From Wired…
England’s EBay for Sex
Britain’s AdultWork website is plugging into the growing niche industry of sex-work dilettantes, people who spend a few hours a week in front of a camera, or in bed with a client, to augment their income — or maybe even just because they like it.
Despite being told by the European Parliament to think again, the EU Council of Ministers has adopted the software patent directive, in the face of requests from Denmark, Poland and Portugal to reject the directive. An EU Council representative said that the Computer Implemented Inventions Directive had been adopted but was unable to give more details. As it now stands, the directive would legalize software patents. This is Really Bad News because the only people really in favour of this are a number of very large and powerful software companies, including a noted abusive monopolist based in the US. The Directive now goes back to the Parliament. If you don’t know who your MEP is, now is the time to find out. This madness has to be stopped. Among other things, it could wipe out Open Source software. The European Parliament can stop it, but will only do so if its members understand the full implications of what is being proposed.
The Pew Internet & American Life Project has just released a report and
a commentary about the internet’s role in the 2004 election. The report
is based on a post-election survey and documents how and why the
internet became an essential part of American politics in 2004. 75
million Americans – 37% of the adult population and 61% of online
Americans – used the internet to get political news and information,
discuss candidates and debate issues in emails, or participate directly
in the political process by volunteering or giving contributions to
candidates.
Report downloadable from here. Commentary by Michael Cornfield available here. His summary is:
The Project report confirms that the internet has become an essential medium of American politics. It has done so gradually, like other media. Yet, the internet’s distinctive role in politics has arisen because it can be used in multiple ways. Part deliberative town square, part raucous debating society, part research library, part instant news source, and part political comedy club, the internet connects voters to a wealth of content and commentary about politics. At the same time, campaigners learned a great deal about how to use the internet to attract and aggregate viewers, donors, message forwarders, volunteers, and voters during the 2003-2004 election cycle.
“A brilliant European sociologist, Norbert Elias, wrote a history of manners called The Civilising Process. He figured out how people conducted themselves in the tntimate matters of daily life many centuries ago by reading what authors of etiquette books were telling them not to do. Why write books telling people not to defecate in public, he reasoned, if that’s not exactly what people are doing all the time? And so it is today. Change management would not be the industry it is if organisations were changing. Change management is huge precisely because organisations are not fundamentally changing”.
From The Support Economy by Shoshana Zuboff and James Maxmin.
The New York Times is reporting that Sony has appointed a Welsh-born former television news journalist called Howard Stringer (currently running Sony Corporation of America) to succeed Nobuyuki Idei, the current chairman and chief executive, who is retiring next year after Sony’s 60th anniversary. You can bet that this Stringer is no Welsh nationalist — he’s accepted a knighthood, no doubt for “services to industry”. Just like that other devout monarchist, ‘Sir’ Bill Gates.
Good journalism enables one to see beneath the surface of events. Two pieces did that for me this weekend. The first was Andrew Rawnsley’s column, which illuminated something that has puzzled me a lot, namely why UK government ministers are so obsessed by the terrorist ‘threat’. I mean to say, this is a political establishment that coped successfully for thirty years with IRA terrorism, and never really lost its cool. But now ministerial utterances are full of unstated dread. They speak as people who are privy to some terrible secret — so terrible that the rest of us mere mortals are not allowed to know it. After a time, we become sceptical, and conclude that they have just been browbeaten by spooks. Rawnsley sees it slightly differently — it’s about covering their asses. “Ministers speak frankly”, he writes,
” — well, at least in private they speak frankly — of their nightmares about a Madrid-style horror, and possibly something 10 times as cataclysmic, happening in Britain. It is the big and terrifying unpredictable about the time between now and election day. Public opinion might rally to the government. Or it might swing angrily against Ministers. No one knows. Not knowing petrifies them. This is driving a panic not to give anyone any reason to be able to point a finger of blame that the government didn’t prevent an avoidable atrocity.”
The second piece illuminated another puzzle, namely the strange behaviour of the US troops who shot the rescued Italian journalist-hostage and killed the Italian Intelligence officer who had negotiated her release. “What Iraq Checkpoints are like”, Annia Ciezadlo’s fine article in the Christian Science Monitor explained what it’s like on the ground in Iraq, and why road checkpoints are so ambiguous — and in the process explained how easy it is for either side to make mistakes.
As a result of reading these pieces, I feel that my ignorance has been reduced and my understanding increased. Wish more journalism had the same effect.
Peter Bazalgette on the central problem facing anyone trying to run the BBC.
‘British TV is an organised hypocrisy, where you have to say one thing to regulators and to government, who don’t have much sympathy for entertainment and don’t watch TV, and another things to viewers, whose primary reason for turning their TV sets on is to be entertained.’
From a nice piece in the Observer by James Robinson.
David Weinberger has written a really helpful overview which puts the burgeoning interest in tagging into a more general perspective.
From the Amicus brief filed by Eben Moglen on behalf of the Free Software Movement and a group called ‘New Yorkers for Fair Use’.:
“At the heart of Petitioners’ argument is an arrogant and unreasonable claim — even if made to the legislature empowered to determine such a general issue of social policy — that the Internet must be designed for the convenience of their business model, and to the extent that its design reflects other concerns, the Internet should be illegal.” Eben is not a man to mince words and he’s gone right to the heart of it.