Avoiding a ManageMyHealth repeat + CES26 Review

Paul Spain:
Greetings and welcome along to the New Zealand Tech Podcast. I’m your host, Paul Spain. And great to have CallumCallum McMenamin from open access joining me on the show today. How are you, Callum?

Callum McMenamin:
Kia ora, Paul. Thanks for inviting me onto the podcast. Doing great, thanks.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Great to have you here. Maybe a quick intro for those who haven’t come across you before. They have been a fair bit in the media over the past couple of weeks with things to do with Manage My Health. Yeah, tell me, tell us a little bit about what you do with OpenAccess.

Callum McMenamin:
Yeah, so OpenAccess is a consultancy that I run and I help organizations to make their digital platforms like websites and apps more accessible for disabled people. So just making sure that if someone is blind, for instance, they can fully utilize every feature of an app and a website. It’s something that’s pretty important for many services, especially government services. So I’ve been consulting now for like the last year, mainly working with NGOs and charities and providing a bit of training as well. And then before that, I helped to write the latest version of accessibility standards for New Zealand government and I developed the monitoring system for that as well. So that’s just a bit of background into what I’ve been up to over the past few years.

Paul Spain:
Fantastic, fantastic. Well, really keen to delve into the Manage My Health situation. And look, I come at this from sort of a number of perspectives and I think that there’s a degree in which it’s important for us to step back at this point in time. Obviously there’s still information and reporting and gaps to fill in on exactly what did happen. I’m particularly interested in how, as a country, we do better from a cybersecurity and a data privacy perspective. And I’m really interested in us chatting around some potential approaches that could help with that. And when we were talking, you know, prior to the show, you know, I think we’ve maybe got some interesting approaches that might not have necessarily been, well, certainly aren’t in place today, put it that way, that might be able to help. But tell us how Manage My Health got onto your radar, because you preempted this, you know, maybe sort of, you know, six months ago that there was a concern around a lack of multi factor authentication, you know, being required to access the Manage My Health system, which, you know, I think we know is very much at odds with, you know, with current standards for logging into things, you know, whether it’s, you know, placing an order for some Kentucky Fried Chicken or, you know, whatever else it is.

Paul Spain:
Right, like there was an issue and you raised it.

Callum McMenamin:
Yeah. So it was about six months ago, I looked into a crystal ball and I saw all of this happening. But no, in reality, six months ago I basically did an audit of all of my digital accounts and I just wanted to list what form of authentication security I had on every single account. A completely normal thing to do. And basically I went through and made sure that every account that I used had at least Multi Factor Authentication or even more secure, I use a Yubikey. So hardware based authentication on those services and pretty much every single thing that I used supported Multi Factor Authentication except Manage My Health. A point I’ve been making in the media is even KFC has mandatory MFA Multi Factor Authentication. So it’s rather unusual that we can order chicken so securely, but our health portals still don’t have mfa.

Callum McMenamin:
Recently Manage My Health has added a Multi Factor Authentication feature. So you can use an authenticator app, I believe, or maybe email based six digit codes. Yes, but it’s not mandatory and it’s, you know, users have to go and enable it manually. So I would say that the percentage of people that have that enabled will be pretty low.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, I agree. I mean, I found myself on the Manage My Health platform because my GP used it and I was not aware of there being any MFA capability when I used it during COVID The GP stopped using it maybe a couple of years ago. This was one of the other things that shocked me was that after the GP stopped using it, we all know that old data should be removed and you don’t just sort of leave this stuff kicking around. And that was not done. Now I think this comes into, I guess looking at a range of lessons that we can all take away and encourage some better behaviour going forwards.

Callum McMenamin:
Yeah, I read into those reports where practices had moved between patient portals, they might have moved from Manage My Health to my indices and all that data was just kept inside Manage My Health. So then you’ve got everyone’s patient data spread across two systems, which doubles the attack surface. So the places where hackers can get in are just doubled because there’s two systems you can attack now instead of one. So there’s some pretty obvious information security risks when data is treated that way. It’d be so much better if there was a way to ensure that health data only existed in one place at a time. It would probably make it far less likely to encounter these kinds of breaches.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, I guess there’s probably some pros and cons of sort of approaches of how you link everything together if it’s in one place, but then you can access it from a portal that goes back and the portal doesn’t have MFA on it, then, you know, you could be opening up to a lot, a lot more data. If all your data was there. In my case, you know, because it was the health files that were, that were compromised. I went, had a look and, you know, recognized I didn’t actually have any health files in there. And. Yeah, but, but so if I look at where I see some disappointment from my perspective, it’s not just manage my health, you know, it’s the GP that selected a piece of software to store health data that would be available publicly. And we all know that a reasonably significant percentage of the population do not have unique passwords for different sites that they access. So when you’re going through a software selection process, and this is something my firm’s involved in on a very, very regular basis from two perspectives.

