Daily Show archive blocked for UK: Channel Four display several layers of stupid

UK fans of America's leading satirical TV show got a shock today when they discovered they could no longer view the show on its website.

The website has forums where overseas fans of the show have been venting their rage at the block. Not just UK viewers but those from Ireland who can no longer watch the show on the UK licensee Channel Four's website yet also remain blocked from watching it on the show's website, apparently because C4 hasn't bothered to tell the Daily Show's channel, Comedy Central, that it's blocked the Irish. People in the rest of Europe have no such problems.

There's no statement from either Channel Four or the show about this out-of-the-blue block but it appears from past Daily Show statements on their forum that they only do the blocking on the request of a country's license holder. Incidentally, I was able to leave a comment on their website and I see that the show's producers do respond to comment. Channel Four offers no such option, there is no comment space offered for the show and they have no forum or similar space for viewers to talk back to them.

What is particularly sad/appalling about Channel Four's actions is that all online video from the extensive Daily Show online archive is now being blocked for UK - yet Channel Four is only showing the past week's shows online! Do they even have rights to episodes from before they started showing the Daily Show, because I can't watch clips from 2000.

What is so stupid about this (and it has multiple layers of stupid) is that I have been posting clips on my blog which promotes the show Channel Four have rights to! Now none of those embedded clips work and so the show gets no (free) promotion from me or the many others who embed clips.

When the Daily Show's sister program The Colbert Report was being shown on a UK cable channel you couldn't watch clips on their website - but you could watch clips embedded on other websites. This makes complete sense as if you liked what you saw it promoted the cable channel's show and made it far more likely that you'd bother to subscribe to it. It also makes it appear that C4's block request included blocking embedded clips.

At the same time that one bit of C4 takes this completely stupid action another makes clips from C4 news freely available, even ad free!


Here's another stupidity. I have watched clips from US shows which have served up country specific ads. On sites like HuffPost I get UK ads. So if you can recognise I'm from the UK you can monetise it to the benefit of the UK license holder. Hardly rocket science.
 What C4 are doing is tragic for the Daily Show itself as it is going to lose a significant chunk of its UK audience. All - one would assume - in the name of driving viewers back to watching the show on More4 ON TV!

I hope that the show's resident Brit, the hugely popular John Oliver, learns about it and tells Channel Four to stop behaving like idiots.

Of course people can watch Daily Show clips if they know how to get around the block by hiding their computer's ip address. This means C4 lose out on any hope of ad revenue. I won't even bother linking to how because a simple Google (or a look on the Daily Show's forums where they allow comments explaining how) will tell you what to do. So not only are C4 idiots but they think the rest of us UK fans of the show are too.

Addendum: Tony Lee has commented on the cross-post of this on the Online Journalism blog that:

Channel 4 denies the above.  I wrote them and got the following response:

Thank you for contacting us regarding THE DAILY SHOW WITH JON STEWART.

We would advise that although we do indeed hold UK broadcast rights for the series, the overall rights to the series are owned by Comedy Central themselves. Content on their website, as with other American networks, is blocked to residents not in the US. These blocks are placed by the channel themselves, not Channel 4.

It is the same with content on UK broadcasters website being blocked to those outside the UK. The reason for this is copyright and broadcasting licence terms.

We would suggest that you therefore direct your complaint on this issue to Comedy Central. You can do so via the following link:

http://www.comedycentral.com/help/questionsCC.jhtml

Channel 4 is not responsible for third-party websites.

Thank you again for taking the time to contact us here at Channel 4 and for your interest in our programming.

Regards,

Rachel Salinger
Channel 4 Viewer Enquiries

This is the exact opposite of what Comedy Central say on their forum - so I will post this statement there and see what they have to say for themselves.

There is an actly petition:

petition @ComedyCentral to  lift the IP block for #dailyshow video online UK http://act.ly/mr RT to sign #actly

Addendum two


A fix has been posted on the Daily Show fan forum (ironically) http://forum.thedailyshow.com/tds/board/message?board.id=support_2008_oct&message.id=2897#M2897 (and it works)

Video: Convergence and technology - Did You Know

The latest version of the "Shift happens" videos updated for autumn 2009, developed by XPLANE in partnership with The Economist. This 'Did You Know' video focuses on the changing media landscape, including convergence and technology.

