Memex 1.1

Truly, you could not make this up…

A single mother put police and journalists to shame in their attempts to unravel the mysterious reappearance of the canoeist John Darwin by using a simple Google search, it emerged today.

The woman found the picture that apparently shows Darwin with his wife, Anne, in Panama City in July last year.

When confronted with the picture, which was printed in the Daily Mirror yesterday, Anne Darwin is reported to have admitted: “Yes that’s him. My sons will never forgive me.”

It was found by the anonymous woman after she tapped in the words “John, Anne and Panama” into Google. She then forwarded the picture to both Cleveland police and the Mirror.

She said when she forwarded the picture to detectives, she was told: “You’re joking.”

She turned to the internet after becoming suspicious about the story, which has gripped the world’s attention, and she admitted her scepticism had paid dividends.

Thanks to Adrian Monck for spotting it.

… what Steve Ballmer is really like.

And here is The Word of Ballmer:

“Optimism is a force multiplier. It reminds us all as leaders that while you want to be very realistic – you could never put on rose-coloured glasses and not see the situation where you are precisely – on the other hand, if leaders can’t see a path to success, and cannot be fundamentally optimistic, no matter what the odds, it is hard for an organisation as a whole.

“Whether our stock price has been flat for five years, despite the fact I think we perform well – optimism, optimism,” he chants, clicking his fingers.

“Am I realistic about what is going on and yet optimistic about our future, whether it is share price, innovation, competitive situations? When you are behind you have to say, ‘We can catch those guys’. When you are ahead you have to be able to say, ‘We can keep ahead of those guys’. And yet they both require a certain form of optimism, tempered with the right kind of reality.”

Hmmm… This is one of those cases wehre the cock-up theory of history probably provides the best explanation. But here’s The Register’s take on the story so far:

Italian bloggers may be required to register with a national database, unless an ambiguously-worded new law is amended before it comes into force.

Widespread outrage among bloggers and IT-savvy journalists has reached the mainstream press, and the government now appears to be keen to revise a draft law which has led politician Francesco Caruso to remark: “This is Italy, not Burma.”

The law got its initial approval from Mr Prodi’s Cabinet of Ministers in mid-October, as part of a package attempting to tidy up Italy’s publishing-related regulations, and requires further approvals before coming into force.

According to many legal experts, the murky text of the law (pdf) can be construed to include non-professional, not-for-profit blogs and websites among “editorial products”, giving them the same duties and liabilities as magazines and newspapers.

This would require even the lowliest Italian blogger or MySpace account holder to go through the hassle of filing personal details with the national registry of “communication operators” currently reserved for professionals of the publishing sector.

And The Register’s conclusion?

The chances of this law becoming effective in its current form are exceedingly slim, so there is no immediate cause for concern. The blog brouhaha may turn out to be another storm in a teacup, but it has certainly shown Italian netizens once again that their government is remarkably out of touch with the realities of the internet age.

From today’s New York Times…

WASHINGTON, July 2 — President Bush spared I. Lewis Libby Jr. from prison Monday, commuting his two-and-a-half-year sentence while leaving intact his conviction for perjury and obstruction of justice in the C.I.A. leak case.

Mr. Bush’s action, announced hours after a panel of judges ruled that Mr. Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, could not put off serving his sentence while he appealed his conviction, came as a surprise to all but a few members of the president’s inner circle. It reignited the passions that have surrounded the case from the beginning…

This, presumably, is the ‘rule of law’ that is going to be planted in the fertile soil of Iraq?

Every year, Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal hosts a lucrative talkfest in San Diego. Here’s the official description of the venue.

D: All Things Digital is once again being held at the Four Seasons Resort Aviara, just 30 minutes north of San Diego. All sessions and activities are taking place at the Four Seasons, and D5 has a complete buy-out of the property for maximum use of the resort’s facilities and grounds.

Southern California’s finest resort experience, the Four Seasons offers casual elegance in a breathtaking location that is accented by wildlife and wildflowers. Guests of the resort enjoy the elegance and legendary service of the Four Seasons in an unequalled setting, featuring spacious guest rooms, an Arnold Palmer signature golf course, six floodlit tennis courts, a luxurious spa and expansive fitness center, Family Pool and Quiet Pool areas with deck side whirlpools and the area’s top dining choices…

Er, pass the sickbag, Alice.

GMSV has a nice passing swipe at the pretentiousness of it all.