Paul Spain:
One, from helping organizations to select software that is going to be a fit for, you know, fit for purpose as well as being appropriate from a risk perspective. Data privacy and cybersecurity. So we do that involved in the selection side. The other area we come in is to try and fix up when an organization has selected some software and maybe they’ve started realising that they didn’t get it right and that there are some issues. So we kind of come at that from two perspectives. But we’ve certainly come across this in another area where data privacy was very important and some software was selected and I guess the provider involved who selected the software had done what they considered appropriate due diligence. But it didn’t even include the basics of, you know, checking things like is there multi factor authentication so that, you know, that I would say there’s numerous, you know, people who are, you know, probably culpable there. Not just manage my health, it’s your gp.

Paul Spain:
And whatever technologists were, you know, were signing off and saying, yeah, let’s go with this platform without going back to manage my health and saying, hey, we’ll sign off on your platform once you’ve ticked these boxes and address these risks and given us clarity that we’re making an appropriate move.

Callum McMenamin:
Yeah, well, the government’s security framework for health, the health information security framework basically does that. It delegates responsibility down to the lowest levels of the system. So for instance, you know, Health New Zealand or the Ministry of Health, they claim to not be responsible for the security of these systems. They also claim to not be responsible for monitoring the implementation of health Information security frameworks, so all of the responsibilities delegated down to the gp. I question whether it really is the most sensible model to make our 1000 GP practices individually responsible for upholding data security requirements. I’m sort of more of the opinion that the government should have had a more centralized approach to its assurance of data security for health information. Basically, if you’re going to privatise digital health systems, we at least need to make sure that information isn’t going to be public as a basic requirement. I would say.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, I mean, I guess we’ve had private health care general practitioners for a very, very long time. In my case, my general practitioner as part of a much bigger group, the doctors. And so to me, they’re of the scale. You would expect them to be able to make a professional decision and select software accordingly and hold their software vendor to account. But they didn’t. But I see the wisdom in having appropriate mechanisms when it’s things like health data, financial data and so on, that we have the right structures in place. And when we look at, say, the world of banking, our banks are held to account in varying areas financially, otherwise the regulator comes in with an iron fist. Right.

Paul Spain:
And people potentially end up in jail and the like when it comes to financial things, when it comes to privacy, this is probably something I’ve been going on about for a reasonable period of time, is we haven’t had legislation that really has teeth. So in a situation where there is, say, negligence in, you know, how data has been looked after and it leads to, you know, some sort of a breach, then what we’ve seen in Australia, for instance, is fines, millions of dollars of fines. You know, we’ve seen, you know, people in New Zealand, like a former Prime Minister as a director, get held to account on financial matters, but when it comes to these privacy matters as a director, you know, it seems to be a sort of a wet bus ticket. So I think there’s an element, you know, here where as a country we can step that up. Right. But now, delving into the work that you’ve done from an accessibility perspective with government entities, you were telling me around the auditing mechanisms that you’re involved in setting up, so automated auditing of government health, sorry, government websites from an accessibility perspective. And I’m really interested to see, you know, could there be a parallel in terms of what goes on there with how we should be looking after, you know, government and government data, you know, individuals sort of, you know, key data like health data and. Yeah, is there a parallel? Is there a Better way.

Paul Spain:
And of course other countries around the world, you know, do a lot more than New Zealand. We do have to consider this in the context of, let’s say we were comparing and earlier we were chatting around a friend of mine who did. He built a website for Royal Mail in the uk. Now that’s a government entity, you know, equivalent I guess, of New Zealand Post here. And they were held to a very high standard when it came to accessibility in the UK. But of course you’ve got, you know, something like 10 times the population of New Zealand. So in terms of funding, that sort of thing, more money available. And then, you know, we had some interactions on a project that he was involved in, you know, here in New Zealand for the Blind Foundation.

Paul Spain:
And so, you know, you’ve got these realities that we have to recognise with New Zealand. We don’t necessarily have as deep pockets as some other countries, but we also need to still get things right when it comes to data privacy and cybersecurity. And so we have to find a way to move forward that means we don’t get continuous repeats.

