Archive for December, 2004
The Sarcasm Point
Writing in Slate, Josh Greenman argues that we need a new punctuation mark: the sarcasm point.
The other day I told my girlfriend I loved her. I did it on Yahoo! Instant Messenger. And the sarcasm just didn’t come across.
[Via MetaFilter]
Ramp up the harshometer
BrandSuicide is a bad-tempered blog about online advertising, with irritated entries about various Flash atrocities fighting each other for space in your browser. It’s entertaining stuff, although the language may not be safe for work.
Quick book review: Screen Burn by Charlie Brooker
Charlie Brooker is the man behind the infamous TVGoHome site, where he invented television programmes such as Get Hen!, where contestants had to get a hen, and Daily Mail Island, where single mothers, asylum seekers and other targets of tabloid ire were torn to pieces by rabid Middle Englanders. Proving that life often imitates art - or at least, arse - even more bizarre programmes were actually broadcast, and in his new role as TV critic for the Guardian Guide, Brooker had to review such pinnacles of popular entertainment as Big Brother, I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here, and the truly bizarre Touch The Truck. Screen Burn is a collection of these reviews, spanning the last three years.
Whether you’ll enjoy Screen Burn depends on your attitude to life. If you’re the sort of person who has a sunny outlook, believes that people are fundamentally decent and greets the dawn of a new day with a big smile, Screen Burn will make you weep hot, salty tears. If on the other hand you’re a twisted misanthrope with an abiding hatred of pretty much the entire human race, the book will make you laugh until your eyes bleed. Brooker doesn’t pull his punches: while other critics might suggest that a programme is below par, Brooker demands that the presenters be locked in a barbed wire cage with angry hyenas and rolled down a mountain. If - as John Lydon once sang - anger is an energy, then Charlie Brooker could power the national grid.
Blunkett and blogs
The connection between our recently departed Home Secretary and the world of weblogs might not be immediately obvious, but bear with me here.
I’m not going to rake over the ashes of the Blunkett scandal, but one of the things that struck me is the u-turn in the government’s support for him. The sudden withdrawal of support seems to be connected to comments Blunkett made in his biography, where - and I’m paraphrasing here - he called his colleagues a bunch of incompetent twats who couldn’t hit a cow’s arse with a banjo. Once the comments were made public, Blunkett’s circle of supporters diminished very quickly.
I was reminded of this when I read Queen of Sky’s article, I was fired for blogging. Ellen Simonetti was fired from her job as a flight attendant with Delta Airlines after posting various vaguely provocative photos of her at work, in uniform, on her weblog. While I’m sure there’s some truth in Simonetti’s argument that Delta overreacted, I have to confess that I don’t have a lot of sympathy. She might not have mentioned her employer by name but it was easy enough to guess, and her weblog contained a number of things that Delta no doubt disapproved of. Not just photos taken on company premises in company time, but sarky comments about passengers, moans about particular planes and references to the Mile High Club.
I’m not familiar with Delta’s contracts of employment, but back in the days when I had real jobs every firm’s contract contained two clauses: a prohibition on doing anything that might bring the company into disrepute (including extra-curricular activities), and a prohibition on using company resources for personal things. If you’ve got a day job your contract probably contains similar clauses, and while they’re rarely invoked, they’re still there.
It does look as if Delta’s reaction has been over the top - firing someone without any warnings is a bit extreme - but that doesn’t mean Simonetti is an innocent victim. It’s arguable that her site did indeed bring her employer into disrepute, and there’s no argument that she was faffing around in company premises, on company time, to take pics that were going to end up on her donation-soliciting weblog. I don’t know if that’s against the terms and conditions of her contract of employment, but it’s certainly against the T&Cs of any contract of employment I’ve ever signed.
Which brings me back to Blunkett. The party line from Labour is that Blunkett did nothing wrong, but slagging off his colleagues made his position untenable. Had Blunkett been a normal employee of a company who blogged about what bastards his bosses and co-workers were, he’d have got away with it provided nobody he talked about found the blog and worked out who was posting it. If his identity had been unmasked, he’d have been in deep trouble.
If you intend to blog about your job, it’s important to be very, very careful. You’re rarely as anonymous as you think you are, and if your firm discovers that you’re calling your customers every name under the sun or blogging about the cluelessness of your co-workers, the fact that you’re doing it in your own time is unlikely to mollify the bosses (and if you’re doing it on company time, you’re in even deeper trouble). You should also watch for “no press” clauses: more and more firms’ contracts state that employees can’t talk to the press about company business without prior approval, and blogging may fall foul of that.
Of course, all of this assumes you have a contract of employment in the first place. Many people don’t - particularly temp workers. In those cases it’s even more important to watch your back, because your employer doesn’t need an excuse to punt you.
Blogging about the day job is all about following the golden rule: if in doubt, leave it out. Employees have all kinds of rights, but the right to free speech isn’t one of them.
It was a dark and stormy night
She resolved to end the love affair with Ramon tonight . . . summarily, like Martha Stewart ripping the sand vein out of a shrimp’s tail . . . though the term “love affair” now struck her as a ridiculous euphemism . . . not unlike “sand vein,” which is after all an intestine, not a vein . . . and that tarry substance inside certainly isn’t sand . . . and that brought her back to Ramon.
Every year, the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest asks the internet community to write the worst possible opening paragraph for a novel - and they do, in huge numbers. The list of winners is hugely entertaining, and utterly appalling.
The terrible news had whisked around the becolumned courthouse like a malevolent, stinking zephyr straight from the sewage works, and on the gum-besmirched footpath, the hunch of lawyers cackled and cawed like a group of very large, gowned, wigged, briefcase-clutching crows, or perhaps ravens since they are of course the larger bird and some of these lawyers were fairly sizeable.