It may not be the cage match of your fantasies, but Steve Jobs and Bill Gates will take the stage together tomorrow at the D: All Things Digital conference, despite scientists’ worries that the density of their combined egos could open a rift in the space-time continuum.

There’s something uniquely nauseating about the top end of the US technology industry.

Later… Which reminds me, Ken Auletta wrote a typically uncritical, admiring profile of Mossberg in the New Yorker. When journalists become the story, the game’s over.

Well, well!

Who’d have predicted this — the Torygraph encouraging its readers to dip a toe into the Web of iniquity?

No, I am not making this up. Tech Review reports that

If you’re passing through a dog park in Boston in the coming months and happen to catch a glimpse of a funny little device hanging off a pooch’s collar, don’t be surprised. A startup called SNIF Labs is gearing up to beta test a technology designed to help dogs–and their owners–become better acquainted.

SNIF Labs–the company’s name is short for Social Networking in Fur–is developing what its website calls “a custom radio communications protocol” that allows special tags dogs wear on their collars to swap dog and owner information with other SNIF-tag users. When two dogs wearing tags come within range of each other, the tags start to swap dog and even owner information…

Galway’s newest resident.

The raging prosperity of my homeland has to be seen to be believed. Some of its manifestations are horrible — for example the despoilation of what were once lovely seaside towns by build-to-rent development. Some are comical — as in the practice of renting stretch limos to deliver 7-year-old girls to their First Communion. And some are beyond satire.

Take the current situation in Galway, the lovely town near where my father’s family live. A stop-frame video made from satellite images of Galway over the last 15 years would show a municipality growing like a tumour, as field after field and hill after hill is covered by speculatively-built housing estates created without the infrastructure to support such explosive growth.

Now we discover the consequences: the public water supply in Galway is no longer safe to drink. On March 28, RTE News reported that:

It has emerged that the city and county water supply in Galway has been contaminated by both human and animal waste.

Tests carried out in laboratories in Wales have also established that the strain of cryptosporidium parasite which has been found in water reservoirs and treatment plants can be transmitted from human to human.

The Health Service Executive says the situation remains a very serious one and it is of the utmost importance that all water is boiled before use.

Experts have told RTÉ News it could be up to six months before tap water is safe to drink in parts of Galway affected by pollution.

Up to 90,000 householders and businesses are affected, and today the number of cases of the cryptosporidium illness in the country rose to 125.

Since then, everyone in Galway has had to use bottled water. Newspapers are full of photographs of families trudging back from supermarkets laden down with huge plastic bottles. Nobody has any idea when — or how — the problem is going to be resolved. It’s got to the state where ‘GalwayWaterCrisis’ even has its own MySpace Profile — surely an innovative use of social networking.

It’s not entirely clear yet what the source of the pollution is, but the Guardian reports that:

Suspicions have focused on a sewage treatment plant at Oughterard, north of Galway, which pumps effluent into Lough Corrib. The Green party mayor of Galway, Niall Ó Brolcháin, claims the plant, built 60 years ago to cater for 250 houses, is unable to cope with the sewage from the now 800 homes in Oughterard that have spread out over the land. “Water services are at capacity and have been for some time,” Mr Ó Brolcháin said. “Yet we are still continuing to develop more houses. That’s wrong. That’s why we are in this mess.”

The Mayor and local politicians blame the government; Environment Minister Dick Roche, however, will have none of it: he retorts that the government had already made 21m euros available for water treatment projects in Galway, but the local council had failed to make use of the money. For once, I agree with the government: this looks like a product of local greed, corruption of the planning system and incompetence. Meanwhile the local business community — which is a major holiday and tourist destination — is beginning to sweat. Will the usual hordes of holidaymakers throng to a resort where you can’t drink the water? Stay tuned.

The delicious irony, of course, is that tainted water used to be a hazard of poor countries like India. In searching for a phrase to describe modern Ireland, a slogan first devised by John Kenneth Galbraith comes to mind. “Private affluence and public squalor”.

The crisis has also, I understand, affected supplies of ‘Holy Water’, which now has to be imported from heathen but uncontaminated localities.

I’m not a great admirer of the British press, but I have more time for it than for its American counterpart, which seems to me to have failed its public and no longer warrants its elevated status as the Fourth Estate. Bill Moyers recently produced a searing expose of his peers. The response of most of them has been to express incredulity. “Who — us?” is the general tenor of the reaction.