Callum McMenamin:
Yeah, that’s a very good point. So what I’ve noticed in this situation is the way the government handles accessibility and all the history there seems to be basically identical to the way that information security is being handled. So for accessibility in New Zealand government we have a standard called the web Accessibility Standard and that’s been mandated by cabinet for over 20 years, I believe. So pretty much all government agencies have to meet this standard. But what happens if an agency chooses to ignore the standard? Well, basically nothing. The system doesn’t have any kind of enforcement mechanism. So when I joined my last role in New Zealand government at Internal affairs, they were responsible for the accessibility standard. So I sort of took that job with the condition that I’d get to build an automated system to centrally monitor how well every agency is meeting the accessibility standard.

Callum McMenamin:
So I used open source software, Axe Core and I built a web crawler using Python and this Python script would basically crawl every single public facing government website and it would automatically test it against the accessibility standards. Automated testing only picks up about 20% of issues, so it’s not full coverage. But my argument is always 20% coverage across the entire system every three months is a lot better than zero coverage at all.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, I think it’s a brilliant initiative and yeah, making that sort of part of taking on the role. Absolutely perfect. Right. What a good way to do it.

Callum McMenamin:
Yeah, well, I started developing the code before I got the job in my spare time and it was sort of like, you know, it was a bit of a janky Python script at the time. And I was thinking, man, this really needs to be part of the public service. So, yeah, they ended up adopting it and I sort of donated it to the government. So it’s under their control now. However, it’s open source under a GPL v3 license, so you can take the code, you can run it on your own computer, and other governments even could use the system if they wanted to. And the data that comes out of the system is published publicly on data.govt.nz. so this government performance data across all agencies, which frankly airs all of their dirty laundry about accessibility because most of them are failing horrifically, that’s all. Public and Internal affairs has released a leaderboard of agencies and simultaneously I released a Loser Board, which ranks the agencies and the websites based on how badly they fail.

Paul Spain:
Did that help?

Callum McMenamin:
It’s had a response, I would say. Some people love it, some people hate it. I’ve been looking at the data because data has been released now for about nine months. So there’s been three releases of quarterly data and the average number of accessibility issues per page is slightly declining. I haven’t yet done any proper statistical analysis on it to determine if that’s like a significant amount of decline or whether it’s just noise. But that’s something that I’ll be doing once we’ve got a few more data points.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. So, yeah, that concept of regularly auditing and seeing how compliant those government entities are when it comes to accessibility, I imagine you could. You could mirror some of that from a cybersecurity and data privacy perspective, especially if you were to go a little bit further and to take what you can get automatically and put a requirement on those entities to also whether it’s run some additional auditing in house or to answer a series of questions on a regular basis, there would be, you know, a mechanism that would give us certainly, you know, much more clarity around some of these sorts of issues. And then I guess it’s deciding, well, who does it cover? Is it just the government entities or. I mean, in this case, we’re looking at, you know, really important data, health data. I think financial data probably sits in a similar sort of category. Maybe those that are regulated in some ways or hold personally identifiable information, like, you know, scans of people’s, you know, driver’s licenses and passports, which we’ve seen breached, you know, in this country, you know, in the past by the likes of, you know, KiwiSaver, KiwiSaver provider and so on. So, yeah, I wonder whether that is something that would, you know, would make sense to actually fire up on a similar basis.

Callum McMenamin:
Absolutely, that is exactly my thought. So the thing that I’m advocating for is that the Ministry of Health or Health New Zealand needs a cybersecurity team that is focused on auditing all of the core systems that hold health data, including the private sector. So one of the important things about that is you need to hire the right type of staff for the team. You don’t want a pack of policy advisors, basically, no shade on policy advisors. They do great work, but they’re the wrong type of person to be running this sort of system. We need software developers with the right kind of software, either developed in house or using off the shelf software. And integrating it together, you could probably develop a very, very good monitoring system for security that will be able to cover hundreds, if not thousands of systems. That’s what we did for accessibility.

Callum McMenamin:
I was a single software developer by myself and I generated a system that had oversight over the entire government’s set of websites. So you don’t need a huge amount of investment to run this kind of system. You just can’t, you can’t hire the types of staff who do everything via an Excel spreadsheet. You need someone who understands how to program systems, who can leverage AI as much as they can. And that’s one of the biggest benefits with these automated compliance monitoring systems is with current algorithms. You know, you might get 20% of coverage of issues, but obviously AI is getting smarter and smarter. And as it gets more intelligent and reliable, you’ll be able to start integrating it slowly more and more into that monitoring system. And you’ve already got all the bedrock blade for that monitoring framework to be running.

