Technology is one of the broadest beats any journalist can cover. There are so many stories that touch upon individuals and organisations every day; technology enables many great things, but it can also cause harm.
Starting this month, interest.co.nz will build its technology coverage with a new section, edited by Juha Saarinen.
Juha has covered information technology for publications in New Zealand and overseas for many years now. They include The New Zealand Herald, PC World, Stuff, Wired, The Guardian, iTnews and CRN.
He’s a firm believer in trying out tech, as that is how the best stories come about, even when things go wrong and fail. Nothing beats experience with tech for deep understanding.
Get in touch with Juha with tips, comments, and what you want to read about: cloud, personal and business tech, AI/ML, cybersecurity, development, internet topics, cars and more.
Go into the draw to win a Yubico YubiKey!
To kick off the technology section in style, we have 15 Yubico YubiKey hardware authentication keys to give away to readers who provide interesting suggestions for topics to cover.
The key model in question is the 5C NFC, which retails for $136 including GST.
With the YubiKey 5C NFC, you’ll get the strongest possible two-factor authentication to protect your computer and smartphones against phishing attacks that could lead to devastating account takeovers.
Hardware keys are considered the gold standard for secure authentication. Google’s Advanced Protection Program which is aimed at journalists, activists, business executives and other potentially targeted people uses them as an additional layer of strong security.
This particular YubiKey model supports USB-C connections, and Near Field Communication. The latter lets you just tap your device to complete authentication with it. You can use hardware keys for passwordless authentication as well.
To enter the draw for a YubiKey, please fill in this Google Form.
Update The YubiKey draw is now closed. Thank you very much everyone for your great responses.
Keys will be sent out on a first come, first served basis, with no correspondence entered into. We can't cater for overseas readers, unfortunately.
NB: Ensure that you visit yubico.com to read more about the YubiKeys, to learn how to use and manage them.
*Please note that we can’t provide support, technical or otherwise, for the YubiKeys. It is vital that you read the documentation for the keys carefully, and follow the instructions provided by Yubico. Failure to follow the instructions could lead to you being locked out of systems you have secured with the key.
17 Comments
Great. One of NZ's greatest tech exports is open-source statistical software R developed by Ross Ihaka at the University of Auckland, Used globally. Not sure many NZers will be aware.
About YubiKey, already crypto exchanges tapping in at the exchange level, including Coinbase. Personally I will prefer to use cold-wallet storage. Leopards never change their spots.
Always loved using R, plus as bonus it was great for maths pirate dad jokes, Rrrrr. (2 degrees separation though from Ross so knowledge of but never had the pleasure of having a good bbq or department gathering with him).
Totally agree keeping money off exchanges and third party online wallets is a high risk poor security measure, especially without the customer protections in cases of theft and companies going bust or just raiding the wallets for frivolous reasons.
Regarding R, I think it's dreadful that Ross has never got the recognition he deserves. Such a humble man and he definitely is recognized by many.
Did an analytics course through MIT. Students could use R or Python, but R was the de facto software of choice used by MIT.
Yes in tech awards and tech marketing you really need to be more about the ego & self aggrandizement than about the solid product and it's design (e.g. Eion). It is a shame that those who produce really good stuff are normally far behind the scenes not seeking major investment or marketing while those more prominent usually are not the ones doing the work and have next to no technical knowledge of what they are doing. Ironically it is the short poppies that do amazing stuff in NZ, but there is a divide in those who market tech and those who make tech and work with tech. I hope Ross is still doing well in next projects.
Met those setting up virtual agricultural fencing for winning sharemilkers and the most down to earth people. One even puts in extra hours for community training courses on both ends of age spectrum. Would never see them in news or marketing media though.
Just my opinion, but govts don't really understand tech. For them, they believe that it's somehow a sector that can generate income as an industry. While that is not wrong, what they don't understand is that tech is very much deflationary. Yes tech drives productivity but that doesn't mean that the outcomes are scalable thereby generation more revenue and profits.
R is being used by Meta for what is know as marketing mix modelling. This kind of modelling used to be handled by companies like Accenture. With the Meta solution, it is 'open source', which basically means that a company or organization doesn't need to hand out the big bucks to the likes of Accenture if they want to do it themselves.
As someone who writes code, R is a horrible language. It eats RAM like crazy and is painfully slow. It's like Matlab where it's made to be easy (comprimised) for mathematicians and engineers so they don't need to write things in ways they aren't used to. At least Fortran is fast. It's all good to use until you need to put some real data through it and realize it doesn't scale. Then you need to pay someone to rewrite it in a real language like Python with native libraries.
Rstudio is a nice IDE though, as it can be used in a web browser remotely and don't need to use it to write R at all.
Cheers for the input and appreciate the technical insight. Slow I can understand but surprised as to why Meta is using R for the application as I highlighted above (https://facebookexperimental.github.io/Robyn/docs/welcome). RStudio and CRAN are quite special for me as I'm not a coder or programmer.
Don't know exact details. Stats people may favour using R because it's easy, free and has a bunch of libraries targeting stats. There's a community out there and if Meta want to gain traction with their new thing, they'll make it available for R. Their thing can be native and work on loaded data fast (it won't be written in pure R), import and export to formats that can be used by other things. It's not all about the language but also the libraries that are available for it. There are funny things about all sorts of languages. Python does arithmetic painfully slow, making list of pairs in each step or something. That's why numpy is used when it matters, a library for Python that's actually written in C.
Yes R is very much stats related and for mathematical applications like regression analysis. I'm not sure why you said R doesn't have libraries as that is precisely what CRAN is about. That's what makes RStudio powerful. So I think for different programming applications, R is obviously suitable. But it's held its weight in scientific research, business and financial modelling, a range of different things. Made by statisticians for academic and real-world application.
I'm always interested in technology that can deliver a meaningful benefit. Yeah, AI is cool and all, but like many I suspect I work for a company that often fails to keep it's basic infrastructure running. The only technology race we're in the running for is the one that ends at the bottom of a cliff.
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