The NZOSS has held its 2012 Annual General Meeting starting at 17:30 this evening, 6 August 2012.

The agenda for today's AGM is as follows:

1. President's report
2. Treasurer's report
3. Membership summary
4. Councillors and Officers stepping down
6. Officer Elections

We would like to make sure the people of NZ are aware of the work being done behind the scenes to ensure that NZ gets a Fair Deal: that we don't suffer substantial restrictions on our personal liberty and sovereignty as a result of the top secret Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPPA) currently being negotiated on our behalf.

The new Lotto website is now online, and it is open source. It is built on the Silverstripe CMS and web application platform. The site involves a fair amount of money changing hands, and is an example of a transactional website performing a government run and managed activity: i.e. it is a crown entity operating under an Act.

The NZOSS will be holding its Annual General Meeting on Monday, 6 August at 17:30. It will take place online (using IRC, the #nzoss room on Freenode.org), with physical locations in Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch as well for members to gather.

We will be nominating and electing council members and the executive. If you have any interest in taking part in the council or in running for executive office (president, vice president, secretary, or treasurer), please either nominate yourself, or let others know you're keen!

For your reference, the current executive is:

A jury has found that Google did not infringe Oracle patents in the development of Android. Earlier the jury found that Google had infringed Oracle's copyright in it's use of the Java API, but the judge is yet to rule on whether this is fair use. The decision on fair use will be decided by the judge next week.

On 2 May, I presented the NZOSS' viewpoint on cloud computing privacy issues at the Privacy Forum 2012 (PDF programme) in Wellington - the official name for the day was "Think Big? Privacy in the age of big data". The questions we were asked, and my answers (or at least the notes on which my answers were based) are below.

The NZ Open Source Society is taking part in a global protest (Wikipedia is blacking out its entire site today) against proposed US legislation, called SOPA ("Stop Online Piracy Act") and PIPA ("Protect IP Act") ostensibly intended