In the case of the NSPCC, because their goal is to do anything that gets money. Children are the excuse. This is the childrens' charity that knowingly promoted a panic about Satanism, and when called on it said "it was worth it because we got donations."
The Home Office and a coalition of children's charities are seeking to block access to the Internet to save the populace from child pornography and Internet-borne cancers.
"Only 95% of Internet users are protected from computer-borne paedophile cancers," said Home Office Minister Alan Campbell. "We must bring the other 5% into line, despite their spurious claims of the fine British-designed Cleanfeed system being 'completely incompetent broken crap that never worked in the first place.' It is clear that blocking all potentially illegal images is as easy as stopping people from sharing movies and music, which is a solved problem."
Zoe fucking Hilton of the NSPCfuckingC concurred. "We need decisive action from the government to ensure our continued income. If you're an ISP who doesn't sign up with the IWF, you're a fucking paedo. Paedo. Paedo. Paeeee-do. And you cause cancer, you fucking arsehole. And give us your fucking money, now. Paedo. I hope they fuck and kill you in jail."
"The IWF has protected ISPs from government interference for over a decade and users from potentially illegal images," said potentially fabulous drag queen and IWF head Peter Robbins. "Although our recent foray into actually attempting to do the impossible rather than just existing as something for ISPs to point at hasn't gone so well, we must protect children from carcinogenic Olympic logos of Lisa Simpson being forced into sexual acts. Think of the cartoon characters!"
The Government has signalled it will block the "streaming" loophole by making it illegal not merely to download such images, but to think about them or consider their possible existence.
I have a toddler. Trust me when I say IT'S ALL ABOUT THE POO.
(To keep vaguely on-topic, she loves my cheap Chinese MP3 player, and keeps picking it up and holding it to her head like a phone and talking into it.)
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer today announced a new era at the Seattle software company, announcing their entry six^Wnine^Wtwelve months hence into the cell phone market with the exciting new Zune Phone, to finally get the company properly into the rapidly changing digital media landscape.
Ballmer, speaking to a group of trained-monkey analysts and cynical bloggers at the company headquarters today, unveiled mockups prototypes of the Zune Phone, which combines the Zune music player (with wifi for "squirting" songs), a CDMA cell phone, a PDA, an eight gigabyte hard disk, a camera, a laser pointer and a bottle opener into one semi-portable device. It will also allow you to "squirt" music to and from your Windows 7^W8 Service Pack 1^W2 Media Center computer.
The product underscores the shift the company has attempted to make in recent years from an office supply company to a consumer electronics darling as it aims not to become utterly obsolete in the digital future. "And even Linux fanboys admit our hardware is pretty nice," Ballmer said before the somewhat sullen and cynical crowd. "It's definitely the best music player we've ever made."
Ballmer called the Zune Phone a revolutionary device that will leapfrog current technology. He said the company expects to sell about 100 million of them next year. "Maybe two hundred million. This is so the coolest music player ever." Unlike the MP3 player market, which the iPod has dominated even with the entrance of Microsoft's Zune, the cell phone market is much more fragmented. "There is not one device that everyone buys," said completely independent analyst Rob Enderle, "but this fabulous device should trounce all comers. I've ordered three already in anticipation."
Weighing in at only 15 ounces (425 grams), with a 5-inch 640-by-480 pixel screen, the $498 (with three-year $80/month contract) Z-Phone, a rebadged version of the LG Smart Display from 2003 with new firmware, looks like a Classic Brown Zune (to come in mission, chocolate, corduroy and meconium) with a phone touchpad in place of its imitation scroll wheel. It runs Windows Mobile, Pocket Internet Explorer, Pocket Microsoft Office, Pocket Solitaire and Pocket Pool. MSN will supply e-mail, mapping, search and other Internet services to the Z-Phone. It also features an amazing 1.3 megapixel (300,000 pixels interpolated) black and white camera. Battery life is estimated at up to four hours in Microsoft tests.
To better work with its content partners and ensure that you, the user, can rest safe in the knowledge that the artists and their representatives have been paid properly for all their hard work, Microsoft has limited "squirtable" songs to encrypted WMA files purchased from the Zune Music Store, which can be listened to three times or within three days before automatically being deleted from both the Zune Phone and the Media Center computer. Songs may also be "squirted" between two Zune Phones (though not the original Zune) if both are registered with Microsoft as being linked to that installation of Media Center. Users are advised to purchase Microsoft Zune Secure Headphones ($129), which encrypt the signal between the Zune Phone and your ears, as playback quality is degraded on conventional "analog hole" earphones or when playing back unencrypted MP3 files. Phone calls may be made to or received from any number on the network carrier you bought the Zune Phone from, with only a 99-cent charge for humming a song to someone you call or are called by on the phone or ten cents per use of the camera, laser pointer or bottle opener. Microsoft will also pay $20 from each Zune Phone sold to Universal Music. In addition to the ability to "squirt" songs, the user may "squirt" his calls, which are stored on Microsoft Zune Live servers and cost $40 per month to access.