Callum McMenamin:
So I, I just see it as a, a strategy that is only going to get more and more effective as time goes on without needing, you know, 500 staff to be constantly manually auditing systems.

Paul Spain:
Now, something I do want to comment on in terms of Manage My health, and this came out quite late in the piece, is my understanding is that they’ve got ISO 27001 certification from a cybersecurity perspective. You know, this to me is, you know, it’s usually a positive sign when organizations commit to this type of compliance, but it’s not the be all and end all. So, you know, I think credit where credit’s due, that they’ve obviously have made, you know, they’ve made that investment and that would be, you know, a part of software Selection process is looking at whether an organization’s got these things in play. But it’s a reminder to us that having a checklist is not the entire process to solving these sorts of problems. And you’ve got to have people that are aware and familiar with the sorts of challenges and risks that exist. And you’ve gotta keep changing what you measure and look at. And a compliance mechanism that’s weeks, months or years old. The longer that time span is, the more things it’s going to miss because the cybersecurity landscape will continue to change.

Paul Spain:
There’ll be new threats, new approaches. That said, I agree with you around your earlier comments around multi factor authentication. I mean this is kind of, you know, basic sort of table stakes for, you know, any system that holds any, you know, important data. There’s, I’m sure, a few things in this world, you know, where multi factor authentication might not be, you know, make that much difference in the scheme of it. But you know, that’s becoming a smaller and smaller percentage of systems. And with this type of data. Yeah, I don’t think there’s probably any excuse.

Callum McMenamin:
Yeah, and you’re right about ISO 27001, where you know, it’s great that they claim to meet that standard, but that’s a standard that also doesn’t mandate multi factor authentication as far as I’m aware. It’s very people based, very process based. You know, do you have an incident management plan, you know, that kind of framework. So it doesn’t go down to the level of fine grained application security controls. That’s where I think there’s room for an additional standard to be mandated and monitored by the government where they just pick a minimum set of technical controls that must be present in all applications that hold health data. And that could include requirements like multi factor authentication, rate limiting of login attempts, which from the public information sounds like was also an issue with Manage My Health. You could make thousands of API requests trying to log in and it wouldn’t get blocked. Other technical security controls might be appropriate, use of capture technologies to prevent bots from trying to hack systems automatically.

Callum McMenamin:
All of those sorts of things could probably be added as an additional standard which currently is absent. The health information security framework is much like ISO 27001 where it’s very high level. The health information security framework does not mandate multi factor authentication either. It mentions it as a great technology, but it doesn’t mandate it. And I just think in 2026 relying on password authentication is just not acceptable because passwords are so easy to breach with credential stuffing and all those sorts of things.

Paul Spain:
I think we’re probably all on the same page on that. Yeah, I guess it’s interesting. My firm’s involved in cybersecurity auditing and part of what we do is for. For say, technical teams, we’ll help them out so they’re able to get things addressed without having to wait for the scary thing of the board saying, hey, we want to get an audit. Actually, sometimes that’s much better to come from a technical team to get someone that will come alongside you, look out for issues and then work with you to solve them and then you can report back up to the board. But we also do it the other way around as well. And look, the reality is any sort of audit or security framework is not gonna catch every single thing, so there’s an ongoing action required. Alright, well, keeping moving.

Paul Spain:
Lots more we can sort of delve into on that one, but I think.

Callum McMenamin:
We’Ll leave it there.

Paul Spain:
For today. We did get news through from Facilities group Canopy Healthcare around a security breach there, July 2025, impacting patient records and some confidential data. Impacting? Yeah, potentially similar sort of number. 127,000 patients potentially impacted there. And yeah, it’s kind of only just now that we’ve learnt about that one. I think we’ll leave that one there as well, rather than delving in. But, you know, certainly some other lessons. The other thing from a New Zealand perspective in the news, company SCX AI out of Australia partnering with New Zealand entity Korero AI on building an in country here in New Zealand, Aotearoa Sovereign AI platform being called Project Krero.

