Archive for March, 2006
Say that again and I’ll sue you
A vivid reminder that UK libel laws still apply online: a college lecturer has been ordered to pay £10,000 in damages and £7,200 in legal costs after libelling a politician. The Guardian reports:
The dark side of the blogosphere was revealed by a libel action brought by Michael Keith-Smith, a former Conservative party member who stood for Ukip in Portsmouth North at the last election. He said he was moved to sue after a woman with whom he was debating the merits of military action in Iraq began a campaign of name-calling that started by describing him as “lard brain” and culminated in falsely labelling him a “Nazi”, a “racist bigot” and a “nonce”.
The “blogosphere” has been crowbarred in there - the libel occurred on a Yahoo message board, not on a blog - but the verdict is as relevant to blogs as it is to other online forums.
Of course, online abuse is nothing new - although it’s rarely as creative as the time I was called a “wankspanner” - but the case does show that legally, there’s a difference between free speech and criminal libel. If you libel someone online, you can’t hide behind your keyboard.
Animals
Jesus wept (don’t read this if you’re squeamish).
From today’s Evening Times:
A thug who stamped a 15-week-old pup to death has been jailed for four months.
Thomas Kennedy, 23, launched the brutal attack in a fit of rage after an argument with his mother.
After the pup died from horrific internal injuries, Kennedy hid its body under his bed.
…The killing of the mongrel pup is the latest in a number of cases of shocking animal cruelty reported to inspectors.
A Banff teenager who hacked off the ears of his two puppies with a pair of scissors, without anaesthetic, was yesterday fined £300 and banned from keeping dogs.
And earlier this year thugs killed a Coatbridge family’s pup by impaling it on a mop handle. Inspectors from the SSPCA described the gruesome killing, involving a “very high level of violence” as one of the most disturbing attacks they had ever encountered.
I’m not one of those people who worries about ickle puppies while not giving a toss about the loss of human life or someone who believes animals are little angels with fur and paws (there’s a local Jack Russell I’d cheerfully kick into orbit, given half the chance), but as Squander Two and I have discussed endlessly, people who do this kind of thing to animals are seriously disturbed and in my opinion, downright dangerous. Animal torture is one of the “homicidal triad”, the three childhood behaviours that can predict murderous behaviour in adults (the other two are pyromania and post-adolescent bed-wetting, in case you’re interested).
Apple, France and DRM
Let’s play The Microsoft Game, where we take a news story about Apple and replace the word “Apple” with “Microsoft”.
Microsoft has denounced France as a sponsor of piracy after the country’s parliament backed a bill that, if enacted, will force the company to open its DRM technology to other hardware vendors and online music stores.
Speaking to Reuters, a Microsoft spokeswoman blasted the move as “state-sponsored piracy”, adding: “If this happens, legal music sales will plummet just when legitimate alternatives to piracy are winning over customers.”
The company also claimed interoperable music “cannot be adequately protected”.
Bad Microsoft! Bad, bad Microsoft! But of course, it wasn’t Microsoft that said those things.
While Apple throws its toys out of the pram, let’s look at what the (proposed) legislation actually says. It doesn’t say Apple, Microsoft et al must sell DRM-free songs. It says that DRM-protected tracks must be interoperable, and that if the firms behind the various copy protection wheezes won’t do that then consumers would be legally entitled to use third-party tools to transfer files from one format to another. So for example someone who’d bought loads of iTunes downloads would be legally entitled to convert the files into something else if they decided to go for a non-iPod player.
What the French parliament is suggesting is that such conversion should be as a result of computer firms working together, rather than third parties. I don’t see the problem.
Update: Jupiter Research analyst Mark Mulligan does. he says: “If the French parliament is hoping that an industry standard DRM will come into being, the likely result is a Balkanized situation as we see in the mobile space (with OMA 2 mired in controversy) or probably Microsoft becoming the de facto standard. Remember that the majority of Europe’s 200 digital stores are already WMA based.”
And as for this bit:
interoperable music “cannot be adequately protected”.
Bullshit! Apple’s DRM has been cracked. Microsoft’s DRM has been cracked. I’d post links to the appropriate programs if doing so didn’t violate about 300 recently passed laws.
Yes, any conversion tool that the two firms (or three firms, if you include Sony) could possibly create would be cracked too. But that’s irrelevant, because DRM always gets cracked. Always. Not that you need to crack it, because every song you can burn to CD can be re-ripped as a DRM-free MP3 and shared illegally. Not that there’s any real need to do that either: albums continue to leak long before they’re available to the public.
