July 7, 2008 – 2:02 am |Also posted in Navel-gazing
I was busy at work today putting the sports section together (apparently there was this tennis match or something), so I didn’t check my non-work email until I got home. I came back to find 17 new messages in my inbox, which is unusually high. A lot of them were delivery failure messages, which made even less sense.
Looking through them, it was obvious someone was sending out spam mail with a forged address at my domain. I foolishly setup a catch-all for that domain so everything goes to me. None were angry messages professing eventual death, which was nice. Some were away-from-my-desk messages, others were anti-spam confirm-you’re-a-real-person messages. The rest were bounces.
Then I looked in my spam box. There were hundreds of bounces. At least 300.
Thankfully I have Gmail, so cleaning that up was pretty simple.
UPDATE: I wake up, and the same thing happens again.
The show is presented in high definition, which seems kind of unnecessary for a tech show that takes half its clips from YouTube and the rest from a handicam mounted on a tripod in front of the host (at 1280×628, it’s too large to even fit my screen). Trying to watch the 13-minute, 52MB video on his website, my computer could manage only about a frame every two seconds, making it completely unwatchable. Only after plenty of hacking sleuthing could I uncover this standard-definition version. Note to Jean-Michel: at least give people the option.
Otherwise, the show is what you’d expect from a tech show: a guy talking about games and videos in front of a Matrix-like display of floating ones and zeroes.
The website is still sparse. One thing it badly needs is a list of links attached to each episode. I’d like to see that video of Darth Vader doing the Thriller dance, and it shouldn’t be difficult for me to find it. A blog couldn’t hurt either.
Otherwise, it’s a decent effort for a first show. The only question is whether it will attract an audience large enough to pay for itself.
I’ve been following the brouhaha over the Conservative government’s new copyright bill, C-61, and specifically how the government has been responding to geeks who are finding holes in it and driving public opinion against the bill.
The more I follow it, the more I come to a rather stunning conclusion: Industry Minister Jim Prentice doesn’t understand his own copyright bill.
The big controversy, as the Globe’s Ivor Tossell explains, is over a provision about so-called digital locks (those software hacks they call Digital Rights Management, or DRM, that try to control how you access digital media). It says that users cannot bypass these locks, no matter how flimsy they are, even if what they’re trying to do with it is entirely legal.
The consequence of this is that companies just put digital locks on everything, and through a loophole in the law can claim rights they shouldn’t have in the first place.
In the above video, Prentice and Heritage Minister Josée Verner are asked about this, and you can see them struggle to regurgitate the talking points they’ve been handed about the bill. (In Verner’s case, you might argue that language difficulties combined with an inability to hear the question might be an excuse.)
It’s also apparent in Prentice’s 10-minute interview with CBC’s Search Engine (its most popular podcast, which incidentally has been cancelled). Prentice calls common-sense hypotheticals about the law “arcane,” seems unclear about what would happen in certain cases, and hangs up on the interviewer to escape his questions.
But to me this isn’t just about a minister and a bill. It’s something that’s always bothered me about parliamentary politics: the idea that being an MP is all the expertise needed to run a federal department. You don’t need to be a doctor to manage doctors. You don’t need to have a PhD to manage universities. You don’t need to have a driver’s license to manage the transportation department. And you don’t need to understand computers to be in charge of a new copyright bill.
Of course, in many cases ministers are put in areas they would be more comfortable with. Ken Dryden being minister for sport makes sense. But cabinet shuffles being as routine as they are makes it seem as if running the military isn’t so different from foreign affairs or finance.
Maybe it’s true. Maybe being a minister is more about managing, appointing directors, making budgets, drafting legislation and shaking hands at ceremonial functions than it is about getting into the nitty-gritty.
But Prentice and the copyright bill show a clear problem with that premise.
———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Thurai Moorthy <xxxxx>
Date: Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 10:52 AM
Subject: United Earth Day, June 21, 2008, Saturday 5:00-11:00 PM, at 4775 Anthime,Pierrefonds, Quebec H9H 4L3, Please Publsh and Send a Reporter
To: letters@thegazette.canwest.com
United Earth Day, June 21, 2008, Saturday 5:00-11:00 PM local time, everywhere on Earth, (local location at 4775 Anthime,Pierrefonds, Quebec H9H 4L3) in your own space. Neighbours, friends, relatives. Inform everyone from Tokyo to Vancouver. Visit www.ueog.org starting at 5:00 PM Tokyo time and continuing east ward at 5:00 PM local time around the globe. United Earth Organization (UEOG), Presentation, Music, Dance. Vegetarian potluck, No disposables.
Folowing ing messsage is meant for the editor and not for publication:
Please send a reporter to cover the above event.
