Posts by Stephen Judd
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I was just saying to my daughter as we drove out to the Dowse today that Thorndon Overbridge sounds like a great name.
So, yeah.
The Reverend Thorndon Overbridge was frustrated. The need to read the gospel to fallen women was building, but the red zone appeared empty of the morally corrupt. He was already shaking after an encounter with some hulking street drinkers. One had importuned him. The Reverend offered the huge man a tea, which substitute had met with angry refusal.
Then in the distance, a pale bulk lolled.
Finally, his kind of siren.
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Hard News: A nation bullied, in reply to Steve Withers,
. Maybe there is a model here that could / should be encouraged if not legally mandated. Or maybe we should dig into our own pockets and make one.
I am ready to repeat the call I made here a couple of years ago to create a charitable trust to fund public interest journalism. Gimme a day or two, I have a draft already that I need to tidy up.
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Hard News: Angry and thrilled about Arie, in reply to DexterX,
I am glad the police don’t carry side arms as they could have shot this guy.
Well yeah. The people who think the police should be dealing out summary justice need to realise that the police WILL make mistakes that can't be fixed as a result. Which ties in with the worrying report earlier in the thread that police after the quake were making it their mission to do so.
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Hard News: Angry and thrilled about Arie, in reply to izogi,
presumably all the relevant court documents state that sworn New Zealand Police Officers were the only authorities involved?
Perhaps Inspector Erasmus is only concerned that Sunday ruined a pending perjury case... /me strains to be charitable
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That was a truly sympathetic and persuasive piece. But, did TVNZ cross a line in interviewing basically all the participants but the police in a pending trial? I am fully confident that Arie has suffered a great wrong, and that there's something rotten in police conduct we need to get to the bottom of, but this aspect of the program bugs me.
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I well remember a person I can't name blogging some years ago about their hobby of getting access to Telecom landline voicemail boxes, which in the old days* used to have a default PIN of the last four digits of the phone number.
Because they were fundamentally a naughty, rather than an evil person, they got their jollies by carefully transcribing people's greetings and then re-recording them in a silly voice.
What Juha says about the default protocols internalised by geeks is correct. At the time I first set up voicemail on my landline I remembered thinking that this was a poor choice of default but I was way too brainwashed by working in enterprise IT to even consider capitalising on it to snoop.
*they don't do that any more, right? Right?
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Hard News: A nation bullied, in reply to nzlemming,
Blogs
Yeah nah. What the Guardian brings to this is the ability to fund Nick Davies for a long and indefinite period of time, and to defend him in the courts if need be. I can see the possibility for a valiant and quixotic whistleblower to blog, but what we have here is a coherent story backed by solid evidence and a decent legal team. That's very hard to do on volunteer labour.
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Hebe: I was more thinking about the evident complicity of the British PM and the Met, than the voicemail snooping and bribery per se. In other words, how would we know to what extent pols compromise to pacify media proprietors?
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Gotta say that from a television point of view, this is a splendid story. Hugh Grant was fabulous, Brooks could be played by Nicole Kidman (not my idea, read it on Twitter) and McMullen actually looks part weasel (especially in the earlier footage where he still had tatty whiskers),.
As I follow this scandal I am oscillating wildly between the joy of watching a deserved come-uppance unfold, and horror at the emerging evidence of just how far the rot goes. We might once have suspected, but now we know.
Without a local Guardian equivalent, how would we find out about something like this in New Zealand?
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To my biassed mind, Goff comes off better in this Herald report.