Month: October 2011

Categories
Humour Technology

Is Spam Evil Enough Yet?

Spam! SPAM! Spam! SPAM! Spam! SPAM! Spam! SPAM...
Now more offensive than ever

You know what’s wrong with spam? it just isn’t rude and offensive enough. Or so some people seem to think. As I mentioned, the comment spam you get on a blog is usually of a fawning, “This is the best blog ever and I’m going to tell all my friends to worship your genitals!” nature. Quite a boost when you get your first one, but when they keep on coming – and you notice they all contain a link to something that wants your money – you learn to ignore them.

So someone has decided we need a refreshing change. Here’s a comment I got the other day:

Anzy Machaczkala – Spam Link Removed

The next time I read a blog, I hope that it doesnt disappoint me as much as this one. I mean, I know it was my choice to read, but I actually thought youd have something interesting to say. All I hear is a bunch of whining about something that you could fix if you werent too busy looking for attention.

Hey, that could be true of any blog… But before composing a measured reply – like “Shut up now and never speak to another human being again, or I will kill you and everyone you are related to just to be certain that your vile genes are extinct” – I paused to check that it was genuine. After all, it did seem an odd thing to say about a cartoon of an elephant. Also there were three from the same address, the other two quite complimentary and all of them linked to some site in Polish about soccer.

Yes it’s just another example of phony Search Engine Optimisation, offering the ‘service’ of spamming blogs and message boards with posts containing links to a site on the (wholly untrue) grounds that these will be mistaken for genuine interest and so improve its search ranking.

Tip to spammers: Google is not run by crowd of slack-jawed morons.

And while SEO spamming was already a complete pain for people who have to keep message boards clean, now that you guys have decided to actually insult the sites you’re spamming, it’s become a lot more personal.

So I’m off to Poland, and I have a pointed stick for poking soccer balls.

Categories
Politics Technology

Blackberry Crumbles

Blackberries
When our children hear us talking about BlackBerries, they'll think we mean these things. (Image by Liz Brooks via Flickr)

The only real question is, whose government did this?

Blackberry phones are beloved of businesses worldwide because they allow people on the move to communicate in a secure, private way. By the same token, they’re hated by governments – oppressive regimes especially of course, but also those facing internal security threats. (I’ll leave you to decide into which category the UK falls.) So far, their maker RIM has stood pretty firm on not allowing governments to eavesdrop on their traffic.

So when that service suddenly breaks down, first in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and now in South America, you wonder just who it is showing them that business is all about compromise. As in: compromise, or I’ll kill you.

Oh they say it’s a physical fault in their servers. But they would, wouldn’t they?

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Humour

Diary Of A Frightened Man 1

view of a typical microsimulation 2D animation...
Oh God Help Me It's A Human-Crushing Machine

So my next driving test is heaving close and – what a surprise – I haven’t done half the work I need to. One week to get into shape. I suppose that’s about as feasible as getting into shape for anything else over one week.

OK I have been driving since the last try; virtually every day, and sometimes quite long distances. I just haven’t been test driving. So I’ve spent the last half an hour doing classic three-point turns, with the handbrake at each stop and the regulation distance from the kerb and all of that, just like they like. I’ve come to think of it as a kind of dressage – you know, that thing where they make horses behave like hovercraft. I’m a lot more comfortable with it now than I used to be. What I’m feeling weak on is road-reading, and having three or four fewer eyes than I really need.

I’ve been working on my manners too, letting people merge, smiling and waving, buying drinks. OK not the last one. This isn’t on the test, but my girlfriend is a much more experienced driver and she insists I start as I mean to go on – i.e., not like a bastard.

Don’t be worried or distressed then if I don’t write much of weight in the next week, as I spend more time behind wheels than keyboards. The Presidential election and the collapse of the world economy will have to continue without me. If you want to read the diary of a frightened man making hilarious mistakes however, stay tuned.

Today’s most egregious error: Attempting to leave a roundabout by a road that isn’t an exit.

Excuse: Whoever heard of a one-way street meeting a roundabout!? The town planners are insane.

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Politics Technology

Join The Irish Diaspora

Have you or any member of your family ever been a member of the Irish nation? Then you should join the great new social network, WorldIrish.com. This was launched to coincide with the Global Irish Economic Forum held this week, and its purpose is to… is to… Actually, I’m not quite sure. Why would Irish people need our own special social network. Were we not talking enough?