Regards,
[Contact info here deleted]
Some suggestions:
This is a blog. I don’t have a reporting staff.
Your luck with media outlets is usually much better if you’re not obviously forwarding an email you sent to another media outlet.
Media outlets have dedicated public addresses for assignment editors. They don’t start with “letters.”
Don’t ask the media to convert Tokyo time to local unless it’s necessary.
Your event listing appears to be missing what the whole point of the event is.
I’d list the things wrong with the website, but let’s just say it’s everything, from the constant text colour changes to the lack of any specifics about what exactly this organization does.
All that said, good luck with creating that united Earth government that controls the world.
Official “launch” of the new, crappy station is scheduled for July 1.
Meanwhile, I should mention there have been rather large, visible ads for CBC Radio One and CJAD in the Gazette suggesting that people listen to them for news and information. Hint, hint.
Le Devoir, whose RSS feed I had to unsubscribe to a while back because it was a monolithic feed that had 60 articles a day, has overhauled their feed system and now offers multiple feeds. Not only do they have feeds for different sections (their media news feed has a welcome new home back in my feed reader), but they have feeds for individual journalists, which is something I’d like to see other websites copy.
The next step will be having feeds for each individual keyword (they’ve been tagging articles with keywords for quite a while now, but haven’t done anything useful with it online yet)
The Gazette has taken the leap, putting its heart and reputation on the line in the name of accuracy, and setup a corrections page on its website. It becomes only the second Canwest daily after the National Post to do so. It’s also the first Montreal daily to have a visible, dedicated page for people to find corrections.
Just a few days after the CBC.ca network went down, Canada.com was out for most of the day yesterday, making the websites of 10 Canadian daily newspapers (the National Post has its own server and was unaffected) inaccessible. Though back up now, the server is running noticeably slow.
Coincidence? Probably. Inside the CBC talks about an internal server data failure, while the rumour at Canada.com is a DOS attack. (Besides, who would want to take out the commies and the fascists?)
Jack Todd needed four tries to file his story yesterday. (Go ahead, make your jokes)
UPDATE (June 3): Kate points out problems at Cyberpresse this morning, wondering if there’s an evil conspiracy afoot. I think it’s Julie Couillard’s exes out to destroy the media.
So apparently some intern law students have filed a complaint against Facebook for having the audacity to allow people to share their personal information with others.
Facebook certainly has privacy issues, as I’ve previously explored, and there’s no doubt that they’re trying to exploit this information for all it’s worth.
But the fact remains that, as Facebook points out, all this information is shared voluntarily. If you don’t want people to know your religion, don’t publicize it online.
The Facebook problem is a problem of user education, not Big Evil Corporations. People need to learn that as the Internet becomes more efficient at connecting and compiling information, they can’t rely on privacy through obscurity anymore. We must assume that anything we type into our computer and send over the Internet will eventually be plastered on a billboard for our parents, employers and ex-girlfriends to see and mock. And we must be vigilant about keeping our private information private. No matter how fun it might seem to break that rule just once.
RadCan’s Sur le Web makes an interesting point (I’d link to the post directly, but I can’t) today about the Tourism Toronto website (which should probably be called the Toronto Tourism site considering its URL, but who am I to judge?) that was featured in a recent Globe and Mail article about the increase in domestic tourism to the city.
Tourism Toronto doesn’t have a French version.
It took me about five minutes to find the links to different language versions (they’re on the bottom of the page), in the form of flags for different countries under the banner “international sites.” There’s a Chinese version, a Korean version, a Japanese version and a Spanish version. But no French. (Incidentally, there are flags for Spain and Argentina which link to TorontoTourismMexico.com, which I’m sure isn’t going to offend anyone, right?).
I haven’t asked the site’s creators what their motives are, because that’s no fun. So let’s speculate about them here. Did they forget? Are Korean tourists more valuable than French ones? Is there some other website for francophone Canadian tourists? Are they trying to get back at us for winning the bagel war?
Tanguay says they haven’t been open long enough for any dramatic conclusions, but he’s still getting used to having a regular schedule, and says he’d advise people to bring headphones to cut out distractions when you’re working to deadline.
Radio-Canada.ca, whose address they got wrong, and which opens audio content in strange 1px-by-1px pop-up windows.
Desjardins.com, which won’t let youme log into electronic banking with Firefox, and whose top-notch security includes such impossible-for-anyone-else-to-guess questions as “what high school did you graduate from?”
Videotron.com, which admittedly I haven’t had issues with, even if their cable and Internet service has much room for improvement.
Metro.ca, which uses Javascript needlessly, has a badly-designed site map page (the stupid web 2.0 sharing buttons hides some of the text) and shows 0 stores in Montreal with delivery service available.