In other news, Ballmer said that Microsoft had reached over 600 music downloads since introducing it
I'm the volunteer press person for Wikipedia who spoke to the press during the incident.
One thing I didn't find out until Monday night (by which time the news cycle had ended): they blocked the page about the album, on en.wikipedia.org, and they blocked the page describing the image, on en.wikipedia.org... but they didn't actually block the image itself, on upload.wikimedia.org.
But then, large websites have only been using separate image and text servers since 1995, so we could hardly expect the IWF to be up with such developments.
As well as blocking people from reading *encyclopedia text*, they *failed* to actually do the thing they were claiming to do: blocking the image.
This brings up one point: there is no evidence whatsoever that they actually do the job they claim to. And there is this piece of evidence that they don't actually know how to. Hamfisted *and* incompetent.
Could you follow up with a question as to how they managed to block text and not the actual image? I'd be fascinated to hear their explanation.
The Internet Watch Foundation's "Crapland" child-friendly Internet theme park has gone bust after only three days.
An information board at the entrance depicts the classical painting Smell The Glove by Scorpionaggio (courtesy National Portrait Gallery) and welcomes the visitor on a "flight of the imagination, travelling down the magical pathways that teenagers have used to get their porn for centuries," and which have been specially opened up for the lucky children invited to come. "Just like Michael Jacksonâ(TM)s Neverland."
Advertisements promised a "Clean Kiddie-Friendly World... Hollywood Special FXs, Blind Faith plane ride, Nevermind swimming baths, Houses of the Holy rock climbing... & much more!"
The reality when it opened on Saturday evening was somewhat less impressive. Spurious 404s, lying customer service staff ("for the authentic Internet experience!"), HTML 2.0 and web searches through AltaVista. "It looked like a website from 1995 or a paper chart of what it should look like," said customer Jimmy Wales. "It was like they'd stacked dial-up modems on both sides of a path together, stuck some printouts on a TV and stuck a keyboard in front. We were waiting two hours and they charged us GBP10 for a photo with Mary Whitehouse."
Two curtain-twitchers and a Whitehouse were attacked by irate Internet users. A posting on 4chan showed a busybody having a fag behind the grotto.
Then, on Tuesday evening, Crapland closed. A statement by the management said this was due to "intentional organised crowd manipulation and event sabotage and unscrupulous and inaccurate negative bias media that quoted our words accurately in full." A woman dressed as a particularly hefty Pepperpot stood outside shrieking: "The IWF's dead. Go home."
Cable internet users who unwittingly signed up for the Crapland experience are giving up and getting DSL broadband instead. "It's been a complete Virgin killer."
Yeah, the DCE-RPC stuff doesn't work at all. Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton is working on it right now, but it's a pretty radical architectural addition.
We're virtualising at work. We have sixty servers running a mix of Solaris 9, Solaris 10, RHEL/CentOS and Windows (for one proprietary app that's intrinsic to the platform... we run it under Wine where we can). Some boxes are flat-out, some boxes are 8-core beasts running one Java program because it won't play nice having multiple instances on the same box. We have 2.5 TB of disk space, of which about 500 GB is used. Similar stats for memory. "We are not Rackspace" is the catchphrase for why virtualising it onto a few blade servers is a highly desirable idea.
http://www.littlelinuxlaptop.com/ - these things are widely available in the UK. They're basically toys as yet (locked down, user-hacked firmware is a hideously rough alpha), but very interesting for their potential.
This is why ARM or MIPS-based netbooks are so interesting. Every x86 these days is a RISC chip with an x86 interpreter on the front - but that's enough that ARM and MIPS still use less watts for the same processing power. But the ARM/MIPS netbooks are Linux just like you're used to, running all the GNU/Linux apps just like you're used to. The lack of Flash is the only practical problem.
Google, the world's largest non-evil corporation, has released Stalkertude, which allows you to share your location in real time with your dearest friends from all your social networks and blogs, that guy your friend gave your LiveJournal username to when you were both drunk and anyone you've ever sent or received a message to or from on GMail. And your boss.
