April 7th, 2009 § § permalink
BBC…
Online advertising firm Phorm is pressing ahead with plans to launch more than a year after it first drew criticism from some privacy advocates.
…
“We have been supported or endorsed by all of the leading stakeholders,” Phorm chief executive Kent Ertugrul told BBC News.
“Ofcom, the Information Commissioner’s Office, the Home Office, leading privacy advocates like Simon Davies, the advertising industry and publishers have all backed our service,” he said.
All the major stakeholders except the people who will be effected the most: the internet using public.
And who’s this Simon Davies bloke? Never heard of him. he might have got this award or done whatever, but he can’t be that much into privacy if he’s ok with Phorm.
Kent Etugrul of Phorm…
I am surprised by the fact, after it has been repeatedly explained how the technology works, they seem to be very keen on misunderstanding what it does
No, people know what it does, and even how it does it. And that is the problem. It is opt out. A fucking awkward shitty opt out that one will have to opt out of every time ones cookies are cleared.
Even when someone has opted out, their movements on the web still go through Phorms equipment, there is no way to bypass Phorm. The user is still dependent on Phorm and its’ technology doing the right thing and not recording their movements.
Phorm and privacy? My arse.
March 25th, 2009 § § permalink
The Guardian…
Children will no longer have to study the Victorians or the second world war under proposals to overhaul the primary school curriculum, the Guardian has learned.
However, the draft plans will require children to master Twitter and Wikipedia and give teachers far more freedom to decide what youngsters should be concentrating on in classes.
*puts head in hands* FFS.
The proposals would require:
• Children to leave primary school familiar with blogging, podcasts, Wikipedia and Twitter as sources of information and forms of communication. They must gain “fluency” in handwriting and keyboard skills, and learn how to use a spellchecker alongside how to spell.
Why do these formats of information need specific mentions?
What is there to learn to use these formats as sources of information? Blogging is no different to essaying or pamphleteering, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, podcasting is TV & radio and Twitter is no different to blogging.
If the intention is to teach ‘how to’ on any of these formats then it is going to be a waste of time. Podcasting for instance, there are so many different ways of recording a podcast that to teach a general ‘how to’, it would become useless. Get a kid to write a story about the school holidays in WordPress on teh internet instead of in a school book and hey presto, the kid is a blogger!
The curriculum, if it is to be teaching this type of stuff, should be teaching about the back end that runs all of it. the principles of databases or programming languages, the stuff that doesn’t, cannot change very easily or quickly. The front end of Wikipedia could be changed not quite overnight, but quick enough to make a lesson about it redundant, but how the internal gubbins, how it references itself and all the other stuff (can you tell I’m getting a little out of my depth here?) is not going to alter for long time. That is the type of thing that needs to be taught with regards to ‘new media’.
handwriting and how to use a pen and pencil should be a priority over keyboard skills. Handwriting needs to be more than fluent, as get the handwriting skills wrong to start with, and the kid is left with poor writing for life. Keyboard skills will improve everytime a keyboard is used.
As you can probably tell from this post, I could probably do with some lessons, but that would be lessons in English, not in blogging.
March 24th, 2009 § § permalink
Jon Gaunt is set to return to broadcasting, according to the Press Gazette.
Jon got the sack from Talk Sport for calling a councillor that wanted to stop smokers from adopting children a Nazi, and since then has only had his Sun column to rage from.
Apparently mainstream radio is run by idiots that are only interested in their bottom line, which of course is nothing like the mainstream press, who do not make up/run made up stories to sell papers, or change the angle of stories to sell as many copies as possible. Mainstream papers are altruistic in the desire to bring the news to the people.
He said: “Mainstream radio is dying because it’s run by idiots who have no interest apart from the bottom line. Now the bottom line is disappearing they don’t know what to do.
“What I love about The Sun is that it is like when I was back having my first job in local radio. They said can you be mischievous, say what you want and have some fun.”
With that in mind, the Sun is giving Jon an internet ‘radio’ phone in show.
With this show Jon has a lot of freedom because…
His new show will not be subject to Ofcom rules on “due impartiality” and “harm and offence” but will instead, The Sun confirmed, be governed by the Press Complaints Commission – which has no rules on taste and decency, or political balance.