This Is Me

Well the site looks and works well. You can create an account there (I’m “Richard”, I came early), add a 600-character bio and a few links. And you pick your five ‘values’, which generates a kind of little avatar. It’s trickier than it sounds though, because you have to choose your five from a list of sixteen things that are all about equally good and wholesome:

  • Ambition
  • Community
  • Compassion
  • Courage
  • Creativity
  • Diversity
  • Equality
  • Freedom
  • Imagination
  • Individuality
  • Integrity
  • Knowledge
  • Openness
  • Practicality
  • Progress
  • Tradition

You think you can’t go wrong, just picking five sugar-and-spice items out of a list of sixteen? How little you know. If I check tradition but leave out progress, I could be taken for a die-hard republican. Vice versa, and I’m a property developer.What if I plump for community but leave out diversity? Big ‘ol racist. What use is compassion without courage, openness without knowledge? Do I choose between creativity and imagination, or pick both and sacrifice ambition?

Such is life. In the end, I left the final decision to what made the avatar come out prettiest.

I really have only one question about WorldIrish.com – how exactly is it a social network? You can browse people’s profiles and you can contact them, but there is no real space for open interaction. There are a couple of pages where you can upload a video, but you can hardly have real conversation through video clips, and though commentary is allowed it’s to the page as a whole rather than the individual video so there is little opportunity for dialogue there either. (What’s more, to make such comments you log in not with your account but with another social networking system such as Facebook.)

In feeling therefore it’s really much closer to a new-media magazine like TheJournal.ie, more about controlled presentation than spontaneous interaction, top-down instead of ground-up. How that turns into social networking eludes me. I’ve joined anyway – networks are what you do with them after all – but I can’t help feeling that this was one of those laudable efforts where someone went “Wouldn’t it be great if we…” and everyone agreed, but no one really knew what the point was.

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Categories
Humour Politics

Quantitative Easing

Bank of England – Images George Rex

Ireland’s government is considering making a deeper fiscal adjustment than planned next year in a bid to further distinguish itself from Greece and build on its recent bond market rally. – Reuters

Ah yes. I think they call that “masochism by proxy”. Our government stands ready and willing to show how much we can suffer.

The UK has taken a rather different approach, one not open to us as Euro members. “Quantitative easing” they call it. Sounds like a euphemism for a good solid dump, but it actually disguises something even more unmentionable – what they used to call “printing money”. Of course, they don’t actually print the stuff these days. Who uses cash, darling? Somewhere in some secret turret of the Bank of England, they push a button and simply magic £75 billion into existence.

Doesn’t seem right, does it? If you like, you could think of it as the B of E simply raising its own credit rating and lending itself that £75 billion. But if it’s a loan, who does it have to be paid back to? The future? An alternative universe maybe? I think it’s best to just grit your teeth and accept the reality. Money is fictional. What the B of E has done here is simply made some more up.

Yes, fictional. Money is nothing except what we pretend it is – not even power. Power after all is the ability to make other people do what you want, and money only has that effect if we all play the game, doing what someone else wants in return for mere tokens in the knowledge that other people in their turn will do what we want to get them. If you think about it too much it seems like an utter house of cards. Why do we go along with it – especially we who don’t have so many tokens to begin with?

Well, the only non-fictional way to make people do what they don’t want to do is the threat of direct physical violence. So playing along is preferable to that. Plus it’s hard to see how anyone could be scary enough to organize a whole society through intimidation, certainly not one of any real size.

The other thing that bothers people here is, who owns this £75 billion? Actual wealth like a resource is still there even when it goes unclaimed and unexploited, but money only exists by virtue of someone having it (and someone else wanting it). So when a government just wishes billions into existence, whose exactly are they?

Well the Bank of England gets to spend it, so I guess it’s theirs. What they do though, mostly at least, is immediately use it to buy government bonds. Not from the government, I hasten to add. Modern economics is insane, yes, but it hasn’t quite reached the point where a government invents money to buy the bonds it invented from itself. No, they buy them from people who have invested in them, thereby making those investors’ assets liquid again so that they can spend, spend, spend. Which is good for the economy.

Or so Tories always say when they need to justify the transfer of public funds to private friends.

Will it work? I’m not so sure. When a government makes money up they are unilaterally modifying the rules of the game. Or cheating, as we once called it. This may encourage other people to get creative too. Will markets play fair with the UK government, or will they say that this new stuff just isn’t as good as the old, and they need some more please?

