With all the hype about this or that battery exploding in recent years the last thing you want to see when working away with a laptop in your actual lap is smoke fuming out the back. Thankfully no explosion in this case, just a poor design leading to a frayed cable connecting the screen. Appears this shorted and started to melt the plastic hence the nasty smoke.

Fortunately it wasn’t the magic smoke, so now I have a desktop for the first time in two years.

This could’ve been good timing, since I was hanging out for the new MacBook Air refresh, but I refuse to buy one since Apple didn’t include USB 3 (seriously, how lazy). I was willing to forgive the lack of page up/down and home/end keys. (Oh and for the love of god Apple throw HFS away already. ZFS please.) So now I just have to wait for Lenovo to release an update for the Thinkpad X1 with an S-IPS panel, 3x USB 3, HDMI, Thunderbolt, but none of the annoying crap I’m never going to use like a VGA port, built in 3G, or that nipple thing (does anyone use it?). Might be a long wait. So hard finding the perfect laptop.

Edit 5:50pm 07/09/2011: Seems I’m not the only one. Ultrabook: Intel’s $300 million plan to beat Apple at its own game — damn it, that Toshiba doesn’t look too bad.

As of February 2011 there are 372,062 domains in .co.nz, the next closest is 24,373 in .org.nz, and following that 23,935 in .net.nz. So, what meaningful purpose do these three second level domains (2LDs) serve? I argue that they serve no useful purpose.

The original intent was for commercial domains to be registered under .co.nz, network infrastructure under .net.nz, and other organisations under .org.nz, but clearly this scheme isn’t followed and has proved to be impractical and unecessary. .co.nz has clearly become the default 2LD for almost all domains regardless of the type of registrant (for example my own domain punk.co.nz, clearly I’m not a commercial website). This makes sense, because most people only want to distinguish themselves, their website, or their organisation as being from New Zealand. Distinguishing the type of their organisation offers little value, but makes the domain more difficult to remember. And few people want to register a domain under .org.nz for example and risk someone else registering the same domain under the more popular .co.nz, probably leading to confusion for their customers. In fact .net.nz now gets mostly used by registrants who are not distinguishing network infrastructure, but who want to use the word network in their name (e.g. a website of an artists network).

Many other countries, much larger ones than New Zealand, do perfectly fine without 2LDs, for example Canada, France, and Germany. So scale is not the issue.

Note there are some obvious 2LDs that might make sense, but these are where moderation is used, such as .govt.nz and .school.nz, and these domains currently have very few domains under them.

So what do I think we should do? Well I think we should phase out .co.nz and open up registration under .nz. Second level domains would still be retained for distinguishing government organisations and similar and these would be moderated. .net.nz and .org.nz would be retained with a lower fee than .nz. Similarly .geek.nz, .gen.nz, and the like would be retained with similar lower fees, and a few extra 2LDs would be added for personal uses and reserved for any likely industries that might benefit from a moderated 2LD in future.

To get there I would suggest one of two courses of action.

Option 1: Open up .nz and permit registrations of new domains at the second level. Initially all registrants holding domains under .co.nz would be offered the option to shift their domain to .nz. If they elect to do this then their .co.nz domain will be retained for 12 months with the same configuration as their .nz equivelent. .co.nz would remain open to new registrations, but overtime most people will elect to use a .nz and the number of domains under .co.nz will reduce, probably in line with .net.nz and .org.nz.

Option 2: Make .nz a mirror of .co.nz, except where the domain under .co.nz conflicts with one of the existing, new, or reserved 2LDs. In that case the registrant will be given the option to pick a new domain. .co.nz could then be closed to new registrations, and possibly eventually withdrawn.

I’m not sure how one gets onto the roof of one of Telecom’s most important exchanges, but someone seems to have worked it out. That’s the Courtenay Place exchange. The tag first appeared a few weeks back and is still there. Vinyl Haps? I’m not sure; sounds like an STD. Hey Telecom, how’s security?

Seems my MasterCard was skimmed somewhere in my travels, winding up in the hands of some crook in the UK. What I found interesting was plotting the thief’s actions with it. Seems they bought some Jewellery (big ticket item) in Torquay, then went on a road trip to Wolverhampton, taking a shopping spree at Tesco’s, and buying lots of gas on the way. $5,305.49 all up.

View MasterCard Skimmed: Priceless in a larger map

If only there were some webcams with archives of these areas. Or the police photographed every vehicle license plate passing certain parts of the M5 as routine, could be quite easy to narrow down a list of suspect vehicles. This would be a fun database project: a system where the fraud investigator at my bank or the police could just punch in the times and locations of the events, and the computer could produce a list of vehicles that were in all of those areas at those times. A bit too 1984-esque though I suppose.

Since I got my domain name, back in 2000, I’ve been running an experiment on spam. Whenever asked for an email address, such as when signing up for a website, or making a paper application for bank account, I create and provide a unique alias for that website or company in question. It has been interesting to track where spam comes to. The most spammed address is the one I used for ICQ. There have been a few obvious cases where it appears dodgy websites have leaked the email address, but the first seriously concerning case has happened recently.

Back in April of this year I started to recieve spam to the unique email address I gave ASB Bank. What does this mean? Well the possibilities are:

1. My computer or webserver was compromised, and my list of mail aliases escaped onto a spam list. But this doesn’t add up. I don’t seem to be compromised, and more tellingly there hasn’t been any other cases of this, which would be statistically strange given the list of aliases is very long.
2. I somehow mucked up, and entered the same email address on a website that turned out to be dodgy. This doesn’t seem likely, because the email address is distinctly identifiable as intended for ASB Bank.
3. I sent an email from that address to someone else, not at ASB Bank, where it escaped. But that one doesn’t add up either, because my records seem to show no outbound email from that address, and only a few legitimate inbound emails to it (the last in October 2008).
4. An employee at ASB Bank has extracted the email addresses from their database and sold them. I hope this isn’t the case, but it always is a slim possibility.
5. A computer at ASB Bank was compromised, and the email addresses were harvested that way.

This last one seems more likely.