Paul Spain:
And the idea is that this would be deployed on local New Zealand infrastructure, be very much focused on New Zealand support for Te Reo and drawing on the work that SCX have already done and with the governance being able to be, you know, very much local and with the goal of a rollout in 2026. What do you think about this idea of sort of sovereign AI? It’s been bandied around, a few people suggesting, hey, government needs to do this, we need to have something that’s local. We don’t have to rely on the rest of the world. Are you keen?

Callum McMenamin:
Yeah, very keen. I think it’s incredibly risky to completely rely upon foreign companies for our access to artificial intelligence and for computation because, you know, intelligence and computation is going to, you know, become increasingly important as time goes on. One of the things that I’m very interested in is, you know, in the us, the, the, the data centers running AI are not very environmentally friendly. Know, they, they create a lot of pollution through the way the electricity is generated and the way that they call the chips as well, wastes a lot of drinkable water. So in New Zealand, I think we’ve got some massive advantages around that, where, for instance, we could, you know, instead of making aluminium with the Manipuri hydro station, you know, aluminium, pretty old and boring, why don’t we invest that electricity in huge amounts of computation and then we could have some of the greenest computation and intelligence in the world because it’s all just hydropowered. So I think New Zealand has some opportunities to become a leader in that sense. And I think there’s already data center companies taking advantage of our hydropower for that exact purpose.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, look, I’m really curious how this might play out. The local entity has only just been launched. It looking at a little bit of the information that’s online on LinkedIn. So I think this is something that’s very new, one person sort of associated with it. I think if this can be done and can be financed and can be sort of solid and stable, yeah, could be really exciting. But I think we’re right at the beginning, you know, in terms of the realities from what I’m seeing publicly. But, yeah, happy to hear from them and delve into this a little bit more to understand how it could play out. But, yeah, some important points there that you raise, Callum.

Paul Spain:
So thanks for that now. Just quickly wanted to. There’s been things floating through the media around. Cesar. What used to be Consumer Electronics show happens early January every year. What caught my interest and attention this year was the worst of show stuff. I don’t, I haven’t noticed those things sort of maybe hitting the news as much in the past, but, you know, we’ve. We saw, you know, a whole bunch of kind of humanoid robots and these things kind of falling over and being clumsy.

Paul Spain:
There’s LG’s robot to help around the house and, you know, it’s got its articulated arms and its hands and, you know, I think, you know, the sorts of things they were highlighting is its ability to, you know, you know, load or unload your dishwasher, you know, folding laundry, serving food and controlling smart appliances. Now, this is still at sort of a concept stage rather than a commercial product. But, yeah, I think, you know, you were curious whether we need a robot that, you know, might take a very, very long time to do something that as a human you could get done lickety split.

Callum McMenamin:
Yeah, yeah. I saw one of the videos of, you know, this robot probably powered by, you know, half a million Nvidia GPUs consuming 10 gigawatts of electricity. And it was just sitting there struggling to fold a tea towel. I found that moment to be quite fascinating. But you know, we’ve got to start somewhere and I’m sure everyone’s seen there’s been massive, massive progress and our ability to control robotics. I imagine the, the computation involved in folding a tea towel is probably immense. It seems simple to us because we’ve had, you know, millions of years of evolution programming our brain and our sensory organs. But you know, to, to develop, you know, human made systems that can replicate that behavior is pretty incredible.

Callum McMenamin:
So it should have amazing impacts even for disabled people as well. For instance. So some disabled people rely upon carers in order to, you know, help them with daily tasks. If we can get humanoid robots that, you know, don’t have to pay them as much, they’re available 24 7, you don’t have to deal with any kind of, you know, privacy invasions. Hopefully it could be an incredible future for many people.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah. Now other things that were kind of coming up in their kind of, I guess, you know, fails or worst in show. Samsung got a call out for their bespoke AI family hub refrigerator which, you know, you’re supposed to be able to, you know, talk to it and you know, it keeps a watch on what’s in the fridge and you know, what you might have available at a given time and so on. I guess, you know, issues there when the technology doesn’t work perfectly, which we’re all used to with, with AI and voice assistants. Don’t always hear what you say and get that stuff right and maybe just don’t really add that much value. And these are really, really expensive gadgets to have in your home. And the nature of them is that the software only ends up getting updated for a few years and then you’ve got this really fancy gadget that really you probably should unplug for the safety of your home network at some point. Point.

Paul Spain:
Even if you like the features to start with, they soon get out of date. Yeah.

