Wednesday, April 4
Bournemouth's 'deaf and dumb' election ban
Dorset Echo
Council condemned for offensive election notes
By Lynn MorrisCHARITIES have criticised a council for using offensive terms such as "lunatics" and "idiots" in election guidelines.
According to the notes for candidates issued by Bournemouth Borough Council "lunatics and idiots" were disqualified from standing as councillors along with "deaf and dumb persons".
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Cllr Ron Whittaker said: "People do often think that councillors are idiots but I have never seen it in print before".
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Following enquiries from the Daily Echo, the council has now amended the document.
The deputy returning officer Matthew Pitcher said that the terms were included in error because they are legal terms.
He said people defined in law as "lunatics and idiots" or "deaf and dumb" could still apply to be councillors.
BBC
Matt Pitcher, electoral services officer, said it was a mistake and
that the terms were taken directly from election law dating back to
1766.
"Of course such language is certainly not acceptable today," he added.
"The terminology used as part of our election pack to candidates was
unfortunately taken directly from a piece of election law which dates
from 1766 but is still current today.
Did their Web Team get it right though?
Top brands not showing up on mobile searches
Brand Attention
03-04-2007There is a severe lack of Mobile Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) among FTSE 100 companies, with many top firms having no branded content on their first page of search results, according to new research.
The study, conducted by SEO brand protection and mobile search firm Brand Attention, looked at keyword search results based on the average results from two key words closely tied to the company's online description, products and services.
Commenting on the findings, Howard Furr-Barton, managing director of Brand Attention, said:
The study revealed that nine in ten (90%) of FTSE 100 companies have homepages listed as the first search result when searching by company name online, compared with only 5% on Google Mobile Web."When inputting a company name into Google.co.uk, the research reveals 7% of FTSE 100 companies' homepages do not appear in the first page of search results. A startlingly high figure, but low in comparison to 93% on Google Mobile Web UK.”
"With 94% of online users failing to search beyond the first page of results (Forrester Research), this highlights a major visibility problem for the UK's leading companies," Furr-Barton added.
Tuesday, April 3
Dept. Homeland Security want Internet Masterkey
30.03.2007 13:09
The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) wants to have the key to sign the DNS root zone solidly in the hands of the US government.
This ultimate master key would then allow authorities to track DNS Security Extensions (DNSSec) all the way back to the servers that represent the name system’s root zone on the Internet. The “key-signing key” signs the zone key, which is held by VeriSign.
At the meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in Lisbon, Bernard Turcotte, president of the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) drew everyone’s attention to this proposal as a representative of the national top-level domain registries (ccTLDs).
At the ICANN meeting, Turcotte said that the managers of country registries were concerned about this proposal.
When contacted by heise online, Turcotte said that the national registries had informed their governmental representatives about the DHS’s plans. A representative of the EU Commission said that the matter is being discussed with EU member states.
DNSSec is seen as a necessary measure to keep the growing number of manipulations on the net under control.
How to disable web filter software
Porn?
I had a comment following up a previous post about the Web filter, SurfPatrol. A local council had just installed it.
Web filters have a terrible rep. Largely for what's called 'inappropriate blocking'.
Because artificial intelligence isn't that advanced - lots of claims about reading flesh tones like the one on the right - sorting out one site from the other is often not as sophisticated as you might think. Basically, it does boil down to the words in the site.
So, firstly, mistakes get made. Hilarious mistakes and Breast Cancer site blocking type mistakes.
But, secondly, the lists Filter (AKA Censorware) companies compile of categorised sites are proprietary - you don't get to see under the hood - and they are well-known for, for example, including sites which criticise them in those lists. The Register has discovered itself blocked in that way.
The other point is that companies are American and may/may not carry over those cultural values into those proprietary lists.
What this means is that with the best will in the world, you cannot avoid inappropriate blocking when you buy these products. And this can have unintended, negative consequences .. like .. blocking rape-crisis, blocking sex education, blocking drugs counselling, blocking Nazi sites from history students.
As you might imagine, gay and lesbian sites get hit disproportionally hard — 'collateral damage'.
People, especially Councils, really don't want this but there's no real way of avoiding it although 'whitelists' are a big help.
The other area where Filter companies have been heavily criticised is for their marketing - their playing on fear to make money (they are extremely profitable and the market is growing). Cybersitter, for example, notoriously put out marketing within hours of the Columbine Massacre.
Needless to say, the War On Terror™ has proved similarly profitable. The CEO of Surfcontrol was recently quoted as saying: "I'm not trying to pick up on an emotional chord, but there are probably cyber terrorist cells inside companies, I don't mean some disgruntled employees ..."
So what do you do?
All the advice you will read on kids and the web comes back to supervision and parental engagement — as well as describing filters themselves as 'only partially effective'.
Filters are never spoken of as anything but a support and offering reassurance - and the Filter companies play very heavily on the latter (for companies they offer legal reassurance).
However, if you are effectively monitoring people's (not children's) web use anyway - isn't that the best policing? If you know your web use is recorded? One of the side-effects of buying censorware for a network is that web use in general drops off. This isn't necessarily a good thing.Computing Which? has the following top tips for protecting children online:
- Keep PCs in a shared living area — not a child's bedroom
- Supervise children's online activities
- Encourage children to discuss any unsavory content they've found
- Warn children about the potential dangers of chatrooms
- Use parental control software but don't over rely on it
- Change your parental control access password regularly
- To which I would add: Teach them what's an advert
This side of managing web use is always the forgotten bit - managing self-censorship. If you are a public body you really need to be simultaneously reassuring people that - no- we don't mind you accessing rape crisis sites and - yes - we want to be told if our Web Filter's blocking this and, yes, it's confidential.