Glen Greenwald has written a nice piece about this in Salon. Excerpt:

[Moyers's] documentary is — in one sense — a very valuable historical account of the corrupt behavior by our dominant political and media institutions which deceived the country into the invasion of Iraq. But on another, more significant level, it illustrates the corruption that continues to propel our political and media culture.

One of the most important points came at the end. The institutional decay which Moyers chronicles is not merely a matter of historical interest. Instead, it continues to shape our mainstream political dialogue every bit as much as it did back in 2002 and 2003. The people who committed the journalistic crimes Moyers so potently documents do not think they are guilty of anything — ask them and they will tell you — and as a result, they have not changed their behavior in the slightest.

Just consider that, as Moyers notes, there has been no examination by any television news network of the role played by the American media in enabling the Bush administration and its warmonger propagandists to disseminate pure falsehoods to the American public. People like Eric Boehlert have written books about it, and Moyers has now produced a comprehensive PBS program documenting it. But the national media outlets themselves have virtually ignored this entire story — arguably the most significant political story of the last decade — because they do not think there is any story here at all.

The fraud that was manufactured by our government officials and endorsed by our media establishment is one of the great political crimes of the last many decades. Yet those who are responsible for it have not been held accountable in the slightest. Quite the contrary, their media prominence — as Moyers demonstrates — has only increased, as culpable propagandists and warmongers such as Charles Krauthammer (now of Time and The Washington Post), Bill Kristol (now of Time), Jonah Goldberg (now of The Los Angeles Times, Peter Beinert (now of Time and The Washington Post), and Tom Friedman (revered by media stars everywhere) have all seen their profiles enhanced greatly in our national media.

Part of the problem with the US media is that their privileged status as one of the ‘estates’ of the realm has, somehow, rendered them impotent. Three examples:

I’ve always been suspicious of the big consultancy firms. When I worked on a project in Whitehall some years ago, I watched a team from one of the major outfits at work. An ultra-cautious, ass-covering junior minister was required to make a decision about a project. Rather than ask hard questions himself, he ordered an investigation by a Big Consultancy Firm. The firm sent in a squad of sharp-suited kids who went around asking silly questions for a week and then produced a stupefyingly obvious PowerPoint presentation which told the minister what he wanted to hear. The bill for this hogwash came to £70k. The minister thought it was good value because (a) it wasn’t his money, and (b) it provided him with a document he could wave at the Public Accounts Office if any questions were subsequently raised about the decision. The whole thing was astonishingly cynical, unprofessional and shoddy.

Now comes an interesting report from Information Week about allegations contained in lawsuits filed last week in an Arkansas federal court by the US Department of Justice. The complaints claimed the defendants — companies like Sun, HP and Accenture — paid or received kickbacks from dozens of companies in violation of federal law, while denying that they had such arrangements.

Accenture figures prominently in the government’s complaints.

While Sun and HP allegedly paid millions of dollars each year in kickbacks, Accenture allegedly accepted them in the form of “system integrator compensation,” rebates, and marketing assistance fees. The company earned all three from Sun and HP, according to the complaint.

As a consultant for the government, Accenture was hired as an objective adviser in choosing vendors and purchasing IT equipment, software, and services. The government, however, says Accenture and its purchasing subsidiary, Proquire, were less concerned with their client, and more interested in profits and revenue from partners. “As a result, millions of dollars of kickbacks were sought, received, offered, and paid between and among the defendants with the alliances in violation of the False Claims Act and other federal statutes and regulations,” the complaint said.

Between 1998 and 2006, Accenture earned more than $4 million in cash from system integrator compensation, the complaint said. Between 2001 and 2006, Accenture received such fees from EMC, HP, IBM, Informatica, Mercury Interactive, NCR, PeopleSoft, and Sun. With the exception of Sun and HP, none of the other companies are accused of any wrongdoing.

Accenture also received rebates and marketing assistance fees that were based on a percentage of the revenue in reselling partners’ hardware, software, and services. Under government regulations, such rebates or fees should be pass on to the government.

Accenture, for example, earned more than $32,000 in rebates from HP in July 2002, and more than $2 million in marketing assistance fees between 2003 and 2005 from Sun, according to the complaint.

Without telling the government, Accenture also negotiated steep discounts on hardware, software, and services, and then sold them to the government at higher prices. “Accenture personnel were instructed to constantly look for ways to structure government contract transactions so as to provide for greater opportunities to maximize resale revenue often at the direct expense of its government clients,” the complaint said.

Thanks to Nick Carr and Bill Thompson for alerting me to this particular example of ingenious consultancy ’services’.