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August 3rd, 2008
01:10 am - Not my government
I just saw this report on The Register. WTF is this shit?
MPs have called on the government to install a YouTube Czar to oversee user-generated content sites and better labels for video games.
The Committee of Culture, Media and Sport, in its report Harmful Content on the Internet and in Video Games, said it was unconvinced by claims from sites like YouTube that they could not check on uploaded content: "We recommend that proactive review of content should be standard practice for sites hosting user-generated content." The report said: "Even if review of every bit of content is not practical, that is not an argument to undertake none at all."
MPs called for the terms and conditions of such websites to be more prominently displayed and for direct links for reporting abuses to police and support organisations. The report said: "We are also concerned that user-generated video content on sites such as YouTube does not carry any age classification, nor is there a watershed before which it cannot be viewed."
The politicians accepted that self-regulation has had a beneficial effect but were concerned at "a lack of consistency and transparency of practice, and the public needs the assurance that certain basic standards will be met". The committee proposed tighter self-regulation, "under which the industry would speedily establish a self-regulatory body to draw up agreed minimum standards based upon the recommendations of the UK Council for Child Internet Safety, monitor their effectiveness, publish performance statistics, and adjudicate on complaints".
The committee even suggests that this body might also regulate online piracy, peer-to-peer services and Phorm-type advertising.
It called for industry standards to be set for take-down times. MPs commended Microsoft for providing a direct link to the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre from within Windows Live Messenger and for putting parental controls into the X-box.
On video games the committee seems to add another level of confusion. There are two systems for labelling video games - one backed by the games industry across Europe called PEGI and one created by the British Board of Film Classification which the committee supports. This is at odds with the findings of Dr Tanya Byron, who recomended a blending of the two systems.
The report summary notes, apparently without irony, that "several Government departments have an interest in this field, and it does seem that there is scope for improved co-ordination of activity between them".
The talking shop also called for the UK council for Child Internet Safety to discuss with the Ministry of Justice whether the law on assisted suicide laws were strong enough and to take action to block sites which encourage suicide.
The report is available here. ®
Where do we begin? This is a government committee, and they don't even know the law? "Even if review of every bit of content is not practical, that is not an argument to undertake none at all." Actually, it is. It's all or nothing. If YouTube reviews some content to make a decision as to whether or not to host it, it becomes a publisher, and therefore culpable for any content it hosts (even that which it hasn't reviewed) which breaks the law, as opposed to in its current form, where it doesn't review anything and is therefore protected as a "common carrier" (like ISPs and telephone companies) and is not responsible for the content it hosts. Can there really be someone in the government who is so uninformed about how the laws of that selfsame government work? Someone who should be fired.
Direct links for reporting abuses to the police? There is a direct link to the police. It's called phoning them and telling them about it. This has always worked. If it ain't broke... Age classification of content on Youtube - who's going to classify it? It's immensely subjective, and if YouTube did it themselves they again couldn't retain their common carrier protection. How is the government going to support the man-hours necessary to do that? There's an awful lot of video to sit through. Especially if you're talking not just about YouTube but also about YouTube-like sites. And "a watershed before which it cannot be viewed". A watershed. On the internet. While this is technically feasible (YouTube already allows and restricts certain content based on country, so implementing a per-country watershed would be possible), it's (a) not necessarily a good idea, (b) only works for YouTube - it just doesn't scale to cover the entire internet and (c) is a completely ass-backwards and overcomplicated way of doing things anyway when parental content-filters do the same job only more simply. As a 25-year-old man with no children, should my access to user-requested content be restricted to certain times of the day, completely breaking the entire concept of user-requested content and effectively castrating (I'm writing this after 9pm so I'm allowed to use that word) the internet? Someone in government has no idea how the internet works, and in the 21st century that's unacceptable. Another one who should be fired.