Callum McMenamin:
There is a direction of product design that does really frustrate me. Just the unnecessary integration of Internet capabilities and screens on fridges just, it’s completely pointless as far as I’m aware. I think good product design for boring gadgets like a fridge is just make a good fridge, you know, that keeps your food cold, that lasts a long time. I think that’s all we really need from our fridges and unnecessary Internet integrations. Yeah, it creates massive risks. So just recently Logitech had issues with their, their peripherals, their mice across the entire world, where if you were using macOS and Logitech peripherals, Logitech’s Options plus software, which provides the drivers for those peripherals, just completely stopped working. And it’s because Logitech forgot to renew a certificate for their code signing. It expired.

Callum McMenamin:
And when that date was reached, macOS refused to launch the software and that also impacted its auto updater. So they couldn’t even patch the software once this issue occurred because the auto updater could not execute.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah, that was quite a debacle. And it’s a reminder that we can end up with this disconnect between technical and technology teams and leadership in a business where there’s no understanding of what goes on. There would have been people within the organisation that, you know, knew this is something that should be monitored and should be dealt with on a, you know, on a regular basis. Who knows whether those people were still there or what the issue was. But, you know, these are things that shouldn’t, shouldn’t be left to chance. And, you know, it’s kind of got echoes of, you know, privacy and other sort of technical, you know, problems that we’ve been talking about where you get that disconnect between those that maybe know what the right approach is to run technology systems well and those who may be in charge of an organisation and you get some breakages and disconnect and then things start falling over. The Ring Doorbell, which is now owned by Amazon, they also won a. I don’t know if win is the right term for being featured as a worst in show for privacy and they said it was because they were doubling down on privacy invasion and supporting the misconception that more surveillance always makes us safer.

Paul Spain:
And that was a comment from Cindy Cohen, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I think a part of the involved in the judging the worst in show and apparently this new feature which Ring have rolled out is an AI unusual event alert that’s supposed to detect unexpected people or happenings such as in quotes, a pack of coyotes arriving at your door. So I find this one quite fascinating because some years ago I was supposed to do an interview with the founder of Ring Doorbells at ces, but there was some privacy headlines at the time, some issues of some missteps from Ring and so I don’t think Jamie, the CEO and founder, even turned up at Cesar. Certainly my interview with him got kicked to the curb. And I was quite interested in chatting with him. Cause it’s quite an interesting story how he’s built the billion dollar business and sold it to Amazon and got rejected on the Shark Tank program. No one wanted to invest with him. But anyway, it was kind of interesting that here they are back at CES and yeah, they’re really being challenged from a privacy perspective.

Paul Spain:
I will say I use the ring doorbells and some of their technology and I like it, generally speaking. But also when I look back over the years, you kind of think around, well, would my life have been better or worse without some of these technologies? And I do think we have to start doing that with some of the technology we use, is evaluating how important really is it to our lives and do we necessarily need everything that software and technology can deliver? Because sometimes, as we’ve seen with the Manage My Health Portal, the results are probably in the light of day, not in the right direction.

Callum McMenamin:
Yeah, and I also wonder, you know, lots of people start frothing as soon as they hear the word cloud and, you know, everything gets pushed into the cloud and, you know, cloud just means someone else’s computer. And I just wonder whether we could get more product design heading in the direction of, you know, systems being sort of more self contained, doing more computation on the device, more storage of information on the device, so it’s held within the local vicinity rather than sent to a central cloud location. So that’s sort of what went wrong with Logitech. Too much of the functionality of their peripherals relies on systems that are outside of the mouse, that are outside of the keyboard. So it’s a design philosophy that could help improve privacy if more is done locally.

Paul Spain:
Yep, that’s a good point. Now, onto other things at ces. Lego have come out and unveiled their smart brick at ces. What stood out to me is that this is just a normal size brick from Lego. It might be a reasonably expensive brick. I think 60 or 70 US roughly for one of them. Yes, 70 US dollars. They’ll usually come as part of other kits.

Paul Spain:
Look to me, I think, you know, things like or brand like Lego bringing in a component that maybe stirs some curiosity in youngsters in a reasonably sort of easy to get your head around way is not a bad idea. But I don’t know, you might not agree. What do you think, Callum?

Callum McMenamin:
I can see good things and bad things in it. So good things is they’re innovating, they’re trying new stuff. That seems pretty interesting. The demo seemed somewhat Interesting with little flashing lights and sounds coming out of it. But on the other hand, it is slightly sad that this very analog form of entertainment for kids, right, and adults, you know, assembling LEGO bricks is getting digitized increasingly. That, that sort of does make me a little bit sad. But I do remember back when I was a kid there was that, oh, what was it called? Lego Mindstorms. There was, there was like this whole um, LEGO system where you could, there was a little sort of microcontroller thing that you could program and stuff like that.

