Tag archive: New Zealand

Despite a few false starts, Apple has started its international rollout of iTunes Match, their cloud-based music-matching service. The UK was among the first countries to report the service's activation, and it was soon joined by users from Ireland, Canada, France, Spain, Germany, Australia and New Zealand. iTunes Match scans your music collection and matches titles found in its own iTunes music database, then makes them available for… Read More

All the way back in September, Facebook promised that we would all soon be basking in the scrollable glory of its new profile layout, known as Timeline. It's going to be incredible, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told us. It will blow. Your. Mind. Well, as of late yesterday, Facebook users can finally enable their Timelines — but only if you live in New Zealand. That's right, New Zealand, the island nation with half as many people as New York… Read More

Kicked off in the pilot program during the first half of the year to start collecting photographs, Google has officially launched an interior version of Street View for buildings. The program sends a Google photographer to a business to take 360-degree photos and allow a potential customer to walk through the store. For instance, a user could navigate through a retail department store to find the exact location of the housewares department and… Read More

The United States, along with 40 other nations, has signed a statement made by Sweden to the United Nations Human Rights Counsel condemning the “three strikes” laws against online copyright infringers as a violation of human rights, reports Ars Technica. Neither the UK nor France, two nations who have such laws on the books, signed the statement. “All users…should have greatest possible access to Internet-based content,… Read More

James Bond got his first jetpack in 1965. It's been half a century, but it looks like the rest of us might finally get our chance to fly. On May 21, the Martin Aircraft Company successfully piloted its latest prototype jetpack to an altitude of 5,000 feet (1,500 meters) for nearly 10 minutes above Canterbury, New Zealand, achieving a climb rate of 800 feet per minute (4 meters per second). The feat is all the more impressive considering… Read More

New Zealand has passed a new law against online piracy that puts the onus on everyday Internet users to prove their innocence, if accused of piracy by copyright holders, or face files of up to NZ$15,000 or have their Internet access shut down for three months. Just to make things more interesting, individual accused of piracy are not allowed to hire lawyers. The new law, scheduled to go into effect on September 1 for traditional Internet… Read More

Someone, somewhere is getting fired right now. In a promotion for the newly released game, Splinter Cell: Convictions, a marketing company in New Zealand thought that it might be fun to send an actor down to the busy Viaduct Basin section of Auckland and engage with shop goers and bar patrons. With an imitation gun. Police were not amused. The NZ Herald is reporting that a man with a bandaged hand and carrying a plastic gun (the gun and… Read More

Could the New Zealand government be going open source? That seems eminently possible after it failed to renew a software agreement with Microsoft for Windows. Talks between the company and the NZ State Services Commission ground to a halt once the Commission realized that "a formal agreement with Microsoft is no longer appropriate." The company couldn’t offer what government negotiators required in price, features, or… Read More

The Business Software Alliance, an anti-piracy consortium made up of many of the software industry's biggest players, has released its Sixth Annual Global Software Piracy Study. Conducted by research firm IDC, the study claims that antipiracy efforts in the United States have more-or-less stalled out, and that approximately one fifth of all software in use in the U.S. is pirated. At 20 percent, the United States has the lowest software… Read More

MTV Games and Rock Band maker Harmonix have announced that the widely-anticipated The Beatles: Rock Band will go on sale to customers in North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand on September 9, 2009—that's right, 9/9/09—for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Nintendo Wii. In the United States, the game itself will be priced at $59.99 as a standalone software title that's compatible with existing Rock Band… Read More

New Zealand's Chris Ogle probably thought he was getting a good deal when he plunked down a little bit of money (reports range from $9 to $18) to buy a used iPod from an Oklahoma thrift outlet…but when he hooked up the iPod, he found some 60 pages of U.S. military data, including information on soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, equipment deployment lists, and mission information. Some of the information included… Read More

Internet search giant Google has released its 2008 End-of-Year Zeitgeist, noting what was hot worldwide in Internet searches for the year. Unlike search engines like AOL and Yahoo who base their end-of-year summaries mostly on the frequency of terms—hence allowing Britney Spears to rule the search engine listings for years on end—Google bases its Zeitgeist both on frequency and on the novelty of terms. In other words,… Read More

Microsoft has filed 63 separate lawsuits against online auction sellers who have been offering fake “Blue Edition” versions of its Windows XP operating system. The company says the breadth of its legal action serves as an indicator of how widespread and globally-interconnected the software piracy business has become—in one case, the company alleges software counterfeiters in New Zealand obtained fake software in China and… Read More

The Center for the Digital Future, part of USC's Annenberg School, has released its World Internet Report, detailing the global impacts of Internet and online technologies, including its use in communication, media, social and political processes, information, commerce, and other facets of everyday life. Once of the findings? While some 88 percent of young Americans have access to the Internet, that figure is far behind Internet… Read More

The Federal Trade Commission claims to have shut down the world’s largest spam network, one which is estimated to be responsible for one-third of all spam sent, according to Vnunet. The global network, which has offices in Australia, New Zealand, China, India, Russia, Canada, and the United States has been responsible for billions of spam messages and had generated over three million complaints. The FTC named two people… Read More