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The Code Book, Mozilla Debates Whether to Trust Chinese, and Facebook on Track for $1B Revenue This Year.

Cryptography

I’ve read this fabulous book on cryptography by Simon Singh, “The Code Book”. It’s easy to read and full of the little anecdotes and trivia nuggets that I love.

The book opens with the story of Mary, Queen of Scots. It’s a great story for illustrating the value and dangers of cryptography. Mary, as I’m sure you know, was sister to Queen Elizabeth and probably had the better claim to the throne. She misjudged the politics and showed up in England to get away from tetchy Scottish locals, only to be thrown in the Tower to keep her from making a play for the English throne.

While in the tower (or “whilst” as the Brits say) she entered into a conspiracy with plotters outside. This is in the days of Catholic vs Protestant and conspirators were plotting with Mary even as she was in captivity.

Not being stupid, they had invented a code to hide what they wrote and hid the messages in a barrel and smuggled them into and out of the country house where Mary was now being kept. So when Elizabeth’s aide, Walsingham, brought Mary to charge for treason, Mary felt safe.

He starts with this story because it shows all the important bits of cryptography. First, you’ve got “steganography”–the art of hiding messages. Smuggling them in via a barrel bung just one way–Ancient Greeks wrote their message on wood and then covered it in wax so that it looked like a smooth wax tablet. This is how Xenophon in Greece was able to get advance knowledge of an attack from Xerxes in Persia, according to Herodotus, and thus foil it.

Then you’ve got the code itself. He takes you through the different types of codes, beginning with jumbling up letters of the alphabet so every “a” becomes a “g”, and so on. This was the type of code that Mary had used, though she’d been a little more sophisticated and some words had become symbols, so “mine” was a kind of double S logo, and “in” became an italic “x”.

Codes revolve around a system and a shared secret. The system here is “replace letters and some words with other symbols”. The shared secret is exactly which letters and words get replaced by others–does an “a” become a “g” or a “q”?

And you’ve also got the codebreakers. Codebreakers are rarely portrayed as heroic, alas, because it takes far more time to break a code than it does to create it. So the poor codebreaker is often like Walsingham’s codebreaker, Thomas Phelippes, who is described as “a man of low stature, slender every way, dark yellow haired on the head, and clear yellow bearded, eaten in the face with smallpox, of short sight, thirty years of age by appearance”. He was a linguist who could speak French, Italian, Spanish, Latin, and German.

The techniques of the codebreaker remain the same. You can either exploit the fact that often a code leaves information that helps you break it, or simply to use some other means to learn more about the cipher and so make your decoding problem easier.

For example, in a later story Singh tell us about the Enigma machines of World War Two. The French Secret Service bribed the disgruntled brother of the head of the German Signal Corps to get the schematics for the machine. This told you how the machine worked, but the machine had settings — to decode messages the Allies still needed to know which settings were being used. The Poles figured it out first–the cipher wasn’t perfect and the Germans reused the settings all day, which gave you a lot of messages that were encrypted the same way. The Poles were breaking Enigma-encrypted messages until 1939 when the Germans changed the crypto system and made it stronger.

Then it was the Brits turn. At a place called Bletchley Park, which you can visit today as a museum, began applying themselves to the new Enigma. Thanks to the Poles they had the basic approach, but the German changes made it harder to crack. Fortunately the Brits had many more people working on it than the Poles did, so were able to read the encrypted German communications.

This is another technique we see today: “brute force”. When your mathematical analysis reduces the number of possibilities to a manageable number, you simply try each one. The more people you have working on this stage, each person trying one possibility, the more quickly you can break it. This is why the invention of computers has changed cryptography — computers can try the many different possibilities much faster than a person can, so we now don’t need as much mathematical insight to reduce a complex code to the point where you can just brute force the possibilities.

Anyway, back to Mary. Mary had received messages about a conspiracy, and they’d been intercepted and decoded. But Walsingham, Elizabeth’s Principal Secretary, really didn’t like Mary. He didn’t just want to deny her liberty, he wanted to get her red-handed plotting. So he waited, and eventually Mary acknowledged and endorsed the plot. He then had his cryptographer insert a PS onto the bottom of an outgoing Mary message, in code, asking to know the names of the conspirators and when the reply came, he had them arrested.

How’d it end? The conspirators were all “cut down, their privities were cut off, bowelled alive and seeing, and quartered”. Mary was beheaded. Score one for the Protestants over the Catholics. Never mind denying your atheist bus slogans, the 16th century knew how to deal with religious dissent.

