*Sigh*

Why do I even need to explain this? Content-flagging protects the hosting company: if children see 'adult' material, someone will sue and try to shut down the service.

In practice, it isn't any random 'someone' that sues: if and when well-funded right-wing religious groups decide they don't like the godless hordes of sodom on a particular web service, they will work very hard indeed to close the whole thing down. If they're serious players, the lawsuit will run alongside a smear campaign in the media - cute images of a shocked family in the Midwest, stumbling on you or someone else's fanfic posts and conflating it with stomach-churning images of real child abuse - which will lead to a total financial and infrastructural boycott of the target company and police raids on the server room. Even the threat of a lawsuit will probably succeed - it's a common blackmail tactic against web-based companies approaching IPO - unless the target can produce a substantial body of evidence showing that they are taking care to protect children from pornography, howsoever defined.

The web hosts live in the real world, not the rhetorical utopia of the First Amendment, and they can be bankrupted, or prosecuted, or financially weakened by repeated lawsuits and a negative PR campaign directed at their advertisers and investors, to the point that they are forced to sell up to Murdoch. Think that one over, then consider this: other 'free' journal hosts who are taking 'refugees' from previous attempts to appease attacks on LiveJournal are actually far less free, because the smaller providers are living on a financial knife-edge and they have no leverage whatsoever with their physical hosts - let alone the content-blocking companies and ISP's. If they don't just fade away through being too small to work as social networks, they have no legal resources and no political backing; and one fine day some television ayatollah and his cross-eyed congregation of illiterate bigots will praise the Lord and pay the lawyers to squash the little player like a bug.

So, however prissy or downright craven SixApart appear to be, the only protection for what little free speech we actually have comes from applying all these little legal fig-leaves to the things we publish, and hoping it's enough to make malicious litigation unattractive. That, and the knowledge that Six-Apart are fairly wealthy, they have a PR team of their own, and they won't go under in the face of repeated lawsuits.

Yes, SixApart could be a lot less clumsy about it. But what's the alternative? As in, what are you going to do that doesn't involve putting other people - their blogs, their jobs, and their share capital - into the line of fire?

Demanding 'free speech' by publishing 'adult' content on a public blog - even pictures of breastfeeding mothers - isn't 'free' at all: it carries measurable financial costs for our hosts and jeopardises the freedom to say anything and everything - from 'Hello World' and pictures of your dog to 'serious' blogging about your lifestyle and your beliefs, real-world politics and why corporation X make products no-one ought to buy.

So if in doubt, flag it. Actually, I think you would be happy to flag anything you wrote if you felt that it was unsuitable for children; the problem is that our definitions differ - you're making an honest judgement about what might be offensive, or genuinely unsuitable; but the dishonest truth is that anything we post faces the 'judgement' of deeply unpleasant individuals who are eager to take offence in order to suppress anything contrary to their scripture. In short, any material with the slightest hint that we're not all happily married heterosexual Protestants consuming our way to Heaven.

The censors have largely succeeded in their aims, more than anyone would've believed when all those fine words about free speech and the rights of man were formulated in the Age of Enlightenment; and they continue to make progress with their threats and their lawsuits today. If anyone wants to campaign for free speech online, fix that and the pressure on SixApart will go away. Meanwhile, think harder about the gestures you're planning to make, and ask yourself who's going to end up paying for them.

Long term, I think the answer is to move off a server-based system and adapt the LJ protocols to a peer-to-peer model. That way, there's no big target to sue... But there will be lots of little people: powerless little people and we have already seen what copyright owners can do. Wait 'til you see botnets on a Mission from God and working heuristics for godless, gay or liberal content.


Yes, it's dystopian: wake up and smell the coffee. SixApart have reasons to be frightened and defensive and I do not believe that their high-risk practice of providing anyone a space to say anything they please will be legally or financially tenable by the end of the decade. Providing a toolkit for self-censorship is their only way of buying time against legal assault and in the end it isn't going to be enough.


Credit where it's due: this grew out of a comment on valkyriekaren's journal.

