Internet – Page 4

How Is A Prime Minister Like A River In Brazil?

Published on April 14, 2009

Both are up shit creek for a start.

Global online retail giant Amazon, now embroiled in its own internet related scandal – the #amazonfail list is now at 1,582 books and other products, and rising – has much in common with New Labour.

Both are omni-bloody-present, both collect huge amounts of info about us and our habits; both believe that a] they alone control the internets and b]computers are only a powerful when they use them. Both suffer from megalomania, control freakery and a refusal to accept they could ever have done anything wrong, or even just immoral – even when it’s quite clear that they have.

Zoe Margolis:

According to one author, Amazon stated a few days ago that it was now its “policy” to exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and bestseller lists, but his book had no “adult” material in it. It seems that books written by lesbian or gay authors, or with lesbian or gay themes, were being classed as “adult”, actively removed from searches, and de-ranked, alongside the books featuring erotic content.

Now both Amazon and Gordon Brown are deep in the proverbial, one for censoring a website, the other for planning one and then continuing to pretend he knew nothing, despite persuasive evidence that he must have:

“This is a den within Westminster. We’re talking about a house in Downing Street, with an office and in that office sits Gordon Brown, Damian McBride and Tom Watson.

“We are talking about three people in this marriage at the heart of this scandal.”

Corporations like Amazon tend to think a computer’s a powerful political tool, but only when they use it. Amazon’s wrong:

Barely an hour after the amazonfail tag first appeared, it was being mentioned four times a second on Twitter search â€“ thousands of people were talking about it; but none of the tweets were positive. Calls for Amazon to be “googlebombed” were acted upon and people were commenting on the politics of “cyberactivism” â€“ contributing to lists of the books that had been affected â€“ and calling for a boycott of the site. Amazon, it appeared, had started to dig its own grave.

New Labour’s wrong too. Daniel Hannan:

A blog has just done something that I thought no one could do: elicited an apology (or as close as we’ll ever get to an apology) from Gordon Brown. Indeed, according to The Guardian, the McBride-Draper scandal might cost Labour the next election. If so, Guido Fawkes would have succeeded where his baleful namesake failed 404 years ago: he would have brought down a government. Even if you think the Guardian story is a bit de trop, the idea that one man with a laptop could do so much damage would, until very recently, have seemed risible.

Both are now desperately trying to ~~spin~~ paddle their way out of the river of cack that attitude’s got them into.

Good luck with that, Amazon and Brown: there’s millions of us, but only one each of you.

Flying Buttmonkeys Rn’t Us

Published on April 12, 2009

buttmnky

Why does Ray Collins, General Secretary of the Labour Party, own, on behalf of the Labour Party, the domain names

davidcameronseconomicpolicy.com

and

davidcameronseconomicpolicy.co.uk?

For negative campaigning, duh. As I’ve said before, New Labour’s studied Karl Rove’s methods very closely. But not quite closely enough.

Like pushpolling and fake leaflets a classic Rovian ploy is to buy up all your opponents’ potential domain names and park them, with page of misleading information – or just plain lies, it doesn’t matter, by the time they get it taken down the campaign’ll be over – about your opponent put up as a placeholder. A lie’s halfway around the world before the truth’s got its boots on, has always been the Rovian motto.

He may have studied Rove’s methods and he may be equally porcine, but Charlie Whelan‘s no Rove and he missed something vital that Rove never did.

Deniability.

Rove knew to hide GOP dirty domain-name tricks behind interlocking puzzles of holding companies and consultants – his hands were never actually seento be dirty. Unlike Labour, which registered smear domains in plain sight for any idiot blogger to do a lookup on, and put its name and address at the bottom of the pages too.

No doubt No 10 spins such stupidity as ‘transparency’.

The Republicans also had an army of flying butt monkeys, insane wingnut commenters, who spammed and trolled opposition blogs and launched DOS attacks against anyone posing a threat online. Again deniability; all were independent commenters, see, no connection to any party, no sir. What email lists and talking points?

Labour doesn’t have anything approaching an army of even pedestrian buttmonkeys; at most it has a few spotty, ambitious youths with Blackberries and a handful of loyal, ageing party apparatchiks with lots of time on their hands trolling the Guardian’s comment section. Labour MPs do look as though they eat plenty of Cheetos though, and most do appear to live in Mom’s basement or at least claim a second home allowance for it.

They failed at blogs and Labour’s efforts at online dirty tricks are an epic fail too. If you want to see quite how epic take a look at their spin doctor scripted, Cameron/Osborne ‘livechat’. They’re just incompetent at everything, even at being evil.