Callum McMenamin:
So you know, they’ve delved into technology in the past and it was pretty awesome. So I don’t know. Good on them.

Paul Spain:
Yep, we’ll see how it plays out. Other news. Boston Dynamics announcing their production ready version of their Atlas robot. So yeah, and just, you know, always fun to watch the Boston Dynamics videos and see their robots doing all sorts of, all sorts of things and their first deployments, working with Hyundai and yeah, putting them into commercial settings where they can operate. So it is an interesting sort of time ahead as we start to see these humanoid robots go into things like factories and scenarios where in the past you would have a single use robot with a specific role. And now as we move into a world with humanoid robots where a robot can be used for a much broader range of tasks potentially. But as you highlighted with the folding, the laundry type of example, some of these use cases are yet to really be fully proven out. Other announcements.

Paul Spain:
Intel have their core Ultra Series 3 chips and they’re very much, I guess, hoping this is gonna be part of their comeback. Intel really been, you know, really been struggling, you know, versus the ARM chips and AMD as well, you know, really massively impacting their, their market share and their share price and so on. And the other one that stood out is Nvidia unveiling self driving car technology. Now their tech has been part of many systems, whether it’s what Tesla have been doing and most others in the autonomous car world have used a reasonable amount of their technology and what they’re launching is an open source reasoning AI platform specifically for autonomous driving. So yeah, it’s gonna be fascinating to sort of see, you know, is that gonna catch up very quickly to the other technologies out there? Are we going to, you know, see those that have, you know, maybe got their investments in, in the likes of Tesla and hoping that’s going to make them a lot of money. Are we going to see these companies that have been really invested in this area? Find out. Actually look, the technology’s all been made open source and you just need to throw money at Nvidia and away you go. It’s not about actually developing the technology yourself.

Callum McMenamin:
Yeah, with self driving technology as well. I just think for disabled people particularly, that’s going to be so incredible. So for instance, I can’t drive a car, so I unfortunately have to rely upon New Zealand’s investments in public transport, which are practically invisible. So, you know, if there were self driving cars available where I could just press a button and a robot just drives me wherever I want to go, that would be life changing. And I’m very frustrated that in New Zealand we’re obviously lagging behind and getting these robot taxis driving around and stuff. I just wish we could get that here as soon as possible.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, a little bit more of a wait ahead now. The last thing I’ll add in as well now this was not from ces, although a lot of this tech on site at CES end of last year I talked about trying out the new remarkable devices which is sort of E Paper note taking tablets. So yeah, really interesting to see that technology continue to evolve and now coming through with a colour screen. So the one I’ve spent the most time with was the Markable Paper Pro Move. Quite enjoying that. But it did give me a bit of an initial view on the idea of E Ink and the new devices offering colour. So when I got the Kindle coloursoft that got a bit delayed getting to me, but arrived sort of around Christmas, I probably had a. A not so positive sort of feeling around the idea of colour and E Ink devices.

Paul Spain:
But as I’ve used these devices a little bit more, Both the Kindle ColourSoft and also the Remarkable, which also competes with Kindle’s, they don’t have an exact equivalent of that particular one, but they do compete in that space of a paper replacement for note taking. That’s digital with E Ink. Yeah. I guess over my experience I’ve probably decided that I actually do quite like adding in the colour into E Ink. There are just some scenarios where it really helps, but that does have to be balanced out with the reality. And I guess Kindle have put it there in the name with Kindle coloursoft as it’s not the bright sort of vibrant colour that you can see with ink on paper or the brightness that you’ll see of colours from an LED tv. But just even using the Kindle and seeing all your book covers in color sort of feels nice. There is, you know, things like if you’re looking at illustrations that are colour and so on, you know, it’s definitely a nicer experience.

Paul Spain:
And yeah, certain text that might be highlighted or what have you, sometimes that works. Well, not in every case though. So for instance, if you’ve got, you know, say some text that’s been highlighted in red, what I found was that red text next to black text. The red text kind of just looks grey. So it’s like that’s a little bit disappointing. But I think my pick is that in the same way our computer monitors moved from being monochrome back in my younger years to, to colour, this is probably the direction that much of this will move. And the price differential between a typical E Ink device and a colour E Ink device will mostly evaporate over time. But the other thing I saw sort of delving into this is there is a massive whole market of products that most of us have never heard of in terms of these, note taking, E Ink devices.