Stalkertude allows you to broadcast where you are at all times. It supports all current smartphones except that stupid iThing from Cupertino. If you're using Google Chrome, you can automatically share your location from your laptop too!
Stalkertude comes preinstalled on the Google Notepad netbook, a free Android-based mini-laptop to keep you connected wherever you go. The laptop maintains and archives a complete record of your life in text, video and audio form with the twelve built-in webcams and microphones dotted around the casing, plus samples of your DNA from the keys. The data is transmitted to the Google servers for your comfort and convenience and remains absolutely and entirely confidential between you and Google's marketing department. Tasteful and understated text ads are subliminally woven into the display pixels.
Privacy features are important to Stalkertude. You can trust us with your entire life record, even as we argue in court over Google StreetView that privacy doesn't exist in the modern world. Besides, better we have your complete dossier than Microsoft, right? And we'll only give it to the government if they, like, ask for it or something. That we've gathered so much data on you in the first place is in no way a danger to you. We promise we won't tell your husband, and that's what counts.
This is far from unheard of. Every journalist uses Wikipedia as their handy background file. Why not - a journalist's job can pretty much be described as turning useful but unreliable information into something more reliable. However, they can also slip up. Then someone investigates the reference, then the journalist is contacted and everyone goes "ah, whoops." Then it's fixed and a note's put on the talk page.
It's part of the joy of a live-ish website...
Flagged revisions won't help here, since the circular references problem comes from the process of Wikipedia editors bothering to reference stuff. Thankfully it's catchable. Of course, it's not possible to gather statistics on circular references (they're an unknown unknown).
"a startup entry which works around the app limit could well be the downfall of the entire system that could allow companies or charities to save money by buying the cheaper Starter editions."
Stuff running in browser plugins. How many functions could you do using Firefox, Flash and Java?
Slashdot Mirror
In the case of the NSPCC, because their goal is to do anything that gets money. Children are the excuse. This is the childrens' charity that knowingly promoted a panic about Satanism, and when called on it said "it was worth it because we got donations."
The Home Office and a coalition of children's charities are seeking to block access to the Internet to save the populace from child pornography and Internet-borne cancers.
"Only 95% of Internet users are protected from computer-borne paedophile cancers," said Home Office Minister Alan Campbell. "We must bring the other 5% into line, despite their spurious claims of the fine British-designed Cleanfeed system being 'completely incompetent broken crap that never worked in the first place.' It is clear that blocking all potentially illegal images is as easy as stopping people from sharing movies and music, which is a solved problem."
Zoe fucking Hilton of the NSPCfuckingC concurred. "We need decisive action from the government to ensure our continued income. If you're an ISP who doesn't sign up with the IWF, you're a fucking paedo. Paedo. Paedo. Paeeee-do. And you cause cancer, you fucking arsehole. And give us your fucking money, now. Paedo. I hope they fuck and kill you in jail."
"The IWF has protected ISPs from government interference for over a decade and users from potentially illegal images," said potentially fabulous drag queen and IWF head Peter Robbins. "Although our recent foray into actually attempting to do the impossible rather than just existing as something for ISPs to point at hasn't gone so well, we must protect children from carcinogenic Olympic logos of Lisa Simpson being forced into sexual acts. Think of the cartoon characters!"
The Government has signalled it will block the "streaming" loophole by making it illegal not merely to download such images, but to think about them or consider their possible existence.
You'll know it happens to you when your box's logo turns to one of these. Instantly recognisable!
I have a toddler. Trust me when I say IT'S ALL ABOUT THE POO.
(To keep vaguely on-topic, she loves my cheap Chinese MP3 player, and keeps picking it up and holding it to her head like a phone and talking into it.)
Yes, he'll be sentenced to having to use it.
The IWF has one purpose for its existence: keep the Goverment off the ISPs' backs. It's actually a private organisation formed by the ISPs.
Unfortunately, the people involved are under the delusion they actually have to do stuff. So they fuck it up.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer today announced a new era at the Seattle software company, announcing their entry six^Wnine^Wtwelve months hence into the cell phone market with the exciting new Zune Phone, to finally get the company properly into the rapidly changing digital media landscape.
Ballmer, speaking to a group of trained-monkey analysts and cynical bloggers at the company headquarters today, unveiled mockups prototypes of the Zune Phone, which combines the Zune music player (with wifi for "squirting" songs), a CDMA cell phone, a PDA, an eight gigabyte hard disk, a camera, a laser pointer and a bottle opener into one semi-portable device. It will also allow you to "squirt" music to and from your Windows 7^W8 Service Pack 1^W2 Media Center computer.
