A "Sponsored Story" has appeared in the NZ Herald written by Microsoft and touting how their new datacentre 'could' drive 'billions of euros worth of investment' and create 'thousands of new jobs'. It has received a lot of positive feedback on LinkedIn⁽¹⁾ of course. While I applaud investment in New Zealand I don't think these claims stand up to very much scrutiny for the following reasons.

A zdnet report on the Azure AD outage in mid march... Pretty ho-hum you might think... normal cloud/IT problems. The real issue with this which people don't seem to understand is that nearly all New Zealand Government public service agencies are in a headlong rush to run everything in Azure and as a result of this outage were unable to function... Couldn't log in, no Teams, no email, no documents, no calendar and of course, no contingency plan. A significant part of the New Zealand Government, dead in the water and relying on a single US multinational to get it going again.

I truly thought this old SCO lawsuit had been killed off, dead and buried, never to see the light of day again but no... It has risen again. ArsTechnica has the details here for those of you interested enough in reading it... Short form: nothing new and will fail again. Most likely an attempt by the venture capitalists at the helm to make a quick buck, which was the original SCO strategy as well... didn't work then. Won't work now.

Yet another tiresome example of why relying on a single company for your software suite is a Bad Thing(tm). The US Government has issued an urgent directive for all of its agencies to update their MS Exchange email systems after Microsoft was compromised, apparently by Chinese operatives...

The recently released Corruption Perceptions Index from Transparency International has New Zealand and Denmark ranked #1 as the least corrupt nations... So a great work but still room for improvement apparently.

The announcement a few weeks ago about the Elastic/Kibana license change to the SSPL has caused a bit of concern in the community, as such changes do. One response that popped up was from Matt Yonkovit over at Percona who outlines why he thinks open is better. Percona themselves seem to be doing nicely as a database service organisation supporting both open and sspl databases. As Matt says, it's hard but still worth it. 

So Google is having a bit of a fit about a proposed Australian law that would force it to pay journalists for content that it uses to attract people to its website and 'threatens' to disable search in Australia if the law is enacted. Here's a news flash, Google is not the only search engine on the market so good luck with that one lads.

In my search for reference material for a proposal to the NZ Govt I came across this webinar series from the European Opensource and Free Software Law Event (EOLE). A couple of sessions have already run but there are three to go so with the next one being Opensource governance in the public sector... heady stuff!

While the turmoil of the last few weeks in the US might seem like the main event it really is just a sideshow... and the new President is busy naming the people who are going to help him with the main event... including David Recordon as White House Director of Technology.

The term 'globalisation' may have become a euphemism for exploitation of foreign workers at the expense of your own labour force in some ways but once each country gets past that initial colonisation phase and starts developing their own markets you get to see some interesting technologies... in this case open source smartwatches. For those of you with a development bent there is the PineTime SmartWatch dev kit or if you want a ready to wear product you can get a P8 SmartWatch or go in with some friends and/or family members and get a three pack PineTime...