So, good book, and it talks about a lot more: Navajo code talkers, and the “public key cryptography” that computers use today. But the basic systems of secrets, codes, interceptions, and breakers is largely unchanged today even though it’s all happening with computers and the code systems themselves are much more complex.

China

There’s really only one security system on the web. When you go to a website whose address starts with “https” and not “http”, you’re gong to a secure site. The communication between you and the server is encrypted and the identity of the other party is verified. This solves the Mary Queen of Scots problems where someone was listening in and even pretending to be one of the people communicating.

The site I linked to talks about the step where your browser verifies the identity of the other party. For example, I go visit ASB’s web site to do my Internet banking. My browser wants to be sure it’s talking to ASB and not to dirtyhacker.com who has rerouted traffic from ASB to their site.

To do this, ASB gives my browser a “digital certificate” signed by someone my browser trusts. There aren’t many places that browsers trust. The link today talks about how Mozilla is trying to decide whether to trust China’s official signing authority.

This is important because if China’s official signing authority becomes a puppet of the government, then dissidents might think they were communicating secretly and privately with a website when in fact all their communications could be overheard and decoded by the government.

It’s tricky politically, of course, because it’s not fashionable to stand up and say “the Chinese government can’t be trusted”. I’ll let you know how it comes out.

Facebook

And finally, Facebook. Facebook’s revenue has doubled every year since 2007: $150M then, $300M in 2008, $700M in 2009, and they’re on track to break $1B in 2010.

What’s interesting is where they make their money. It’s almost all coming from advertising. They know about what you like, so they can show you ads that you’re likely to like, so advertisers are happy and pay more for the advertising space. It’s Google’s idea but more personal–until recently, Google had no way for you to tell them how old you are, where you live, what interests you have, and so on. Despite that, of course, they’re still making a billion dollars every quarter, so it’s not too shabby.

People spend an hour a day on Facebook on average, which is much more than the 15m on average that people spend on TradeMe. Of course, if TradeMe could get you laid, maybe their average visit length would go up …

Today’s connecting them: life (Mary’s loss thereof), liberty (Chinese loss there off), and the pursuit of happiness (and Facebook’s monetisation thereof).

Links:

Guatemala
The murdered lawyer
National Security
GhostNet

Guatemala

Guate is an unstable country. 36 years of civil war ended in 1996, but the unrest continues. This year has seen something new. My explanation here draws heavily on an article that blogger Xeni Jardin wrote for GOOD magazine, and on her posts for the BoingBoing blog.

LAWYER ACCUSES PRESIDENT FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE

May 10 this year, lawyer Rodrigo Rosenberg was assassinated. Ordinarily this would be tragic for the family but another of the 6,000 annual murders in Guatemala. But the lawyer left a videotape saying: “If you are watching this message”, Rosenberg says on the video, “it is because I was assassinated by President Álvaro Colom, with help from Gustavo Alejos” (Álvaro Colom’s private secretary). He claimed he would be targeted because he planned to come forward with evidence that Colom’s government engaged in drug money laundering and misuse of public funds through a partly state-owned bank.

The video was handed out on DVDs at his funeral, it was quickly posted to YouTube, went viral, and started something the government is still finding hard to deal with. Rosenberg’s accusation hasn’t been proven or disproven, but it has made life very difficult.

YOUTUBE HIT

Soon, it was the focal point of chatter among mostly young Guatemalans on social sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Hi5. Users followed those conversations by searching for the hashtag #escandalogt—shorthand for “Guatemalan Scandal.” Remixes of the video soon appeared online, along with subtitled versions and amateur op-ed responses to the claims therein.

SOCIAL NETWORKS ORGANISE PROTESTS

Those social networks then helped spread the word of protests, with between 30,000 and 50,000 people turning up. (For comparison, I was at the Auckland Harbour Bridge bicycle crossing and that was 1/10th the side yet buggered up traffic in the city for a day). Many protest participants wore white, to symbolize an end to violence, and they became known as the “tsunami blanco.” Web-savvy news organizations broadcast live video of the protests online, right there in the streets, using laptops, cellular data cards, and free streaming video services like Ustream.

What’s the reaction? One Twitter user was arrested, jailed, and faces up to 10 years in prison for having posted a single 96-character tweet about the bank at the center of the corruption scandal. He said Guatemalans should withdraw their money en masse and create a run on the bank.

THE FUTURE?

