There are some wonderful parts of New Zealand up north, just over an hour away from Auckland. However, to get there, you’ll have to use a dangerous road, State Highway 1.

This weekend, I got solid evidence of it, as I was driving back from Leigh on Saturday evening with my wife. A few kilometres before Orewa, a small Japanese lorry heading north had been hit by a passenger car crossing the centre line going round a bend.

The first we saw of the accident was cars coming towards us with drivers flashing the headlights, to warn us. When I saw the accident, I thought everyone would be dead because it was a head-on crash and both vehicles were badly mangled.

We stopped, wondering whether we’d be in the way or able to help. As there were no emergency services or police at the accident yet, we decided to stay. I’ve had some first aid training, but could I deal with badly smashed-up people, bleeding profusely? Probably not, so I hoped there were other people with medical training of some kind among those who had stopped to help.

Luckily for everyone, the drivers of the vehicles were relatively unhurt. The passenger car driver was badly shocked but, once helped out of the car, seemed coherent and apart from cuts and bruises, wasn’t too bad considering the state of his vehicle.

Mauricio at Geekzone reckons state-owned ISP Orcon will be first with the Apple iPhone in New Zealand; if this is true, it’s a major coup for Orcon and its parent company Kordia, which bought the Auckland internet provider earlier this year.

Orcon has signed up for a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) deal through Vodafone. This was meant to be up and running already, but has been delayed until February next year. Apple has in customary style remained mum about the iPhone coming to New Zealand, whether it’d come through Vodafone or another provider. If the iTunes Store precedent is anything to go by, don’t hold your breath: New Zealand is only slightly above rural Uzbekistan on Cupertino’s market priority list.

So, I see that Microsoft NZ MD Helen Robinson’s leaving, and email her with some questions. Nothing nasty or even mildly controversial, but even so, Microsoft’s mail server gives me teh h4t3Z:

Subject: Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender
Date: Thu, 27 Sep 2007 11:06:49 +1200
From: Mail Delivery System <Mailer-Daemon>To: juha

This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

xxxxxxx@microsoft.com

SMTP error from remote mail server after end of data:
host mailb.microsoft.com [205.248.106.30]: 550 5.7.1 <Your e-mail was rejected by an anti-spam content filter on gateway (205.248.106.30).

Reasons for rejection may be: obscene language, graphics, or spam-like characteristics. Removing these may let the e-mail through the filter.>

I’ve got the same rejection message earlier, again with some pretty innocuous stuff, so I’m not sure why the emails bounce. Is it because Is be using Open Source Software?

Grahame Lynch at Communications Day has sniffed out what appears to be a plan by Net giant Google to lay a new cable across the Pacific Ocean, code-named Unity.

According to Lynch’s sources, Unity broke cover early this month, and is scheduled to go into operation by 2009 - in other words soon after Telstra’s new trans-Pacific cable, which should be ready next year.

Unlike the Atlantic, the Pacific Ocean is perhaps somewhat “under-cabled” in comparison. This means Internet service providers, and of course you and I, pay much more than, say, Europeans do for international data. The Southern Cross cable has been wildly profitable for Telecom, a situation that’s almost unheard of in the telecommunications industry. It’s the only real alternative for data transit to the US at the moment, and as it’s owned by competitors such as Telecom, Singtel and MCI/Verizon, Telstra felt it had no option but to build a cable of its own, so as not to get caught out by ever-increasing growth in data demand.

A month after shifting house and trying to get the landline and DSL broadband to come along with us, neither’s working at the new place. Nothing happened through ihug and Telecom Wholesale apart from a busy signal on the phone.

Thinking that Telecom Retail would be able to bypass at least one layer of bureaucracy, I asked if they could organise phone and DSL service. I’m not sure yet what happened, but now there’s nothing. No dial tone or engaged signal. It’s entirely possible that I’ve done something wrong, and not followed the right procedure but… according to everyone we’ve talked to, it should’ve been a walk in the park.

I’ve asked around for alternative solutions, like wireless links or even a fibre (yeah, I can dream) hook-up through which I could run Voice over IP phones and data connections, but no luck so far. They’d probably be too expensive but boy, would I like to have an alternative telecommunications supplier now.