There are a lot of these videos out there which throw stats at you, this is the best one I've seen yet.

The Eight Stages of Genocide

Crossposted from my new outlet, Cosmodaddy



How can we predict and prevent genocides? Greg Stanton outlines his groundbreaking theory on the eight stages of genocide: classification, symbolization, dehumanization, organization, polarization, preparation, extermination and denial.

Genocide in Darfur, he argues, has proceeded through these stages before our eyes. Genocide could have been prevented by means of intervention at any one of a number of critical points in the past, but the international response has amounted to too little, too late.

This has always been the case and I don't see this changing anytime soon, despite the best efforts of fantastic groups like Avaaz though groups like them remain our best hope, as does the work of people like Stanton who help people understand that - yes - things can be done and that genocide is not some 'natural, unstoppable force' like an earthquake or a tornado.

One starting point would be for those responsible for doing nothing to be seen to learn lessons and admit their errors. For 'never again!' to mean anything, it's essential. This is why the campaign around Belgium, for example, to own up to its horrific history in the Congo is so important, as important as for Serbia to own up to its role in the Balkan's genocides in the 90s.

It's also close - very close - to home. This is from a post of mine last year about Hillary Clinton's claim that she tried to stop the Rwandan genocide.

Rewriting history over Rwanda

The Americans weren't alone. The British, the French, the Belgians and much of the rest of Africa all either didn't do anything or actively stopped aid. They all looked for their own interests and none had any interest in stopping genocide.

It was Britain's ambassador to the UN, Sir David Hannay, who proposed that the UN reduce its force. A year after the slaughter, the Foreign Office sent a letter to an international inquiry saying that it still did not accept the term genocide, seeing discussion on whether the massacres constituted genocide as "sterile". Then Ministers John Major, Douglas Hurd, Malcolm Rifkind and Lynda Chalker have never even been asked about their role.

Virtually no-one emerges heroically (Canadian peacekeeper Roméo Dallaire is one and his view on Clinton's claims would be interesting to hear). In fact I would urge anyone to make themselves read the harrowing background as an object lesson in international power politics and its victims - a million of them in Rwanda. There's a blog which covers the 100 days before and during the slaughter in detail. 'A People Betrayed' by Linda Melvern is very good.

For Hillary to now try to adopt that heroic mantle is, as commentators have noted, worse than 'monstrous'.

Almost - almost - as monstrous as this comment from Gordon Brown:

"You cannot have Rwanda again because information would come out far more quickly about what is actually going on and the public opinion would grow to the point where action would need to be taken."

Where is Twitter on the genocides happening right now in the DR of Congo? Or the slaughter of indigenous people in Peru? Where is Brown? Where is Sarah Brown!?

Here is a list of the genocides taking place now in the world.

The media doesn't give a damn and, unfortunate but true, neither do most Twitter users.

HT: Domino

Why they are screaming 'socialism'

A commentator to Andrew Sullivan's blog gives some background on the right-wing American 'tea baggers' which is essential information for anyone wanting to understand WTF is going on.

It's worth quoting in full:

Of course they are screaming 'socialism'. They've been doing that since the 50s at least. They're not talking about economic redistribution of wealth - they never have been. They've been talking about redistribution of privilege this whole time. They called MLK a communist because he wanted blacks to have the same rights as whites, and to them that was a redistribution of the privilege that whites had 'earned'.

In their view, white, Christian, heterosexuals have earned something that gays, non-Christians, and non-heteros have failed to work hard enough at. It's been a class war from the outset, just not one based around income or net worth - mostly because the whites in the south were economically pretty bad off and blacks in the north were catching up to them.

This picture shows they were pushing the same buttons half a century ago that they are today. Anti-christ, communism - it's all the same as it is today and is well known code. It's why the protesters will decry socialism today but wouldn't have under Bush - it's all tied to race and other social objectives and has nothing really to do with taxation, deficits, and big government. You probably missed it when you came to the US, but this is pretty old game - particularly to guys like Carter that grew up around it.

Past posts: 

• US health 'debate': the dangers of rhetoric and the need for responsibility 
• Daily Mail has joined the American lunatic fringe

 

Seduced by huge c*ck..

So.....what if you were restricted in the real world to only 140 Characters?

