The way it is

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Excerpt from an email sent by a colleague currently working in Africa:

FYI: Anyone watching the news right now will be aware to a greater or less extent that Kenya is hitting a big low. A Kenyan friend has written to me saying that ‘the whole country is in depression and murder, mayhem are the order of the day’. Anyone will be aware that many Kenyan people are facing a violent, dangerous & insecure time. So you should also be aware that the United Nations is currently in the process of considering evacuating ‘all staff’. All staff that is, er-hum, apart from ‘local Kenyan staff’. Whilst the UN international staff get shipped out, on huge per diems, and weep over their losses; the local staff sit tight and hope & pray they survive and that this spiral of violence ceases.

International organizations do this all the time. When the going gets tough, the humanitarians (often, not all, but often) pull out all foreign staff and leave the ‘locals’ to sweat it out. It’s their country after all, so they can fix it. The foreign staff must be saved at all costs. But why go into a job at the UN, or one of the big aidies, if you’re not prepared to stick it out when the shit hits the fan? Often you’re the least likeliest of targets; you are afforded the best protection; with the best life & health insurace; and all means of pensions, salary benefits etc.

It stinks.

Yep.

Every picture tells a story…

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This is the Weichert seismograph recording for 13:12 GMT on April 18, 1906. Location: San Francisco.

Here’s the result — as captured by George Lawrence with a huge panoramic camera flown aloft by kites. This is a blown-up section of Lawrence’s huge photograph (fuller version here.)

The 1906 earthquake was felt as far away as Oregon and central Nevada. Strong shaking was experienced as far north as Eureka and as far south as King City. The San Andreas Fault ruptured along a length of almost 300 miles, from San Juan Bautista to Shelter Cove (south of Eureka), with maximum surface offsets as much as 28 feet. Much of what wasn’t destroyed by the quake was wiped out by the fires which broke out. As ever, there was looting — of which the Mayor took an exceedingly dim view (as this exhibit from the city’s Virtual Museum makes clear):

A hundred years after the quake, a team of panoramic photographers led by Ron Klein built a replica of Lawrence’s mammoth camera, suspended it from a helicopter and took a panoramic photograph from exactly the same location as Lawrence’s original vantage point.

One member of the team, Scott Haefner, still does kite aerial photography. He has an interesting website.

Don’t expect UK privacy law reform

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Just because the government has been shown to be disgracefully casual in its handling of confidential personal data doesn’t mean that the Brown administration is proposing to do anything radical about it. That’s not just an uninformed, cynical take on what’s happening. It’s also the view
of Rosemary Jay, Head of the Information Law team at Pinsent Masons (the law firm that publishes OUT-LAW.COM)

One million iPhones have gone missing

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Register report:

About 27 per cent of the iPhones sold in 2007 are being operated on unauthorized wireless networks, according to research released today. That works out at about one million handsets.

The unlocked phones are used largely in regions where the must-have device isn’t officially sold, according to a report issued by Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi. He says the appetite for the modified phones has given way to a cottage industry that sells hacks or phones that come out of the box unlocked. Most phones originated in the US where, thanks to current currency exchange rates, prices are comparatively low…

Unlocked phones dramatically reduce the profitability of iPhones for Apple becaue the company gets $300 to $400 from its network ‘partners’ for each iPhone sold. So the missing phones generate 50 per cent less revenue and up to 75 per cent less profit than normal. A million missing phones therefore means $400m in lost revenue. Ouch!

Gutenberg 2.0

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This morning’s Observer column…

Today’s Gutenberg is Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the web. In the 17 years since he launched his technology on an unsuspecting world, he has transformed it. Nobody knows how big the web is now, but estimates of the indexed part hover at around 40 billion pages, and the ‘deep web’ hidden from search engines is between 400 and 750 times bigger than that. These numbers seem as remarkable to us as the avalanche of printed books seemed to Brandt. But the First Law holds we don’t know the half of it, and it will be decades before we have any real understanding of what Berners-Lee hath wrought.

Occasionally, we get a fleeting glimpse of what’s happening. One was provided last week by the report of a study by the British Library and researchers at University College London…

Federal Court decides that cease-and-desist letters are protected by copyright

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Interesting decision.

Glen Allen, VA (PRWEB) January 24, 2008 — The US District Court for the District of Idaho has found that copyright law protects a lawyer demand letter posted online by the recipient … The copyright decision… is the first known court decision in the US to address the issue directly. The Final Judgment calls into serious question the practice of posting lawyer cease and desist letters online, a common tactic used and touted by First Amendment groups to attack legal efforts at resolving everything from defamation to intellectual property disputes.

In September 2007, Dozier Internet Law, a law firm specializing exclusively in representing business interests on the web, was targeted online by “free speech” and “public participation” interests for asserting copyright ownership rights in a confidential cease and desist letter sent to a “scam reporting site”. The issue generated online buzz in the US with commentators such as Google’s lead copyright counsel and Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen attacking the practice as unlawful, and Dozier Internet Law responding. Bloggers from around the world soon joined the debate, reeling at the thought of losing a valuable counter-attack tool.

The Court, in its decision, found that a copyright had been adequately established in a lawyer’s cease and desist letter. The unauthorized publication of the letter, therefore, can expose the publisher to liability. Statutory damages under the US Copyright Act can be as much as $150,000 per occurrence plus attorneys’ fees that can average $750,000 through trial. The publisher of the letter raised First Amendment and “fair use” arguments without success.

Germans are planning to eavesdrop on Skype

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Interesting documents on Wikileaks. Basically, it seems that the Bavarian authorities have been looking for contractors to install Trojans on target machines which run Skype. Slashdot explains:

The first document is a communication by the Ministry of Justice to the prosecutors office, about the cost splitting for Skype interception. The second document presents the offer made by Digitask, the German company secretly developing Skype interception, and holds information on pricing and license model, high-level technology descriptions and other detail. The document is of global importance because Skype is used by tens or hundreds of millions of people daily to communicate voice calls and Skype (owned by Ebay, Inc) promotes these calls as being encrypted and secure. The technology includes interception boxes, key forwarding trojans and anonymous proxies to hide police communications.

Quote of the day

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Putting [Lotus] Notes on iPhone is like getting out a piece of exquisite Wedgwood china and using it to serve a steaming pile of dog shit. Have you ever seen Notes? It’s not software, it’s a form of punishment. Companies that use Notes have to staff not only a help desk but also a suicide prevention center — it’s that bad. Even the poor bastards at IBM, who are forced to use it, do nothing but complain…

From the The Fake Steve Jobs diary.

The Davos gabfest

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It’s that time of year again — the world’s bosses have gathered in Davos to do some schmoozing and pretend they have social consciences. Bill Gates delivered his plea for a kinder, gentler capitalism*, for example, which is bit like hoping that wild boars will learn to respect suburban flower-beds.

Needless to say, the Google boys are there — and there’s a substantial YouTube presence as a result. See, for example, the Davos question where the fat cats post their answers to the question “What one thing do you think that countries, companies and individuals must do to make the world a better place in 2008?”.

*Footnote: latest kinder, gentler capitalist results. Microsoft sales up 30%, profits up 79%.