The first Yelp app review from a New Zealand “customer” is out… And it’s not good. Except, of course, if you discount the fact the poor one star review comes from the competitor’s marketing department, as shown below:

Yelp launched in New Zealand 2nd May. The service is a local business guide and review site with social networking features, launched in the USA in 2004 and is now in 21 countries, uses 12 languages and had more than 100 million monthly unique visitors in January of this year. Localist is the local brand of a similar service. Someone there must be feeling threatened. Or is it a prank by someone else?

Thanks to @jaredvh for the tip.

Bill Nye, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins and others discuss the Storytelling of Science, hosted by Arizona State University’s Origins Project.

A few weeks ago there was a massive breach of security in the Yahoo! email service behind the Telecom @xtra.co.nz addresses. according to information supplied by Yahoo! in a press release up to 20% of 400,000 active email accounts had been compromised.

Telecom employees worked hard day and night to manage the situation. Most of the action needed from consumers of this service involved password reset. This caused lots of trouble to people who weren’t able to access their accounts from email clients or third party services.

After the event a review was launched by Telecom New Zealand: ““We share the frustration that our customers have been experiencing over recent months. We fully appreciate that repeatedly saying ‘sorry’ doesn’t cut it anymore. We are committed to taking a close, hard look at the best way to meet our customers’ email needs.”

Almost a month after Telecom announced they decided to stick with Yahoo! as the email provider for its consumer ISP service: “Telecom New Zealand announced today that it will continue to offer its Yahoo! Xtra email service with Yahoo as its email provider, after receiving strong feedback from customers around the high value they place on it and obtaining a commitment from Yahoo! that it would work with Telecom to improve the customer experience of the service.”

It took Yahoo! a week to acknowledge something was wrong:

Yahoo! is continuing to work with Telecom to ensure Yahoo! Xtra mail accounts that were compromised last weekend have been secured and its in-depth investigation into the circumstances surrounding this issue is on-going.

“There is a lot of misinformation around what may have caused this vulnerability in the Yahoo! email product and the type of information that may have been compromised. There is currently no evidence to support reports that access has been gained to any user information beyond the customer's email address book or that this issue is related to any issues overseas, although we continue to investigate this,” say Laura Maxwell-Hansen, GM Yahoo! New Zealand. 

A “lot of misinformation” said Yahoo! so I asked the PR person if they could clarify exactly what happened, so that we could post the correct information and the reply was “It’s not appropriate to disclose that information as these details could be misused and may assist a hacker in the future.”

Either they were not sure what cause the problem in first place or there was no fix being released soon. Otherwise how could disclosing it “assist a hacker in the future”? Obviously we don’t know for sure because of all this security by obscurity.

Guess what? Almost three weeks after the events, and just a week after Telecom’s decision to stick with Yahoo! as its email provider it seems the @xtra.co.nz email service has been compromised again. This is from their network status page:

UPDATE: Here is what the Inbox folder of a compromised mailbox looks like when the account sends spam out and starts receiving bounces from servers reporting invalid addresses… Just look at the frequency of spam being sent:

(Imnage courtesy of Geekzone user possum888)

I just had the most strange experience after installing Office 2013 on my laptop… Someone pointed out to me that an Anniversary date showing in my Windows Phone calendar for a contact was wrong by a couple of days, so I went into my Outlook on the laptop to update the information.

It took me almost 24 hours of talking a Microsoft friend how to actually access the Anniversary field in an existing contact. I will show you why…

Let’s create new contact, which uses a “long form” dialog like previous Outlook versions:

After saved I find my contact in Outlook and this is what I see:

Double-click the contact in the list and we now get a different, “metro short form” dialog:

Nowhere to edit the Anniversary. Surely if I entered that information in my contact card then I should be able to edit it?

I asked my Microsoft friend and he kept telling me on Twitter to edit the contact and click “Details”. But there’s no details here. Someone else then suggested I change the Contacts view from “People” to “Card” before opening the contact.