I know where my fictional money is.

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Categories
Humour

Shitehawk

English: Red Kite flying over Berkshire in Aug...
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I used to think this was a peculiarly Irish term of abuse – “Ya shitehawk ya” – with origins obscure and possibly whimsical. Some say it originally meant a manure pedlar. But it seems not; for the shitehawk is a real bird.

And not just any old bird either, but one of the most attractive and impressive of the smaller raptors – the red kite. This is a beautiful creature with ruddy feathers and a swift-like forked tail. It also happens to be a hawk for shite.

Or to put it in more scientific terms, as well as being a bird of prey it’s a carrion feeder, eating the bodies of animals it didn’t kill itself and other handy leftovers. A lot of the raptors double-job like this; after all if you’re built to chase down and murder living food you’re probably pretty high up the queue for the dead stuff too. Indeed debate still rages over whether their cousin¹ the Tyrannosaurus was mainly predator or scavenger. So the red kite is attracted to human settlements, because we pretty much live knee-deep in delicious detritus. It hovers – literally – about our dumps and middens.

It’s as a predator though, taking things people wanted to keep like rabbits and young chickens, that it became persecuted as vermin and was once in danger of extinction. Though not before British soldiers had a chance to apply the same vivid name to the carrion birds they met abroad. In India therefore the shitehawk was a vulture. And apparently the word persists in this role in parts of England, except applied to that new ubiquitous flying rat: the seagull.

I like that – I think I’ll refer to gulls as shitehawks from now on. The name suits those raucous opportunists (video) far better than it does the rare and pretty red kite.

  1. It’s true. Birds are basically just the dinosaurs that didn’t die out.
Categories
Technology

Patents – The New Rock ‘n’ Roll

Phone patent litigation in US courts alone ©The Daily Beast

With what I want to believe was ill-disguised glee, Samsung has taken out injunctions against sale of the iPhone 4S in France and Italy over alleged patent infringement. Why just there? It’s difficult not to believe that they’re keeping it commensurate with Apple’s blocking of Galaxy Tab sales in Germany and the Netherlands, that basically they’re saying “If you want to go there, we can go there”.

Do they have a case? Who can tell. The only thing certain is that patents are the new Rock ‘n’ Roll.

And not in a good way. Like Rock ‘n’ Roll in its heyday, the mobile technology world is turning into a filthy quagmire, with pretty much everybody accusing everyone else of stealing about everything – as the illustration shows. The main reason Google purchased Motorola‘s mobile arm was that otherwise the two companies could have sued each other out of existence¹. R&D is rapidly becoming the new A&R, with phone makers patenting about anything in the hope of finding the one elusive hit technology that will rake in unimaginable sums. This wasn’t very good for music, and it won’t be so good for technological innovation either.

While being able to profit from research and invention is a good thing, current law allows companies to charge exorbitant fees or even refuse to license their patents, essentially granting them a monopoly to a lucrative technology. While this was fine in the days when you might patent a tangible device like a mousetrap, now they can be used more or less as intellectual property land-grabs, claiming rights to possible designs. A cause célèbre of course is the granting to Apple of patents so fundamental to a multitouch interface on a mobile touchscreen device that it is hard to see how anyone can now create one without infringing them. Yet Apple did not invent either the multitouch interface or the mobile touchscreen, they were merely the first to put one on the other. Does that really mean they deserve to control the entire concept for the next twenty years?

What might work much better is a short period – maybe only a year or two – of exclusive use. That would decrease the incentive to take out speculative patents on everything, and greatly increase the incentive to, you know, innovate.

  1. To give the actual science of this: When two corporations collide at sufficiently high financial energies, they either fuse into a single entity or annihilate one another in a shower of fundamental business particles known as “happy lawyers”.
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Cosmography Technology

The Passing Of Steve Jobs

Perhaps we should have expected it. Why would have Steve Jobs stopped doing the job he loved one moment before he had to? It is a great loss. I’ve never been an Apple fan, I liked to criticise him. But I liked to criticise *him*. Criticising lesser mortals will never be as much fun.

The image above is a detail of one posted by BoingBoing.net, of people leaving tributes at the San Francisco Apple Store. If you’re feeling particularly sad it’s a good size to use as your desktop.

