Highlights were:

• The number of internet users rose form 79% in 2007 to 83% in 2009
• Broadband usage jumped to 82% compared with 67% in 2007
• The proportion of users that use their mobile phones to access the inter more than doubled from 7% in 07 to 18% in 09
• Nearly half of all users are members of social networking sites and 3/4 of these say that Facebook is the site they visit most often
• About half of users post online messages, images or videos, while one in ten earns income in this way

The bi-annual survey, conducted with more than 1200 New Zealanders, shows how ingrained the internet has become in daily life, according to the Director of AUT’s Institute of Culture, Discourse and Communication Professor Allan Bell

Most New Zealanders, regardless of age, ethnicity, gender or soci-economic status, are increasingly using the internet for a variety of activities such as social networking, buying and selling goods online, Internet banking, accessing information. learning and entertainment.

We don’t think that there any surprises there, except maybe that the 10% of social network users actually earn money from their activities.

Sort of confirms claims in the past few days that Facebook has now overtaken Google as the most visited site in the world according to Experian Hitwise

The full report, executive summary of the project  can be downloaded from the AUT web site

It appears that a record number of brands (356) were hijacked in phishing attacks during October last year – a whopping 4.4 % increase (0ver the previous highest in August) according to APWG (Anti-Phishing Working Group)

Wow – a 4.4% increase, but it was interesting to see in the APWG website that November was down to 306 and December 249 (the later being a minor -40% odd from October of the same year.

For those unfamiliar with the Phishing, in my uncomplicated definition, phishing is the sending of emails to you pretending to be your bank, or someone else you may have a relationship with in an effort to obtain account details from you.

The email tells you that your account has been compromised and encourages to click on the link and put in your login details to change your settings, or stop your account being suspended or something like that. The website you click to often looks extremely legitimate, in fact more often than note, it will look exactly like your bank account login.

To be fair, it is true that all mail servers with decent anti spam software cannot detect these types of emails. Particularly when a new phishing attempt is made, and the filters have not had time to recognise them as phishing attempts.

But really, after 4 years or so of seeing these attempts to get your private details and with the heaps of publicity over the years, who would actually click on such an email. Well, some can get caught out I suppose – like the FBI head Robert Mueller whos wife banned him from online banking after he nearly fell for a phishing scam.

Back to the Computerland story. Really – it must be a bad news day – how trivial, which I suppose makes this post trivial as well.

On one of the few days this “part time” blogger actually looks for an interesting story to tell our readers.

Google has launched a free website, Flu Trends, that shows how widespread the flu is in the North and South islands each day.

The United States internet giant calculates this by tracking search queries from the public that have been shown to correlate with the actual incidence of flu.

Flu Trends has been available in the US since November and in Mexico since April. New Zealand and Australia are the third and fourth countries to get the service, paid for by Google’s philanthropic arm, Google.org.

Google product manager Roni Zeiger said Flu Trends could provide flu information ahead of official data, which could be out of date.

The live graphic data is at: http://www.google.org/flutrends/intl/en_nz/

At this time, the “trend” is low – Check each island by clicking National in the drop down box to the right above the map

Thanks Stuff for bringing it to our attention

After having a brief look, and typing in a couple of addresses, we found it pretty easy to use. If the address you type in actually has a street frontage, a thumbnail image will appear in the resulting bubble, with a Street view link under the photo. Simply click on the thumbnail and the image appears.

You have a series of controls to use to move the image around and you can "move" up or down the road by clicking on the arrows, and down the bottom right of the page isa small map with a person figure, which you can move around to another location within the map, which is quite neat.

There has been much discussion in the media about privacy. Apparently peoples faces are made indistinguishable and vehicle number plates cannot be read, but we don’t see this as a major issue for law abiding folk. But every one will have their own opinion.

It appears that that our business address in Koru Place in Stoke was missed by the camera. Maybe it is because that while on google maps it does show Koru Pl, the satellite view is at least 3 years out of date. and does not actually show the street from the satellite.

Street view will be of use to many, even if it is to just look at their own property. One of the most obvious users will be those looking at purchasing a new property using the net as their first place of visit. They will be able to see the state of the neighbourhood which real estate photographs don’t show.

This morning we had a complaint from a client – "there is something wrong with your email system. We have just received an email that was sent 6 days ago". Whooo – hang on, before getting mad at us, lets look at the facts.

It seems that an email that was sent last Friday afternoon (6 Jun) from a supplier, had only just been received this morning. One of the best things about having our own email hosting server is that we can go back through logs to find out what has happened. Our logs showed that the email was in fact sent at 16:28 on Fri 6 Jun from an xtra hosted account and received at 19:47 on Thu 12 June.

