I've restrained myself so far, but bloody hell. Heads roll at the BBC over trumped up accusations of bias (pun intended). Yet the organisation's most glaring and unconscionable bias - against Palestinians suffering a genocide at the hands of Likud and the IDF - hasn't been mentioned. Not once […]

I'll admit to being a huge fan of Infinity Saga era MCU movies. They're big, dumb fun, but at the thoughtful, character-driven end of big, dumb fun. Berries and yoghurt, rather than pure cotton candy. An example, when Spiderman bested Vulture, I wasn't 100% sure I was on Peter's side, and I […]

Anyone in Oz looking to connect with software freedom types? Check out; @flounder #softwarefreedom #australia

"From the 1950s onwards, the CIA rigged elections, destabilised governments through fake information, and organised violent coups, in Italy, Greece, Syria, Iran, Guatamala, South Vietnam, Indonesia, and Chile. In all, the US ran covert operations to otherthrow 66 foreign governments, and in 26 […]

One of the obstacles to understanding the #fediverse is the misleading language used to describe it; "More than 100 apps are talking with one another in the Fediverse, including the photo-sharing site Pixelfed and the music-sharing service Funkwhale. Still, Mastodon remains the biggest. That’s […]

"It probably goes without saying that Luxon’s asset sales plan is a throwback to the 1980s, and to the privatisation excesses of the fourth Labour government that continue to cripple our economy ... Talking of which, we sold Air New Zealand and then had to buy it back when the private sector ran […]

"A bill to make road tolling easier and shift Road User Charges (RUCs) towards a digital tracking system has been introduced to Parliament." #russellpalmer, 2025 https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/578768/bill-to-expand-road-user-charges-introduced This is a horrific violation of basic […]

Before being recruited as a National candidate, Nicola Willis studied English literature and journalism, and worked as a corporate lobbyist. It just boggles the mind that someone with such an obvious bias, and absolutely no background in economics, finance or accounting, could become the NZ […]

NZ has a simple choice about the kind of social safety net we want to have. Either; * we means-test superannuation so it doesn't bankrupt the government OR * we provide a Guaranteed Minimum Income for *everyone*, and lift taxes on excessive incomes and hoarded wealth, so those who don't need […]

"So called 'dark patterns' are steering people to spend more than they would otherwise intend to - and manipulated up to a third of those buying through websites, [Consumer NZ] revealed in a report out today." #rolandvandenbergh, The Post, Nov 13, 2025 #ConsumerNZ #darkpatterns

"And yes, our current Minister of Finance is a woman. Funnily enough, our two worst ones have been. Which only proves the point: this isn’t about gender or personality. It’s about an ideology so deep in our political bloodstream that even good people end up preaching the same sermon. The uniform […]

"The Government have finally announced their response to soaring Meth use with a $30million project that includes new powers for organised crime ..." #BomberBradbury, 2025 https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2025/11/12/will-new-meth-policy-work-and-why-the-new-fbi-base-is-crucial-to-its-success/ Given […]

#cluxon is doubling down on the #b416 social media ban for kiwis under 16. This is a terrible idea, for many well-documented reasons. But, if tech policy and civil rights activists allow ourselves to be pulled into a narrow, negative campaign against it, there's a risk this will push many people […]

"Over the past two decades, the Chinese government has been steadily refining their model of internet control using surveillance and censorship technologies domestically while promoting this approach to other nations under the banner of 'digital sovereignty'." […]

Thanks to KiwiBank selling off their KiwiSaver scheme to Fisher Funds, I'm not inadvertently investing in a range of disgusting corporate activities, including animal torture, fossil fuel mining, and fucking Meta and Uber […]

People are "digital natives" in the same way we're "car natives". Just because we're born into a society where a technology is normalised, that doesn't mean we understand it or know how to use it safely, or in ways that give us agency. #digitalnatives

