Protection System’, but no he was off on his next busy move.

I had given up ever finding out how I could become a member of this club and gain such a traffic advantage. That was until I ended up sitting next to an older chap having a coffee at Mangere Bridge Village. We were chatting away and I raised this subject then asked him if, by chance, he knew anything about this club.

I was quite unprepared for his very enthusiastic revelation in response. Thank goodness I wasn’t sitting across from him otherwise I would have been showered by a mouthful of Chai Latte (without sugar)!

That was followed by a burst of words, many of which I wouldn’t normally use and from what others tell me, are not printable. But I did pick up what I thought was a key word in my search for the club – ‘Schmucks!’

Success!  Finally, a vital word clue in my search for membership of this special and exclusive club. So I am off to chat with another friend, Mr Google, to find out more about this ‘T2 Driving Schmucks Club’. I’ll let you know how I get on.

 

First published in the Franklin County News on 27th September 2018

Techno Nosey Parkers

Your employer could be using your social media presence to see if you are looking for a new job.

You may recall a month or so back I wrote about Facebook and how we are now keenly aware of how our data is being accessed and manipulated, often without our knowledge.

And if you post a picture of yourself, and your face is visible, you can be identified by those nosey parkers. Well, there is a whole new meaning to nosey parker now.

Google tracks your movements even if you have turned location history off. An investigation has found that even if you explicitly tell Google not to track your location and movements on your iPhone or your Android smartphone, they do anyway.

The investigation found that users are being misled by Google’s claim that for those who turn off Location History “the places you go are no longer stored.” In fact, even with Location History turned off, some Google apps automatically store time-stamped location data without asking. For example, Google stores a snapshot of where you are when you merely open its Maps app. Automatic daily weather updates on Android phones pinpoint roughly where you are. And some searches which have nothing to do with location, like “chocolate chip cookies,” or “kids science kits,” pinpoint your precise latitude and longitude, accurate to the square foot, and save it to your Google account.

So many of the company’s services track your location, it’s virtually impossible for the user to know just how many services they need to disable to regain their privacy. Now that you have digested that, take a swallow of this next revelation.

There is a powerful new “face search” engine that could be a privacy nightmare. Cybersecurity firm Trustwave has released an open source tool to find accounts of large volumes of people across social media platforms by automatically matching names and profile pictures.

The tool, Social Mapper, is designed for testing security measures and gain access to computers. Social Mapper users provide their own login credentials to various social networks, along with a file specifying names and facial images of the people they are interested in targeting. The tool then logs into the likes of Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram, and uses the sites search tools and open source facial recognition tools to find and log likely matches.

Whilst designed for a specific security purpose, there have to be concerns about whether it could be used for malicious purposes or to violate people’s privacy. And we already know privacy doesn’t count for much in this techno world. Once Social Mapper has finished running and the reports have been collected here are just a couple of uses that information could be used for:

• Create fake social media profiles to ‘friend’ the targets and send them links to credential capturing landing pages or download malware. Recent statistics show social media users are more than twice as likely to click on links and open documents compared to those delivered via email.
• Trick users into disclosing their emails and phone numbers.
• View target photos looking for employee access card badges and familiarise yourself with building interiors.

But wait there is more.

In San Francisco, hiQ, a data mining company helps employers predict which of their employees are thinking about jumping ship.

They built their business on the back of a valuable cache of data – public user profiles on the professional networking site LinkedIn. Is the data you share publically on social networking sites like an announcement in a public space?

LinkedIn says ‘No’.

hiQ says ‘Yes’ and recently a California judge sided with hiQ.

First published in the Franklin County News Thursday 6th September 2018.

Communities Redefined

A while back in the good ol days of the Franklin District I recall attending a community meeting in Waiuku to discuss the Council Plan. I was fresh back from a visit to the States where I had spent a few days in Tucson Arizona as the guest of the University Business School. Water was pretty precious there in the desert. I was impressed that every house had two separate supplies of water. One was treated water for human consumption the other was recycled grey and waste water to be used for flushing the toilet, watering the garden, washing the car.

At the Council meeting in Waiuku I asked what our plans were for water recycling, and also why every house didn’t have a water tank. Neither of those were on the agenda.

Of course now we are flat out building dormitory suburbs in Franklin on A class growing soils. Instead of doing what we always do, the development could have been a fabulous opportunity to make a difference.

There are those who argue our modern lifestyle is utterly unsustainable. The technology already exists to change that and it is just a matter of applying science into the architecture of everyday life.

ReGen Villages is a start-up real estate development company aiming to build small, self-sustaining residential communities around the world. The first one is expected to be completed in Almere in the Netherlands in 2018. It will collect and store its own water and energy, grow its own food, and process much of its own waste. Also, no cars. Each completed village will house 100 families on about 50 acres. ReGen villages are designed to give people an environmentally friendly alternative to urban life.

ReGen stands for regenerative, where the outputs of one system are the inputs of another. The concept combines a variety of innovative technologies, such as energy positive homes, renewable energy, energy storage, door-step high yield organic food production, vertical farming aquaponics / aeroponics, water management and waste-to-resource systems. Food waste will turn into fish food for aquaculture, and houses will filter rain water.

Homes in these communities are totally designed for sustainable living. The community shares water storage facilities and there are areas for livestock, communal dinning, playgrounds and communal learning centres.

A living machine system will use plants and trees to filter sewage, and a separate anaerobic digester will handle the neighbourhood’s sewage and provide irrigation or water reused in energy systems. A system for processing food and animal waste will use black soldier flies and aquatic worms to digest the waste and create both chicken and fish feed.

