Memex 1.1

The New York Times Blog has been following up complaints from would-be Hotmail users who have been told that they cannot have a username which includes the letters “tibet”.

Big American tech companies have given us plenty of reasons to be cynical about how far they will go to keep China’s leaders happy and keep their fingers in the Chinese market … And China’s leaders would prefer that everyone just not mention those unruly Tibetans, especially with the Olympics on the way. But would the Chinese regime really feel threatened by the creation of, say, ILoveTibet@hotmail.com? And even if it did, would Microsoft really agree to help perpetuate that insecurity?

A Microsoft spokeswoman had a different explanation. The company blocks usernames that include the names of various financial institutions. This is meant to make life harder for those seeking to impersonate a bank using an official-looking e-mail address in order to steal customers’ passwords. In this case Microsoft is blocking usernames containing “tib,” apparently to protect customers of TIB Bank in Florida.

Ho, ho!

Where do the Cameroonians get their ideas from? One source, apparently, is Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. This focuses on the foibles and idiosyncrasies of human behaviour and on how, with a little discreet encouragement, we can usually be ushered in the right direction. Writing in the Guardian, James Harkin is not impressed.

Nudge has been put on a list of 38 books which Tory MPs have been given by Dave as their summer reading. I’ve just looked at the list. It’s got some weird things on it — The Rise of Boris Johnson, for example. The only item I’ve read is Ferdinant Mount’s memoir, Cold Cream. Other books are Tom Wheeler’s book on Abraham Lincoln’s use of the telegraph in the Civil War and Philip Bobbitt’s Terror and Consent. And why the Cameroonians should need David Runciman’s Political Hypocrisy is beyond me, given that they are such past masters of the art.

Er, wink, wink.

“We spend too much time getting our systems to work, and not enough putting them to work.”

Lorcan Dempsey

Save the Internet | Rock the Vote

Good campaigning video. Wonder where John McCain and David Cameron stand on this.

I’m not into geotagging, but if I were this would be useful. The Nikon Coolpix P6000 has a built-in GPS unit which enables the coordinates of each image to be recorded. An Ethernet port built into the camera then lets you connect it to the web and log your picture locations on a Nikon image map service — and, eventually no doubt, on Wikipedia and Google Earth.

From The Register…

Dell’s grip on a “cloud computing” trademark may not be as solid as it first seemed.

The US Patent Office has canceled its “notice of allowance” on the Round Rock computer vendor’s attempt to master the popular IT buzzword. Passing the “allowance” step in the trademark process had meant that opponents could no longer object to Dell’s claims. But Dell’s trademark application was updated yesterday to show the case has now “returned to examination.”

It would seem someone working for the USPTO was stuck by thunderbolt of rationality…

Not before time.