Archive for January, 2005
Giblets’ inauguration speech
Over at Fafblog, Giblets has posted his inauguration speech:
Can you doubt the freedom-spreadery of Giblets? Giblets has decreed Iraq to be free and now it is! Oh sure, not in the petty “liberal democracy with equal protection under the law” sense. But in the “infested with terrorists” sense it’s as free as they come!
…Freedom is like a woman, or a well-aged cheese, or a monkey.
Mauled by the Mail
There’s a fascinating article in today’s Media Guardian (free registration required) about Indymedia journalist Mark Covell and the Daily Mail newspaper.
Covell, a journalist, was so savagely beaten by the Italian police that he lost consciousness, suffering serious injuries which included multiple broken ribs, a collapsed lung and internal bleeding. He was taken to hospital where he was given a blood transfusion and a chest drain was inserted to remove fluid from a lung. He was heavily sedated and his room was placed under armed guard.
…The day after the assault he awoke to find a man and a woman in his room. In his drugged state, he assumed the personable woman to be from the British embassy and therefore answered her questions, including the name, address and phone number of his mother.
The woman was Lucie Morris, a Daily Mail journalist, and her companion was a photographer.
The next day’s Daily Mail front page was headlined “Armed guard on Briton who led rioters”… The story, under Morris’s byline, accused Covell of “helping to mastermind” the Genoa riots by running “computer systems used to co-ordinate attacks … by anarchist groups”.
As Roy Greenslade points out:
The central thrust of the story, that Covell had led a riot or even had anything to do with its organisation, was wildly inaccurate. He was operating computers for Indymedia, a journalistic collective of environmentalists which despises “the corporate media” but which took no part in the violent confrontations with police. Covell, who did not even attend the street protests, was one of many innocents attacked by the Italian police that night.
The article’s worth reading, not least because it provides some insights into the difficulty of fighting back against a newspaper character assassination.
Sony: we dropped the ball
It seems that in the last few years, the only people who didn’t realise that Sony’s MP3 strategy was D-U-M dumb were the bosses of Sony. Now, it seems, they’ve seen the light. Ken Kutaragi, president of Sony Computer Entertainment, told reporters that Sony blew it with their refusal to support MP3 and obsession with their own, proprietary, music format.
Sony’s problem was political: the hardware bods wanted to make MP3 players, because they’re all smart people; unfortunately, Sony’s entertainment divisions didn’t, because they’re paranoid. The entertainment divisions won, and everyone and their dog bought an iPod instead of a Sony device. Pre-iPod, Sony dominated the world of portable music; post-iPod, it’s drinking whisky in sleazy bars, boring the other barflys with tales of how it coulda been a contender.
So what’s Sony doing to strike back? Two acronyms: DRM and PSP. Entertainment firms won’t sell content if it doesn’t have the dreaded Digital Rights Management technology, and Sony has joined other consumer electronics firms to agree on a DRM standard that works on everything - a big improvement from the mess of incompatible DRM systems we have now, although if Microsoft and/or Apple aren’t involved then it’s questionable whether the new standard will ever get off the ground.
The second plank is the PSP, or PlayStation Portable. Sony sees the PSP as a platform not just for games, but for music and movies. The PSP has already sold the best part of 1 million units since going on sale in Japan last month, and is likely to do serious numbers in the US and Europe when it launches this spring - not least because it’ll cost the same as an iPod Mini. It’s worth noting that while Apple has shifted around 10 million iPods, sales of the PlayStation family are currently sitting at 175 million. If Sony’s plan works, the PSP is likely to be a serious player not just in games, but in music and movies too.
I see dead people, at £30 a pop
Downmarket tabloid newspapers can be pretty depressing things at the best of times, but it’s when you turn to the advertising that things get really appalling. Easy loans with interest rates loan sharks would be ashamed of, cheap and nasty tat, and worst of all, psychic telephone lines.
There’s a special circle of Hell reserved for the worst people in the world, and when they pop their clogs the operators of psychic phone lines will end up there. Their expensive ads promise closure or advice and offer to solve problems, but the only problem they solve is “how do we line our pockets by preying on the despairing, the depressed and the deeply troubled?”
Here’s the pitch. You call one of four numbers depending on your particular needs, so if you want to speak to a departed relative it’s the first line, if you want psychic advice on love and relationships it’s the second, and so on. All of the print is nice and large except for the price, where if you peer at the ad through the Hubble Telescope or an electron scanning microscope you’ll eventually be able to find out that calls cost £1.50 per minute, and a typical call could exceed 20 minutes. That’s £30 from people who can ill afford to spend such sums, and who almost certainly won’t realise how expensive their call will be.
Maybe I should call one of these lines with a pressing enquiry and report back on the quality of psychic insight - I’ve got a call recorder on the phone, after all, so it’ll be pretty easy to do. What do you think? Of course, it does mean that I’d have to go and purchase a downmarket Sunday tabloid next weekend, but that’s a price I’m willing to pay. Although I may solicit paypal donations to cover the cost of the phone call, heh ;-)
£1? Yikes!
From today’s Evening Times web site:
American Airlines wants to know everything about you
Another BoingBoing post, but much more serious than conceptual art: if Cory Doctorow’s experience is typical, then it seems American Airlines now expects passengers to provide the names and addresses of everybody they intend to stay with in the USA.
They claimed that this was due to a TSA [Transport Security Administration] regulation, but refused to state which regulation required them to gather this information, nor what they would do with it once they’d gathered it.
… I asked for the name or number of the regulation, its text, and the details of the data-retention and privacy practices in place at AA UK. The security officer wasn’t able to answer my questions, and she went to get her supervisor.
After several minutes, her supervisor appeared and said, after introducing himself, “Sir, this is for your own protection.”
Your arse belongs to us
BoingBoing links to an interesting bit of art: a chair that shoves big spikes up your arse if you don’t have a Licence to Sit.
As Cory Doctorow explains, “The piece makes a point about the rentware world we’re fast approaching, where individuals are stuck in a kind of feudal relationship with commercial entities.”
Site spit and polish
I’ve made a few tweaks to the weblog design - nothing too serious, but I’ve gone for slightly different fonts to make the text more readable. I’ve tested it in Safari and Firefox and everything seems okay, but if users of other browsers spot any problems could you let me know please? Thanks.
Aieeeee!
According to this report in The Inquirer, bird flu has spread to humans. I believe the medical term for this development is “oh, shit”.
A message for Tom Dennis
Tom, I’ve tried again and again to mail the replies to your questions but the mails are still bouncing - your ISP’s convinced that there’s no space in your mailbox for incoming messages. Can you get in touch with an alternative email address, please?