James Ehrlich is the founder of ReGen Villages. He reckons a neighbourhood can be connected the way it’s supposed to be which is around natural resources. As cities become increasingly expensive and crowded, Ehrlich believes this type of development may become more common.

There is a terrible housing crisis and Governments around the world are in a desperate situation to build probably over a billion new homes. At the same time they wrestle with a number of things including the commercial interests of farmers, the commercial interests of traditional real estate developers and material companies which have been doing things the same way for a long time. Without doubt we need to provide new kinds of suburbs and new kinds of neighbourhoods.

Have we missed the opportunity to lead by example, in our clean green country, to redefine residential real-estate development for the next three billion people coming to the planet?

 

First published in the Franklin County News 21 August 2018 

Our Web ID Tag

I am not a big user of face book. Unless I am expecting some news or information via that medium, or I want to put something up, I might check it out for an hour twice a week.

Don’t get me wrong, I think face book is a great idea. I enjoy keeping up with family and friends. It’s a delight to see younger relations growing and vicariously sharing their development and learning through regular updates on facebook.

When I first accessed this service I was invited to read the conditions and rules. Never did and don’t know anyone else who did. If I wanted to use face book I had to agree, so I would take my chances.

When the recent face book / Cambridge Analytica affair broke cover there was outrage. As the matter progressed I began to feel the outrage was unwarranted and perhaps the type we inflict on others when we have made a mistake and they have exploited it.

You see neither face book or Cambridge Analytica did anything wrong. We, the users of face book had accepted the terms on which we would access and use this communication tool. There may have been some aspects of use not particularly or specifically covered in the agreement, but then there was no rule saying it couldn’t be done.

Instead of being vilified, Cambridge Analytica should be congratulated for their incredibly clever idea and using what they had gathered so creatively and powerfully.

That congratulations should also include thanks for them drawing our own irresponsibility and downright stupidity into such compelling and frightenly close focus. We are now keenly aware of how our data is being accessed and manipulated, often without our knowledge.

Both face book and Google gather information about us from things we actually provide to them, like geotagged photos, messages, emails and profile information. But they and other tech companies can also assemble huge troves of data about us – what we like, what we read, the trips we are thinking of making – by following us around the web.

They can also track us when we go from web page to web page if those pages have like and share buttons on them, or even just comment fields.

It doesn’t even matter if we interact with these buttons and comments or not. Every app we load is another open door inviting organisations and people, completely unknown to us (let alone their motivation), to gather information, make assumptions about us, and share with others for commercial gain.

It’s not just the social media and search giants that use sneaky techniques to follow us around the web. Virtually every other online ad and data company uses another intrusive method known as fingerprinting. This allows us to be identified by them identifying a unique set of characteristics of the device that we are using. These characteristics include configuration, fonts and plug ins that they use to assign us a unique finger print or ID tag and track both us and our device.

And if you put a picture of yourself, and your face is visible, you can be identified by those nosey parkers. Sobering though huh?

 

[First published in the Franklin County News 17th July 2018 page 6.]

The slaughtering is futile and senseless

The dreaded words mycoplasma bovis arrived in our vocabulary as a bit of a shock.

Given we were one of about two countries in the world that did not have the disease present, I would have thought at least an air raid alarm would have started sounding relentlessly demanding our attention. But apparently not.

And then, oh my goodness, there seemed to be a bit of it about. Suddenly late in January The NZ Dairy Event (Dairy Week) Chair received a letter from Dairy NZ advising that although the Event was perceived to be low risk in light of the fact that not all links with infected farms had yet been completed, their advice, “...was to avoid co-mingling of cattle between islands.” MPI supported the advice.

Consequently the Event Committee made the decision to request South Island exhibitors to withdraw their show and sale entries from the 2018 event. This effectively excluded some of the top dairy cattle in New Zealand attending the National event. Now more people were sitting up and paying attention. However, the expectation was to reduce the risk of infection until other measures were found to eradicate the disease. And the slaughtering of cattle started in the belief the disease could be eliminated.

Mycoplasma bovis is a bacterial disease commonly found in cattle all over the world. It leads to serious conditions in cattle and therefore constitutes an animal welfare and productivity issue. It spreads from animal to animal through close contact, and between farms through the movement of animals that are infected but may not be showing symptoms. It does not infect humans and presents no food safety risk. There is no concern about eating meat, milk and milk products.

My interest stems from my role as the President of the Royal Agricultural Society of NZ (RAS) which is the umbrella group for the 95 Agricultural & Pastoral (A&P) Shows throughout the country and 65 Breed Societies and associated groups. Our RAS Southern District Council in the South Island met and a number of shows made the decision not to run dairy and or beef cattle classes to minimise any risk.

A major decision for an A&P Show, given one of their prime purpose is to bring country to town, providing an educative platform for showing excellence in agriculture.

I attended a round of meetings throughout the country from Whangarei in the north to Winton in the deep south, where we discussed the issue at our livestock forums.

There was universal concern that the focus was solely on the elimination of the disease, which was looking less and less achievable.

Our Shows, Exhibitors and Breeders wanted to know, given the commercial cattle industry continues to prosper and cattle showing continues unabated and unhindered in dozens of other countries living with the disease, whether there was information as to whether the management of cattle herds was a common denominator in seeing the rapid spread of the disease, and what contingency plans the Government and MPI intend to implement if the disease could not be eliminated.

And then the disease was in the North Island and down the road in Cambridge!  It should be clear to everyone by now, the slaughtering is futile and senseless.

Published in the Franklin County News Thursday 14^th June 2018