Comment Of The Day

Published on March 24, 2009

Didn’t I say a couple of years back that a depression’s only official when the middle classes start complaining about benefit rates? Job Seekers Allowance is currently just over a measly sixty quid a week and even Guardian journos are struggling.

A commenter wryly commiserated:

dementedlands

23 Mar 09, 11:45am (about 19 hours ago)

I am unemployed. It is impossible to live on Â£60 a week. Luckily I discovered that I was able to claim Â£14,000 a year for the house my parents live in. I use it for job seeking and have made over Â£60,000 .

Neighbours call me a benefits cheat and point out that a couple were recently given a 6 month jail sentence for a Â£40,000 fraud. I call them a bunch of jealous peasants.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/mar/23/tony-mcnulty-allowances.

Heh.

The brass-necked, greedy dishonesty and sheer hard-faced gall of Employment Minister Tony McNulty, who’s been highly visible in the Guardian’s pages and elsewhere demonising non-existent cheats and scroungers with his hateful ‘no ifs or buts’ anti benefit fraud campaign, beggars belief. Talk about rubbing the faces of the 2 million unemployed in it.

Understandably it’s been front-page news all over the UK and a hot topic on blogs of all political flavours; corruption’s corruption after all, however inured we’ve become to it since the advent of New Labour.

But not at the Guardian, though being a supposedly leftwing paper you’d think they’d find the irony delicious. But while the tabloids and broadsheets scream condemnation the Guardian’s appeared oddly muted on McNulty and strangely quiet on the corruption and greed of the Labour establishment in general. I’m amazed that comment got through CiF’s notoriously harsh moderation.

Another irony the Guardian seems to have missed in light of the up to 150 journalists and others the Guardian Media Group (Editor Alan Rusbridger, salary Â£355,000 pa including 17,000 benefits) is itself about to make redundant on sixty pounds a week (Â£3,120 pa)is that it should then publish a comment decrying the low benefit rates that it is itself condemning its own employees to. Talk about rubbing the faces of the unemployed in it.

Comment is Free‘s a very popular Guardian section that appears to rely mostly on insecure freelancers, cheap recent graduates and user generated comments for content and must already be – compared to a fully staffed print newspaper – cheap to run.

It would be interesting to know, therefore, exactly how many Guardian journalists and CiF columnists already rely on the benefits system to feed their families and underpin their struggling and insecure writing careers – and conversely (how like so many other British companies) how many and which newspapers offering low-paid parttime or freelance employment rely on state benefits to underpin their business models. Without Tax Credit support for freelancers how many newspapers would fail entirely, I wonder?

I see now why the Guardian, wants unemployment benefit rates to rise. It’s potentially vital to it’s new shiny 24/7 online business model.

Tell me again, who’re the welfare scroungers exactly? No wonder the Guardian has such a discreet empathy with McNulty.

Don’t ….

Published on March 23, 2009

jslo

It could be just a ploy to entrap UK civil liberties activists into committing a crime.

A Facebook Group a fan site, a website and an email being circulated suggest that recipients do just this by overwhelming the Home Office – since they plan to read all our mail and take dominion over everything we see and do online – with an influx of cc’d email on June 15th.

The general gist is ‘see how they like it up ’em in practice’:

“No government of any colour is to be trusted with such a roadmap to our souls”: Ken McDonald, former head of the CPS.

The government has unveiled plans for a private company to run a
“superdatabase” that will track all our emails, calls, texts, internet
use and so on. This is an immense infringement of civil liberties, not
to mention a major risk to our private data – but it won’t make us any
safer. The sheer amount of information that the Government intends to
collect will be impossible to analyse properly and will undoubtedly turn
up false positives while missing potential security threats amongst the
morass of spam emails and private chat.

Read more at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/dec/31/privacy-civil-liberties

So, for one day, we should send a message to the Home Office – “you want
to see our emails? Ok then, here they are then!”.

The date has been set for June 15th. However for legal reasons, please don’t go ahead with the protest of your own accord. Please enter your details below and we will keep you up-to-date from time to time – and you’ll get confirmation closer to the time that the protest is going ahead. Alternatively, you can become a fan at our Facebook page.

I can see a number of problems with this. To begin with something blindingly obvious – why on earth would anyone want to willingly subscribe to any potential ’round up the usual suspects’ list of political dissidents, whatever their politics? Perhaps the author(s) haven’t quite thought their plan through.

Or maybe they have. Maybe this is a uk.gov fishing expedition.”Please enter your details below”, “Please invite your friends if you have joined and spread the word!”, indeed. Well they would say that, wouldn’t they?

