Last week, we brought you a story about a New Zealand animal charity that is teaching dogs to drive cars. Well, that program was a success, and one of the dogs drove a car better than your drunk uncle.

The “driving dogs” program was created by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in Auckland. The intention of the program is to show that dogs are smart creatures and can be trained to do many things with proper guidance. The SPCA wants people to adopt its awesome driving dogs and many of its other pets in need of homes.

Porter the dog was the first animal in the program to successfully “drive” a Mini. Watch the great clip of Porter driving below:

You know how that lamp in Pixar that makes you believe cold metal could actually be a great cuddle buddy? That’s what a team from New Zealand has created: a little loveable lamp that can both see and hear you.

The lamp is named Lamp and he is built with Arduino, an open source platform that lets you build electronically run entities on top of; a web cam; and six Servos motors. He looks for where you face is and moves around to find it if its not in its direct view. It also get confused when you hide your face. Should you decide to read or ignore the lamp, it will move up and down in order to grab your attention again.

The project is called Pinokio and unlike the Pixar Luxo lamp which is white, this lamp is black, but still has the personality.

The sweetest part of the video is when the lamp tries to turn itself back on. It’s not done playing with you and it’s not going to take your human ability to turn off machinery. Oh no, Lamp is staying on whether you like it or not.

Check out the video of Lamp below:

Pinokio from Pinokio on Vimeo.

hat tip CNET; Pixar Lamp image via Jason Pratt/Flickr

Xero is a public company. It was founded in New Zealand and is active on New Zealand, Australia, and the UK. With this hefty investment, it will attempt to infiltrate the US market, a space dominated by QuickBooks. This investment was led by Valar Ventures, which is backed by Peter Thiel, and Matrix Capital Management. Thiel participated in Xero’s round of $16.6 earlier this year. Of the $67 million, $49 million came in the form of capital, and $18 million came from purchased shares.

Sure, he is a massive publicity hound, but he’s an interesting publicity hound. Fresh off rebranding his defunct MegaUpload service as a sparkling new file-sharing service called Me.ga — yes that’s Mega, but it’s also ME dot GA — Dotcom now wants to help build a new fat pipe to online content in the U.S.

Specifically, in fact, to Los Angeles, home of the Hollywood execs who instigated his MegaUpload mega takedown.

One way or another New Zealand needs Pacific Fibre. I think it is important to reboot efforts to make it happen.

—
Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) November 03, 2012

Pacific Fibre was an attempt to create a second link between Australia, New Zealand, and Los Angeles. However, the consortium failed to attracted the $400 million in investment required to lay the 10,500 kilometer (6500 mile) cable and closed its doors as of August.

Now Dotcom, who lives in New Zealand, is proposing rebooting the project — which would surely be helpful to his new file-sharing business, as it needs high-speed global connectivity.

But while Dotcom’s legal problems may be slowly clearing up as both the American and New Zealand governments have significantly fumbled the copyright infringement proceedings against him, he is almost certainly still persona non grata to officialdom and content czars in both countries.

In other words: Dotcom agitating for a new intercontinental broadband cable may very well be the kiss of death to the project. That is, if it weren’t dead already.

At least one Internet user in New Zealand, however, who dubbed the effort megacable, pointed out the fatal flaw:

While I admire the @KimDotcom #megacable plan, there is a tiny flaw. US permission required to connect to USA m.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/articl…

—
Rod Drury (@roddrury) November 03, 2012

Image credit: Pacific Fibre; Hat tip: Ars Technica

But the new poster boy for internet freedom has a big-kids message:

“The war for the Internet has begun. Hollywood is in control of politics. The Government is killing innovation. Don’t let them get away with that.”

Whether you agree or disagree, Dotcom is eager to make his case on the new Kim.com, where he calls on American president Barack Obama to “end the war on internet freedom” … and shares 10 facts about the MegaUpload scandal and court cases in an attempt to both exonerate his company and demonstrate the illegal nature of the US government’s actions.

And he explicitly links his message to Dr. Martin Luther King, saying “I have a dream, like Dr. King.” He also links himself implicitly to Che Guevara, the famous Argentinian Marxist who contributed to the Fidel Castro’s revolution in Cuba, by wearing the beret cap in the video.

Watch, listen, enjoy:

Somewhat interestingly … on the bottom of the Kim.com website is a small image: a copyright notice.

And there’s a terms of service, which states that the website is copyrighted and may not be used by organizations, companies, or businesses for any purposes. And one more thing:

Unauthorized framing of or linking to the Website is prohibited.