New Firefox add-ons

Image via Wikipedia

It's a while since I've done one of these and my add-ons have actually changed quite a bit.

With the last Firefox major upgrade a number of them failed to update and others took ages to update. This now seems to have settled down but I have had to find replacements for a few that remain incompatible and for some I haven't found an easy replacement.

Gone are

TinyUrl Creator · ScrapBook · ReminderFox · Menu Editor · Advanced Dork · Text/Plain and one which I would like the functionality of but I haven't found a simple compatible replacement LinkChecker.

New are

bit.ly preview
With the bit.ly Preview Plugin for Firefox, whenever you hover over a bit.ly URL on any web page, we display a tooltip showing the Page Title, Long URL, and any Click Data we have about the page the URL links to.
Extended Copy Menu
Provides the option to copy selection as plain text or html.
Fasterfox Lite
Performance and network tweaks for Firefox, without the Enhanced Prefetching.
FireFTP
ScribeFire
A full-featured blog editor that integrates with your browser and lets you easily post to your blog. I may drop this and I hardly ever use it.
Shareaholic
Shareaholic is the ultimate tool for sharing stuff with 60+ destination services including Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Delicious, MySpace, Wordpress, and more!
Shorten URL
Shorten long URL from context menu or toolbar button with your selected URL shortener and display the result in location bar.
View Dependencies
Adds a tab listing dependencies and their sizes in the Page Info window.
Zemanta
Contextually relevant suggestions of links, pictures, related content and tags will make your blogging fun again.

Bad user testing beats no user testing

Jakob Nielsen has noted that it's now twenty years since he started what he calls the 'discount usability movement'.

This might be egging it a wee bit, I'm not sure there is such a 'movement' apart from that which Nielsen promotes.

It's true that major companies use discount usability tactics - I noted before how last.fm used it when their site went through major changes. But 'movement'?

Moving on ...

Nielsen presented a paper entitled "Usability Engineering at a Discount" at the 3rd International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction in 1989.

It was born out necessity, he says, as he simply didn't have the budget of the IBM User Interface Institute where he'd previously worked.

The paper advocated three main components of discount usability:

• Simplified user testing, which includes a handful of participants, a focus on qualitative studies, and use of the thinking-aloud method. Although thinking aloud had been around for years before I turned it into a discount method, the idea that testing 5 users was "good enough" went against human factors orthodoxy at the time.
• Narrowed-down prototypes — usually paper prototypes — that support a single path through the user interface. It's much faster to design paper prototypes than something that embodies the full user experience. You can thus test very early and iterate through many rounds of design.
• Heuristic evaluation in which you evaluate user interface designs by inspecting them relative to established usability guidelines.

Nielsen says he was stoned in the market square as a heretic and I can well believe it.

I had a similar experience when, discussing issues with LocalDirectgov's usability offering, I proposed that council web teams should use discount testing methods. This provoked nigh on outrage and a swipe at Nielsen by the usability company Nomensa. I like to think I moved them on from their initial horror to grudging agreement but you can make your own mind up in the debate, as it spilled over several posts and onto a Nomensa worker's blog.

• Postscript: More birth pangs of government 2.0 
• Usability and culture
• AlastairC - Usability myths and professionals
  

Nielsen even has the nerve, to some people's delicate sensibilities, to say:

Discount usability often gives better results than deluxe usability because its methods drive an emphasis on early and rapid iteration with frequent usability input.

As well as, the horror:

Discount usability methods are robust enough to offer decent results even when you don't use perfect research methodology.

In other words: Bad user testing beats no user testing, every time.

He cites a team that ran a usability study of MacPaint 1.7 (an early drawing program) in 1989 who each tested three users.

Better usability methodology does lead to better results, at least on average. But the very best performance was recorded for a team that only scored 56% on compliance with best-practice usability methodology. And even teams with a 20–30% methodology (i.e., people who ran lousy studies) still found 1/4 of the product's serious usability problems.

Nielsen claims that "my 20 years of campaigning for discount usability have certainly not been in vain, [but] I can't yet declare a win" — and nowhere is this more evident than in government, where cheap-but-effective methods of finding website errors would, you would think, have most resonance.