Hold onto your hats, it’s gonna be a bumpy ride.
March 16th, 2009 § § permalink
March 11th, 2009 § § permalink
Chicken Yoghurt…
Yay, my Project Honey Pot honey pot caught an email harvester. Go me!
“WTF is Project Honey Pot?” I thought.
Project Honey Pot…
Project Honey Pot is the first and only distributed system for identifying spammers and the spambots they use to scrape addresses from your website. Using the Project Honey Pot system you can install addresses that are custom-tagged to the time and IP address of a visitor to your site. If one of these addresses begins receiving email we not only can tell that the messages are spam, but also the exact moment when the address was harvested and the IP address that gathered it.
…
We collate, process, and share the data generated by your site with you. We also work with law enforcement authorities to track down and prosecute spammers. Harvesting email addresses from websites is illegal under several anti-spam laws, and the data resulting from Project Honey Pot is critical for finding those breaking the law.
Additionally, we will periodically collate the email messages we receive and share the resulting corpus with anti-spam developers and researchers. The data participants in Project Honey Pot will help to build the next generation of anti-spam software.
Everyone hates spam and spammers, unless of course you are a spammer, and as someone who’s had their email address spoofed and then been spammed by my own email address, I particularly like this idea.
So, to all those spammers, I have this message, in the immortal words of Farmer Palmer…
Get orff moy laand!
March 5th, 2009 § § permalink
Wikileaks:
Which? magazine, The Telegraph, Google/UK Press Association and Channel 4 have all pulled articles over Phorm Inc. (BT/Webwise) legal threats.
Which? magazine[1], an independent non-profit magazine published by the Consumers Association in the UK, carried out a survey of their readership on their responses to proposals by Phorm Inc.[2] to work in conjunction with Internet Service Providers in the UK, to use Deep Packet Inspection technology to intercept and profile their customers Internet communications to profile them in connection with behaviourally targeted advertising.
…
When the magazine was published Phorm Inc. immediately applied legal pressure to the Consumers Association. A follow up press release from CA notified publishers of Phorm’s objections to the survey and requested that they not publish articles based on the findings in the survey until matters had been resolved between CA and Phorm. Articles published online by the Press Association, the Daily Telegraph, and a video news report on Channel 4 were immediately taken offline, in response to this legal pressure, and a report in the online version of the Daily Mail was heavily edited to remove references to the Which? survey.
Via
February 25th, 2009 § § permalink
A big number two at number two, beaten by a man who was a number two and had two (cont. p. 94)…
background 1, 2.
February 23rd, 2009 § § permalink
You remember I decided to join Tim in spreading some lurve on Youtube?
Well, it’s been 6 days (sooner than I expected to be honest) and we have a result with Patrick Holford…
I think I might have to wait a tad bit longer for Iain Dale…
Update:
Lets see how long this one takes then, eh…?
Tanya Byron
February 17th, 2009 § § permalink
Tim has found out that it is possible to Googlebomb Youtube…
I found out about this after I linked to this ‘Ninja Cat Fail’ video in this post, using that nice Mr Draper’s name in the linked description. The next day, I was looking for a clip of the man, recognised the 2nd-to-top result (screengrab), and realised immediately that I alone had artificially/externally provided the only ‘relevance’ to this query.
Tim wants Google to fix it and thinks the best way to do that is to make a big thing of it till Google realise what’s happening.
I’m just think it’s funny and am curious to know how little influence I have in the results.
So I am going to link to …
… and count the years roll by before I’m on the first page of results.
February 12th, 2009 § § permalink
Sudooli:
How am I going to protect my 4 decades of diary writing so that my kid’s kids can read them with the same interest I am my grandma’s? What happens when Twitter disappears. More importantly when it doesn’t give me access to all my tweets*. Or Flickr closes and I lose the photos therein? When the email I have sent over the last 10 years is consumed by the company I work for? What happens in 30 years when PHP and MySQL and Linux no longer exist?
…
How will my grandkids ever find out what I thought of their wedding day if Twitter is bought by AOL and completely buggered?