This has got nothing to do with piracy.
My bank isn’t better than your bank
About a year ago, I wanted to set up a new bank account. I’m a simple wee soul so I didn’t need anything particularly complicated: a cash machine card, internet banking and crucially, no overdraft facility. If I’ve got one I use it, and I’m better off without it. Unfortunately non-overdraft, non-savings accounts are rarer than hens’ teeth, so the choice is very limited; however, as I lived really near an Alliance & Leicester branch I went for their basic cash account. And for a while, I was happy - until I actually needed to use their internet banking.
When I lived near the branch, I sensibly enough did my banking at the branch. Now, though, I’m a good half-hour away so using the web site is more sensible. So a few days ago I needed to make some one-off payments and filled out the appropriate information, only to be told that I had “reached the maximum number of payees for this account.” To add any more payees, I needed to call the internet helpdesk and delete some of the existing ones.
It turns out that A&L automatically saves the details of anyone you transfer money to, whether you want them to or not. And there are just eight slots, so when you’ve made eight transfers you can’t make any more. And that’s where the fun begins.
I called the helpdesk, which - as I mentioned earlier - told me that the success of the new internet banking service meant that the tech support lines were horribly busy. Undeterred, I waited until I was asked to enter my nine digit account number. Unfortunately, my account is an eleven-digit number, and the voice system told me I’d entered an invalid number. I tried a second time, and it hung up on me.
I tried again. This time I was transferred to the security department, who seemed pretty pissed off and who informed me that no, they couldn’t transfer me to a human. I needed to speak to my branch.
I called my branch, who - after about 10 minutes - told me that they couldn’t help. All they can do is let me take cash out or pay it in. Everything else needs to be done over the internet. There was a special, dedicated helpline for basic cash account holders, but that was closed a few months ago.
So I got clever. I called the helpdesk again, but this time waited for the option that said “If you are a multimillionaire who wants to take out a mortgage, 22 credit cards, six ISAs, a pension and a car loan, press 3.” I pressed 3 and got speaking to a very nice lady who offered to transfer me to the internet help people, bypassing the evil voice system. Which she did.
By this point I’ve spent three hours trying to speak to someone, but I finally get through to Roger on the internet helpdesk. He can’t help, because they can’t access basic cash accounts. I need to speak to the branch. I explain that the branch have already told me that I need to speak to him. Roger then goes on a (pleasant) rant, explaining that the bank really doesn’t want people to have cash accounts and as a result they’ve closed the telephone helpline and removed account holders like me from the support programme. But! There’s an answer!
I need to send a fax to head office in Bootle, explaining who I am, which specific payees need to be removed from the online banking, and enclosing a copy of my passport to prove my identity. I then need to wait 48 hours for them to action it.
Passport photocopied, letter written, fax sent. That was on Thursday and of course, sod-all’s happened. So I did the high-tech thing, got in the car, went to the branch, took out the cash, went to a different bank, paid in the cash, went home, and used *that* bank’s website to finally transfer the money, six days after I first attempted to make some very simple electronic transfers.
Isn’t online banking wonderful?
Sugababes: poptastic
I went to see Sugababes last night (my wife’s a fan), and I’ll cheerfully admit I wasn’t looking forward to it. Not just because I’d be the oldest person in the audience, but because pop gigs can be dangerous things: for every slice of perfect pop there’s usually 25 hours of tedious session musician guitar wankery, mindless babble and ill-advised jazz-funk reinterpretations of the hits you’re there to hear, all in an attempt to take 30 minutes of decent tunes and fill an hour and a half of showtime.
But my god, Sugababes were superb.
Apart from the Arctic Monkeys cover.
MySpace is bad because it’s safe
That’s what Nick Carr reckons, anyway. His criticism is superb:
What I see is a dreary sameness, a vast assembly of interchangeable parts. Everything feels secondhand: the pimps-and-hos poses before the cameraphone, the ham-fisted, cliche-choked blog-prose. It’s sad to see so much effort put into self-expression with so little to express.
[Via Charles Arthur's blog]
South Park’s superb scientology statement
Ronnie Tommy from This Place Is Dead quotes South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, who have responded to the shelving of the (very funny) Scientology episode:
So, Scientology, you may have won THIS battle, but the million-year war for earth has just begun! Temporarily anozinizing our episode will NOT stop us from keeping Thetans forever trapped in your pitiful man-bodies. Curses and drat! You have obstructed us for now, but your feeble bid to save humanity will fail! Hail Xenu!!!
