#philpennington — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #philpennington, aggregated by home.social.
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"Two percent of GDP spent on defence - the lowest threshold the US approves of - would require New Zealand almost doubling its outlay to $10 billion a year"
#PhilPennington, 2025
"We will be spending more on defence. We will be getting as close to two percent as we possibly can."
#ChristopherLuxon, 2025
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"'We all know that we are likely to be recorded by CCTV footage in public spaces to assist with crime prevention and detection."
Judge #BelindaSellars,
2024#PhilPennington, 2024
So this normalisation of privacy violating practice automagically makes it acceptable? WTSF?!?
It needs to be illegal to point a private security camera at any public place. Or at minimum, illegal to upload footage from that camera to any platform that allows it to be shared.
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"Police have been given the legal clearance to continue tapping into private cameras more than 200,000 times a year for evidence."
#PhilPennington, 2024
The surveillance-industrial complex, hard at work. If David Seymour cared about democracy he'd be fighting this, not fighting the Crown's grudging recognition of its obligations under Te Tiriti o Waitangi.
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"The NDMS [National Disease Management System] was being hosted within a 'private isolated section' of Amazon's 'cloud' of data warehouse servers in Sydney."
#PhilPennington, 2024
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"...the Ministry for the Environment said it was 'cloud infrastructure agnostic' but expressed a preference in two tenders as the solution had to 'integrate' with what it already had from Microsoft or AWS."
#PhilPennington, 2024
This kind of lock-in is precisely why we don't want public agencies leasing hosting from foreign DataFarmers.
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"More than 180 New Zealand public agencies have transferred masses of data to Microsoft cloud computing servers in Australia for storage and processing since 2019. Sensitive courts data could be headed that way."
#PhilPennington, 2024
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"A power system that is already prone to shortages like those currently forecast on Friday is facing never-before-seen demand from electric vehicles (EVs) and big data centres.
Vector is preparing for it - but the lack of laws and regulations and an Energy Ministry are in its way."
#PhilPennington, 2024
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"The government is being warned that tight electricity supply situations could become more frequent, especially on cold winter mornings and evenings.
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The briefing said the government's dumping the aspirational goal of 100 percent renewable electricity by 2030 - and the Lake Onslow 'battery' project along with it - gave the ministry more room to work on the problem."
#PhilPennington, 2024
Avoiding the short term power shortage at the cost of long term fixes 🤦♂️
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Another horrifying expose of public sector IT incompetence by #PhilPennington of RNZ;
"But DIA told RNZ that racial bias was not an issue because in recent tests the tool was 90 percent accurate. The tests covered 250 people."
If you believe that, I have a cancer cure for you, that's definitely been tested on at least 250 people, and 90% are them are still alive...
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"Enter the national data platform - the foundation for a $700m-plus overhaul of data and digital health..."
"The new platform will need to be able to take over, merge and make sense of petabytes of data, multiplying itself daily in 28 disparate, siloed health data warehouses, and processed by a motley, often ancient crew of hospital apps numbering in the thousands."
#PhilPennington, 2023
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If it's true that NZ is one of the least corrupt countries in the world., I shudder to think how corrupt other countries must be...
"The idea was hatched by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) as a so-called "lighthouse" project in 2020-21 after Internal Affairs asked it to come up with some special work for Microsoft."
#PhilPennington, 2023
#Aotearoa #NZ #MBIE #InternalAffairs #CorporateWelfare #PublicService #corruption
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Huh? Why?!?
"A Powerpoint released under the OIA noted 'the word *sovereignty* is receiving a negative reaction from some'."
#PhilPennington, 2023
#RNZ #Aotearoa #NZ #DataSovereignty #HealthData #TeWhatuOra #OIA
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Local company Catalyst IT employs more people here than BorgSoft does, and probably pays more tax.
https://nz.linkedin.com/company/catalyst-it-limited
"Microsoft revenues in this country [Aotearoa/NZ] have risen more than fivefold since 2018 to over $1 billion. It pays little tax here and large fees to its US parent. It used to employ about 150 people locally but laid some off in April."
#PhilPennington, 2023
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"The shift to use more biofuels is forecast to raise petrol and diesel prices and knock up to $1 billion off New Zealand's economic growth within four years, but not making a move could also carry big, uncalculated costs, reports suggest."
- #PhilPennington, 2021
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/458668/what-is-the-real-cost-of-a-switch-to-biofuels
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"The government has done a deal over facial recognition technology that throws access to it wide open."
- #PhilPennington, 2020
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"Asia had already shown what worked, #HaydenMcCall said, pointing to #TraceTogether where enabled phones digitally 'shake hands', leaving an accurate trail for contact tracers to follow, with the phone owner's permission. It is #OpenSource for anyone to use."
- #PhilPennington
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/413530/covid-19-major-it-groups-not-consulted-over-race-to-speed-up-contact-tracing -
"Surveillance is necessary"
- #PhilPennington
https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/insight/audio/2018699455/insight-christchurch-attacks-are-intelligence-agencies-watching-the-right-peopleIs it though? Just before the Berlin Wall fell, I'm sure any journalist in East Germany would have said "the Stazi are necessary." This kind of comment is arguably a sign of #hypernormalization.