The “tuiteros” exhilarated by their own newfound, potent public voice fear the darker aspect of that history will repeat. “The problem is that sooner or later, they’re going to persecute us,” tweeted one. “Just like they did the so-called ‘communists’ of the ’60s and ’70s.”

Social media didn’t destabilise Guatemala. It has been a mess for a long time. The interesting question for me is whether social media like Twitter and Facebook can bring citizens together, to create a united Guatemala around a common belief in the future.

National Security

COMPUTER SYSTEMS CONSTANTLY UNDER ATTACK

Black hat hackers under the pay of foreign countries attack the US military, government, and utility company web sites every hour of every day. I’m not making this up: there was a recent story about Chinese crackers who sent messages in support of the Dalai Lama to fool sympathisers into clicking on a link that would infect their computer with malware.

Infected computers download a Trojan known as ‘Ghost Rat’ that allows attackers to gain complete, real-time control. Such a computer can be controlled or inspected by its hackers, and even has the ability to turn on the camera and audio-recording functions of an infected computer that has such capabilities, enabling monitors to see and hear what goes on in a room.

The network of infected machines was called “GhostNet” by the researchers, and it spanned over a dozen countries and included embassies and the Prime Minister of Laos. 30% of the infected computers were in government offices. Today over 130 countries are developing this kind of cyberwarfare capability.

YOUR FACEBOOK PAGE TELLS THE ENEMY HOW TO FOOL YOU

Regardless of how scary that is for us, it’s very scary for the US government and that’s why some are getting antsy about the growing use of Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking sites. The more an attacker knows about you, the easier it is for them to fool you into opening an attachment or visiting a hostile web site.

One of the US Armed Services just did a study that showed 60% of the service members involved in the study have posted enough information on MySpace to make themselves vulnerable to adversary targeting. This included officers and enlisted troops from Intelligence and Security postings as well as other sensitive positions posting such things as units they have deployed with, new duty stations, personal medical data, job duties, information about training, and pictures of themselves at deployed locations.

USING TWITTER OR FACEBOOK TO AMPLIFY ATTACKS

Another set of researchers raise the possibility of a State Department Twitterer’s computer being taken over as a result of one of these attacks. Then the attacker posts a Tweet that includes a link to the infecting malware. Boom, all the government employees who read and trust that State employee are now infected.

SO NO MORE SOCIAL MEDIA IN THE GOVERNMENT?

Social media won’t go away. But there may be limits of access for those in combat, and a lot of education necessary for those who aren’t about just how easy it is to be conned as a result of what you post on the Internet. A lesson we all should learn.

What followed was a day and a half of intensive high-speed learning. I’ve never worked in the healthcare industry, so I was scrambling to learn the acronyms and history. My fellow committee members are all experts in their field (we have the top GP, the top hospital medical officer, the chief pharmacist, a CEO of a good DHB, etc.) so I had good tutelage! Of course, any inaccuracies in what follows is not their fault and I’m quite aware that I am not an expert. All I’ve heard are anecdotes and impressions, I’ve probably misunderstood some of them, so take what you read here as “this is how Nat currently understands it, but all assumptions must be validated by numbers and facts before acted upon”. And, of course, let me reiterate that our health care system does largely work. There are many national health systems around the world that do not. We have it good. Now, that said …

The state of NZ’s healthcare system is chaos. Government policy has been to devolve authority to the regions, hence the 21 District Health Boards (DHBs). DHBs get $ from the government, which they use to run hospitals and fund various community NGO activities. Alongside DHBs in the community are General Practitioners (GPs), delivering what’s referred to as Primary Care. GPs are not funded by DHBs, they are businesses. GPs used to band together in coop-like arrangements called Independent Practitioners Associations (IPAs, not to be confused with the beer), which provided services to their members. The IPA model was so successful that govt recently set up PHO (Primary Health Organisations) to mimic what they were doing but include the various non-GP deliverers of care (e.g., mental health groups, some NGOs, etc.) who are also on the front lines. Not all areas were happy to fold IPA activity into PHOs, and some areas kept their IPAs. Supporting GPs are med labs and pharmacies. On top of all this sits the Ministry of Health, apportioning the 9%+ of GDP that goes to public health. The MoH is huge, I think I heard >800 people mentioned as the number. (can’t find citation for this, so take with even larger grain of salt than the rest of this)

Whew. As you can tell, a lot of acronyms! Also a lot of organisations, each with their own governance and overhead. In theory it’s meant to devolve control of healthcare organisations back to the communities they serve, much like Tomorrow’s Schools devolved control of schools back to the communities. In practice the results vary. Some DHBs have their board, their CEO, and their staff all working together well. Others not so well, with the consequent lack of productivity and institutional inability to change.

