Monthly Archives: February 2006

Drug dealer reports dope theft to cops

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From The Register…

An 18-year-old drug dealing master criminal is languishing in Utah County Jail after reporting the theft of his stash to police, the Deseret Morning News reports.

He rang the cops to complain that someone had broken into his Orem home and made off with the “quarter-pound of marijuana he had been trying to sell”. The burglar “had broken a window and apparently cut himself while crawling into the home” and a “trail of blood indicated that the thief’s efforts were concentrated on the 18-year-old’s bedroom, where the drugs had been kept”.

Clash of civilisations

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In this case, those of the US and Europe. On the day that every newspaper on this side of the Atlantic is devoting acres of newsprint to the widespread and continuing Muslim protests against the cartoons of the Prophet published in Scandanavia and elsewhere, the US’s premier liberal newspaper has nothing at all about the issue on the front page of its web site.

Apple-pie protest

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Nice, properly barbed, piece by Tom Zeller in the New York Times about the way US technology companies are caving in to the Chinese government’s repressive demands.

Western technology companies have only themselves to blame if users in the free world quickly ask when Shi Tao, the journalist whose name Yahoo gave to Chinese authorities and who subsequently was sentenced to a 10-year prison term, will be released. Or that people use what-ifs to ponder the moral limits of saying that local law is local law.

That’s partly because it is only recently that any of the players have made any genuine efforts at transparency in their dealings with China.

Two weeks ago, Google took the bold step of plainly admitting that it was entering the Chinese market with a censored search product, tweaked according to government specifications. Then last week, Microsoft announced new policies that would enable it to honor a government’s demand to shut down a citizen’s blog (as happened five weeks ago with a popular MSN blogger in Beijing) while still keeping the blog visible outside of China.

But these are small victories, said Julien Pain of the group Reporters Without Borders, which tracks Internet censorship in China, not least because the companies “seem now to accept censorship as a given, and have simply decided to be transparent about it.”

Still, to many, it signaled progress.

And yet all four American companies with P.R. baggage in China — Cisco, Yahoo, Microsoft and now Google — were no-shows at a hearing last Wednesday of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus. At least three of the companies submitted written statements defending their activities in China, but their absence only added to their image problem, as headlines like “Tech Firms Snub Feds” and “Google Stiffs Congressional Caucus” bounced around the blogosphere.

Later in the piece, Zeller ponders the question of whether Google in particular might pay a price (in the West) for its capitulation.

IceRocket is one of several search alternatives listed at NoLuv4Google.org, which is run by a group called Students for a Free Tibet. Clusty.com, a search site developed by several Carnegie Mellon computer scientists, is another. Clusty proudly states that it “never censors search results” or excludes material “that would be objectionable to governments or would be unlawful in unelected, nondemocratic regimes.”

In an e-mail message, Mark Cuban, IceRocket’s founder, put it more bluntly: “IceRocket doesn’t and won’t censor. We index more than one million Chinese-language blogs. No chance we censor or block anything in this lifetime.”

Even David Pinto, who owns the popular — and wholly apolitical — site BaseballMusings.com, has ceased taking income from Google ads. “I was no longer comfortable taking money from them,” he said. That’s the sort of apple-pie protest that American companies can’t ignore.

The House of Representatives Subcommittee on Global Human Rights is going to hold hearings on this interesting topic on February 15. Google & Co will have to show up for this because the commitee has the power to subpoena them.

Who do you trust?

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This morning’s Observer column…

One of the more interesting news items of last week was the report that Tiffany and Company, the celebrated New York jeweller, is suing eBay, the online auction company, for ‘facilitating the sale of counterfeit goods’ over the internet. It turns out that undercover agents working for the company secretly bought 200 ‘Tiffany’ items in eBay auctions and found that three out of four were counterfeited. The case will go to trial in the US later this year…

Realism at last?

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BBC Online is reporting that

Shares of internet search company Google fell 7% on Wednesday after its earnings fell short of Wall Street expectations for the first time.
The firm said late on Tuesday that fourth-quarter profit rose by 82% to $372.2m (£209m), or $1.22 per share. Analysts had expected $1.50 a share.

Google’s stock fell $30.88 to $401.78 in New York amid concerns that the tech-industry giant may be overvalued.

Well, well. The ingratitude of Wall Street. And after Google’s capitulation to the Chinese regime, too. There’s no pleasing some capitalists.

The iTab

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A host of Apple patent filings have led to frenzied speculation — e.g. here — that Steve Jobs’s next bombshell will be a tablet computer that really works. I’ll believe it when I see it — not the tablet, but software that makes it do useful work. The computing tablet that’s more helpful than a Moleskine notebook has yet to be invented. But I’d buy one tomorrow if it existed.

