Dan Lyons (image: AP Photo/Forbes, Glen Davis)

So good, I had to plonk it here: One of my heroes, Fake Steve Jobs (Dan Lyons)…

China to Google: Drop dead

Minister of Information Technology says Google must obey the laws or leave, and China doesn’t give a crap because they’ll be just fine without Google. (Especially since they apparently can waltz into Google’s servers whenever they want, steal Google’s algorithms, and create Google clones.) Now, I’m no fan of censorship, except when I’m the one doing it, in which case I’m all for it, but I must say I am loving this — seeing someone, finally, who isn’t afraid of Google and will just tell them, straight up, that they are totally full of sh*t and should just go f** themselves. Smell the glove, Eric Schmidt. Smell it.

Where do I start? It’s just brilliant at all levels.

And this: “Now, I’m no fan of censorship, except when I’m the one doing it, in which case I’m all for it …” … well, um, yup.
(And no, don’t worry, the big fat irony apropos my discussion about censorship earlier this week, is not lost on me.) As I have disclosed before, I tend towards the totalitarian fascist*, too [cough] but am a democrat (small D) by breeding and conviction.

Anyway, kudos Dan Lyons, kudos. – P

*Note to a mate: Yes, like you, I too am a fascist by inclination (but a democrat by philosophy and ethics, as I hope you realize.)

Tech columnist for The Independent Rhodri Marsden, prompted by the jailing in the UK of a serial rapist/murderer who groomed his latest teenage victim through Facebook,* reflects …

What is it about these sites that’s creating such a problem?

First, they’re extraordinarily popular with young people. Facebook is second only to Google in terms of overall popularity online, and the amount of time we spend on such websites to socialise, exchange messages, post links to interesting websites, play games and arrange real-life meet-ups is increasing rapidly.

via NZ Herald

* On Monday in Britain, Peter Chapman, 33, was sentenced to a minimum of 35 years in prison for the murder of Darlington teenager Ashleigh Hall. Chapman, a convicted sex offender, was “very active” on a stolen black Acer laptop in the period leading up to the murder; it later transpired that he had used the social networking website Facebook in order to choose his victim. …
In autumn last year he signed up to Facebook under a false identity. By using the name Peter Cartwright and a photograph of an attractive, bare-chested young man, he successfully posed as a 19-year old and began to exchange messages with Ashleigh. Within the space of a month they had arranged a weekend rendezvous; Chapman explained in a message that the father of “Peter Cartwright” would be picking her up in his car. Ashleigh’s body was found the following Monday.

That this new community square/common, too, is rife with predators in the undergrowth should be no surprise.

What the hell are we going to do about it? Marsden offers some ideas…

An interesting debate is rumblng about the use of Ad-blockers on web browsers…

Ars Technica’s Ken Fisher laid out his case “Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love” including this section which got me thinking:

My argument is simple: blocking ads can be devastating to the sites you love.

I am not making an argument that blocking ads is a form of stealing, or is immoral, or unethical, or makes someone the son of the devil. It can result in people losing their jobs, it can result in less content on any given site, and it definitely can affect the quality of content. It can also put sites into a real advertising death spin.

As ad revenues go down, many sites are lured into running advertising of a truly questionable nature. We’ve all seen it happen. I am very proud of the fact that we routinely talk to you guys in our feedback forum about the quality of our ads.

I have proven over 12 years that we will fight on the behalf of readers whenever we can. Does that mean that there are the occasional intrusive ads, expanding this way and that? Yes, sometimes we have to accept those ads.

But any of you reading this site for any significant period of time know that these are few and far between. We turn down offers every month for advertising like that out of respect for you guys. We simply ask that you return the favour and not block ads.

Tech-savvy or not, I’ve used some form of ad-blocking for years. Initially using pop-up stiflers and the userContent.css lists that are published to block ads — I’m now a satisfied user of Safari AdBlock and ClickToFlash … and regularly use Flush to clear out the Flash cookies that still accumulate like dental plaque. (It was animated Flash ads competing for my attention that drove me to it. We filter spam email for the same reason … don’t we?)