Of course, when you judge websites through a mathematical formula that suggests quality of a website is directly proportional to the size of the organization running it, this is what you get.
Like every other OMGWEB2.0WE’RE S000K001!!!111 media website around, Cyberpresse has added those dreaded share links to the bottom of every story. You know, the ones you click on and, through the magic of URL variables brings you directly to a del.icio.us bookmark-save page, Fark submission page or prefabricated Facebook post.
These things really annoy me for a few reasons:
They’re entirely unnecessary. I already have a bookmarklet to save pages to del.icio.us. For any other purpose, it’s simple to copy the URL and paste it where needed.
There are far too many of these. Del.icio.us, Digg, Fark, Slashdot, MySpace, Facebook, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Furl, etc. There are so many, in fact, that other services have been created to be the middleman and make sure they’re all supported. If you’re not using one of the top three services, you’re not going to find those links on all pages, and so you have to find an alternative, and so #1 comes back into play.
They’re ugly.
This unnecessary help doesn’t end there. Cyberpresse, like many of its bretheren, also has plenty of other buttons and links that pointlessly duplicate existing browser functions, badly.
Text size: Toggles between only three sizes (the default is the smallest). Changes only the article text, not the text of other type on the page.
Print: Normally, you’d expect this to provide a specially-formatted print-friendly version of the article. No, instead it just calls the print function through Javascript. Oh, and there is no specially-formatted print-friendly version, so you get the background image, navigation, headers and footers, and all the ads.
It’s all just a waste of HTML, much like everything else on the page that’s not the article I want to read.
Meanwhile, their entirely Flash-based video site provides no way whatsoever to share links to individual videos. I can’t bookmark them, send them as emails, save them to social networking sites, or post them to blogs.
For those who don’t know, Akoha is … uhh … what does the “About Us” page say again? Something about fun and play and sharing and making the world a better place.
It could be a social-networking site for fundraisers or it could be a giant multiplayer Pong game with the Sesame Street theme playing all the time. They’re still kind of being coy about it.
I’m not much connected to the investor/rich-people market (if I did, I’d probably have a better apartment and/or life), so the names don’t quite impress me. The one I do recognize is Jonathan Wener, who sits on Concordia University’s board of governors and its real-estate committee. He’s a big reason behind the new buildings they have, to the point where I don’t know why he doesn’t have one named after him yet.
More importantly, he’s very rich and not one to waste money on some go-nowhere startup without a plan. That alone makes me think Akoha’s got something here.
The PQ’s Daniel Turp is flogging the idea that the Internet should have a .qc domain. Separatists with nothing better to do are angry over having to type “.qc.ca” to get to Quebec-based websites
It’s this kind of thinking that has forced Quebecers to file two tax forms every year, pay two different kinds of sales taxes, and deal with all the other pointless duplication of federal services just to make us be different for difference’s sake.
And until Quebec reaches the promised land, which PQ hard-liners unilaterally declare to be an eventuality, websites based here will need to have both a .qc and .qc.ca domain.
Can someone tell these people that they lost the referendum? Twice?
UPDATE: Wow. 14 comments. Most are, of course, insulting, but I’ve responded to some of the counter-arguments brought up below.
(I realize nobody’s going to go to Mix 96’s website as their source for news, which just makes me ask why they bother subscribing to Associated Press in the first place)
UPDATE: For good measure, the Team 990’s website’s current top sports story: “Jets agree to long-term deal with Rhodes” (and I can’t find out more details because their website is misconfigured)
I’m not a very frequent visitor to your website, but even I’ve begun to be disturbed by this photo of Claire Danes, which has appeared on every article page for over six months now. It draws attention to the fact that your “weekly newsmakers” photo gallery hasn’t been updated since August.
More importantly though, she’s starting to really creep me out. It’s kind of a mindless expression in the first place, as if she was just turned into a zombie or something, but with none of those rotting scabs and messed-up hairdos they all have.
If you don’t intend to update it (Nissan not paying the bills any more?), could you delete it from your template, along with all the other stuff that’s gathering dust on a virtual shelf somewhere?
There are various levels of immorality on the Internet that people with no shame have exploited for their own ends:
Spam: The broadcast of messages for a purely commercial purpose
Porn: Exploiting our animal desires by peddling pictures of naked women
Plagiarism: The appropriation of someone else’s artistic work as your own without permission
Tabloidism: The exploitation of catastrophic events to draw attention to yourself
Well now we have all the above rolled into one:
Someone has taken a YouTube Dawson College shooting tribute video (one of those lame wire-service-still-photos-combined-with-sad-song montages) and re-uploaded it with an ad for a porn site at the bottom.
The reason? The original video had “college” and “girl” in its description.
Why don’t porn spammers have better quality control?