The product underscores the shift the company has attempted to make in recent years from an office supply company to a consumer electronics darling as it aims not to become utterly obsolete in the digital future. "And even Linux fanboys admit our hardware is pretty nice," Ballmer said before the somewhat sullen and cynical crowd. "It's definitely the best music player we've ever made."
Ballmer called the Zune Phone a revolutionary device that will leapfrog current technology. He said the company expects to sell about 100 million of them next year. "Maybe two hundred million. This is so the coolest music player ever." Unlike the MP3 player market, which the iPod has dominated even with the entrance of Microsoft's Zune, the cell phone market is much more fragmented. "There is not one device that everyone buys," said completely independent analyst Rob Enderle, "but this fabulous device should trounce all comers. I've ordered three already in anticipation."
Weighing in at only 15 ounces (425 grams), with a 5-inch 640-by-480 pixel screen, the $498 (with three-year $80/month contract) Z-Phone, a rebadged version of the LG Smart Display from 2003 with new firmware, looks like a Classic Brown Zune (to come in mission, chocolate, corduroy and meconium) with a phone touchpad in place of its imitation scroll wheel. It runs Windows Mobile, Pocket Internet Explorer, Pocket Microsoft Office, Pocket Solitaire and Pocket Pool. MSN will supply e-mail, mapping, search and other Internet services to the Z-Phone. It also features an amazing 1.3 megapixel (300,000 pixels interpolated) black and white camera. Battery life is estimated at up to four hours in Microsoft tests.
To better work with its content partners and ensure that you, the user, can rest safe in the knowledge that the artists and their representatives have been paid properly for all their hard work, Microsoft has limited "squirtable" songs to encrypted WMA files purchased from the Zune Music Store, which can be listened to three times or within three days before automatically being deleted from both the Zune Phone and the Media Center computer. Songs may also be "squirted" between two Zune Phones (though not the original Zune) if both are registered with Microsoft as being linked to that installation of Media Center. Users are advised to purchase Microsoft Zune Secure Headphones ($129), which encrypt the signal between the Zune Phone and your ears, as playback quality is degraded on conventional "analog hole" earphones or when playing back unencrypted MP3 files. Phone calls may be made to or received from any number on the network carrier you bought the Zune Phone from, with only a 99-cent charge for humming a song to someone you call or are called by on the phone or ten cents per use of the camera, laser pointer or bottle opener. Microsoft will also pay $20 from each Zune Phone sold to Universal Music. In addition to the ability to "squirt" songs, the user may "squirt" his calls, which are stored on Microsoft Zune Live servers and cost $40 per month to access.
In other news, Ballmer said that Microsoft had reached over 600 music downloads since introducing it
I'm the volunteer press person for Wikipedia who spoke to the press during the incident.
One thing I didn't find out until Monday night (by which time the news cycle had ended): they blocked the page about the album, on en.wikipedia.org, and they blocked the page describing the image, on en.wikipedia.org ... but they didn't actually block the image itself, on upload.wikimedia.org.
But then, large websites have only been using separate image and text servers since 1995, so we could hardly expect the IWF to be up with such developments.
As well as blocking people from reading *encyclopedia text*, they *failed* to actually do the thing they were claiming to do: blocking the image.
This brings up one point: there is no evidence whatsoever that they actually do the job they claim to. And there is this piece of evidence that they don't actually know how to. Hamfisted *and* incompetent.
Could you follow up with a question as to how they managed to block text and not the actual image? I'd be fascinated to hear their explanation.
The Internet Watch Foundation's "Crapland" child-friendly Internet theme park has gone bust after only three days.
An information board at the entrance depicts the classical painting Smell The Glove by Scorpionaggio (courtesy National Portrait Gallery) and welcomes the visitor on a "flight of the imagination, travelling down the magical pathways that teenagers have used to get their porn for centuries," and which have been specially opened up for the lucky children invited to come. "Just like Michael Jacksonâ(TM)s Neverland."
Advertisements promised a "Clean Kiddie-Friendly World ... Hollywood Special FXs, Blind Faith plane ride, Nevermind swimming baths, Houses of the Holy rock climbing ... & much more!"
The reality when it opened on Saturday evening was somewhat less impressive. Spurious 404s, lying customer service staff ("for the authentic Internet experience!"), HTML 2.0 and web searches through AltaVista. "It looked like a website from 1995 or a paper chart of what it should look like," said customer Jimmy Wales. "It was like they'd stacked dial-up modems on both sides of a path together, stuck some printouts on a TV and stuck a keyboard in front. We were waiting two hours and they charged us GBP10 for a photo with Mary Whitehouse."
