Strypey
@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz  ·  activity timestamp 3 days ago

@llnz
> the UK equivalent (creatively named National Grid) is a private company, so it could be worse

Oh believe me the Ruthenasiacs would have hocked ours off too if they thought they could get away with it. As with the roads and water infrastructure, and the surviving bits of the public education and health systems, there were dedicated and militant anti-corporatisation campaigns to stop them.

But as long as it's a corporation, that risk is still there, and with this government ...
Strypey
@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 days ago

to the Water Pressure Group in Tamaki Makaurau, as a notable example of the grassroots anti-corporatisation campaigns of the nineties and noughties. They engaged in a bunch of nonviolent direct action to resist the commercialisation of public water supplies, and networked with other "water warriors" around in the word. I vividly remember the retired fire engines they bought to protests;

natlib.govt.nz/records/30781104

archive.is/zqcAS
Strypey
@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz  ·  activity timestamp last week

OMG someone said the quiet part out loud! I wonder how much money the public of Aotearoa gave BorgSoft over the last 5 years? How much we will fork over during the course of the next 5? How much of our sensitive government data is stored in systems that are legally obliged to give the US government full access on request?

The strategy laid out towards the end of the linked article is bang on.

https://mastodon.social/@glynmoody/114992197954697319

#PublicService#GovtIT#MicroSoft
Strypey
@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz  ·  activity timestamp last month

Well, I finally got around to evaluating the portal;

managemyhealth.co.nz/about-us/

When my GP suggested I sign up with it, I presumed it was a public service offered by Te Whatu Ora, like My Health Record;

tewhatuora.govt.nz/health-serv

So what do I think of Manage My Health? Not impressed. This is a privately-owned, for-profit digital platform, that I can't be certain isn't patients who sign up with it.

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Strypey
@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 months ago

Again, I must protest that the official website for making Parliamentary submissions has hard dependencies on proprietary scripts served from domains owned by Goggle; google.com and gstatic.com

So a known DataFarmer has a number of potential backdoors into a system that is recording people's contact details and political views. Considering the role tech corporations are playing in the new USAmerican fascism, the wisdom of this is even more questionable.
Strypey
@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz  ·  activity timestamp 2 months ago

"These agencies, these universities, these governments ... they've got so used to having a FB account, or an InstaGram account, that I don't think they can see how peculiar it will look to people in the future, that the PM's address is Justin@hotmail.com. Why would you put public information on a thing you don't own, when we now have the tools to get away from that."

@paige, 2025

video.fedihost.co/w/rnNZ3FxnH9

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Strypey
@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 months ago

If you look into the "comms" budgets of NZ public services, you'll find that every year they give huge pots of money to corporate platforms, to "promote" public service messages to kiwis using them. At the same, they've been considering making those same companies give money to legacy news media companies, instead of funding public interest journalism (FDNBB), and now they're cutting funding to public media.

This is absurd.

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