According to @pluralistic, copyright offices around the world have published clarifications that media created by generative models is not subject to copyright law. Not text, not images, not audio or video, and not code. So every generative model that outputs media ought to add a public domain […]

This is an intriguing panel discussion from FediCon, published on the @decentered podcast; https://wedistribute.org/podcast/s2e4-we-distribute-live/ Some very challenging comments made, including "open source is dead". I just wish the host had asked the guests to explain exactly what they […]

"There's a reason that fascists attack unions first. It's because the opposite of fascism is solidarity." #corydoctorow, 2025 https://craphound.com/news/2025/10/25/enshittification-with-ed-zitron-at-the-seattle-public-library/ #podcasts #CrapHound #unions #solidarity

Mike Sabin has come a long way since his MethCon days (and a con it certainly was); https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/experts-warn-nz-drug-laws-outdated-as-calls-for-reform-grow-the-elephant/FTWPJIPOCRH2TLXOD56WNKF4XM/ But he's still stuck in a 20th century paradigm where there is a single 'just […]

"It's a fundamental shift in how scholarly discussions can work. When you start a discussion on Sciety, that conversation becomes part of the Fediverse, discoverable and participatory for researchers on our preprint focussed bonfire instance (discussions.sciety.org) and, if you choose, other […]

"Tell us why you're making the payment You may be asked what the payment is for, for example paying a friend or a bill. This helps us show you scam protection tips based on your payment purpose." #kiwibank, 2025 https://www.kiwibank.co.nz/personal-banking/accounts/payments/safer-payments/ […]

Chris Fowlie discusses the use of hemp to replace the plastic component of wool carpet, and weed mats in the Manawatu Gorge; https://feeds.95bfm.com/link/22115/17204660/marijuana-media-with-chris-fowlie-6-november-2025 I wonder if hemp could be used to make biodegradable hay bail wrap for farms […]

"The coalition government is exploring the potential sale of its stake in the telecommunications lines company Chorus after investing in the rollout of ultrafast broadband." #morningreport, 2025 […]

Cory Doctorow believes that the economic crash that will ensue when the "AI" bubble finally bursts will make the GFC look like a mild wobble. Worse, there's nothing any of us can do except burst the bubble as quickly as possible, to reduce the scale of the damage. Bleak stuff, but his logic is […]

Today is the 36th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_the_Berlin_Wall May we build more bridges as we tear down the remaining walls. ✊ #berlinwall #ironcurtain #bridgesnotwalls #otd #onthisday

Has anyone noticed that central locking offers a minor convenience we could easily do without, at the cost of massive headaches when it inevitably starts going wrong? It's so hard to fix properly, so it works reliably across all doors. How did it ever become so ubiquitous? Did nobody notice the […]

Just read an article in The Post about how "AI" will transform air travel and aircraft design. Substituting the word "magic" wherever any article says "AI" gives you a more honest account of what people are promising or expecting. #ai #mole

The front page of this morning's edition of The Post has an article by Glenn McConnell and Katie Ham about the NatACT First plan to target meth use. A couple of concerning things buried in there; "The Search and Surveillance Act will be changed, to make it easier for law enforcement agencies to […]

When I first started backpacking around Aotearoa in the late 1990s, a walk-on ferry ticket cost about $25. When I booked a walk-on ferry ticket today, it cost over $100. I flew from Kirikiriroa to Ōtautahi a couple of months ago for not much more than that. It's a ridiculous situation […]

Meta, Meta, Meta. So Meta. This Reuters report is 🔥 "Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show" "Meta projected 10% of its 2024 revenue would come from ads for scams and banned goods, documents seen by Reuters show. And the social media giant internally estimates […]

@JourneysInFilm Do you folks have a PeerTube channel I can follow?

