Rescue of Jessica Lynch entirely “staged” by US soldiers? An extraordinary story from the BBC, which says it will supply evidence that this is so in a news documentary to air Sunday in the UK. A cover story report in today’s Guardian newspaper says that the Fedayeen had abandoned the hospital days before the ‘rescue’ and that the advance party of US soldiers had been informed of this via their own Arab interpreter. More bizarre, US soldiers had actually fired on a vehicle carrying Lynch, driven by an Iraqi doctor who had informed soldiers that he would try to bring her to them from the hospital as basically the whole place was empty anyway and she wasn’t badly hurt. Under heavy fire, he had to turn and drive her back. The Pentagon claimed that she had gun and stab wounds. But doctors at the hospital say she had no gun or other combat wounds, only broken bones and a sprain consistent with a car accident – and the Pentagon is now saying there is now some “conflicting information” about what wounds she actually has, refusing to say anything more.

The doctors also say the soldiers arrived along with their film crew and as the film rolled, started kicking in doors and shouting — though they’d been told there was no resistance and hadn’t been for days. Only a couple of doctors remained in the hospital and one patient, handcuffed to a bed frame. The doctors and the empty hospital are presumably in the military film, but only a five-minute edit of the ‘rescue’ was released (within two hours of the event itself, and rushed to US media) and the Pentagon has refused to release the full film — with the doctors in it — to UK journalists asking for it, to clear up discrepencies. Says one doctor, “I don’t know why they think there is some benefit in saying she has a bullet injury.”

Says another: “It was like a Hollywood film. They cried ‘Go, go, go’, with guns and blanks and the sound of explosions.” The Pentagon would not say what, if any, kind of resistance had been met by the soldiers at the hospital.

And on top of all this, the senior Downing Street official sent to Iraq to represent the Prime Minister’s office has complained that at the very least, the Lynch affair was overblown, a minor human interest element compared to the discovery of the bodies of her comrades. He won’t be any more specific but did complain privately to the UK government that the Lynch presentation was particularly ’embarrassing’. Further, British military Group Captain Al Lockwood, the British Army spokesman at central command in Iraq, says in the documentary that the British could not believe the pandering way in which the US military dealt with the US media, culminating in the Lynch episode, and the gushing, unquestioning acceptance of same by the US media. “In reality we had two different styles of news media management,” said Lockwood. “I feel fortunate to have been part of the UK one.”

Meanwhile, Lynch says she can’t remember anything that happened to her. Will the US media pick up on any of this? Or will it shy away from ruining a potential blockbuster action film through too many difficult questions?

[[ t e c h n o c u l t u r e ]]

The Bushies’ Saudi problem: update

According to the New York Times , the US is fed up with Saudi incompetence and dilatoriness on security matters. Quote:

“Reflecting what some officials said was increasing American frustration with the Saudi efforts against terrorism, the ambassador, Robert W. Jordan, praised Crown Prince Abdullah and Prince Saud al-Faisal, the foreign minister, for their “sincere” vows of a crackdown on military groups. But he also said that “executing the plan to provide additional security is another matter, and I think there’s some ways to go on that, quite frankly.” The ambassador’s comments, coming two days after three bomb blasts in Riyadh killed 34 people including 8 Americans, illustrate the depth of continuing strains between American and Saudi officials over cooperation in fighting terrorism.

Even the White House, which has tried in recent months to repair relations with the kingdom, said today that Saudi efforts to combat terrorism remain inadequate, despite some recent improvements.

“As with many countries around the world, the fact is that Saudi Arabia must deal with the fact that it has terrorists inside its own country, and their presence is as much a threat to Saudi Arabia as it is to Americans and to others who live and work in Saudi Arabia,” the White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, said today. “

Hmmm… According to the CIA Factbook, Saudi has 23,513,330 inhabitants — including an estimated 5,360,526 non-nationals (most of them Palestinians and poor Arabs from other Islamic states). My guess is that if we discount the Al Saud regime’s retainers, freeloaders, parasites and hangers-on (say one and a half million mendicants) that means that upwards of 22 million Saudis and their gastarbeiters are fervent admirers of Osama bin Laden. So how exactly is the ruling regime going to sort that out?

Something you must see!

Readers of my newspaper columns know that I believe PowerPoint rots the minds of both presenters and audiences. How nice then to see that Edwarde Tufte, a great expert on how to present information clearly, has written a pamphlet entitled “The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint”. What really made me laugh, though, is the wonderful illustration on the front cover.

Monopolistic business as usual at Microsoft

Well, well. An interesting New York Times story reveals that, back at Redmond, all systems are functioning normally. Quote:

“Last summer, Orlando Ayala, then in charge of worldwide sales at Microsoft, sent an e-mail message titled Microsoft Confidential to senior managers laying out a company strategy to dissuade governments across the globe from choosing cheaper alternatives to the ubiquitous Windows computer software systems.