Changed from People to Card view and that’s how the list looks now:

When I double-click the contact entry to edit I then get the old style “long form” edit form, the same one used to create the contact in first place:

And indeed if I click Details I get to the information I want to change, which is what I’ve done for the last fifteen years:

So let’s check this:

• Regardless if you are in People or Card view, you always get the “long form” when creating a new contact
• If you are in People view you get the all hipster “metro short form” when trying to edit a contact
• If you want to actually, you know, edit the contact with all the information in the “long form” then you have to switch to Card view before opening the contact to edit because there’s now switch before “short” and “long” forms once you start editing it.

Why didn’t I think of this? Perhaps because it’s not intuitive enough? Perhaps because it’s confusing? Even the Microsoft guy forgot to tell me that I had to switch between views. He kept telling me on Twitter “People, Contact, Details” and never mentioned that I had to switch views.

A friend on Twitter came on Microsoft’s defence saying that any upgrade project would require training, etc. But I don’t buy that. Do people seriously think John Doe walking into Dick Smith to buy a copy of Office 2013 to install on their new PC (or buying a new PC with pre-installed Office 2013) won’t get confused? Do people seriously think John Doe will buy a new PC and training to use at home? I got confused, and I use this every day, I can imagine what non-tech users will think.

Here is an interesting insight on why the so much publicised closing down of Google Reader is probably going to affect the web as we know it. According to the blog Google Operating System post "Google Reader Data Points" the CNN RSS feed has 24 million subscribers on Google Reader. The second most subscribed feed is Engadget with 6.6 million subscribers. JoelOnSoftware has 148,000 subscribers.

As for our little Geekzone, here is our most recent stat from Feedburner (another Google service) showing we have 176,049 subscribers via Google Reader, out of 177,299.

That's 99% of our RSS subscriber base disappearing on 1st July. I imagine other blogs and news sites around the world will see a similar number.

In a single stroke Google is wiping a whole lot of information consumers from these publisher's stats.

Some might say "oh, but people can use Google+ Circles, Twitter feeds, Facebook pages, LinkedIn Groups and so on to distribute this same information around".

Sure, this could be done sure but publishers would struggle to get the same number of subscribers on those platforms. And the amount of work (and money) required to reach readers on a diverse set of platforms, each with its own problems, would be huge.

I don't think Google is doing a great service to the web when they announce the Google Reader death.

It's almost one year since I've posted the last State of Browser on Geekzone March 2012, so it's time for the annual update. These charts are based on more than 600,000 visits (and a couple million page views) to Geekzone during the 30 day period ending 12th March 2013.

Since last year Chrome usage on Geekzone went up from 30% to 40%. Both Firefox and Internet Explorer had a very small dip, and Safari a very small gain. Firefox went down from 28% to 24% and Internet Explorer from 26% to 23%.

Now for New Zealand-specific numbers. Chrome went up from 30% to 39%, Internet Explorer is the second most used browser with 24% (down from 29%) and Firefox is the third most used browser with 22% (down from 27%).

Similar to the last update, here are two charts showing New Zealand only browser usage split in business hours and after hours:

And here is the split of Internet Explorer versions. Internet Explorer 9 is getting strong going up from 43% to 50%, but Internet Explorer 10 is gaining traction going up from 0% to 10% in the last twelve months. Internet Explorer Explorer 6 practically disappeared with only a couple of hundred visits to the site out of almost 70,000 Internet Explorer visits in total. Internet Explorer had a big dip from 43% to 30% but Internet Explorer 7 remains around the same number:

In the last few months I have been running some RUM services on Geekzone, including Torbit and a beta version of Pingdom RUM. So here is for the first time the fastest and slowest of the top three browsers on Geekzone. About 30% of Geekzone visitors use ad blockers, and I'd expect Firefox and Chrome users to use ad blockers more than Internet Explorer users. These numbers could be a bit shifted to those two browsers:

I hope you found this post informative. If you want some more specific measurements please post in the comments.

UPDATE: As requested, here is an OS distribution:

Over the last couple of months we started seeing a trend in our Geekzone forums: more and more people who bought Samsung Galaxy SIII smartphones being affected by the Samsung Sudden Death. But the worrying part of this trend was really the number of times people reported their handsets coming back from the repair service with a "no warranty repair" tag, saying the user must have tampered with the ROM on the phone.

The Samsung Galaxy SIII Sudden Death is a well known problem and Samsung is quiet about it. Basically you are using your phone and with no reason at all it freezes. You can't turn it off, you can't do anything except take the battery out.

