Help Me Net NZ

16/10/2026

This is my weekend sidequest - selling books with my daughter. Today we are at the Kapiti Botanist Market with Foxtail Events in Paraparaumu. Wonderful people, beautiful things

30/09/2026

All around Aotearoa, community groups and volunteers are helping their neighbours cut household bills by thousands of dollars a year, and cut emissions at the same time, by going electric.
They're doing it through free community events like the Electrify expos popping up across the country. Each one brings together:
⚡ Local exhibitors and installers
⚡ Speakers who know the tech and the numbers
⚡ Everyday Kiwis who've already switched to solar, EVs and heat pumps, or got off gas, and are happy to tell you what it was really like
No sales pitch. Just real people answering real questions.

This is how change happens: people getting together and doing the work, one neighbourhood at a time.

Get along to your local expo. If you're on the Kāpiti Coast, ours is this weekend:
⚡ Electrify Kāpiti Expo
⚡ Sunday 4 October, 10am–4pm
⚡ Waikanae Memorial Hall
Free entry, all welcome.

30/09/2026

23/09/2026

It's not a glamourous job. Keeping up with security threats, software updates and all the minutiae and detail of software and technology ain't fun when you love the pretty!
But it's what we do to keep our client's websites safe so they dont even have to think about this stuff!

At Help Me Net we help established, practical business owners succeed online without having to become digital experts themselves.

Want to know more about our wordpress care plans? https://helpmenet.co.nz/summit-club/

This security release features a fix for a critical severity security vulnerability. Because this is a security release, it is recommended that you update your sites immediately. You can download W…

23/09/2026

Don't trust that link just because ChatGPT handed it to you

Here's a habit worth breaking. New data from cybersecurity firm ESET found ChatGPT search results routinely pointing users toward sites already flagged as unsafe: fake online stores, crypto scams, imitation login pages, even responses linking to malicious code. The catch is that people tend to treat an AI's recommendation as pre-checked, so they click without the suspicion they'd apply to a dodgy email or text. It isn't. An AI answer is not a safety endorsement of anything it links to. With four in five Kiwis now using AI tools, that's a lot of misplaced trust. The wider picture is grimmer still: ESET reckons the median gap between a flaw going public and being exploited has collapsed from 771 days in 2018 to zero in 2026, and in one test an AI model turned a browser patch into a working exploit in under an hour. The old advice about spotting typos in phishing emails is fading too, now that AI writes clean, tailored copy in seconds. The fix isn't complicated: treat AI-supplied links exactly like any other unknown link, and check where you're actually landing before you type a password.

26/03/2026

Venture capitalism models in Big Tech keep leaving small business owners high and dry. OpenAI's latest announcement about dropping Sora is just another example.

While all the hype is telling you to go all in on AI systems at the expense of skilled employees and time and resource....ask yourself.... How long will these tools be around? And what happens when the price triples?

Tool dependency in a business can be an issue in a tech world

24/03/2026

Here's what I think all the guides to leaving ChatGPT got wrong.... They didn't go far enough. I break down all you need to know to take your work with you over at Witchdoctor

One hundred and sixty-eight weeks. About three years. Roughly a third of that on a paid account. I know my ChatGPT history the way you know a relationship: the early excitement, the growing familiarity, the slow accumulation of small frustrations you start cataloguing only once you’ve already half-decided to leave.

This is a considered exit, not a rage-quit. And Anna Butterfield of Help Me Net NZ lays out a very practical guide to switching to Claude that Claude’s own onboarding won’t give you. Copy-and-paste prompts included.
Link in the comments.

24/03/2026

Be very wary buying products from sites you find on social media

Malwarebytes has exposed a huge network of more than 20,000 fake online stores designed to steal payment details and personal data.

These sites look like legit retailers, complete with product listings, reviews, and checkout pages. But behind the polish, they either deliver nothing or send cheap knock-offs. The real goal is harvesting your data for fraud and resale.

The operation is highly industrialised. Thousands of domains run off just 36 IP addresses, using cloned storefront templates powered by Sellvia on WordPress. Many use “.shop” domains and recycle identical designs under different brand names, making them quick to spin up and hard to shut down.

Fake shop scams are booming, with incidents up nearly 800% year-on-year in early 2025. Social platforms like Facebook and YouTube remain key entry points, luring users in with ads and too-good-to-be-true deals

12/03/2026

Time to lift for internet browsing game. Choose a browser that protects your privacy. I wrote a full breakdown of the options for you, available now on Witchdoctor.co.nz

https://www.witchdoctor.co.nz/2026/browsers-privacy-guide-2026

Not all browsers are out to profile you. Rather than treating your behaviour like gold dust for advertisers, some software developers are still fighting the good fight to put privacy and user choice front and centre. Here’s our no-nonsense rundown of the best browsers that respect your privacy, and won’t sell you out for a few extra ad dollars.

19/02/2026

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