There is a lack of consistency in self-regulation? Oh, really? There is very little variation in self-regulation policies from site to site on mainstream sites. If you want to codify that lack of variation, go ahead, but to claim that there is no consistency makes you sound like someone who's never even been on the internet, so you should be fired, too. Perhaps some sites are a little less regulated, but so what? Those are the sites where people who know what they're doing end up and aren't in need of so much protection.
Regulation of online piracy, peer-to-peer services and Phorm-type advertising sounds like a good thing, if it was regulated by anyone who had any fucking idea whatsoever what they were talking about. Sure, let's regulate piracy. Let's throw huge punitive fines at Sony BMG for their use of pirated software. Regulation of peer-to-peer services is great if you realise that peer-to-peer has legitimate uses which, given what else I've seen from that report, I'm guessing these politicians don't. Regulation of Phorm-type advertising sounds great, but why regulate it? Why not just criminalise it and get it over with? It is, simply speaking, an invasion of privacy. I quote from BT Retail Technologies' external validation report of 121Media's (Phorm's) PageSense technology:-
PageSense proved to be almost entirely transparent to end users. Only 15-20 trialists (0.1% of the trial userbase) identified the presence of the system and had a negative reaction. To ensure 100% transparency, the following work is planned:
Translation: "some of our customers found out what we were doing and didn't like it, so we'd better make sure none of our customers find out what we're doing". Yeah, fuck you very much, too, BT. I'm glad you're not my ISP (ever since they were bought out by Tiscali, Pipex hasn't been great, but at least they respect my privacy). Still, it's understandable that they don't want customers to find out about it, given that according to the report, during the trial BT "committed at least 18,875,324 allegedly illegal acts of interception and modification". Let's take a good look at that word again: Il-le-gal. Phorm uses a user's browsing history, supplied by the ISP, to sell targeted ads. For more information, go here, not here, which makes it all sound very nice and doesn't really address the issues. For more information on one company associated with the use of Phorm, go to www.datapimpingservices.com.
But enough about Phorm, what else about this government report? The rest of El Reg's story seems fine. I can agree with the committee on supporting BBFC classification of video games over PEGI, for while the PEGI system works, the classification is ultimately decided by the software publishers based on PEGI guidelines, rather than by PEGI themselves. Furthermore, given the option of educating parents on a separate classification system for video games or just making games use a classification system the parents already know, the latter does seem like a better choice. The only thing that concerns me is the shrill alarmist sensationalism that surrounds video games. There's already been some talk of some games being rated 18-R, meaning that they can only be purchased at specially licenced sex shops. This is completely unjustifiable if games are to be classified in the same way as movies: the push for 18-R was brought on by some Conservatards whining "oh, it's very violent..." Yes, and very violent movies are given an 18 rating, not an 18-R, so why shouldn't it be the same for games? Morons.
The blocking of sites that encourage suicide is worrying. It's an ethical enough minefield to begin with, and I really don't know whether or not such sites should be allowed. Suicide is not, and never has been illegal in Scotland, and it hasn't been a crime in England and Wales since the 1961 Suicide Act. That same act criminalises assisted suicide, but in Scotland, again, the law differs, and assisting a suicide can bring a charge of murder or culpable homicide, but might not: this is decided on a case-by-case basis. If assisting a suicide is, in some cases, not a crime in Scotland, then surely offering words of encouragement and maybe some details on the most effective way to do it falls into those cases. Therefore, if it's not illegal in Scotland, then the sites surely shouldn't be blocked here, but only (potentially) in England and Wales, and I'm not even sure they should be there. Hopefully the Ministry of Justice will see things the same way. But it's not just about suicide. If I may allow myself the luxury of a minor logical fallacy, when you start talking about blocking one type of site, what's to stop you talking about blocking another? And how long before that escalates to the blocking of sites critical of the government?
In related news, it seems that the arguing for regulation of online piracy in the above report could lead to pirates being banned from the internet, according to a New Scientist news story. I'm not, in principle, against a crackdown on piracy. However, any such crackdown must be accompanied by the complete illegalisation of DRM technology (which, if the crackdown works, won't be needed anymore anyway). As a Linux user, I have a sizable collection of music I've paid for and can't even listen to. To get around this, I have three options.