Both the US (usability.gov) and UK (usability.coi.gov.uk) official government usability advice contain no reference to discount methods.

~~~~~~~

Here's a presentation I gave on discount user testing called Cheap'n'easy usability first in 2006.

View more presentations from Paul Canning.

PayPal still thinks Africa is the 'dark continent'

Image via Wikipedia

I just got an email from a friend in Austria. Inspired by a post on LGBT Asylum News he wanted to make a donation to the Sex Workers Outreach Program (SWOP) in Nairobi.

The people there are wonderful, and intelligent, and courageous and open-minded people indeed, and they deserve our help and solidarity. Tears are forming in my eyes when thinking of the women and men with HIV infection and AIDS living in poverty there.

But my friend found out that whilst sending money via PayPal is possible for people in Kenya receiving money is not.

When he contacted PayPal customer services by email they claimed that receiving money is not allowed by the legislation of Kenya. Yet he was able to send the money to Kenya via Western Union — for the transmission of Euro 100 he had to pay a fee of Euro 17,50 which is far higher than PayPal's charges.

Jonathan Gosier, a software developer, writer and social entrepreneur, explains on appafrica how:

PayPal, intentional or not, are sending a very strong message to the rest of the world about Africa.

Prior to moving to Uganda, Gosier had used PayPal for four years and estimates that he's transferred over $100,000 during that time

Bu this counted for nothing once he'd moved to 'the dark continent'.

Apparently PayPal’s way of ‘policing’ their service is to simply flag various IP addresses as being ’suspect’ . hrmm. I have a few Iranian and Indian friends who could tell you a bit about what it’s like to get profiled based on where you appear to be from. (And if they won’t suffice as anecdotal evidence, I’ve got a few million mexican and black american friends who’d double down on the sentiment.)

So Africa remains a high-risk zone as the sheer number of comments like these from paypal users indicates:

I am in the process of trying to sell a laptop. i have posted ads on comtrader and ebay. So far the item has been bought off ebay by a mother who wants its for a present for her daughter in AFRICA. Two people have expressed interest through comtrader, one wishes to buy it for a business associate in AFRICA, and the other wants it for himself, and guess where he lives….. AFRICA. Sorry for all the capitals, but am i missing something here. I’ve replied to the ebay purchaser who is going to pay through Paypal, which i know is covered by ebay so i feel safest. Just wondering if this obsession with me posting it to AFRICA is anything i should be sketchy about.

Or this person’s thoughtful reply:

Anything from africa is a scam so stay well clear. Re-list the item if you have too.

Wow. Anything from Africa is a scam. I better take back this computer I just bought from GAME!

The unintentional effect here is that by blanketing the whole region as suspect, it reduces the number of viable alternatives for legitimate businesses and professionals who want to use services like PayPal for trade. I use PayPal for some of my payroll now (for people who don’t live near me). However, whenever I do, PayPal flags my account and shuts it down temporarily ‘because I accessed it from a suspicious location’. To unlock it I have to call them, from Uganda and do a bunch of other stuff that’s inconvenient. I suppose this is the price of admission for using the service in country it wasn’t intended to be used in. So no complaint here either.

But what it does mean, is that from every angle legitimate African businesses are smacked in the face by measures put in place to police the one’s that are indeed abusing the system. But this affects even expatriates and NGOs that might want to use the service. If it’s accessed from a certain IP there’s a red flag, especially if that IP is not where you registered to use the service.

Once again, the message perpetuated here is to be cautious when dealing with Africans, Africa or anything you suspect of being related to the aformentioned. This is nothing new. Most people here have been dealing with such mentality their whole lives, why would it stop now that the medium has changed? To be fair, there’s truth to this stereotype. There is indeed a huge problem of scams here. There is some truth to most stereotypes, the word itself simply implies that those truths are applied where they don’t necessarily belong.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of people here who are just like consumers everywhere else in the world. They want to buy things, they want the conveniences of online shopping, they want to do business…and they want their neighbors to stop scamming you so they can have those things.

I realize that the problem can’t be solved entirely by Paypal alone but I would appreciate at least an option to flag my account in advance for what might be mistaken for ’suspicious activity’. I’d be happy to leave this to PayPal’s discretion but my problem is they aren’t using any. African transaction? Banned! Banks will allow customers to indicate that they will be abroad for a certain period so that they don’t shutdown accounts by mistake. Why doesn’t PayPal? You’d be surprised at how damaging these blanket policies can be to an organization like mine that simply just wants to pay employees and be paid by clients.