Categories
Technology

Yeah Yeah, New iPhone

Photograph showing Apple Newton hand held comp...
Here it is, the iPhone 5... Wait.

Who would have thought this day would come? The day when they release a boring iPhone.

The 4S is by no means a minor update. It is significantly better than the 4. Dual core. iOS 5. The 8 Mpx camera alone will be enough to change the minds of many waverers. But it is a consolidation, a strategic market repositioning, not a shock. It perhaps takes back the lead, after the Galaxy S II being seen by many as the new messiah. But it’s still neck and neck, and that is not what we have come to expect from an iPhone release. On its day of launch, the latest iPhone is supposed to be the most desirable piece of consumer electronics on Earth. Unequivocally.

It’s Tim Cook I feel sorry for, Apple’s new CEO. In place of the showman, they’ve got the man credited with the sound strategic business decisions. Decisions like closing down Apple’s manufacturing in the US (and indeed, Ireland) and moving it to such questionable locations as Foxconn‘s giant plants in China. It is just his misfortune that his first product launch happens to be of a rather strategic and businesslike update to the iPhone.

But people are bound to say that if Steve were still in charge, there would have been surprises. Steve would have taken some feature of the new iPhone – probably Siri, the voice recognition ‘valet’ – and make it sound like God’s personal gift to you. Actually no, Steve wouldn’t even have presented us with something as lacklustre as mere voice recognition. It would have read your mind, and granted desires you had not yet even consciously formed. Steve could do it, why can’t this phone?

Yeah. Basically people are mostly just missing Steve.

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Technology

Doing The Digital Switchover

Photo of the RTÉ News Studio
RTÉ trying to look cool

We decided to make the switchover to digital TV, a year ahead of the deadline. Not, let’s be honest, for the many wonders this new technology brings. Nor for the early-adopter cool. No, it was mainly because of stuff in the attic.

You see up until now broadcast TV in Ireland has been on both UHF and VHF.

No? My God, do I have to draw diagrams? That means you need two aerials¹. And because our attic is small these are too close together, bouncing signals off each other. So any time you move one it buggers up reception on the other. In short, trying to get a good picture on all channels was about as much fun as being repeatedly stabbed.

So after we moved the aerials to get the attic insulated, I decided it wasn’t worth going through all that again, and that we should skip straight to the new technology. It’s not expensive. You may have heard you need a new ‘digital’ aerial. In fact you just need a UHF one, so if you’re already getting TV3 or TG4 you’ve probably OK. A very nice bonus is that the all-or-nothing nature of digital makes it a hell of a lot less sensitive about position. Even though ours is so off-beam it renders analogue channels in snowy monochrome, we still get a crisp digital picture.

Nor do you need a new TV, you can buy a digital tuner to connect to your existing set for less than €100. And if you rent one, then it’s the rental company’s problem. Ours was more than happy to swap our 21″ analogue CRT for a fairly nifty 26″ flatscreen at the same rent. (It has so many inputs!!!)

 In short then, approximate cost and hassle of switching to digital = Sweet FA.

So should you rush to join me on Saorview?² Yes if you have a bad picture, in which case the switch could make an amazing difference. Otherwise, nah. For one, it’s not guaranteed to work yet. You may find it ups and disappears on you randomly. (Though if it does, you should still be able to tune in the old analogue signal.) While HD is nice and all it’s not exactly a viewing revolution, and only Network 2 is being broadcast in HD yet. There’s 3e if you’re not getting that already, which justifies its existence by showing Futurama, and RTÉ’s new digital channels, which no one remembers asking for. And that’s about it – so far anyway.

Except that this may be your first brush with owning a widescreen TV – or at least, one with a widescreen signal to match. I’d like to say this makes sense of the whole thing, but it’s still a mess. You were used to films being letterboxed on your old 4:3 TV. Now you have to choose between programmes being cropped, stretched, or pillarboxed. And you must choose, because not everything looks best the same way. And you must not choose stretched. Goddamit people are fat enough these days.

Any other cons? Well on this set at least there’s a very noticeable delay when you change channel. Maybe you get used to that. And you’ll need a new Saorview-compatible DVD player to record from the digital signal, so factor that in when calculating… well, calculating the expense the government is putting you to for as yet no very clear reason.

  1. You may prefer to call them antennas.
  2. We call it Saorview, from the Irish Saor, meaning ‘Free’, and the English View, meaning ‘Radharc’.
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