Swedes decline to FCKU2MF

Amazon has made a big bet on cricket played in New Zealand as a means to help it crack the Indian market.

Cricket New Zealand overnight announced that Indian viewers hoping to watch cricket played in the South Pacific nation will only be able to do so on Amazon Prime, the retail giant’s Netflix clone.

The deal will start in late 2021 and run for six years, a period during which the Indian national men's cricket team will twice tour New Zealand.

Cricket matches featuring India’s national team can literally attract hundreds of millions of viewers.

Microsoft has announced an Azure region in New Zealand.

Aotearoa, to use the native Maori name for the country, will not be the least-populous nation to host Azure: Qatar has about two million fewer residents than New Zealand's five million. But New Zealand is comfortably the most remote Azure outpost as it has just three submarine cables connecting it to the USA plus three that route directly to Australia.

None are shorter than 2,000km, which won't make for crippling latency but may reduce the region's utility as a bottom-of-the-world bolthole for those who like extreme geographic resilience.

Microsoft said the new build will be a proper three-bit-barn region, located in Auckland and named "New Zealand North". Auckland is New Zealand's largest city and while it hasn't seen volcanism for 600 years, it is considered active (albeit not in a time frame expected to bother even the youngest Reg readers).

Bork!Bork!Bork! New Zealand may appear to be practically perfect in every way (at least when viewed through the lens of the UK's Lockdown Number Two) but the city of Christchurch is not immune to bork.

Spotted by a Register reader on a stroll though the city's Evolution Square, the video projection animation of the Ōtautahi mural has garnered the odd admiring glance or two.

However, the edition of Windows responsible for running the show is demanding attention, like a petulant child, before it deigns to sling video onto the SALT Square mural.

New Zealand’s stock exchange (NZX) has closed for a third day thanks to a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.

The exact nature of the incident is not known: an NZX spokesperson told The Register that “network connectivity issues relating to DDoS cybersecurity attacks” were behind the decision to close the market after around 70 minutes of Thursday today. The market also closed on Tuesday and Wednesday, with the NZX expressing a desire for swift restoration after those incidents.

“This decision not to re-open has been made while we focus on addressing the situation. We continue to address the threat and work with cybersecurity experts, and we are doing everything we can to resume normal trading tomorrow (28 August),” the spokesperson told The Register.

Local media suggest that the Exchange’s web site is the target of the attack, rather than its core trading systems. However the Exchange has shut down trading because if the website is down it prevents market-moving company information reaching investors.

New Zealand has created what it claims is the world’s first “Algorithm Charter” that sets out how government agencies should devise algorithms and explain their workings.

The premise of the charter [PDF] is that algorithms are mighty useful, but also fallible. It therefore calls for agencies to have “particular focus on those algorithms that have a high risk of unintended consequences and/or have a significant impact if things do go wrong, particularly for vulnerable communities.”

It also outlines how agencies should explain their algorithms to the public and sketches some accountability measures.

Among the requirements are to “maintain transparency” about algorithms with a menu of options that includes publishing plain English documentation of the algorithm, documenting how they are used and publishing information about how data are collected, secured and stored. The charter also calls for agencies to “make sure data is fit for purpose” by “understanding its limitations” and “identifying and managing bias”.

The New Zealand government has released a new digital check-in tool to enable Kiwis to keep a digital log of their movements.

The new app, called "NZ COVID Tracer", works by letting users scan QR codes at the businesses, public building and other organisations they visit. It then provides users with a "check-in" history, so they can more easily track their own movements.

The app also registers users' contact information so that country's COVID-19 tracing team, the National Close Contact Service (NCCS), can contact them if necessary.

"This is what I would describe as a digital diary," Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said in a press conference on Monday. "Helping users when they're out about to keep log of their own movements, for instance, between cafes and restaurants. That's obviously something those businesses are doing themselves, but this is a way that people can do it that keeps the data for themselves."

Updated Microsoft’s cloud services have a nasty case of Monday-itis.

Reg readers report that Office 365 and Azure Active Directory are both inaccessible at the time of writing. One user told us “Our organisation cannot access any apps requiring Azure AD authentication”. Others told us Office 365 is dead and that even attempts to access its status page produces the following less-than-brilliantly-useful message.

Upstart rocketeers at Rocket Lab had a bad weekend as the thirteenth launch of its Electron rocket ended in failure.

The flight of the Electron on 4 July appeared to work at first, and the onboard cameras caught the first stage booster falling back to Earth. Viewers were then treated to the separation of the payload shroud, as planned, before things began to go a bit pear-shaped.

Acceleration appeared to slow at around the five to six-minute mark and the company abruptly stopped the feed shortly after. Fans were left hoping that hey, maybe it was just a telemetry funny.

Alas, it was not. Rocket Lab boss Peter Beck took to Twitter to confirm that the mission "Pics or It Didn't Happen" had indeed failed. As it transpired, the issue occurred "approximately four minutes into the flight" according to the company.

New Zealand police have started arresting some of those who allegedly shared a livestreamed video of the mass murder of 50 people in Christchurch last week.

The footage was broadcast live on Facebook by the killer as he gunned down dozens of innocents, and it was removed approximately an hour later by the antisocial network.

But copies were made and subsequently reposted by a large number of netizens across the web, seemingly unconcerned about its contents. As many as 1.5 million versions of the murderous rampage were eventually deleted from Facebook alone, the Silicon Valley giant claimed.

The video was subsequently officially designated an "objectionable publication" by New Zealand's censors, given that it depicts the actual murder of other human beings. That means sharing it is a serious offence.

New Zealand’s highest court has ruled that Kim Dotcom can be extradited to the United States of America to face charges of copyright infringement.

In the early 2000s Dotcom founded a cloud storage locker called Megaupload that, at a time before streaming video became widespread, attracted more than a few folks who uploaded and shared pirated movies and the like. Dotcom always maintained that he was shocked – so very shocked! – that anyone would abuse his service in such illegal ways, though he also offered rewards to users who shared widely downloaded files.

It wasn’t long before copyright cops took an interest in Megaupload. Dotcom thought he had stayed one step ahead of the law by wining New Zealand residency on a visa reserved for investors who bring more than NZ$10m in the country.

Dotcom arrived in 2010, obtained a colossal mansion with sports cars to match, and gave an infamous interview to WiReD in which he revealed that he slept on hand-made mattresses that cost $103,000 apiece.