Two curtain-twitchers and a Whitehouse were attacked by irate Internet users. A posting on 4chan showed a busybody having a fag behind the grotto.
Then, on Tuesday evening, Crapland closed. A statement by the management said this was due to "intentional organised crowd manipulation and event sabotage and unscrupulous and inaccurate negative bias media that quoted our words accurately in full." A woman dressed as a particularly hefty Pepperpot stood outside shrieking: "The IWF's dead. Go home."
Cable internet users who unwittingly signed up for the Crapland experience are giving up and getting DSL broadband instead. "It's been a complete Virgin killer."
The BBC? Yes.
Yeah, the DCE-RPC stuff doesn't work at all. Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton is working on it right now, but it's a pretty radical architectural addition.
Handy hint: Wine runs quite a lot of this sort of niche vertical-market app very nicely and has powerful ambitions to run the rest. Worth a try.
We're virtualising at work. We have sixty servers running a mix of Solaris 9, Solaris 10, RHEL/CentOS and Windows (for one proprietary app that's intrinsic to the platform ... we run it under Wine where we can). Some boxes are flat-out, some boxes are 8-core beasts running one Java program because it won't play nice having multiple instances on the same box. We have 2.5 TB of disk space, of which about 500 GB is used. Similar stats for memory. "We are not Rackspace" is the catchphrase for why virtualising it onto a few blade servers is a highly desirable idea.
http://www.littlelinuxlaptop.com/ - these things are widely available in the UK. They're basically toys as yet (locked down, user-hacked firmware is a hideously rough alpha), but very interesting for their potential.
The Sun X4600 AMD64 servers at work each have a PowerPC in the LOM processor. Running Linux, no less :-D
This is why ARM or MIPS-based netbooks are so interesting. Every x86 these days is a RISC chip with an x86 interpreter on the front - but that's enough that ARM and MIPS still use less watts for the same processing power. But the ARM/MIPS netbooks are Linux just like you're used to, running all the GNU/Linux apps just like you're used to. The lack of Flash is the only practical problem.
Google's promise: "Better we have all your data than Microsoft. Or your husband."
Google, the world's largest non-evil corporation, has released Stalkertude, which allows you to share your location in real time with your dearest friends from all your social networks and blogs, that guy your friend gave your LiveJournal username to when you were both drunk and anyone you've ever sent or received a message to or from on GMail. And your boss.
Stalkertude allows you to broadcast where you are at all times. It supports all current smartphones except that stupid iThing from Cupertino. If you're using Google Chrome, you can automatically share your location from your laptop too!
Stalkertude comes preinstalled on the Google Notepad netbook, a free Android-based mini-laptop to keep you connected wherever you go. The laptop maintains and archives a complete record of your life in text, video and audio form with the twelve built-in webcams and microphones dotted around the casing, plus samples of your DNA from the keys. The data is transmitted to the Google servers for your comfort and convenience and remains absolutely and entirely confidential between you and Google's marketing department. Tasteful and understated text ads are subliminally woven into the display pixels.
Privacy features are important to Stalkertude. You can trust us with your entire life record, even as we argue in court over Google StreetView that privacy doesn't exist in the modern world. Besides, better we have your complete dossier than Microsoft, right? And we'll only give it to the government if they, like, ask for it or something. That we've gathered so much data on you in the first place is in no way a danger to you. We promise we won't tell your husband, and that's what counts.
Everything at http://blogs.msdn.com/ is guaranteed ridiculously satirical and over the top.
This is far from unheard of. Every journalist uses Wikipedia as their handy background file. Why not - a journalist's job can pretty much be described as turning useful but unreliable information into something more reliable. However, they can also slip up. Then someone investigates the reference, then the journalist is contacted and everyone goes "ah, whoops." Then it's fixed and a note's put on the talk page.
It's part of the joy of a live-ish website ...
Flagged revisions won't help here, since the circular references problem comes from the process of Wikipedia editors bothering to reference stuff. Thankfully it's catchable. Of course, it's not possible to gather statistics on circular references (they're an unknown unknown).
So ... you mean it's a good simulation of living in the real world, then?
*cough* You realise of course that Parallels' Direct3D support is actually based on the WineD3D layer ...
You know, I can't think of a better way for Microsoft to fight Google than to make people run everything in the browser.
"a startup entry which works around the app limit could well be the downfall of the entire system that could allow companies or charities to save money by buying the cheaper Starter editions."
Stuff running in browser plugins. How many functions could you do using Firefox, Flash and Java?
Expect stuff running in browsers as AJAX, Flash or Java a *lot*.