- Burn the music to CD, then rip it to MP3, thus circumventing the DRM technology, though suffering a loss of quality.
- Go to an online store which doesn't use DRM technology and buy the music again, or go out and buy the CD.
- Illegally download the music.
Option 1 is unacceptable. I've paid for the music, not for a shitty quality bootleg of the music, so I should get to listen to the music in its original quality. Option 2 is also unacceptable. Obviously if I've already paid for the music, I shouldn't have to pay for it again, but it's also sometimes not even possible, since some record labels persist in not allowing their music to be sold DRM-free. The only remotely fair option is option 3. By using the only remotely fair option if this idea goes ahead, I could be banned from the internet. Does that make any kind of sense at all?
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June 1st, 2008
April 11th, 2008
05:52 pm - While we're going legal...
Digital content delivery music stores. I love them. I haven't bought a new CD in ages. But needless to say, some are good and some are bad, so here's a round-up of the ones I've used.
( Read more... )
In related news, did you hear about how Sony BMG got busted for piracy? Yes, the company that's been at the forefront of preventing music piracy using means of more-than-dubious legality (and certainly ethically unsound) was caught using software it had acquired illegally.Sony BMG is no stranger to piracy. As one of the most vocal supporters of the RIAA and IFPI antipiracy efforts, the company has some experience hunting down and punishing consumers who don't pay for its products. The company is getting some experience on the other side of the table, however, now that it's being sued for software piracy.
PointDev, a French software company that makes Windows administration tools, received a call from a Sony BMG IT employee for support. After Sony BMG supplied a pirated license code for Ideal Migration, one of PointDev's products, the software maker was able to mandate a seizure of Sony BMG's assets. The subsequent raid revealed that software was illegally installed on four of Sony BMG's servers. The Business Software Alliance, however, believes that up to 47 percent of the software installed on Sony BMG's computers could be pirated.
These are some pretty serious—not to mention ironic—allegations against a company that's gone so far as to install malware on consumers' computers in the name of preventing piracy.
While PointDev is claiming €300,000 (over $475,000) in damages in its suit against Sony BMG, Agustoni Paul-Henry, PointDev's CEO, says (from a Google translation of a French report) that this is more about principle than money: "We are forced to watch every week if key software pirates are not [sic] on the Internet. We are a small company of six employees. Instead of trying to protect us, we could spend this time to develop ourselves."
Paul-Henry thinks Sony BMG's piracy of PointDev's products is the fault of more than just a single employee (again, translated): "I think piracy is linked to the policy of a company. If the employee has the necessary funding to buy the software he needs, he will. If this is not the case, he will find alternative ways, as the work must be done in one way or another."
Certainly, one wonders what led to Sony BMG to steal PointDev's product in the first place. It's a safe bet that the company can afford to pay for the necessary licenses, which leaves sheer laziness as the most likely culprit. In any event, it's absolutely inexcusable for a company that has been at the forefront of the antipiracy fight, going so far as to surreptitiously install rootkits on its customers' PCs.
Source: arstechnica.com
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February 8th, 2008
03:31 am - Priorities
Help me prioritise what to listen to next, please. What follows is a long list of artists created by an amalgam of various passes through the last.fm recommender script (with some help from a BBCode to HTML converter).
( List )
Pick three or four of the ones that aren't crossed out, and tell me why I should listen to them. Or alternatively, forget the list and just tell me stuff I don't know to listen to. If you really want to put the effort in, you can find stuff I do know here.
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January 23rd, 2008
06:55 am - Writing
Yesterday, instead of studying Operating Systems, I spent a lot of time looking at picturesofwalls.com. As collections of pictures go, it's definitely a better use of time than the various lolcat sites or the tedious omnomnomnom.com. For those unfamiliar, it's a huge collection of graffiti from around the world. The photography and slogans speak for themselves, being delivered refreshingly without comment (except, occasionally, a translation if the graffiti happens to be in a non-English language).
