Author Archive
Should blogs link to the leaked BNP membership list? Probably not
Linking to defamatory material isn’t a good idea, and as Matt Wardman writes:
this scenario exists in the case of the BNP Membership List if a single person is on there by mistake: links will be to a post alleging that x, y or z is a member of the BNP. Bearing in mind that BNP Activists are posting that the list is out of date, and that the current membership is of the order of 6,000, linking to a posting suggesting that 10,000 people or so are BNP members looks a touch perilous.
Anybody else searched for namesakes in the list? Just me, then?
A little rant about the government’s £12 billion interception programme
I originally wrote this as a column, but couldn’t make it funny…
Since 9/11, our government has been rather keen on burying bad news (its phrase, not ours) by announcing really stupid ideas when people are distracted by more immediately terrifying things. So with capitalism apparently collapsing around our ears, cynics would expect something truly appalling to sneak out when our attention was elsewhere. They were right. While shouting “Look! Over there! It’s all your money! And it’s ON FIRE!” the Home Office quietly admitted that it planned to spend £12 billion to wiretap every single person in Britain – and that it had already committed £1 billion to the project.
Maybe the Home Office got the idea from The Wire, but if they did then they’ve missed the point of the programme altogether. The Wire isn’t about How Wiretaps Are Brilliant; it’s a howl of anger about political betrayal and the damage done when the people in power only care about the next headline. Maybe the Home Office watched it with the sound off.
Leaving the civil liberties arguments to one side – it’s something the Stasi might consider a step too far, it means an Englishman’s home is no longer his castle, it’s going to be abused – let’s just talk about the money. £12 billion is a lot of taxpayers’ cash, but the real bill will be much greater. When it comes to budgeting IT projects the government is like a shifty builder who promises to do your extension for six grand in six weeks. Ten years later you’re sitting in rubble and the builder’s spent your savings on a Bentley. Don’t believe me? Two words. ID cards. Originally, the government told us the bill would be £3.1 billion. Now, they tell us it’ll be fifteen billion, ish. According to the Telegraph, analysts reckon it’ll be costlier still: somewhere north of £34 billion.
Let’s pretend that we can actually trust the government’s figures, though, and the combined cost of ID cards and total surveillance will be £27 billion rather than £50-plus billion. What’s it for? Fighting terrorism, inevitably, plus a few other tabloid favourites such as catching kiddie-fiddling rings. Of course these are serious things, but is that really where we need to spend the money?
Friends of the Earth says that in England alone, 20,000 people – most of them pensioners – die every year from the cold. That’s three times the combined death toll of 9/11 and the Northern Ireland conflict combined, each and every year – and according to FoE, “the rise in the number of fuel poor is likely to put more lives at risk this winter. Many families with young children are forced to choose between heating their homes and cooking a hot meal.”
While the Home Office is chucking billions at GCHQ to tap people’s communications, FoE and Help The Aged are taking the government to court for allegedly breaching its commitment to eradicating fuel poverty. For a supposedly civilised country to spend billions on unnecessary and invasive IT while tens of thousands of people freeze to death isn’t just appalling. It’s an abomination.
Fighting piracy by shooting yourself in the foot, #3124
High Definition Content Protection (HDCP)—you can’t live with it, but you practically can’t buy an HD-capable device anymore without it. While HDCP is typically used in devices like Blu-ray players, HDTVs, HDMI-enabled notebooks, and even the Apple TV in order to keep DRMed content encrypted between points A and B, it appears that Apple’s new aluminum MacBook (and presumably the MacBook Pro) are using it to protect iTunes Store media as well.
the problem comes in when you realize that the new unibody machines don’t offer a VGA / VGA-to-component output, meaning that you have to connect it to an HDCP-compliant display if you want to see anything. We know, one word in particular keeps coming to mind to describe this fiasco: awesome.
As one Engadget commenter puts it:
Seriously, if you pirate it, it JUST WORKS. No need to spend extra to comply with DRM/HDCP crap.
iPhone bug automatically emails photos of your genitals to women
I took my husband’s i-phone and found a raunchy picture of him attached to an e-mail to a woman in his sent e-mail file (a Yahoo account). When I approached him about this (I think that he is cheating on me) he admitted that he took the picture but says that he never sent it to anyone. He claims that he went to the Genius Bar at the local Apple store and they told him that it is an i-phone glitch: that photos sometimes automatically attach themselves to an e-mail address and appear in the sent folder, even though no e-mail was ever sent.
[Apple support, via Fark]
“What in heaven’s name made you think you could monetize the real estate in which somebody is breaking up with their girlfriend?”