I suppose the complaint is that PayPal doesn’t give me an option to avoid my account getting bricked. It costs me money everytime they do it. they give me no alternative to prevent it from happening and when I talk to them, somehow it’s my fault for existing ‘in that country where The Last King of Scotland took place‘.

My Austrian friend says:

To me this is a kind of discrimination, and neo-colonialism, and racism towards African people, and it reminds me of the inhuman politics of the pharmaceutical industries not to reduce their prices for medicaments for HIV and AIDS in poor countries, but to accept the death of lots of people who could not afford these high prices. If you are living in a rich country of the European Union you survive, if you are a poor woman and a poor man in Africa you die. We must not accept it!

I thought of his experience and Gosier's whilst reading about the coming of broadband to East Africa (which includes Uganda) via the BBC's excellent series of reports.

This did warn of and catalogue the whole raft of other challenges to Africans other than the lack of broadband, which puts its arrival in context, but they missed this one.

Theresa Carpenter Sondjo notes that there are alternatives for African entrepeneurs to PayPal, however they are all more "more expensive and less flexible". That seems to be a running theme for Africa - lots of stuff to build a business is way more expensive, Africans have a stack of hurdles to jump over.

Maybe Oxfam, Mr Bono and Mr Geldof should get onto this one and start shaming PayPal?

When Twitter is *dangerous*

17% of Twitter users vs. 12% of non-Twitter social media users had accessed social media from a washroom or toilet

New Crowd Science survey

And how many are male and missing their aim?

11% of Twitter users admitted to accessing social media while driving in the preceding 30 days, compared to only 5% of other social media users (my emphasis)

To be reminded of the consequences of this very bad behaviour see my past post Texting + driving = death.

Twice as many Twitter users as non-Twitter social media users (8% to 4%) had accessed any social media from a theater during a movie or live performance (during the preceding 30 days).

Nearly three times as many Twitter users as other social media users have accessed social media from restaurants (31% vs. 12%)

Can I say 'potential violent reaction'?

41% of Twitter users prefer to contact friends via social media rather than telephone, compared with 25% of non-Twitter social media users, and 11% (vs. only 6% of those not using Twitter) actually prefer social media over face-to-face contacts.

Dying a lonely death?

14% of Twitter users said they have revealed things about themselves in social media that they wouldn't under any other circumstances. Then again, 8% admitted to "frequently stretching" the truth about themselves online.

Nearly twice as many Twitter users than non-Twitter social media users say they update Twitter during work hours.

Putting your job/career/marriage in jeopardy?

What are we doing to ourselves people!?! 

HT: WebPro News

Flashmob as political satire

Chancellor Angela Merkel may well have a new enemy to worry about when she is making her campaign speeches: irony.

Der Spiegel

On 18 September as Merkel gave a campaign stump speech in Hamburg she must have at least blinked as every so often the air was punctuated by loud 'YEAH's!'

Der Spiegel reports that a Flickr user posted a picture of the placard announcing Merkel’s rally online on September 11 and sent the link to friends on Twitter. Placard said, “The Chancellor is coming,” and underneath, the user wrote: “Yeah.” Ironically.

Soon after, the invitation went viral on Twitter and sites like Nerdcore and Spreeblick and the flashmob was on.

The people who went did it apparently as a joke and Merkel soon cottoned on.

In Mainz the flash mobbers held up yellow and black signs with "Hurrah" written on them (yellow and black are the colors that symbolize a coalition between the CDU and the FDP) and they too called out "yeah" after Merkel finished every sentence. However, at Monday night's meeting the chancellor did address the hecklers. "It can't hurt to yell something else other than yeah after every sentence," she said. The group then repeated Merkel's words, saying nonsensical things like "growth", "back door" and "five" after the Chancellor did.

The phenomenon could have unintended consquences. A German Twitter user said after the Hamburg flashmob, "Wouldn't it be funny if the international audience got the wrong impression?" Maybe, she worried, they would think it was some sort of "alarming German political euphoria."




There has been some German un-ironic talk of 'banning' and although I can imagine how delicious something like this might be during the 2010 UK election campaign I can also imagine the reaction of the British bobbies vs the German polizei — which is kindof ironic ...