 Much of it is funny, thought-provoking or endearing though they are interspersed with a few reminders why 'ordinary' people don't like graffiti: the inane, the trivial, the pretentious, the coarse and the downright stupid.
I'm in two minds about graffiti in general, really. I don't know why people don't like it. Is it because much of it is so inane (in which case that's an opinion I can agree with) or is it because it's confrontational? I like confrontational graffiti. Anything that will make people stop and think has, I think, got to be a Good Thing. I don't like tagging -- given that it's, essentially, another form of territorialism, I don't see any difference between that and pissing in the street.
The real joke is that I'm sure some might say it makes the place look ugly. I don't agree with that at all. If anything, it serves as a reminder that the urban wasteland was ugly in the first place, which is something we all-too-often ignore. In that, there may be something 'hyperrealist' about graffiti which makes people uncomfortable.
The existence of picturesofwalls.com raises interesting questions in itself. It is, essentially, graffiti-on-demand. You, too, can witness writing in public places from the comfort of your own home, via the magic of the intertubes! Given this controlled environment, I'm sure some of the impact -- and therefore some of the whole point of graffiti in the first place -- is lost. But it also puts some perspective on the issue by raising these very questions.
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January 6th, 2008
11:11 am - Piss
In September I asked for ideas about what to rename my LJ, following a "shift in the tone, focus and purpose" of my verbal spew. I have now renamed it Anserine because I couldn't fucking come up with anything better. For the subtitle I chose "Pissing all over your internet."
This is not merely a simplification of ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) orwellian_trash's suggestion, nor is it solely a pseudo-ironic declaration of my superiority over the internet. It's also an allusion to a post about stupidity I made in November, in which I drew parallels between internet posting and territorialism.
Robert Anton Wilson, through the character known as El Eswad, said that "Every national border in Europe marks the place where two gangs of bandits got too exhausted to kill each other anymore and signed a treaty. Patriotism is the delusion that one of these gangs of bandits is better than all the others." Personally I'm not sure that idea doesn't entrench the concept of borders too much in civilization. Such treaties have existed in some form or another since the days of tribalism, when the simple core of the notion is revealed: We piss here, you piss there. It's exemplary of the human drive for in-group solidarity (as humans are, by nature, gregarious) and -- more worryingly -- out-group hostility that gives rise to such things as identification of opponents with Satan and all the horrors concomitant with that (such as the Holy Inquisition).
Internet posts indulging things like PS3/Wii/XBox360 fanboyism are enormously tiresome, but they gain a new fascination when considered as nationalism-in-microcosm. They share the same traits of in-group solidarity and out-group hostility. Ultimately, they too boil down to "We piss here, you piss there." There seems to be an unconscious drive in these groups to conquer the infinite territory of the internet, trying to set up their own borders. Of course, since the territory is infinite, such endeavours are pretty futile, but this is not a rational action: It's subservience to a primal urge.
The subtitle I chose is not ironic, in that sense. Far be it from me to suggest that I am above such drives. I, too, have been guilty of out-group hostility (fucking neds). I am a creative person, and that creativity is fuelled by the urge to make my mark on something, to be able to say "This is mine." But that romantic notion is in itself nothing more than a disguise for "I piss here, you piss there."
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December 13th, 2007
02:49 am - The Mystic Computer Scientist
 It's a well-known fact that Oriental dualism is largely divided by the yang - the masculine principle - and the yin, the feminine principle. This is opposed to Western, Zoroastrian-influenced dualism which distinguishes between Good and Evil and has probably set society back a couple of thousand years.