GPs have traditionally been very hip with IT, though. Until 3 years ago, NZ GPs lead the world in adoption of it. What happened three years ago? Sure, the rest of the world caught up, but there was also a change in NZ. One vendor bought up another, there was an acquisition by a Singaporean VC, and suddenly development stalled. The GPs are still hungry for new features and want to be doing new things, but the software hasn’t been providing that. One product, MedTech32, has >80% market share. The main reasons why GPs would find it hard to change vendor is that they’ve customised the software, added their own fields, etc., and they’re terrified of losing decades of data. “The burden of prior innovation”, this was called. They lead the way before there was a standard way of doing things, now adopting the standards are as much of a pain to them as a benefit to others.

I look forward to learning more about DHBs: they consume a lot of money, and currently most everyone has analog processes when data moves between entities (GP, DHB, pharmacy). Each DHB has a CIO, and they all network. I heard several times that, like most technology people, the CIOs have trouble communicating the business value of the technology they’re implementing. Many CIOs are apparently sitting on 150+ different pieces of software, accrued over the years, and it can take all their time to simply manage what they’ve got. On top of that sits several high-profile and painful failures of software development (“we’ll solve this problem, we’ve spend a hundred million dollars, oh shit it is just a miserable disaster!”), making everyone from DHB Chairs to the CIOs themselves nervous about embarking on new projects. It seems safe to say, based on the stories I’ve heard, that no part of the healthcare system has a firm grasp of change management and project rollout.

Furthermore, each DHB does things their own way. This independence extends to the procedures around surgery, admission, etc., as well as to the IT systems in the back end. Only recently have they begun buying insurance together. The CIOs have agreed to a form of collective purchase: when they negotiate a contract, they share the price they got and vendors are required to offer the same price to other DHBs. CEOs have also signed on to adopting whatever initiatives have been most fruitful elsewhere, not duplicating projects. The board chiefs, CEOs, CIOs, chief medical officers, and other levels in DHBs all meet their compatriots regularly and share information on mailing lists. Yet there’s still an astonishing lack of overlap in adopted processes and tools. One person suggested that NZ’s spending on healthcare wasn’t small, it was just that it’s being spent on 21 different healthcare systems.

So let’s describe the paralysis: adding new software to a DHB is difficult because of tight money and the lack of consistency in ability to roll out new systems. Rolling out one DHB’s solution in another is difficult because of the varying processes across DHBs and some CIOs’ inability to be strategic because of the burdens caused by their mishmash of legacy systems. The Ministry of Health can’t force top-down solutions into DHBs because of devolution, the most they can do is dangle financial incentives. GPs don’t get new software because the vendor hasn’t provided it and switching costs are high. NGOs don’t get new software because they don’t have any money (many don’t have broadband or modern PCs).

Why do we want better software? Not just for software’s sake, but because: (a) interoperable software would cut down on patients who fall between cracks, (b) there are features like decision support that would improve patient care, (c) simplifying the things that are currently done by hand frees up staff to care for patients, (d) we need visibility into how our healthcare providers are doing but at the moment there’s no single consistent view of stats like “how many people died in surgery or within 60 days of surgery” across the NZ healthcare system, (e) we can’t begin to offer patients their healthcare information if its trapped within the organisations. We want to see safer organisations, better outcomes, fewer errors, more staff time spent delivering care, and visibility into the system.

Where did we end? This first meeting was to figure out what we wanted to do. We’re writing that up now, and will report it to the new Minister. (Poor bugger, I imagine he’s going through a similar learning curve to me, only several orders of magnitude worse!) Then we’ll gather research to show the current state, what’s lead to successes before and elsewhere, and advise the Minister so he can, hopefully, untangle this ghastly mess.

I talked about the technology trends that any strategy will need to deal with (analog to digital, tethered to mobile, generic to personal, etc.), looked at the system rather than any one facet, and tried to be my usual hardheaded self and keep the focus on what we could realistically achieve. I talked a little about open source, but I want to make sure I understand how software gets adopted and why it doesn’t before I rush in with my pet solutions. The problem here might not be software, it might be the systems and people around it–I just don’t know at this stage.

Thoughts? My apologies if I’ve mischaracterised something. As I said, this all came at a rush and I’m looking forward to learning the whole time I’m there. Corrections in comments welcome!