I don’t think Che had a terms of service page, Kim.

Note:  last week Dotcom published the following letter to the movie industry via The Hollywood Reporter.

Dear Hollywood,

The Internet frightens you. But history has taught us that the greatest innovations were built on rejections. The VCR frightened you, but it ended up making billions of dollars in video sales.

You get so comfortable with your ways of doing business that any change is perceived as a threat. The problem is, we as a society don’t have a choice: The law of human nature is to communicate more efficiently. And the economic benefits of high-speed Internet and unlimited cloud storage are so great that we need to plan for the day when the transfer of terabytes of data will be measured in seconds.

Businesses and individuals will keep looking for faster connectivity, more robust online storage and more privacy. Transferring large pieces of content over the Internet will become common — not because global citizens are evil but because economic forces leading to “speed of light” data transfer and storage are so beneficial to societal growth.

Come on, guys, I am a computer nerd. I love Hollywood and movies. My whole life is like a movie.

I wouldn’t be who I am if it wasn’t for the mind-altering glimpse at the future in Star Wars. I am at the forefront of creating the cool stuff that will allow creative works to thrive in an Internet age. I have the solutions to your problems. I am not your enemy.

Providing “freemium” cloud storage to society is not a crime. What will Hollywood do when smartphones and tablets can wirelessly transfer a movie file within milliseconds?

The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. Instead of changing their views to fit the facts, they try to change the facts to fit their views. The fact remains that the benefits of Megaupload to society outweigh the burdens. But instead of adapting, you imported one of your action-conspiracy movie scripts into the real world. In my view, MPAA CEO and former Sen. Chris Dodd lobbied his friends in the White House to turn me into a villain who has to be destroyed. Due process? Rule of law? Eliminate me and my innovation and worry about the consequences later. Never mind that millions of Megaupload users lost access to cloud data like their wedding photos. Well done, Hollywood, everyone with similar innovations got the message. But wait … You did not read the end of the script.

The people of the Internet will unite. They will help me. And they are stronger than you. We will prevail in the war for Internet freedom and innovation that you have launched. We have logic, human nature and the invisible hand on our side.

As you should have known, our Mega services operated within the boundaries of the law. We had users that spanned from the military to Hollywood to lawyers and doctors. If you are unhappy with that, it is up to you to convince Congress to amend legislation. You tried with SOPA and you failed. As an alternative, you chose to lobby the Justice Department to ignore the law and stage a global show of force and destruction. The only parties a New Zealand court has found to have violated the law in this case are the local police and the FBI.

Regardless of the issues you have with new technologies, you can’t just engage armed forces halfway around the world, rip a peaceful man from his family, throw him in jail, terminate his business without a trial, take everything he owns without a hearing, deprive him of a fair chance to defend himself and do all that while your propaganda machine is destroying him in the media. Is that who you want to be?

There can still be a happy ending. I am working on solutions. Just call me or my lawyers. You know where to find me. Unfortunately I can only do lunch in New Zealand.

This open letter is free of copyright. Use it freely.

Image credit: Kim.com

Kim Dotcom, whose file-hosting service Megaupload was shut down by the New Zealand and U.S. governments for copyright infringement at the beginning of the year, has had plenty to say about the case until now. But as he awaits news about extradition to the U.S. from New Zealand, he’s become unusually quiet.

I’m wondering if his silence is due to the fact that the judge who was overseeing his extradition case to the U.S. has stepped down — presumably making Dotcom’s future a bit more tremulous.

The New Zealand Herald is reporting that Judge David Harvey, who was overseeing the extradition case, has removed himself after voicing his opinions on the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade agreement that could be expanded to make circumventing a DVD’s region code illegal. And for those of you who don’t know what region codes are, they are codes that allow certain DVDs to work only within certain countries to limit piracy.

Harvey, who previously looked favorably on Dotcom, referred to the U.S. as the enemy for its part in upholding silly matters of copyright law internationally. In this instance, it had to do with DVD region codes, but obviously those comments could paint him as biased in the case, which is why he decided to step down.

“Under TPP and the American Digital Millennium copyright provisions you will not be able to do that, that will be prohibited… if you do you will be a criminal – that’s what will happen,” Harvey said, adding, “We have met the enemy and he is [the] U.S.”

Harvey was previously responsible for reinstating Dotcom’s Internet access based on good behavior. He also allowed him to visit a recording studio to finish his politically charged hip-hop album, as VentureBeat previously reported back in April.

