2009 February

This Could Get Ugly

Over the coming weeks you may notice some changes around here.

I’ve decided to do a few “new” things…

• Take a new look at the design. Although I like the look of Nevermind, it’s quite rigid and inflexible. With some newly-flexed coding muscle I hope to either improve or replace the look & feel of Nevermind to something better. Of course, I have no idea what better is – hence the title of this post
• Integrate some new technology. There are lots of great things out there in the Blogosphere just waiting to be taken advantage of. I’ve been testing some plugins that will let me play with some new toys and hopefully make things better for my readers and commenter. OpenID, Facebook Connect and Action Stream are all on my list.
• Take a new direction. Excepting a few things, I find it hard to get excited these days about what our government is up to and the tedium of political “debate”. I hope to make Nevermind a more personal place with a wider spread of content including technology and life.

So bear with me, if you do/don’t like something feel free to shut speak up

Goodbye, Nanny State! Hello, Big Brother…

The governments proposed amendments to the Criminal Investigations Act are, quite simply, chilling.

The police already have powers to store your DNA but under very strict circumstances – under Judicial allowance or after being convicted of serious offences (rape, murder and some other). The Government wishes to change that so the police will have the authority to extract and store your DNA for simply being suspected of a crime.

This idea is at ends with the New Zealand Bill Of Rights Act (BORA). The governments Attorney General, Chris Finlayson, has reported back to the government this fact and it’s looking like it’s going to be ignored, and National will ram through more legislation under urgency totally bypassing the select committee submission process once again.

This is ridiculously scary stuff. Especially since similar movements to allow police fishing expedition in the UK are now under investigation for breaching the European Bill of Rights.