Current affairs: The National Library is “harvesting” the New Zealand web. That is, they’re visiting every .nz web site and many other sites hosted in New Zealand (e.g., aldaily.com). They’re archiving the contents for posterity. See http://www.natlib.govt.nz/about-us/current-initiatives/web-harvest-2008 and http://librarytechnz.natlib.govt.nz/2008/10/2008-web-harvest-let-us-know-how-we-can.html. There’s been some grumbling from the web site owners, some just general grumbling (how dare they!), but some specifically about how they went about it–they’re using machines in the USA to do the harvesting, and many hosting companies/ISPs charge more for data that goes over the international link than they do for domestic traffic. End result: bigger bill.

NatLib is also ignoring a convention called robots.txt–it’s how web site owners communicate with people who are harvesting their site (Google harvests, for example, because to give good results to web searches it must know what’s on every page). The robots.txt file says “don’t harvest these bits of my site”, but some web site owners have been using it to mean “these bits of my site are private, don’t put them into Google results”. NatLib must save all pages, they’re required to by law, so they’re ignoring robots.txt. Grumpiness on mailing lists, Twitter, and beyond ensues.

I’m a geek and sympathise with the web site providers, but I’m also part of the Library Information Advisory Commission (LIAC), which advises the Minister for National Library … so I see it from the library’s side too.

Web site: Moral Sense Test. Researchers are increasingly turning to the world to study real people, and here’s one example: experimental philosophy. Instead of “what is the meaning of life?” and “can we start with `I think I am’ and work up to an integrated theory of right and wrong”, they’re doing tests on real people to figure out what they see as right and wrong.

This web site is a series of hypothetical situations, each with a course of action that you have to express your opinion on from very wrong to very right. The challenge for the researchers is to find a rhyme or reason to our rather arbitrary distinctions in right and wrong.

I’ll be curious to see the results, which aren’t yet available (I think they feel people would be influenced in their choices if they knew what other people had thought).

There’s a long history of people using the web for research. Luis von Ahn is a CMU researcher whose “ESP Game” was turned into a data gathering exercise for Google’s image recognition algorithm. See a Smithsonian article on von Ahn.

Local Content: New Zealand On Screen. The start of a big database of New Zealand video. From old educational reels to the first episode of Gloss, there are clips from lots of Kiwi programs and more coming each week. Also: cast details, interviews, and more. Links to where you can buy the shows if they’re for sale. Fully funded by the Gubmint via NZ On Air.

My favourite so far is the bit of a 1975 documentary on Hone Tuwhare . He came to my high school in the 80s and read his poetry to us in the library. He was incredibly powerful then, and the clips of him reading his poems in 1975 are even more vivid. This documentary is not for sale or full viewing, alas. I’d love to have an hour of Tuwhare readings.

Also enjoyed a great documentary on potter Barry Brickell … if you turn off the jazz. The opening notes are ghastly! But, having recently gone up the Driving Creek Railway, it’s great to see it as it was back then.

If you’re a Kiwi, don’t miss the chance to catch up with your favourite kids shows.

Culture: What is a “friend” online?

Writer found himself with 700 friends on Facebook and invited them to a party. One showed, despite fifteen having confirmed and 60 more said “maybe”. What does it mean to friend someone online? Blame firmly in the court of having to make a binary choice about friendship when it covers casual acquaintances to “interested in what you’re doing” through to “know Biblically”.

Digital OE: See the Internet through Chinese eyes. A plugin for Firefox that shows you the Internet as a citizen of China would, censorship and all.

Politics: How To Get My Nerd Vote. 10 things from the guy who created Metafilter, one of the early web communities. He wants the American government to do things that’d make it better for working nerds. It’s unashamedly selfish, but I agree with him that these policies are good sense as well as vote-winning among nerds. Not all apply in NZ (we have universal healthcare already), but I like his ideas about incenting people to move closer to their work and renewing the commitment to education and science.