However, I sympathise with Ars Technica and other good sites, funded by eyeball$$. It’s an issue.
With the ‘free’ culture of the interwebs, what’s a wholesome site to do? Well, there ARE other models offering ‘premium’/members-only feeds and subscriptions etc.

But there’s another important issue, too, embedded in this debate:

A discussion forum I have supported and frequented for several years has, it seems to me, always accepted advertising “of a truly questionable nature” (to use Fisher’s phrase from above) — in this case, from advertisers who are sometimes the subject of trenchant, comprehensive negative criticism (even exposé) on that very forum.
The unpalatable compromise of Fisher’s “sometimes we have to accept those ads” fits.

I understand. Economics. It’s not a charity. That’s OK, for me. I’ve blocked the ads.

And truthfully, for a long while, the shining light of this particular discussion forum was its courage under fire: resisting prolonged, heavy bullying by (coincidentally) its biggest corporate advertiser who clearly hated what was being said about the firm, its officers and its practices – said in the forum! To the site’s credit, a lot of that discussion was left unmolested.

But under intense, almost continual pressure and, eventually, legal threats, it seemed (to me and other observers) that the forum management’s resolve began to crack and crumble. Just a little at first. While in some crucial ways nobly staying true, in others they conceded. They caved in. Just a bit. For instance, they shut down some discussion threads, shredded others, ‘muzzled’, drove away or ejected some posters. Pissed off some others. Just a few. Quietly.

Very recently, it seems, under threat and pressure from different advertisers/spruikers, or the poor economy, or something, the ‘corruption’ (to use a word I really dislike) appears to have spread.
It has now reached the point where unlike the Ars-Technica forum where “we routinely talk to you guys in our feedback forum about the quality of our ads” … the forum Moderators and management appear to be actually CENSORING THE DISCUSSION FORUM to make the site more ‘hospitable’ for their shonky advertisers. (more…)

As in life, bluster and threat are commonplace in business – especially the technology business. So that interaction was good preparation for a later meeting with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. They’d flown in over a weekend to meet with Scott McNealy, Sun’s then CEO – who asked me and Greg Papadopoulos (Sun’s CTO) to accompany him. As we sat down in our Menlo Park conference room, Bill skipped the small talk, and went straight to the point, …

… Bill was delivering a slightly more sophisticated variant of the threat Steve [Jobs] had made, [i.e. to sue] but he had a different solution in mind. “We’re happy to get you under license.” That was code for “We’ll go away if you pay us a royalty for every download” – the digital version of a protection racket.

from “Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal” (a quote attributed to Pablo Picasso*. Referenced by Jonathan Schwartz former CEO of Sun Microsystems (It’s worth reading his whole blog post.)

Like Schwartz, I’m aware that this kind of attempted intimidation has its proponents.

Threatening ‘legal action’ is commonplace and just the threat can unsettle people who know they are in the right, but don’t fancy a fight, for whatever reason.

It takes GUTS and mental preparation (resolve) to resist pressure from bully-boys. Sometimes even intelligent, honest people don’t have the stomach for the fight and cave in — rewarding the bully. (Thereby making things worse for next time.)

It happens.

*Picasso, it should be noted was making a distinction between inspiration and copying — good artists making a duplicate, great artists using it for inspiration.

If you want peace, work for justice

— Pope Paul VI

I don’t quote many popes. But he had a point.

First raised in a comment here, this story of a fabricated Enola Gay memoir, an imaginary PhD supposedly issued and withdrawn by Victoria University of Wellington (my Alma Mater) complete with “baseless and defamatory” allegations of a hot debate about evolutionary theory (!) … well, the whole thing just gets more and more interesting …

Read all about it in the New York Times

Last week Henry Holt & Company stopped printing and selling “The Last Train From Hiroshima,” about the atomic bombing of Japan, because its author had relied on a fraudulent source for a portion of the book and possibly fabricated others.

A police investigation into ’stolen’ or ‘leaked’ emails from the Leader of the Opposition’s office reveals just how slack so-called computer security can be… until we have reason to beef it up. I bet they’re more security-conscious now!

