The Drupal security team published a PSA to warn about upcoming security advisories. I shared my advice and predicted attacks within the hour after the security advisories are published. The security advisories are now published. Here is my followup. I applaud the Drupal Security Team for warning about the highly critical updates. However the public service announcement (PSA) left the impression that this event was going to be much more serious than it was.

Most kiwis are, unfortunately, too proud of New Zealand's traditional anti-nuclear political stance to keep an open mind on the topic. Media and politics promote the idea that the rest of the world is "impressed" by our political stance. (My impression is that the rest of the world actually thinks our policy is stupid.) Kiwis are so proud of our nuclear stance, that it would probably be political suicide for a politician or political party to say "

Online retailers BWMsnow and SKATEgear require the professional services of a Drupal vendor or developer to take over the maintenance and future development their websites. BWMsnow is NZ's largest online retailer of snowboard gear and has been operating for more than 4 years internationally, focussing more heavily on the NZ market in recent years. BWMsnow was NZ's only online retailer of snowboard gear until recently. BWMsnow is a NZ limited company which continues to grows significantly every selling season (March to June).

The New Zealand Government loves Drupal: The Beehive's (Parliament building) website runs Drupal Three of the seven represented parties run their websites on Drupal; Labour, Greens and ACT Those three parties represent 57 of the 122 parliamentary seats – almost half! read more

We did it! NZ is (very nearly almost) free of software patents! "We recommend amending clause 15 to include computer programs among inventions that may not be patented. We received many submissions concerning the patentability of computer programs. Under the Patents Act 1953 computer programs can be patented in New Zealand provided they produce a commercially useful effect. Open source, or free, software has grown in popularity since the 1980s.

Today I had a long and very positive meeting about software patents and the NZ Patents Bill with Commerce Committee chairperson, Labour party's Lianne Dalziel, as well as Drupal-peers Dave Lane and Jonathan Hunt.  Dalziel, Christchurch East MP, was well-informed about the Patents Bill, the Ministry of Economic Development's Patent Review and the insufficient attention paid to software patents (thanks to our emails and exchange of documents beforehand).  She was not so well-informed about software patents and the harm that they cause – as would be expected given the complexity and obscurity of these issues for those who do not work in the software development.

The online protest against changes to copyright law in New Zealand – aka Internet Blackout NZ – was successful in that it has resulted in a 4-week delay. It is expected that this will give the new New Zealand government enough time to reconsider the consequences of such a ridiculous law change, and most probably repeal the changes entirely. The NZ Herald has more details. This is an enormous shout out to everyone who drove the protest and participated in some way.

On a road Trip to the West Coast (New Zealand), we found the merchandise, prices and marketing rather peculiar. This store had a particular broad but limited range of products and services: While the petrol in Ikamatua seemed just a little over-priced:

I just discovered I have page rank 5 on my drupal blog. Wow!

This is why patents are ridiculous; On Tuesday, the USPTO granted Microsoft a patent for privacy policy change notification, which describes how to threaten users with the loss of their accounts and access to web sites and services should they refuse to consent to changes in a privacy policy. This includes the case where a user might object to allowing personal information, collected earlier with a promise of confidentiality, to be shared in the future with third parties.