Perfume (Dedicated to everyone who finds the perfume department in a department store as pungent and overwhelming as Mr Bean and I do) #pungentmoviesorfonts #hashtaggames

For those who think Jack Tame is biased against the right because he regularly exposes right-wing politicians and their bullshit non-answers, here he is doing exactly the same thing to Chris Hipkins; https://m.soundcloud.com/qandanz/chris-hipkins-will-capital-gains-tax-have-unfair-outcomes […]

The Fediverse feels more vibrant when conversations are buzzing! Mastodon 4.5 fetches replies from other servers to show you more complete conversation threads - another much-anticipated feature.

"Today we're releasing Bonfire Social 1.0: a federated community‑first social network and the modular toolkit that powers it: a framework for building apps on the open social web beyond microblogging. We're pairing the launch with a crowdfund so communities drive what we build next. " @Bonfire […]

A 2023 blog post on the pain points of interoperating with existing fediverse server software, written by @mro, the author of Seppo https://blog.mro.name/2023/12/implementing-federation-i/ #fediverse #activitypub #seppi

More evidence of the cozy relationship between NatACT First MPs and corporate extractors looking to turn public services into profit sources; https://thestandard.nz/tend-healths-aratataki-a-fully-registered-charity/ I'm all for remote consultations as a first line of triage. So people don't […]

"In the face of the international legal and political systems' paralyzing silence and utter failure to hold Israel accountable for its genocide in Gaza, international civil society has refused to stand idly by. ... The latest, and arguably most critical, expression of this global conscience is […]

"The marker dominance of the banking cartel and the supermarket duopoly have been left untouched. Far less attention though, has been given to what has been taken away. Routinely, all three coalition parties rail against Big Government. It is part of their political DNA. In reality however, the […]

I think it could be a good thing for Te Pāti Māori that this factional dispute in is coming to a head now, a year out from the next election. If they can resolve it before the summer break, and restore their kotahitanga, they can go into the election year with knives out for the coalition of […]

"39-year-old Anna Reed has also reckoned with the “lazy” stereotype. Both she and her husband work flexibly, partly from home and partly from the office, which she says Gen X struggles to understand. 'They see working from home as not working'.” #emilybrookes, 2025 […]

Zohran Mamdani's win in New York was impressive. Not only did he get about 10 times the votes of GOP candidate Curtis Sliwa, he also comfortably defeated centre-right Clintonite Andrew Cuomo, by about 150,000 votes. This has been widely noted as a beacon of hope for the anglophone left. But […]

"...the Charter School model is just totally, fundamentally flawed. Labour will repeal the Charter School model, we'll deal with any schools that have been established in the meantime on a case-by-case basis ..." #chrishipkins, NZ Labour leader, 2025 […]

“[Economist Cameron] Bagrie’s central diagnosis is that New Zealand’s form of capitalism has become fundamentally unproductive, addicted to an asset class that creates the illusion of wealth without generating real economic value. As he bluntly puts it, 'You do not get wealthy selling more […]

There are a wide range of institutions (including several major climate advocacy groups) encouraging "responsible" and "ethical" use of generative chatbots, eg 'checking outputs' This only worsens the harm: the people most compelled to trust ChatGPT are also the least likely to check.

The enshittification of YouTub continues. They're now applying Trained #mole filters to some videos - without the knowledge or consent of video creators - creating glitching that can cause seizures in people with epilepsy and other visual sensitivities […]

"The leader of the party of consumers and taxpayers argued against a measure to increase competition and lower prices because it might upset incumbent capital. In that single statement, the party’s modern priority was laid bare: protecting established businesses now trumps the creation of […]

"[Harm Reduction Coalition Aotearoa] believes that endless amendments to an unworkable law are not the solution. It is time to replace drug laws with a single, coherent Psychoactive Drug Law—one that regulates all drugs, including currently legal substances, such as alcohol. A modern drug law […]

Yes, some people sleeping in vehicles are inconsiderate to others; https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/577981/auckland-scout-group-fed-up-with-freedom-campers-defecating-leaving-trash But laws against "freedom camping" often fail to distinguish between people who are responsible and […]