Photo illustration: Jolie O’Dell/VentureBeat

A New Zealand judge has pushed back the extradition of Megaupload kingpin Kim Dotcom to March 2013, a move that will give him more time to prepare for an eventual trial in the U.S.

Dotcom’s contentious extradition hearing was scheduled for Aug. 6, but several legal issues gave New Zealand pause. Essentially, aspects of the police raid on Dotcom’s home were illegal, as was cloning the hard drives of Dotcom’s 135 computers.

Dotcom has become a bit of an Internet folk hero as of late and now is acting as a larger-than-life figure fighting overreaching government charges related to copyright. His file-sharing service Megaupload was shut down in January by U.S. and New Zealand authorities as part of a massive sting operation against sites that enabled copyright infringement. Dotcom has now even attracted the support of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who says the case against Dotcom is “weak.”

The upcoming extradition hearing in August was looking like a tough battle for Dotcom, as U.S. authorities wanted to give him just a single 40-page document out of 22 million e-mails to prepare for his hearing. The U.S. argued that Dotcom did not need to see all the evidence against him before he faced trial in U.S. courts.

Now Dotcom will have more time to prepare for his extradition hearing in 2013, and perhaps he’ll be able to find a way to see all the evidence against him before that time.

And whether or not you believe that Kim Dotcom’s file-sharing business MegaUpload was a legal business or a thin front for profiteering from piracy, a New Zealand judge has just ruled that at least part of the search and seizure that resulted in the destruction of MegaUpload’s business and the arrest of Dotcom himself was illegal.

Oops.

One aspect of the search and seizure mission involved taking and cloning the hard drives of 135 computers in Dotcom’s $30 million mansion, under the authority of a general warrant. And that, says the judge, was over the line.

“These categories of items were defined in such a way that they would inevitably capture within them both relevant and irrelevant material. The police acted on this authorisation. The warrants could not authorise seizure of irrelevant material, and are therefore invalid.”

The current home page of MegaUpload.com

As has been well documented, American and New Zealand authorities arrested Dotcom, impounded his house, initiated an extradition request, and shut down MegaUpload.com. The site allegedly facilitated the piracy of more than $500 million of content through tactics like this.

The current legal wrinkle in the Dotcom case is not likely to end the MegaUpload founder’s legal woes. But it is one ray of sunshine for the embattled entrepreneur, arriving soon after Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak showed sympathy for his situation.

One thing is certain: Lawyers are making a lot of money off intellectual property cases. Dotcom will be lucky to have anything left of his considerable fortune by the time this legal mess is cleaned up.

Of course, if you’re a movie company executive, you’d say he’ll be lucky to have his freedom.

Image credit: ShutterStock

PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel must have a thing for Kiwis. He’s launching another venture fund focused on the otherwise unheard of New Zealand technology scene.

The fund, which Thiel is executing through his venture capital firm Valar Ventures, totals $32 million and received some money from the New Zealand Venture Investment Fund, according to the Wall Street Journal. Thiel is contributing roughly $12.1 million, with NZVIF and another organization picking up the rest.

According to New Zealand Minister of Economic Development Steven Joyce, the country needs this kind of fund not only for the money but also for the connections.

“[This] is a very positive development for New Zealand technology companies wanting to expand into large offshore markets,” Joyce told the Journal. “These companies require not only capital but also getting access to the right offshore networks in those markets and building their customer base.”

Recently, Valar Ventures invested a second time in New Zealand-based Xero, which creates accounting software for small businesses.

Thiel is otherwise known for being an early investor in Facebook and forhis creation of the Thiel Foundation, which encourages young folks to put off college and become entrepreneurs. Through the foundation, Thiel offers $100,000 to 20 people younger than 20 years old who have not gone to college and who have a business idea. The program is open to anyone around the world.

New Zealand dollar image via Shutterstock

The incident raised questions about Twitter’s security. The site has swiftly grown to more than 140 million users. It recently raised $100 million in venture capital and is valued by its investors at more than $1 billion. It has gone on a hiring spree, even as many question its plans to make money. And the fact that two teens were so easily able to take it over raises the concern that it’s neglecting security amid its torrid growth.

The hack first spread through an account named @Matsta, who resides in Auckland, New Zealand, the city where I live. I got in touch with Matt, the 17-year-old behind that Twitter handle, to find out the real story.

Matt and his friend Harrison, both high school students, admited that they were involved in spreading the exploitative code. (Both are 17, so VentureBeat is not publishing their last names.) Drawing from our exclusive interview with the pair, who have both blogged about the incident, we now have the story behind the Great Twitter Exploit of 2010.