The boot might show something like this:

ODIN MODE
PRODUCT NAME:
CUSTOM BINARY DOWNLOAD: No
CURRENT BINARY: Samsung Official
SYSTEM STATUS: Custom

The "SYSTEM STATUS" shows customs because the NAND memory is corrupt and it can't read the product name or system partition therefore it defaults to 'SYSTEM STATUS: Custom'.

According to a discussion on XDA:

The following ROMs include a Kernel, bootloader and recovery with the Update 7 "Fixes" applied. If you have one of these, officially consider yourself "Safe". If you rooted one of the below stock ROMs, you will also be safe, however - if you changed to a custom kernel or recovery, you need to look at the below custom sections. If you have never rooted, the stock section is all you need read.

As It appears all 4.1.2 kernels have the fixes, there is no longer a need to test them all. See below for a list of tested kernels that have the fix. All kernels subsequent to these will also be regarded as safe.

• XXELKC
• XXELL1
• XXELL4
• XXELL5
• XXELL6
• XXELLA
• XXELLB
• XXELLC

People who have never rooted need not read any further. Essentially, if you have an official, never rooted 4.1.2 ROM, you're "safe"

You can check your handset by running eMMC Brickbug Check. At this moment there isn't firm information if this is really just a firmware issue or a hardware problem with some batches of the memory used on these handsets.

We read reports of people on Geekzone saying that repair services denied warranty repair claiming the phone was modified based on this system status, even if there was no modification at all.

If you get this kind of response, do not settle. Take the handset back to the retailer where you got it from and make sure they understand this is a known fault. You do not have to deal with Samsung as under the Consumer Guarantees Act this is what retailers have to do. Make it clear it's a problem that Samsung is aware of and it must be repaired under warranty.

If you are subscribed to the NZNOG list you might have seen this announcement. Otherwise if you are in any way working in the network operations landscape in New Zealand, read on...

The NZNOG 2013 programme is now available online. Confirmed speakers are:

• Scott Bartlett (Orcon) - UFB one year in
• Andrew McDonald (Vodafone) - RBI Wholesale 12 months.
• Colin Dyer (GeoNet) and Ewen McNeill (Naos, Consultant) - Geonet: 1pps to 10,000 hits/second.
• Beatty Lane-Davis - SDN: accelerating the pace of evolution in packet and transport networks
• Sam Russell (REANNZ) - Thimble: OpenFlow-enabled device
• David Brownlie (REANNZ) - perfSONAR for measuring performance, and troubleshooting.
• Donald Love - UFB realities
• Philip Smith (APNIC) - IPv4 / IPv6 route table analysis for NZ
• Phil Regnauld (NSRC) - DNSSEC
• George Michaelson (APNIC) - Last words on IPv6
• Stu Fleming (WIC) - On being a WISP
• Plus updates from NZRS, APNIC, CityLink, IPv6 Task Force, WAND and InternetNZ.

The NZNOG 2013 is happening in Wellington. Workshops 21st - 23rd January, Tutorials 23rd January, Conference presentations 24th - 25th January. There are two side events happening as well (a drinks evening and an official dinner).

Check the programme for more information and registration.

Just to make it clear: mobile phones sold in New Zealand through mobile operator stores are not locked, except the ones sold by Skinny.

If you buy a mobile with support for at least three 3G bands (850/900/2100 MHz WCDMA) then you should be covered to use those in all mobile operators around the country. That's because Telecom New Zealand runs a 850 MHz WCDMA network, while Vodafone and 2degrees Mobile have the use of the 900/2100 MHz WCDMA bands.

Make sure you look at the WCDMA (3G) specs. If you buy a mobile with 850 MHz 2G it will not work on Telecom as Telecom runs a 100% 3G network.

Do not rely on Phone Arena to check if the phone is suitable, as most of the times the bands listed do not take in consideration different models sold in different markets.

Stay away from any mobile phone seller advertising phones with "Works on 2degrees only". In special if you see this on Trade Me close the page and walk away. They are most likely reported stolen or lost and blocked from working on Telecom and Vodafone (hence the "works on 2degrees only" in the ads).

If you have a locked Skinny mobile you can get a free unlock code after nine months or pay $30 to get the code. Check the Skinny page about phone locking.