I would imagine that, by now, everyone has read Gutman's warning.         Cached document here

Vista isn't happening in the Square Mile this year. It's that simple. We do not know what the DRM code is doing, it runs at a level of privilege way, way above our own security systems and we simply cannot cede that degree of control over our operations. Let's not even think about malicious code masquerading as the DRM components of a device driver, or as a revocation notice; the worst of it is that bad drivers cannot be backed-out to a minimum certified functionality (like the basic 640x480 video mode) unless we have a long train of certificates permitting us to do so - and that train only needs to be broken once to cost us millions. Nobody has done any of the thinking about system recovery before they started coding driver revocation, and it's simply too late to put it in now.

What happens in five years time is another matter: hell, we're only just getting 'round to XP. We do innovate, despite the staid reputation, and we do spend money if there's a measurable gain - and all too often if there isn't one - but we are very, very cautious about system changeovers because subtle changes in our calculations can cost megabucks and the regression-testing to prevent that costs an eye-watering amount of time and money.

And yes, we're under a regulatory obligation to do the testing. Everyone is taking some serious operation risks if they don't, so - as usual - our regulations are actually no more than sound business practice and a valuable protection. But I bet everyone else in 'the real world' just wings it on 'upgrading' to Vista and hopes it all works.

Unless, of course, there are horror stories. Or quite possibly, even if there are; and what's the betting that the features of Vista be imposed on us anyway, in service packs to XP? Microsoft are going to do some very intensive news management in the next two years; cynic that I am, I believe that the advertising spend on Vista is more to do with financial leverage over the media than any need to open up a communication channel with the customer base.

But, however clever and well-funded their PR people may be, we will know. Investment Banks see everything: it's our business to know about every business and we will buy in the talent from firms who have made the upgrade. And, more importantly, we will buy in the talent from firms who have failed to make the upgrade; brush up your CV's fellow-geeks, the lessons you will learn have a realisable monetary value.

Fast-forward five years to the day when we are forced to move on from an obsolete OS. What's the betting that you'll see a quiet but very well-funded programme of co-operation with the Open--Source movement? Imagine a really cautious risk manager insisting that every trading desk has one reserve machine running cut-down versions of the trading systems and the spreadsheets on Linux... It's not as expensive as losing a day's trading - especially if (say) we have to exercise an option before close-of-trading on the NYSE.

I've worked with Windows all my working life and, despite what you may hear, it has been a blessing to us all: without it we would still be running Wang word processors on Wang hardware that saved documents in a Wang file format that can only be read by other Wang applications and printed on Wang Printers. Or HP, Or IBM, or Toshiba: whatever. It took a Big Bad Corporation to build a big enough operating system that everyone uses it, and every other software vendor works with it rather than against it, each other, and the user population. I fully expect the Big Bad Corporation to make a handsome profit from their systems and I am certain that Microsoft have behaved far, far better than IBM would've done if their DOS and their visual interface had established the natural monopoly that emerges from a widely-used operating system. But Vista and Microsoft's implementation of DRM is a clear indication that they have failed to balance the constant commercial compromise of profit, competition, quality, and customer service.

No, I'll go further - Vista marks out Microsoft as having abandoned that constant search for balance: they are working against their customers, they know it, and and they are entirely satisfied with the direction they have taken.

...Another post that started as a comment on someone elses's ideas. In this case, reddragdiva. The original post is here.

Taken from a comment on feanelwa's journal that kind of grew, and grew, and threatened to hijack a post about middle-class mediocrity and student loans that's well worth reading without yours truly barging in.

One of the things we've missed, as it crept up on us this last decade or so, is the retreat from the 'home-owning democracy' - the egalitarian society in which we all own land and houses, and all have capital and thus have a stake in the second pillar of a free-market capitalist democracy.*

( Cut for length... )The evil of student loans isn't that they favour those who are already wealthy, it is that they entrain economic inequalities even at the education stage, further reducing its utility as an engine of social mobility.

This is, of course, irrelevant at the bottom end of the market, where sink schools define an hereditary caste of unskilled and disposable semiliterate casual workers.