–James K. Baxter
(learned of it via The Road to Jerusalem, a documentary about Baxter)

• Effect of the Depresson on Technology
• The Connected Economy
• Torkington’s Law

• “When we try to pick up anything by itself we find it is attached to everything in the universe.” — John Muir
• “I throw a spear into the dark — that is intuition. Then I have to send an expedition into the jungle
  to find the way of the spear — that is logic.” — Ingmar Bergman
• “Lovers of wisdom must be inquirers into many things indeed.” — Heraclitus, 5th Century B. C.
• “You have about 10 minutes to act on an idea before it recedes back into dreamland.” — Buckminster Fuller paraphrased by Stewart Brand
• “Tool: Something with a use on one end and a grasp on the other end.” — Stewart Brand
• “If you cannot think of three ways of abusing a tool, you do not understand how to use it.” — Gregory Bateson
• “Big whorls have little whorls / Which feed on their velocity, / And little whorls have lesser whorls / And so on to viscosity.” — Lewis F. Richardson
• “I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.” — Tolstoy, quoted by Joseph Ford, 1985, in “Chaos: Solving the Unsolvable, Predicting the Unpredictable”
• “Technology without morality is barbarous; morality without technology is impotent.” — Freeman Dyson
• “Words challenge eternity.” — Horace
• “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.” — Thomas Pynchon
• “When the looms spin by themselves, we’ll have no need for slaves.” — Aristotle

Wednesday night in Wellington is a lot more exciting when the New Zealand Open Source Award ceremony is on! The Minister for Communications and Information Technology, David Cunliffe, made a brief speech lauding open source and was around to hand awards to the winners. We gave out prizes for best project, contributor, use in government, use in business, use in education, use in community organization, and use for infrastructure, as well as two special awards.

I was a judge (along with Don Christie, Rochelle Hume, Colin Jackson, Janet Mazenier, Chris Daish, and Paul Matthews) and presented the Project award to Silverstripe and one of the special awards. It was quite the honour to be on stage with the wonderful winners. A list of the finalists and winners is on the NZOSA web site.

As all awards should be, they were very hard to judge. Everyone finalist was doing great work, and it was almost impossible to pick one over another. Nonetheless, Robert O’Callahan from Mozilla edged out Debian, Perl, and OpenSolaris contenders for Best Contributor. Richard Hulse from Radio New Zealand took home the award for use of Open Source in Government (their online presence is built on open source and they even offer Ogg Vorbis show downloads, e.g. for science show This Way Up). Dave Lane from Egressive in Christchurch won Best Use in Business for almost singlehandedly building the open source business scene in Christchurch. FLOSS Manuals won for Best Use for Community Organisation, beating out Wellington’s rising star Brenda Wallace. CityLink won for Best Use in Infrastructure.

There were two Special Achievement awards handed out. Colin presented one to New Zealand’s CIO, Laurence Millar, to acknowledge the great work the State Services Commission has done in levelling the playing field for open source and open data within Government. I was honoured to present one to Matthew Holloway, whose work on the ISO OOXML proposal was a key part of the great work that Standards New Zealand did to establish their position (they voted against it becoming a standard). Well, I would have been if Matthew had been there, but it was accepted in his absence by Peter Lambrechtsen who was also part of the Standards NZ process.

There was even drama on the stage. Colin Jackson gave the Minister some stick over the ISP-hostile DMCA-esque provisions of the latest Copyright Act being snuck in after the bill had passed the Select Committee without it. Then I, as part of my speech above Matthew, got to observe that the transparency of the Standards NZ process was something that New Zealand could be proud of–unlike the ACTA and US Free Trade agreements which are being negotiated in secret and have considerable potential to interfere with the computer industry. The Minister stood up afterward and extended an offer to us and the relevant industry representatives to meet the appropriate people after a Cabinet meeting and go over our objections with the people who need to hear them.

Many thanks to MC Mark Cubey (by day the producer of the Kim Hill show), and to Catalyst IT Limited, the NZ open source consulting company that has funded the NZOSA for the last two years and built it into the great event that it deserves to be. Go Kiwis!

I ask because t’s the rare geek who successfully runs a company; even the Google boys needed adult supervision in the form of Eric Schmidt. Building a business takes different skills than building a product: salesmanship, attention to the accounts and to corporate structure, insight into finance and business metrics. These are all things that geeks tend to throw up their hands and put aside in favour of an interesting Javascript bug.

The ideal CEO and bizdev person has same love of sales, business, and management details as a technical geek has of operating system, programming language, and API details. And where are they in NZ? Where are the people who ran and sold their last company and are looking for the next one to start? I’d even take the people who have built a solid reputation within a big company and want to start their own. Rod Drury is the first name that springs to mind, but I challenge you to find a second. Rowan is investing in but not joining companies. Sam Morgan is still at TradeMe.

Leave the names as comments or mail me as nathan AT torkington DOT com. I’d like to invite more of these people to Kiwi Foo as part of my new mission to find and support more types of talent.