The hack used well-known security flaws in JavaScript, a simple programming language used extensively in websites, to take over the accounts of Twitter users when they visited the service’s website. Users rolling their mouse over certain pages and links automatically retransmitted malicious code, messages, and links to their followers — the mechanism by which the Twitter worm swiftly spread. Twitter fixed the exploit later Tuesday morning.

The story began when a developer in Japan, known as @kinugawamasato on Twitter, found a vulunerability in Twitter’s code. The exploit, a version of a commonly known hacking technique called cross-site scripting (XSS), enabled custom JavaScript code to be executed whenever a user’s cursor paused over a link. The developer reportedly made Twitter aware about the issue a month ago. Company representatives reportedly responded by telling him they’d fixed it. (According to a Twitter corporate blog post, they had addressed the issue, but subsequently rolled out code that restored the vulnerability.) The Japanese hacker, noticing that the vulnerability remained, went on to create a harmless Twitter profile that changed the background colors of his tweets to different colors as a proof of concept.

The exploit was seen by a 17-year old Australian teenager named Pearce, who goes by @zzap on Twitter. Pearce modified the exploit to enable it to insert JavaScript in a tweet. This version of the exploit, which he posted on Twitter, displayed the words “uh oh” whenever a user rolled their mouse over a link.

One of Pearce’ followers on Twitter was Harrison, a friend of Matt’s, who goes by @Peppery on Twitter. Harrison noticed the code in the hack was too long for it to run any “meaningful” JavaScript code, given Twitter’s 140-character limit on posts. He went on to shorten the code to a fourth of its original size, and found a way to make it automatically retweet a message by having the entire page — not just a single link — react on the movement of the cursor. That improvement proved key to spreading the hostile code.

“When you can make something retweet itself, you have what is essentially the same thing as the Samy XSS worm that propagated on MySpace some years ago — a virally spreading exploit,” Harrison pointed out.

Having laid the groundwork for a successful exploit, Harrison then instant-messaged the code to his friend, Matt (@Matsta), as a joke. ”Go to Twitter and copy and paste this into the box,” he said in a message, pointing to the code he had just come up with.

“When I sent it his way, I was mostly curious as to what would happen when the code was posted,” Harrison says.

Matt, who said he was unaware of what the code would do, tweeted it out to his 800 people who subscribed to him on Twitter, and thus was born the infamous Twitter exploit.

Now it’s no secret what took place afterwards. In just over two minutes, the exploit had been retweeted thousands of times, spreading from user to user as they opened their Twitter homepages and saw someone’s tweet.

Jonathan George, the developer of Boxcar, a popular iPhone application which sends Twitter notifications to a phone, noted that one of Matt’s tweets had been retweeted 61,516 times. Needless to say, within minutes, the word “Matsta” was trending on Twitter.

Soon after, spammers and other miscreants took notice and modified the code for their own use, spreading links to pornographic sites and opening up malicious popup windows. What started as some idle fun to see how Twitter would handle self-propagating JavaScript code turned into a viral spam heaven, with links being spread by the the mere opening of the Twitter homepage.

“We had no idea that it would take off in that way,” said Matt. “I only gave it two seconds of thought before I posted the code.”

Around 7 a.m. Pacific Time, Twitter suspended Matt’s Twitter account, apparently in response to the hacking incident.

However, the code was still out and being retweeted until Twitter developers finally fixed the underlying vulnerability at around 9 a.m. Pacific Time. Meanwhile, back in New Zealand, where it was already night, Matt and Harrison headed to bed to get ready for class the next morning.

The news caught fire as they slept. The story was covered by nearly every major outlet around the world. To date, there are over 1,800 news stories containing the word “Matsta”, according to Google News. Back at home, the New Zealand Herald reported the involvement of two fellow Kiwis in the attack, as did a national TV news channel.

As a result, Matt and Harrison’s Facebook pages have since been littered with links to coverage of the incident, with friends and acquaintances congratulating the two for making world news with an idle prank.

Matt has since made a new Twitter profile and hopes the company will let this one slide. “No, I will not hack your Twitter,” he promises in his bio. (Update: it appears Matt’s new account has also been suspended by Twitter. Update 2: Twitter is working with Matt to restore his account, on the promise that he will “report this kind of stuff responsibly before letting it spread.”)

Carolyn Penner, a Twitter spokesperson, said the company would not pursue legal action against either Matt or Harrison.

[Homepage photo: bixentro]