The greatest bit of investigative journalism ever written
Timothy Noah of Slate has written a piece that will go down in history: he’s discovered Amazon.com’s customer service number.
In this season of celebration, I have received many e-mails from readers prostrate with gratitude that, like Stanley tramping through the African jungle in search of Livingstone, I dug this number out from the Web’s darkest recesses and shared it with the world. I offer it here again for those who didn’t think to Google the words “Amazon” and “phone number.”
[Just the US one, unfortunately]
Ian Pearson is living in the future
One of my favourite interviewees is Ian Pearson, a one-man quote machine who’s one of the most entertaining - and intelligent - people I’ve ever spoken to. As BT’s futurologist his job is to dream up likely scenarios for the future of technology, ranging from everyday applications to evil robots enslaving us all.
If you’d like a quick peek inside Pearson’s giant positronic brain, he’s popped up on the BBC News site to talk about personal body networks, intelligent make-up and other exciting things. As he points out, there are dangers:
If you are wearing smart make-up, where electronics are controlling the appearance, you don’t want people hacking in and writing messages on your forehead.
Pearson’s site is worth a look too: you’ve got to admire a man who bills himself as:
Much more accurate than Mystic Meg, much cheaper, but about the same dress sense.
Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies
Sometimes the best way to deal with worrying news is to satirise it, and that’s exactly what Fafblog’s done. As the US administration ponders whether to plant false stories in foreign media to influence public opinion, Fafblog wheels out The Medium Lobster to explain why it is a good and necessary idea:
With the facts solidly turned against the war effort, the war effort’s last option is to officially declare war on the facts.
You are the weakest link
One of the big fears that many people have about online shopping is that some ne’er-do-well will magically nick their credit card details, and while that’s a legitimate concern - I wouldn’t give my card details to a site I didn’t trust - I think it’s been blown out of all proportion. I know a few people whose card details have been stolen (it’s happened to me, too) and in each case the guilty party wasn’t some faceless foreign hacker, but someone on the other end of a phone, or someone in a shop.
The best tool in any hacker’s armoury isn’t a bit of software or some mad card number-intercepting gadget; it’s social engineering. That’s a fancy way of describing the methods you can use to persuade people to give you confidential information. A typical example is calling someone up, pretending to be the IT department, and asking them to confirm their user name and password. A lot of people will do just that and boom! The villain’s in the system. The same principle is behind the “phishing” scams that infest the net: rather than intercept your credit card details, phishing scammers simply put up a fake page that looks like your bank and ask you to hand over your details. An alarming number of people do just that (and if you’re one of them, you’ll probably find that your bank won’t reimburse you for any dodgy spending that results).
I was reminded of social engineering the other day when I was having a cigarette break outside a PIN-protected building: as a guest, I’m not allowed to know the door code. But I got in anyway, thanks to a group of people who *were* allowed to know the code; one of them had forgotten it, asked their colleague what it was, and their colleague duly supplied the code number in a voice loud enough for me to hear. In one fell swoop the security system became redundant - although I was only there to steal everyone’s coffee, rather than to do anything sinister.
The weak link in any security system is usually a person, or people in general. Passwords are often absurdly easy to guess - the wife’s name, the person’s date of birth, the name of their dog or worst of all, the word “password” or “letmein” - and if you can’t guess it, you can usually persuade people to hand over the details by pretending to be the IT department or bribing them with a Toblerone. And if that doesn’t work, there’s always good old-fashioned stupidity, such as the offices with ultra-secure buildings and ultra-secure networks whose employees stick a couple of wireless network access points on the corporate network, forgetting that the whole point of wireless is that it works through walls. Judging by the press releases from security firms I’ve been reading recently, there are still an awful lot of firms providing free internet access to passers-by - and leaving their networks wide open to villains, ne’er-do-wells and ruffians.
Of course, it’s important to take security seriously - and there are some horrifically talented people out there who can bypass even the toughest security systems. However, you’ll find that the most common threats tend to be ridiculously simple: a fake email purporting to be from your bank; an email that claims to be a screensaver but which contains something nasty. If people were a little more paranoid and a little less trusting, the net would be a safer place.
Pedantic note:
Although I’ve used the term “hackers” in this post, some members of the hacking community would be unhappy about that. Technically a hacker is someone who takes things - hardware, software, systems - apart to find out how they work or to make improvements, while someone who uses those skills for evil reasons is a “cracker”. However, language changes and over the years, “hacker” has come to mean anyone who breaks into systems, whether they’re good or bad - hence “white hat hackers” (the good guys) and “black hat hackers” (the bad guys). Complaining about the use of the term “hackers” to describe bad guys, then, is a bit like moaning that “shambles” no longer means “slaughterhouse”.
Give them an inch and they think they’re rulers
Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing has discovered yet another example of digital rights management technology being used for things that have nothing to do with piracy: US cable companies are being pressured by Time Warner to “expire” their customers’ digital recordings of TV programmes such as Six Feet Under when the next episode airs.
This is the danger of sucking up to the studios in the first place: they say, “Suuuure, we’ll ‘let’ you build a PVR that will tape the shows you cablecast to your customers, but that permission is contingent on our ongoing goodwill. So if in the future we decide, for example, that your PVR can’t record certain shows, or can’t skip certain commercials, or can’t store certain recordings for more than a few days, you’d better implement it. Or else. So what if your customers can’t figure out why their PVRs don’t work properly? That’s your problem, pal.”