* The three pillars or 'stakeholders' are:

1. Workers and consumers (ie: those who serve capital in return for a wage, and are the ultimate purchasers of goods and services);
2. Owners (who own the capital, providing it to enterprises in return for interest or dividends);
3. And the body politic (who must participate in the control mechanisms that define the market, and actively maintain institutions for the common good that do not arise naturally from individual self-interest)

Well, that's Valentine's Day over with for another year.

What is it all about, this giving women flowers? Somebody please explain to me, in simple terms, the 'romantic' connotations of dead vegetable reproductive organs.

If you gave someone severed mammalian reproductive organs, they would call the Police.

( Caveat... )

A quote from naranek's latest journal entry:

I note that with the adoption of eBooks as US University textbooks, RMS's original nightmare prediction about students not being allowed to share textbooks or read them more than once has quietly happened without anyone really noticing (or, apparently, caring).

Do you know, there's an interesting new power to hand? We know that the state may or may not choose to prevent us saying or publishing something disagreeable; now the state can forbid a named individual from reading a specific book.

( Cut for tedious and repetitive anarchist polemic... )

What other interesting new powers have you spotted today?

I will set aside, for the moment, the technical difficulties I have had with eBooks since I had to replace that hard drive, and confine myself to pointing out that, for many titles, Amazon will not accept payment on a non-US credit card nor supply the eBook file for download to IP addresses outside the USA.

There could be sound reasons for this. There could be doubts about the enforceability of copyright outside the USA. There could, of course, be a desire on the part of the publishers to impose a 'region-coding' scheme of controlled release as the marketing machine is brought on bear on each country in turn.

But, however benign the reasons, it seems that we already have an effective restriction on who can and cannot read selected e-book titles. Time is passing and better DRM technology, and better enforcement will allow better control.

For certain values of 'better'.

That George Best, what's it all about? Wall-to-wall nonstop media coverage for who?

nja has pointed out that he's getting more coverage than Pope John Paul II. Get a grip guys.

Actually this is news: the drinks industry is a major source of advertising revenue for the media but here we are today, watching on cable TV and waiting while a man dies of alcoholism.

And you will very rarely hear mainstream media coverage of the death toll due to that disease, even when there is a clear opportunity to criticise the government of the day: coverage of the new licensing laws has focused on public order issues with only the most cursory mention of alcohol-related health issues. Most of that is 'lifestyle' and heart disease, and never a word about addiction, mental illness, liver failure and straight keeled-over-dead from alcohol overdose.

Which is, incidentally, killing more teenagers every month than the total recorded death toll due to overdosing on 'controlled' drugs.

There are days - not weeks, months or years - days, when more people die of alcoholism than die of every single health scare published this year in the papers. Nobody knows, or seems to care; not that you'd hear about it, anyway.

But today it hits home because a generation of men in England wished that they could be George Best, and now see part of themselves and their lives' aspirations, dying on a respirator in a London Hospital.

So maybe some lasting good emerges from George Best's ruined life and cruelly prolonged death.

As for the man himself, the end can only be a merciful release.

I hate Microsquashy Outlook.

I had lots of useful filters set up, and a handy little out-of-office macro to identify any mail addressed directly to me, and forward it to my Yahoo account. Clearly it all worked, because none of the usual drizzle of drivel from Corporate Communications, Maintenance, Global Communications and internal propaganda reached my Yahoo mailbox while I was on holiday.

I came back, logged in, fired up Outlook, and found over two hundred mails in my Inbox; I clicked the 'OOK' to switch off out-of-Office... and watched the pile slowly shrink away to just two messages, relevant, urgent, and addressed to me directly. A moment passed, they flickered, and turned up in the 'Sent Items' folder with a 'forwarded' marker.

Then it dawned on me: 'Out-Of-Office' has been set up by our administrator to be client-side only. That is to say, it doesn't run on the Exchange server.

Still with me?

Okaaayyy, let's-spell-it-out-slowly: Out-Of-Office filtering and forwarding only runs when I come into the office, log in, and start up Outlook.

And now my Yahoo account is clogged with cobblers, and I can't get at it from here because webmail sites are blocked... Assuming, of course, that my profile allows macros and scripts to send or forward mail at all: some people can, some people can't.
( Cut for swearing )