I read with some interest the reports about New Zealand government computer systems allegedly being hacked by overseas governments, wondering how our Security Intelligence Service identified where the attacks came from.

Reportedly, the Chinese are happily hacking into our and other governments’ computers, a charge that they vehemently deny.

Unless the SIS releases more detailed information on how they traced the attacks, I’m with the Chinese on this one. Shortly after the story appeared, an acquaintance who works in the IT security biz told me that, by and large, the attacks originated from compromised computers in China.

Some of them are infected with Trojan Horses, programs that pretend do something, but are in fact often used to plant remote control software on your machine, and which can then launch scripted attacks across networks. Others are “bouncers”, used to hide your tracks; you bounce your traffic across several computer systems around the world. This makes it nigh impossible to work out where it originated from, especially if you use encrypted tunnels between the machines.

Is this the case with the NZ “cyber attacks” too? I wouldn’t be surprised if it is.

Ever since it was announced that the Apple iPhone would only work on a single mobile provider in the US - AT&T - people have worked on getting around that rather annoying lock-in.

Perhaps due to the huge amount of hype and the high pricing, I’ve been ambivalent about the iPhone. However, Geoff Hunt of Kordia let me have a look at his, and I thought it was pretty nice overall. So much so that I kind of felt I wanted one, just for the lovely screen with the gesture-driven interface.

However, the iPhone without the phone bit isn’t much fun, just an expensive media player really, with WiFi.

Some brave hackers around the world have responded to the challenge of putting the phone fun back into the iPhone, including software developer John Ballinger.

Moving house is really expensive - I knew that already, but last weekend drove it home. Not only did we suffer some of the slowest movers in the universe who needed help lifting the fridge, but we’re also without landline phone service and broadband at the moment.

Why is that? I’m not sure;  the move was to another place something like two kilometres away, but the phone line is a wholesale one. That is, Telecom supplies it to ihug, which in turn resells it to us.

There was a delay in getting the order to shift the line processed with ihug, which meant no chance of getting things going over the weekend as I expected. However, when ihug rang to confirm the order (on a mobile phone) I was bit shocked to hear that it would take ten to fifteen days to sort out.

That’s working days too, so we’re talking about two to three weeks. Something of the throwback to the bad old days, isn’t it?

Telecom reassured me that it was a worst-case scenario, and on average, it only takes four days. Later on, ihug rang and said everything would be connected on the 31st, so here’s hoping it’ll happen.

What really had me jumping up and down swearing was the cost though: $150 all in all. That’s to move the phone and DSL- $40 plus $99 - and GST.

Well, it looks like the 419ers, or West African internet-borne confidence scammers, are taking things to, er, a new level.

The below death-threat spam was sent to an employee at Ihug. According to the email headers, the message came from a block of network addresses registered to someone in Victoria Garden City, Lagos, Nigeria.

Sure, the message is silly, but it’s still unpleasant. It’s likely that the message has been sent out in large numbers, indiscriminately to recipients young and old. West African gangs are actually ruthless as well as tech-savvy, so there’s a hint of seriousness to the spam that’s hard to overlook.

Unfortunately, there’s not much that can be done about this rubbish - while ISPs can filter out West African networks, the scammers find ways around such blocks. Ideally, the police in countries like Nigeria should act and close down the Internet sweatshops where sometimes hundreds of people sit and churn out messages by hand, but… let’s just say that “law enforcement” means a different thing in West African countries than, for instance, here.

Subject: WHY ARE YOU INVOLVE TO BE KILLED,REPLY OR YOU WAIT FOR YOUR DEATH??

Date: Tuesday, 21 August 2007

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How committed is Telecom New Zealand to its country of origin? That’s a question I’ve had on my mind for a while now, given the billions that Telecom shovels into, for instance, the Aussie market to take advantage of local loop unbundling there.

In March this year, I wrote a piece for Computerworld about Telecom Xtra moving its services to Australia in the wake of the new partnership with Yahoo! expressing disappointment that a company that effectively enjoys a state-supported telco monopoly and makes huge profits out of it can’t see fit to keep the email system for the country’s largest ISP in the country.

That’s right: if you’re an Xtra customer, your email now goes via Sydney. Sure, you get additional goodies, but is this really what 600,000 Xtra customers wanted?