For those of you who dont know, if you ring xtra’s help desk to try and find out what is going on, most often the people at the other end are not aware of actual problems happening at that time. And correct me if I am wrong, there is never anything on xtra’s home page saying there are problems.

So to actually find out what is going on we generally ring Xtra’s complex tech support on 0800 268 070. We spoke to Yuri who shed some light on the matter. After explaining that an email send last Friday had just arrived in our mail server last night, he did explain that yes – for the past week or so, "some" customers had experienced mail delivery delay problems over the past week or so. Because the problems did not affect many customers, they did not publicise the issue, although Yuri said that had put something on their website about it for a little while.

Good on ya Yuri for telling us the real story. Sometimes we think that xtra are hiding things from their customers when things go wrong.

We did not even go go down the track of asking what the story with some xtra users receiving non delivery emails when sending email to hotmail.com email addresses that happened for a week or so.
It appears that some xtra IP addresses was on Hotmail list of banned senders for a while

Here is a reply from xtra that was sent to one of our customers.

Reporting-MTA: dns; sf1433.xtra.co.nz
Arrival-Date: Thu, 5 Jun 2008 17:07:13 +1200
Received-From-MTA: dns; mta03.xtra.co.nz (172.23.11.31)

Final-Recipient: RFC822; <xxxxxx@hotmail.com>
Action: failed
Status: 5.1.1
Remote-MTA: dns; mx4.hotmail.com (65.54.244.232)
Diagnostic-Code: smtp; 550 SC-004 Mail rejected by Windows Live Hotmail for policy reasons. A block has been placed against your IP address because we have received complaints concerning mail coming from that IP address.

Appears that things were fixed after a week or so.

We know it did not affect all users. We used an xtra account to send mail to a hotmail address and it was received no problem.

The second lead in the newsletter said this: – Change to .au policy. The policy changes regarding the sale of .au domain names will come into effect on 1st June 2008 (note the date). The story went on to suggest we Kiwis (presuming that is whom the newsletter went too, seeing it was from Domainz) should be protecting our online brand by registering our .com.au name now, because for the first time .com.au domain names can be on sold.

WOW.. That is a change of policy. We read it to mean we now can buy an aussie domain name, without having a registered business in that country? – so I scoured the .au ownership rules (schedule A 2), but the rules of .au domain names had not changed in terms of having to have a registered business there.

To clarify the situation, we rang the domainz 0800 number, waiting for about 10 mins cause "all our operators are busy on other calls", to ask if we could now register a .com.au domain. "Well no" we were told. You have to have a Australian registered business to register a .com.au domain name.

Here is the newsletter we received – the online version. We would be interested to know if you interpreted it differently from us.

Great marketing Domainz. Hope your 0800 number does not get overloaded in the gold rush.

Received an email from Google-AdWords-noreply <adwords-noreply@google.com> – subject line read: Your Account with Google AdWords – a few mins ago, saying they could not process my payment and my ads would be suspended. Like a dummy, I clicked on the link which I did not notice any thing out of the ordinary. but it took me to http://www.adwords.google.com.lingst.cn/select/Login/ (did not notice the cn (Canada top level domain at the end) – fortunately I could not remember my adwords password, and clicked "I cannot access my account", and was linked to the legit google site.

To cut a long story short, I then realised that the mail address this phishing email had come to did not have a google adword account, and that caused me to dig a little deeper.

The email address appeared to be sent from a hotmail account – ah ha – clang – penny dropped.

The domain name lingst.cn appears to actually be hosted in Romania, which is where a lot of phishing attacks originate from. The 2 emails received on our email server to date originated from China and the USA

Be careful out there

Commissioned by January 2001 at a cost of US$1.3 billion, the installed capacity was 80Gbit/s and extended to 480Gbit/s in January 2003.

Southern Cross Cable Network is jointly owned by Telecom NZ (50%), Singtel-Optus (40%) and Verizon Business (10%)

More details are here

They say the company would be price regulated by government and would be required to give all service providers equal access to its network.

NZ Institute head Davi Skilling says "This is a service based competition, not infrastructure based competition". He says competing infrastructure will not work in NZ, where population is sparse, where it does in Hong Kong for example where the population is concentrated.

New Zealand Institute discussion paper is available here to download

Founded by British born Michael Birch and his partner Xochi in 2005, Bebo claims to have 40 million montly users worldwide. In New Zealand Bebo is the favourite social networking website for teenagers.

Bebo president Joanna Shields will continue to run Bebo reporting to AOL president and chief operating officer Ron Grant.

5% of AOL is owned by Google who purchased that share for $US 1 billion in December 2005