“While it is accepted by the experts interviewed that external hacking can never be fully eliminated, ‘hacking’ of the Parliamentary Services computer is not considered to be how the offence was committed,” the investigation report stated.

It suggested two ways in which the emails might have been obtained – Dr Brash may have been using an “auto forward” function on his email accounts, or someone else had used computers or laptops that had access to them.

The investigation found gaps in security access to Parliament’s third floor, meaning there were opportunities to grab sensitive documents in electronic or hard copy form.
It noted that Dr Brash printed documents at night to collect in the morning and left documents in his out-tray for shredding, which was not attended to regularly.
He and an associate, whose identity is protected in the report, left their laptops unattended while logged on.

The report quoted computer company Axon’s service delivery manager, Deborah Clarke, as suggesting attitudes towards security in Parliament were too relaxed. “They want all the security in the world but they’re not prepared to live through the fundamentals of doing what you have to do to make sure you maintain security,” she said. “So they don’t let us implement complex passwords.”

From the NZ Herald

Footnote: Of course, Dr Brash wouldn’t have had to resign if the contents of the leaked/stolen emails wasn’t so politically damaging. Crikey dick, it wasn’t Nicky Hager’s book The Hollow Men that destroyed Brash’s political career. It was just the truth about those communications (or a version of it) coming out!

I’m not all aquiver like some of the media, but this DOES look like a new doorway to me…

Cool.

(Premiered during TV coverage of the 2010 Academy Awards today.)

Sometimes a zealot can go ‘too far’ …. even for his/her own supporters.
I’ve seen it in political debate. I’ve seen it in business.
The ‘object’ of the exercise — the debate, the contest of ideas — becomes somehow personal, and the ‘campaign’ can start to lose focus.

It can be like a blood lust in combat or what Robert McNamara (Kennedy/Johnson Secretary of Defence) called “The Fog of War“.

I don’t know Liz Cheney but, judging from this, it looks like she may have wandered into this undergrowth … (it can happen to any of us if we feel strongly enough about something).

First, watch this propaganda:

As we discussed last time we talked about Joseph McCarthy, put yourself in the shoes of the ‘targets’ of this stuff. Are they being treated fairly? How ‘decent’ is the behaviour of the critic?*

Conservatives Turn Against Liz Cheney – As Bad As McCarthy

The backlash is growing against Liz Cheney after she demonized Department of Justice attorneys as terrorist sympathizers for their past legal work defending Gitmo detainees — and now it’s coming from within deeply conservative legal circles.

On Friday, the conservative blog Power Line put up a post titled, “An Attack That Goes Too Far.” Author Paul Mirengoff, called Cheney’s effort to brand DoJ officials the “Al Qaeda 7,” “vicious” and “unfounded” even if it was right to criticize defense lawyers for voluntarily doing work on behalf of Gitmo detainees.

Reached on the phone, Mirengoff offered an even sharper rebuke, contrasting what Cheney is doing to the anti-communist crusades launched by Sen. Joseph McCarthy and, in some respects, finding it worse.

“It could be worse than some of the assertions made by McCarthy, depending on some of the validity of those assertions,” Mirengoff said, explaining that at least McCarthy was correct in pinpointing individuals as communist sympathizers. “It is just baseless to suggest that [these DoJ officials] share al Qaeda values… they didn’t actually say it but I think it was a fair implication of what they were saying.”

from Huffington Post

Targeting individuals is always tricky. Motivations are near-impossible to divine. ‘Sympathies’ even more so. There’s usually a whole lot of hallucination going on.

I hope Ms Cheney and her cohorts take the opportunity to re-calibrate, and question their approach. What harm can that do?

* The other side of this is that sometimes one feels called to be the universe’s feedback mechanism to people who are acting wrongly (however you define that). As I said here: (more…)

The profession “blogger” is still not considered “journalism”,
depending on whom you ask and the time of day.

Comment 42 from ‘Gus2000′ on Roughly Drafted Magazine blog re Daniel attending and asking questions at the recent Apple shareholder meeting but not being ‘allowed’ to report them.

Gus has it right. (But for how long?)