Daily Archives: October 23, 2007

Apple now bigger than IBM

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Hmmm… From Good Morning Silicon Valley…

Ask people these days who Big Brother symbolized in Apple’s classic “1984″ commercial, and a goodly number of folks are liable to say Microsoft. But 23 years ago, the target of Apple’s hammer-wielding freedom fighter was IBM, the PC market leader at the time. So it must have been with an exhilarating sense of satisfaction that Steve Jobs and the Apple brass watched another dazzling set of quarterly financials push the company’s stock price up to around $187 a share today, vaulting Apple’s market cap past IBM’s by about $6 billion.

And while Google-watchers go gaga over its soaring share price (see “A six-letter word for bubble? Try gasbag“), note that an investor who bought Apple on the same day Google stock debuted in 2004 would have, as of the close of market yesterday, made 40 percent more than if the same money had been put into the search sovereign’s shares.

Warning to abusive bloggers

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Some interesting cases were decided last week.

Disgruntled fans of Sheffield Wednesday who vented their dissatisfaction with the football club’s bigwigs in anonymous internet postings may face expensive libel claims after the chairman, chief executive and five directors won a high-court ruling last week forcing the owner of a website to reveal their identity.

The case, featuring the website owlstalk.co.uk, is the second within days to highlight the danger of assuming that the apparent cloak of anonymity gives users of internet forums and chatrooms carte blanche to say whatever they like.

In another high court case last week, John Finn, owner of the Sunderland property firm Pallion Housing, admitted just before he was due to be cross-examined that he was responsible for a website hosting a scurrilous internet campaign about a rival housing organisation, Gentoo Group, its employees and owner, Peter Walls.

Exposing the identity of those who post damaging lies in cyberspace is a growth area for libel lawyers.

Dan Tench, of Olswang, the law firm representing Gentoo, said: “This case illustrates an increasingly important legal issue: proving who is responsible for the publication of anonymous material on the internet. This is likely to be a significant issue in defamation cases in the future.”

The website Dadsplace, set up to campaign against perceived injustices in the family courts, had a forum where anonymous postings made various accusations against Gentoo, Mr Walls and his staff.

Those posting the comments went to considerable lengths to hide their identity, and Gentoo’s lawyers ran up a bill estimated to be about £300,000 – which Mr Finn will now have to pick up, along with any damages awarded – taking the case to court and amassing circumstantial evidence that he was behind the website…

Another lucrative line of business for m’learned friends. And a salutary reminder to utopian libertarians that the law has a longer arm than we once supposed.

Polish democracy grows up

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The best news we’ve had in months came from the Polish electorate, which comprehensively rejected the crew who have been ruining the country for the last few years. As the Guardian leader-writer puts it…

Polish democracy grew up on Sunday, when the country’s voters rejected the strident, xenophobic nationalism of Jaroslav Kaczynski. The election mattered not just because it was the first time a generation born after 1989 could vote. Nor because the liberal conservative winner Donald Tusk won the strongest mandate of any prime minister in the post-communist era. It was important because it saw a new generation of voters express its impatience with a leadership that saw the rise of Poland exclusively through the prism of 20th-century invasion and occupation. Though Mr Kaczynski’s twin brother Lech still holds the presidency, Poland has turned a corner.

The reaction in European capitals to the departure of the intellectually dominant Kaczynski twin is not the best way to gauge the result of a snap election. But it does show how many countries the twins alienated in their brief but incident-packed reign. There was Germany, which found that the country they had sponsored for entry into the EU was now using membership as a way of settling old scores. There was Russia, whose relationship with the EU was embittered by Poland, retaliating to a Russian ban on Polish meat. There was the EU itself, whose reform treaty was nearly scuppered in the summer by Polish demands for more votes. The election was as much about Poland’s image abroad as it was about the need for more tolerance and liberty at home. If Mr Kaczynski’s model for Poland was a combative, xenophobic country surrounded by perceived enemies, and committed only to a relationship with a dwindling band of US neoconservatives, that model was rejected by the thousands of Poles living in Britain and Ireland who had a calmer, less hysterical view Poland’s place in Europe…

Italian bloggers to be officially registered?

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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.

In praise of binge drinking — by toffs

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Curious column by Andrew O’Hagen in the Torygraph. He opens with a meditation on the England rugby team’s piss-up in Paris, which was apparently attended by Princes William and Harry:

Prince Harry – a lager-lout if ever there was one – could talk the hind legs off a donkey and he doesn’t hesitate when some bladdered oaf hands him the vodka bottle.

We know this because we’ve all now seen the pictures from the post-defeat bacchanal that followed the Rugby World Cup final.

There’s Prince William hugging his mates to tell them he loves them; there’s Jonny Wilkinson, drink in hand, with a face like a bulldog chewing a wasp, diving headlong into temporary oblivion. Some other bloke has lost his top and Prince Harry, ever the scarlet-faced chieftain of the stag party, is ready for a song.

This is called “drowning your sorrows”. It’s called “letting off steam”. It’s called “cheering up the lads”.

But then,

Let us put aside the fact that the same behaviour in Newcastle quickly gets you bundled into the back of a police van, and concentrate instead on the occasional value of binge drinking.

Funny how the spectacle of upper-class vandalism still makes the new modern Torygraph go all dewy-eyed.