Managing web use isn't and can't be just about technical solutions.
And how to disable filtering? See Peacefire and/or StupidCensorship.com.
This is the last point — smart kids can get around it.
- Past post on web filters
- My Submission for ACGLR to Australian Senate (1999) - PDF - HTML
Sunday, April 1
Not as good as the Viagra one
Google announces free in-home wireless broadband service
"Dark porcelain" project offers self-installed plumbing-based Internet access
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The Toilet Internet Service Provider (TiSP) project is a self-installed, ad-supported online service that will be offered entirely free to any consumer with a WiFi-capable PC and a toilet connected to a local municipal sewage system.
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Home installation is a simple matter of GFlushing™ the fiber-optic cable down to the nearest TiSP Access Node, then plugging the other end into the network port of your Google-provided TiSP wireless router.
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Interested consumers, contractually obligated partners and deeply skeptical and quietly competitive backbiters can learn more about TiSP at http://www.google.com/tisp/install.html.
| Trickle | The #2 | Royal Flush | |
Download speed (max) | 8 Mbps | 16 Mbps | 32 Mbps |
Upload speed (max) | 2 Mbps | 4 Mbps | 8 Mbps |
Price | Free | $9.95/mo. | $24.95/mo. |
| Actual speeds will vary, depending on network traffic and sewer line conditions. Users with low-flow toilets may simultaneously experience a saving-the-environment glow and slower-data-speed blues. | |||
Is Google TiSP safe and reliable?
Google TiSP ensures reliable throughput through the power of fiber, which has been proven through extensive research to effectively facilitate consistent data flow with minimal latency. And you can rest assured that under no circumstances will the TiSP system ever expose your privates.
whoops ....
Not Found
The requested URL was not found on this server. There are so many reasons that this might have happened we can scarcely bring ourselves to type them all out. You might have typed the URL incorrectly, for instance. Or (less likely but certainly plausible) we might have coded the URL incorrectly. Or (far less plausible, but theoretically possible, depending on which ill-defined Grand Unifying Theory of physics one subscribes to), some random fluctuation in the space-time continuum might have produced a shatteringly brief but nonetheless real electromagnetic discombobulation which caused this error page to appear. Or (and truth be told, this is by far the most likely scenario) you might have reached a page that we meant to create but didn't get around to it, since this year's April Fool's joke got hacked together at the last minute, more or less the same way this one did. And this one. And this one, and this one, and this one...
NYT survey's Google's move into traditional media
The New York Times has published an excellent review of Google's move into the offline ad market. What's the strategy?
Google is building a TV ad sales team, have radio and print in beta, and their recent purchases for video game advertising, YouTube and other buys show they are building a company that really wants to be an all-encompassing media company. The NYT is one of the major media brands using them.
The most profitable area is thought to be likely to be TV, especially with trials of demographically targeted cable ads to individuals.
The area they're having the most trouble is Radio. There they are:
suspicious that its technology-based approach will turn their business into a commodity and take away the relationships with advertisers that stations have spent years building.Which is an interesting reflection of other comment about how the Google brand is morphing into Big Brother, with comment pieces quoting Sun Tzu as an anti-Google strategy source. There are thousands of 'Victim of own sucess?' stories.
The piece concludes that Google has ad technology competition and, at the moment, it's offline ad share is tiny. So no need to panic yet then.
ABC1's head downmarket - online
Hitwise's Heather Hopkins has been looking at
How does the profile of offline readers of newspapers compare with online readers?
Her points seem to reflect some of the recent changes in UK tabloid newspaper websites:
There are opportunities for Print Media websites to diversify their online audience by targeting lower income groups, groups with younger children and those in the Group Rural IsolationBut I was most interested to spot:
Groups that are less likely to pick up The Sun from the newsstand are more likely to visit the websiteThis is slightly less true of the Mail, as well.
She has a hunch
"This also has something to do with people not wanting to be seen on the Tube with The Sun, but being happy to enjoy the content."Ah. Class-consciousness is alive and well.
I sometimes look at the Sun website. Not for the Tits, just to see what it's saying as it's so important. I don't look for The News, just to see What News they're reporting, and how. And just what they're doing with the site.
Things like their changing attitude to Race and Gays is interesting as well as what campaigns they're running (same with the Mail). It's not that I wouldn't be seen buying it...
Host not found
Hari Kunzru writes about the harsh realities of internet censorship in an essay for PEN, published in the Guardian.
He starts by placing us in the [Libertarian] context in which much of the superstructure of the Web has been perceived.
"The net treats censorship as damage and routes around it." John Gilmore.Then brings us back to the material reality.
It's used by people sitting in real offices with real doors that can be broken down by all-too-real police.Kunzru documents how information access is controlled by large companies and how this plays out.
Even in markets with no overt state censorship, the threat of legal action may be enough to take controversial information offline, a tactic frequently employed by corporations against critics or whistle-blowers.
We appear to be moving towards a world with a privatised knowledge infrastructure.
Anyone watching the growth of Censorware would have to agree.
> ARTICLE <
Best April Fools ever
A spokesman for Wyevale Garden Centres, which has 106 UK branches, said: "At first, it was just a trickle of inquiries, but now stores are virtually being besieged each weekend."
"We have had men buying dozens of the plants and, at one store in Croydon, there were men old enough to know better fighting over the last remaining trays."
The latest gardening craze was triggered by a discovery by a 55-year-old furniture restorer, Michael Ford, on his allotment.
He said: "The effect was almost immediate. I had to stay in my potting shed for an hour or so before I could decently walk down the street."
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