Now I understand how computer games can cause violence
I would love to meet the developers of the shooting game Black and, well, shoot them. From putting the disc into the Xbox to actually starting play takes the best part of 15 minutes. First, there’s the lengthy, tedious and unskippable opening credits; then, a cliched and unskippable montage of newspaper headlines and video clips to show that, like, there’s bad people and political instability and terrorism and war and stuff; finally, some crappy and unskippable animation that’s designed to show how cool, enigmatic and tough your character is. Just like every other sodding first-person shooter, albeit with a bigger budget.
God almighty, when I buy a first-person shooter I don’t give a flying arse who the project manager is, I could care less about the backstory and I’d rather eat my own legs than watch yet another crappy cutscene. ENOUGH OF THE CINEMATICS I WANT TO SHOOT THINGS GODDAMMIT
Microsoft and that iPod packaging parody
The spoof video showing Microsoft redesigning the iPod box has been attracting a lot of attention, and the news that the video was created by Microsoft seems to have surprised a lot of people. For example, writing in today’s Observer John Naughton asks whether the video shows that irony has entered the Microsoft campus.
I’m a bit bemused by this, because the video’s part of an ongoing Microsoft tradition. Microsoft regularly takes the piss out of itself, although the spoofs don’t usually leak. Last year, covering Microsoft for PC Plus, I spoke to long-term Microsoft watcher Joe Wilcox and Microsoft’s UK MD, Alastair Baker:
One area Microsoft could also address is its marketing, where it’s consistently spanked by Apple. As Baker admits, “we don’t have the halo effect of the iPod” - but it isn’t helped when Microsoft hides its light under a bushel. As Joe Wilcox explains: “Our data shows that XP has tremendous entertainment capabilities built-in, but our research shows that consumers miss them because they don’t know they’re there… compare iPhoto to the comparable feature in XP, the Camera And Scanning Wizard. It’s deep in the OS, difficult to find - how do you market that? iPhoto is simple and catchy, you can build a marketing campaign around it. How do you sell the Camera and Scanning Wizard, or the Scanner and Camera Wizard? I don’t even know what it’s called!” he laughs.
Microsoft’s ads could be better, too. “When Microsoft launched Office 2003 they had these ads where someone’s made some great accomplishment and they’re all jumping about with excitement,” Wilcox recalls, “but you never saw what they’d achieved or how the software helped - although they were clearly happy about something. I’ve heard rumours that within Microsoft there’s a spoof of it; they spoof themselves a lot. There’s a bunch of people at a table, Bill Gates is at one end, and there’s a toaster in the middle; when the toast pops up they all jump around and go ‘yay! We’ve made toast!’ I’ve suggested that Microsoft takes some of the ads they make for internal use and distributes them.” It could work: after all, Apple has its iconic iPod adverts; perhaps Microsoft could use Steve Ballmer’s legendary monkey dance to promote Media Center PCs.
OK, I was wrong about the monkey dance - but the leak of the iPod spoof has generated some very positive publicity for a firm that’s usually (wrongly, in my opinion) depicted as some kind of evil empire staffed by dull corporate drones. However, while Microsoft was happily spoofing the Office 2003 ads a few years ago, the iPod short suggests that the message isn’t necessarily being heard by the marketers.
Put it this way: Apple’s next operating system is called Leopard. Microsoft’s response? Windows Vista Starter Edition, Windows Vista Home Basic Edition, Windows Vista Home Premium Edition, Windows Vista Business Edition, and Windows Vista Enterprise Edition…
Is MySpace bad?
There are lots of things I just don’t get - celebrity magazines, LiveJournal, the popularity of James Blunt, people who think Jack Russells are cool dogs - and top of the list is probably MySpace. I know it’s a social phenomenon, huge visitor numbers and all that, but every time I venture into it I have the same thought: “this sucks!”
Publishing 2.0 reckons that MySpace is a ticking time bomb. Scott Karp writes:
MySpace is a DEEPLY DISTURBING place. It’s so disturbing that I’m convinced that the vast majority of the Web 2.0 fan club who gush over MySpace has NEVER actually spent any time on MySpace.
…But as [a] Web 2.0 watcher, I have a strong view from a business perspective, which leads me to this prediction: Rupert Murdoch will come to regret the purchase of MySpace.
Why? Because the reality is that MySpace can’t be controlled, and that’s a liability.