Mr. Ayala’s message told executives that if a deal involving governments or large institutions looked doomed, they were authorized to draw from a special fund to offer the software at a steep discount or even free if necessary. Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, was sent a copy of the e-mail message.

The memo on protecting sales of Windows and other desktop software mentioned Linux, a still small but emerging software competitor that is not owned by any specific company. “Under NO circumstances lose against Linux,” Mr. Ayala wrote.

This memo, as well as other e-mail messages and internal Microsoft documents obtained from a recipient of the Microsoft e-mail, offers a rare glimpse these days into the inner workings of Microsoft, the world’s largest software company. They spell out a program of tactics that were carried out in recent years, ranging from steep price discounts to Microsoft employees lying about their identities at trade shows.

The Microsoft campaign against Linux raises questions about how much its aggressive, take-no-prisoners corporate culture has changed, despite having gone through a lengthy, reputation-tarnishing court battle in the United States that resulted in Microsoft’s being found to have repeatedly violated antitrust laws.”

There is also the added complication that Microsoft’s “have Windows free if you were thinking of Linux” strategy is illegal in the EU — which now encompasses 25 countries.

Bush’s Saudi problem just got worse

“US Vows to Find Saudi Bombers” is the headline on a BBC story about the Riyadh bombings. But the difficulty is that Saudi Arabia has more Bin Laden sympathisers than the rest of the entire Arab world. And the Saudi royals are, er, somewhat ambivalent in their attitudes to ol’ Bin Liner himself. In fact, some of them have been bankrolling Islamic terrorism for decades. Most of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudis. Saudi Arabia poses a much bigger threat to the US than did Iraq. Will we now see a new ‘coalition of the willing’ to sort out this sordid, medieval fiefdom? Hmmm…

The hidden cost of file-sharing: you might get a nasty virus — and not just from the RIAA

Register story. “Using P2P networks as a vector for viral propagation has become a popular trick of late. In February, the Igloo worm (which falsely promised racy pictures of celebrity nudes) spread through KaZaA. In August 2002, the Duload worm used attempted similar propagation tactics. Before that we had the (awkwardly named) Backdoor.K0wbot.1.3.B and Benjamin worm. So Fizzer is just the latest in a long and ignoble line. However its use of random names and payload makes it more stealthy and dangerous than most of its predecessors.”

15 tips for remote collaboration

Useful essay by Indi Young.

A litmus test for e-commerce sites

In my Observer column today, I propose a test for determining whether a company aspiring to do business online understands the Web: Can you find out what a product or service costs in three clicks or less? The astonishing thing is not that many sites fall at this elementary hurdle, but that so many are reluctant to cite prices at all. Instead they invite you to dispatch an email query to sales@braindead.co.uk.

What this implies is that they are afraid that potential consumers will be able to compare them with their competitors. Such a strategy may wash in the real world but it bombs in cyberspace, where customers are accustomed to performing effortless price comparisons. It’s a mistake Jeff Bezos never made – which is why he’s taking over the world.

The Web is only good for searching and selling according to the New York Times. Oh yeah?

The Times publishes one of those pieces which makes you wonder if the author (Steve Lohr in this case) inhabits the same planet as the rest of us. The gist is that the Net has failed to live up to its promise of creating ‘new media’, and instead has degenerated into an arena where only shopping and searching are viable. Quote:

“The shift to bits promised more than just faster and cheaper distribution of the same old information and entertainment. The digital age held out the potential for a genuinely “new media.” Pundits and media executives spoke about the prospect of everything from interactive television and shopping — click the zapper to suggest a new story line or buy the sweater Jennifer Aniston was wearing on that “Friends” episode ?– to donning goggles and suits to enter virtual worlds offering simulated sports, travel and sex.

But it hasn’t happened. The companies that spent hugely on the “digital convergence” of media and Internet-era computing, AOL Time Warner and Vivendi Universal, which bought Mr. Diller’s media properties, are in turmoil. And their visionary architects, Stephen M. Case at AOL Time Warner and Jean-Marie Messier at Vivendi Universal, have been ousted.”

Note the argument: because some brain-dead Big Media companies couldn’t create ‘New Media’ on the Web, therefore the Web has failed. But who said that new media would be Old Media plus broadband? If Mr Lohr had chosen to look at — for example — the Blogging phenomenon, he would have seen seriously ‘new’ media in action. And then he might then have been obliged to contemplate how radical this phenomenon is — how it involves what Clay Shirky calls “the mass amateurization of publishing”. But print journalists are so locked into their paradigm that they apparently cannot see what’s in front of their noses.

Paul Graham’s “A Plan for Spam”

Fascinating essay outlining a probabilistic approach based on analysing the content of spam messages, rather than concentrating on the headers.