Some grown-up questions for Google

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Terrific piece by Becky Hogge on openDemocracy.net

Since going public in August 2004, [Google] has released over a dozen products, including Google Maps, Google Web Accelerator, Google Homepage, Google Sitemaps, Google Earth, Google Talk, Google Desktop, Google Base, Google Book Search, Google Video and Google Pack. So what has Google been up to in China during those eighteen months?

One clue might lie in the feature of google.cn that sets it apart from the other global search providers, like MSN and Yahoo!, operating inside China. This feature – much lauded in the official statements given by Google on the day of the launch – is that google.cn tells its customers when their search results have been “filtered”. How Google got that concession from the Chinese authorities might go some way to explaining why it took so long to release google.cn. But the question then has to be, what did Google offer in return?

The digital camera market

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From David Pogue, writing in the New York Times…

Big changes are in the photographic air. First, there’s the astonishing collapse of the film camera market. By some tallies, 92 percent of all cameras sold are now digital. Big-name camera companies are either exiting the film camera business ( Kodak, Nikon) or exiting the camera business altogether (Konica Minolta). Film photography is rapidly becoming a special-interest niche.

Next, there’s the end of the megapixel race. “In compact cameras, I think that the megapixel race is pretty much over,” says Chuck Westfall, director of media for Canon’s camera marketing group. “Seven- and eight-megapixel cameras seem to be more than adequate. We can easily go up to a 13-by-19 print and see very, very clear detail.”

That’s a shocker. After 10 years of hearing how they need more, more, more megapixels, are consumers really expected to believe that eight megapixels will be the end of the line?

So, what’s next?

In no particular order, Pogue predicts:

  • Image stabilisers
  • Improved movie recording capabilities
  • WiFi connectivity to printers and computers
  • changing appearance — there’s no reason why a digital camera has to look like a film camera
  • Better batteries
  • Onboard GPS
  • Better screens
  • Smaller SLRs
  • Er, that’s it.

    • End. Period. Stop.

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    This really is the end of an era. Western Union has transmitted its last telegram.

    STOP: After 155 years in the telegraph business, Western Union has cabled its final dispatch.

    The service that in the mid-1800s displaced pony-borne messengers has been supplanted over the past half-century by inexpensive long-distance telephone service, faxes and e-mail. In a final bit of irony, Western Union informed customers last week in a message on its Web site.

    “Effective January 27, 2006, Western Union will discontinue all Telegram and Commercial Messaging services,” said the notice. “We regret any inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you for your loyal patronage.”

    The terse notice, confirmed Wednesday by Victor Chayet, a spokesman for the Greenwood Village, Co., unit of First Data Corp., was in keeping with telegraphese, the language customers devised to hold down costs. Sentences were separated by “STOP,” which was cheaper to send than a period, Chayet said.

    Thus ends a comms channel that has given rise to more than its fair share of jokes.

    Like the American news reporter who, upon arriving in Venice, cabled: “STREETS FLOODED STOP PLEASE ADVISE”

    Or the time when Cary Grant got a telegram from a magazine fact-checker: “HOW OLD CARY GRANT QUERY”. He replied: “OLD CARY GRANT FINE STOP HOW YOU QUERY”.

    Tom Standage, Technology Editor of the Economist, wrote a nice book about the telegraph entitled The Victorian Internet.

    Pete (who corrected the Venice quote, above) reminds me of Evelyn Waugh’s wonderfully comic use of telegraphese in his novel, Scoop, e.g. this dispatch from the hapless war correspondent, William Boot, in response to a series of urgent demands from Head Office for dispatches from the front:

    PLEASE DONT WORRY QUITE SAFE AND WELL IN FACT RATHER ENJOYING THINGS WEATHER IMPROVING WILL CABLE AGAIN IF THERE IS ANY NEWS YOURS BOOT

    Quote of the day

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    The Carrowteigue area is notorious for its scenic landscapes.

    From the online brochure of a Co. Mayo estate agent.

    Update: I’ve had a lovely email from a fastidious reader who points out that ‘notorious’ has several meanings. For example, the Shorter Oxford lists these three:

  • Well known, commonly or generally known, forming a matter of common knowledge, esp. on account of some bad practice, quality etc., or some other thing not generally approved of or admired;
  • Such as is or may be generally, openly or publicly known. (Now rare.);
  • Conspicious, obvious, evident.

    I of course assumed the first, which is why I hooted with laughter upon reading the estate agent’s blurb. But it is perfectly possible, I concede, that in the recesses of Co. Mayo (where I was born), there dwells an estate agent with a more extensive grasp of the English language than mine and an even more antiquated style!

    What a thing it is to have erudite readers. I expect I will now become notorious among them for my ignorance. Sigh.