Not everybody in marketing sees the entire world as an advertising opportunity, it seems. According to Silicon Alley Insider, Procter & Gamble’s GM for interactive marketing and innovation, Ted McConnell, isn’t keen on Facebook ads.
Who said this is media? Media is something you can buy and sell. Media contains inventory. Media contains blank spaces. Consumers weren’t trying to generate media. They were trying to talk to somebody. So it just seems a bit arrogant. … We hijack their own conversations, their own thoughts and feelings, and try to monetize it.
Sex ramp!
[Via Fark]
Newspapers: firing the wrong people?
There’s an interesting piece by David Carr in today’s New York Times about (US) newspapers’ latest cost-cutting wheeze: firing their best writers.
Right now, the consumer has all manner of text to choose from on platforms that range from a cellphone to broadsheet. The critical point of difference journalism offers is that it can reduce the signal-to-noise ratio and provide trusted, branded information. That will be a business into the future, perhaps less paper-bound and smaller, but a very real business.
…Having missed the implications of the Web and allowed both their content and their audience to be scraped away by aggregators and ad networks, newspapers are now working furiously to maintain audience, build new ad models and renovate presentation. But they won’t stay relevant to readers with generic content ginned up by newbies with no background in the communities they serve.
I’m inclined to agree with this bit too:
I have always thought of journalism as more craft than profession and tell students that it is the accumulation of experience and technique that makes a journalist valuable, not some ineffable beckoning of the muse.
Dead Space (Xbox 360)
I’ve mentioned this game a couple of times now, but now that I’ve actually finished it (on the easiest level, naturally - I’m rubbish at games) I thought I’d do a quick review. Why? The timing of its release was terrible: instead of shining like an oasis during the summer games drought, a period so bad that people (well, me) spent hard-earned cash on crap such as Fracture because there was sod-all out, it came out just as big hitters such as Gears of War 2 and Fallout 3 were on their way to the shelves - which means there’s a good chance it’ll be overlooked. That’d be a shame, because it’s the most fun I’ve had with a game for ages.
Reviews have said it’s derivative, which it is: a lot of Alien, a bit of Doom and a soupcon of Prey. They’ve said it flags a bit in the middle, which it does. They’ve suggested that the story is a bit rubbish, which it is. And they’ve said the scares are of the simplest, open a box, AAARGH MONSTER kind. Which is a wee bit unfair.
There are indeed plenty of open a box, AAARGH MONSTER scares in the game, but what Dead Space is really good at is establishing a constant feeling of dread. Imagine your testicles were filled with explosives, and the explosives were really quite volatile, and you’re on a bus being driven by an idiot, and it turns onto a cobbled street, and there are lots of holes in the ground, and the driver speeds up, and you know that sooner or later your balls are going to blow up. You know it’s going to happen, but you don’t know exactly when it’s going to happen.
Dead Space is a bit like that. But with AAARGH MONSTERS instead of balls.
It’s not a 10/10 game by any means, and it’s not a 9/10 either, so if you’re the sort of person who doesn’t buy anything unless Edge has okayed it then you might not bother. But it’s worth getting hold of pre-owned, or when it hits the bargain rails, or on eBay, because it’s about ten hours of solid entertainment. It’s the game I’d hoped Doom 3 would be - dumb, derivative, gory fun.
George Saunders: The brain-dead megaphone
“…the nightly news may soon consist entirely of tirades by men so angry that all they can do is sputter while punching themselves in the face, punctuated by videos of dogs blowing up after eating firecrackers, and dog-explosion experts rating the funniness of the videos…”
I think I’m going to enjoy this book.
Now I’m nostalgic for “dude, get a Dell”
The English language has suffered so much violence at the hands of marketers it’s too time-consuming to get irate at all of it. So when Dell decided that “yours is here” would be a good slogan, I ignored it just like a small child screws his eyes shut to make monsters go away.
Unfortunately it seems like Dell is escalating its campaign. Today, I received a flyer with this strapline:
YOURS IS SO EASY TO SHOP FOR AT DELL.
What?
It reminds me of a bloke I once trained in IT. He was a truly talented graphic designer, but he couldn’t write to save his life (not a criticism: my drawing skills never went beyond potato printing, and I’ve made the English language scream for mercy on many occasions).
Anyway. This was the copy on one of his portfolio pieces:
WHATS NEW IN CARS
FORD SIERRA THATS WHAT
To be honest, I quite liked it. And it’s a damn sight more readable than the Dell advert - an advert that no doubt cost Dell a lot of money. Or as Dell might put it, money a lot of cost Dell advert good very not.