Paul Spain:
A whole range of brands that don’t, you know, aren’t available necessarily broadly and major retailers and so on and then more obscure ones that you can find on, you know, the vendor website or through AliExpress. I saw someone was really excited around a little one that they, they just attached to the back of their phone and they read, they read ebooks off it and you can buy this little thing for something like 70 New Zealand dollars and it’s got a 4.3 inch screen or something. So there’s a really great variety of these products. But yep, I think for me the colour is a win. Whether it’s worth actually paying for it, that’s going to be I guess down to the individual purchaser. But yeah, my pick is in the future that that will just become the norm. The Kindle ColorSoft thing starts about $449 in New Zealand. So it’s not a low cost purchase.

Paul Spain:
And these devices don’t last forever. That’s been my experience as well. Kindles do tend to die after a few years for whatever reason. Not always, but I’d say my failure rate on Kindles is reasonably high. And I hear a lot of other people who find after a few years their Kindle just dies for some unexplained reason. And the Kindle Scribe, which is their note taking one that I got maybe four or five years ago, yeah, that’s stopped working correctly now. There we go.

Callum McMenamin:
Yeah, I think it’s pretty cool technology that we, you know, are now seeing color in E Ink. You know, it’s long been just a very grayscale technology. So yeah, super happy to see that. Yeah.

Paul Spain:
Now, before we finished up, it’s good if there’s anything else that you want to, you know, add in around, you know, the work that you’re doing at OpenAccess or, you know, where people should look if they wanted to find out, you know, a bit more about your work.

Callum McMenamin:
Yeah, so I’ve got a website, it’s OpenAccess nz. And yeah, we’re just working. We generally provide audits of digital systems where you get like a very cool looking report on things to improve, to make digital technology more accessible, more inclusive and easier to use for everyone. So, yeah, that’s basically what I’m up to. And yeah, I’ve got a little blog there as well where I write some rants down occasionally.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, fantastic. And what would you say if you had to give one piece of advice to listeners who are wondering, where should we start? What’s the most basic thing that we should be doing? Maybe on the level of an equivalent for Multi factor authentication in the accessibility world, what’s the basic starting thing that everyone putting a website online should aim to do?

Callum McMenamin:
I think one of the main things I would potentially look at is to just zoom in on your website. On Windows, just hit Control plus a bunch of times. On Mac, hit Command plus a bunch of times and just zoom into the webpage. And does anything break? Is everything still usable or does it just completely fall to pieces? Because that’s quite common on web pages. So being able to zoom in on a web page is really important for people that have vision impairment. So that’s just a very simple test that you can do and something to fix if a developer notices that it breaks.

Paul Spain:
Excellent. Good tip. Thank you, Callum. Now, lastly, we’ve been running a little survey in the background. Anyone that hasn’t completed the survey still encourage you to jump online nztechpodcast.com survey and fill that in. But as part of the period that we have been running it, we’ve been doing some giveaways as well. So we have two winners who will be alerted via email. We’ve got Stuart McIntyre.

Paul Spain:
So thank you, Stuart, for entering. You’ve got your 1 NZ warriors jersey, Logitech Keys 2 Go and Logitech Kasa Pop up desk. And our other winner is Lillian Kwan, I think it is, who’s run a Motorola Edge 60 Fusion and a Logitech Casa Pop up desk. So thanks everyone for that, really appreciate the feedback and we’ll be delving into that a little bit more in terms of what we can take away from everyone’s survey. Results. But as I say, if you still want to share your thoughts, would love to hear from you with your feedback on the New Zealand Tech podcast. That’s us for this episode. Of course.

Paul Spain:
A big thank you to our incredible show partners to One NZ, 2degrees, Spark, Gorilla Technology and Workday. Really appreciate them keeping us on air, the incredible work that they do to support the tech and innovation ecosystems here in New Zealand as well as of course, if you’ve been watching the video, then follow us on your favourite audio podcast platform. And likewise, if you’ve been listening to the audio, you can follow us on your favourite video platform. We do usually stream through my profile on LinkedIn, Paul Spain and you can also find the video through on YouTube X and Facebook. I think so, yeah. Thank you very much, Callum, for joining us on the show and thanks everyone for listening in.

Callum McMenamin:
Thanks.

Paul Spain:
Cheers.