Which brings up another problem, forwarding incoming email ‘regardless of importance and content:

We do this by simply cc’ing or bcc’ing every email we send (and if you like, forwarding every email you receive), regardless of importance or
content, to public.enquiries at homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk.

That way Jacqui Smith and the Home Office will be able to see how
difficult it will be to get on with their actual work – keeping our
country safe – when they’re trying to monitor every harmless private
thing we say and do.

***Please invite your friends if you have joined and spread the word!***<

I really don’t think so.

It’s outrageous even to suggest forwarding received emails as a form of political protest. In doing so you’d be subscribing the identities of all those people who’ve emailed you to the same potential database of political dissenters as you, but by proxy. Nice.

Also politically yet not quite so technologically aware readers might take this to mean that they should send the entire contents of their in and outboxes, since forever – and virtually labelled ‘seditionist’ too – to Jackboot Jacqui on the 15th June. It does seem a foolhardy course of action to suggest, as does the idea to that we forward all the emails we send and receive only on the 15th of June, which is what I think was actually meant.

Of course what the (possibly somewhat naive) authors may have envisioned is just that protestors might perhaps register a disposable email account, use it at a few of the more interesting sites, sit back, watch the reconstituted pork product that pours into the inbox get cc’d to Jacqui. Voila, enough spam to supply police canteens for a century. What larks.

But whatever the authors actually meant, there’s no getting round the fact that what they’re suggesting their fellow citizens do by way of an act of supposed civil disobedience is to overwhelm the Home Office and other UK.gov network resources with traffic – otherwise known as a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) the organisation of or participation in which carries a hefty 10 year prison sentence under UK law.

Why would any activist, however naive and well-meaning, incite that others (albeit unknowingly) participate in conspiracy to commit a crime?

It all smells of entrapment to me.

Who is this ‘Martin’? Who registered the website? Where did this email originate? So far it’s not taking off that well there’s little I can find mentioned about it except on a libertarian/far-rightwing blog (which refers approvingly to the BNP), which inclines me just to say sod it, let them get themselves banged up and good riddance.

But I would hate for anyone who’s not an incipient nazi, who’s just concerned about civil liberties but who feels powerless to be heard, to take this as a legitimate call to action. I don’t trust it a bit.

Please don’t cc your email to Jacqui Smith on June 15th.

Is Google Streetview NL In Breach of EU Data Protection Law?

Published on March 20, 2009

Streetview may be winning in court in the US, but they may find the legal going a bit stickier in the EU.

The furore in the British press this morning about the advent of Google Streetview in UK and NL echoes that of its US launch, when Google Streetview, which allows the casual browser to wander at will virtually peeking in windows, gardens and doors, or wherever else Google’s camera poked its invasive lens, faced legal challenges on breach of privacy grounds.

So far Google’s defeated its legal challengers – but will EU data protection laws defeat Google?

Streetview’s just been launched here in NL too, and lo and behold! There’s our house: and our bedroom window, which you can look right into. And our front door, with our names on it.

That’s because it’s obligatory when you move into a property here to register your residence with the local authority, the gemeente. They then give you or you buy an embossed nameplate (see above), which you put on your front door, usually above the letterbox or by the doorbell. (Makes it easier to round you up – the Arena bomb hoaxers arrested up the street the other day had their names on the letterbox too).

This means that what Google Streeetview has done, in effect, is to compile a visual database of the names and addresses of every resident in the Netherlands save those paranoids – or the sensible, your choice – who haven’t complied with the local gemeente‘s pettifogging door-labelling rules.

Did Google or its licensers in government ever consider that, because it’s possible to zoom in on this database and that therefore it’s accessible to any casual viewer, they are potentially in breach of EU data protection laws – specifically Directive 95/46/EC on the protection of personal data?

Google claims it owns all Streetview data. Streetview NL is a database, although it’s visual. Surely any database containing individuals’ names and addresses should be subject to EU data protection regs? I’d certainly contend it should*.

Any EU member government body that allows or licenses Google to compile such a database might also be in breach of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights which guarantees the privacy of individuals and families; broadly, it covers “private and family life, .. home and correspondence”, subject to certain restrictions that are “in accordance with law” and “necessary in a democratic society” .

I’m no expert on EU data protection laws and their application in NL – *I am no longer a lawyer – but that jumped right out at me.

Why didn’t it jump out to any of Google’s high-priced advocaten?

UPDATE

Heh.

When interviewed, a Google Streetview driver/photographer demanded he not be photographed.