It is sometimes claimed that the yang is active, and the yin is passive, and sometimes claimed that both yin and yang have passive and active aspects. That latter view is, in Western lore, found in the Tarot, where Swords and Wands represent the active and passive masculine principle respectively, while Cups and Discs represent the active and passive feminine principle respectively. I'm not sure I prefer the demarcation between passive and active to the astrological triplicity of Cardinal, Mutable and Fixed (and taking that point of view, it's easy to see why not all reactionaries are conservatives) but what can I do about that?
 The mysticism of Tarot does impel one to want to plot a link between the four suits and the "occult elements" of Fire, Earth, Air and Water, (which appears to be entirely different in each element's character from the astrological quadruplicity which uses the same element names) but by merely looking at a deck of ordinary playing cards today, and noting the division into red and black suits (each of which is cognate with a Tarot suit), we can see that cards have an undeniable dualism. Incidentally, there is a school of thought which suggests that the 'masculine' Tarot suits are related to the I-Ching's yarrow stalks, and the 'feminine' suits are related to the I-Ching's coins, which suggests that it may not be entirely absurd to draw parallels between the Tarot and the Taijitu.
 The other interpretation of the yin and the yang - that the yin is inherently passive and the yang is inherently active - turns up in the oddest place, however: in Computing Science. As anyone with any knowledge whatsoever about the internal electronics of a computer knows, a voltage represents a binary '1', and no voltage represents a binary '0'. From this, it should be intuitive that the 1 embraces the active aspect, while the 0 represents the passive aspect. However, inspection of the numerals used shows '1' to be a phallic symbol, representing the masculine, and '0' to be its feminine counterpart. (This idea is challenged somewhat by the fact that '1' is Arabian, and '0' is Indian, but let's gloss over that for fear of opening up an entirely different can of worms - the idea can still remain.)
Of course, this binary system forms the basis not only for the internal workings of a computer, but also for all electronic communication; for the very Internet itself. That the Internet is, at base level, made up of various permutations of the masculine and feminine principles is proof positive (if any were needed) that The Internet Is For Porn.
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November 30th, 2007
08:52 pm
Due to a security update across a number of our servers, we are asking customers to reset both their FTP and Domain Control Panel passwords. Current passwords will no longer be valid and all customers will need to reset these. You will not be able to use your existing password or a previously used password for your new FTP/DCP password.
I'm sure that's all very well, but why couldn't you have e-mailed me instead of making me look for such a notice, and, come to think of it, how come the only way I could even see that message is BY USING THE CONTROL PANEL PASSWORD YOU SAID WAS NO LONGER VALID?
Ah, my web host is so cute.
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November 24th, 2007
07:17 am - Piracy!
Here's another guardian.co.uk blog, this time from last month, about the closure of tv-links.co.uk. I don't really fall on either side of the debate - let's face it, it wasn't like it was a site for legitimate stuff that "just happened" to accidentally link to illegal stuff - but this blog was refreshingly different from the ZOMG PIRACY!!1 sensationalist tack that most of the reports seemed to take.
I pretty much disagree, though. Linking to a page which the owner of the page then modifies to include illegal content should not in itself be illegal, no. But I'm under no illusions that that's what the owner of tv-links.co.uk was doing. Knowingly linking to illegal content probably should be illegal, but of course one has to prove the linker's knowledge of what was at the other end beyond reasonable doubt. I'm almost certain the Guardian blogger's attitude might have been quite different if the owner of the site had been knowingly linking to child porn rather than videos with the lesser crime of copyright infringement.
That said, I do agree that it's a bit stupid to go after someone who's linking to sites that are hosting illegal material and not bother to go after those sites themselves.
As far as I can tell, this is just a thinly-veiled argument on whether or not copyright infringement in itself should be illegal. That's a much thornier topic (I believe it should be illegal, but the law on it should be more relaxed and less oriented towards giving big companies the opportunity to fuck creative types up the arse at every opportunity, naturally) but misdirection by dressing it up in some other outfit isn't going to get to any kind of useful answer.
On the other hand, of course, linking, not hosting, was precisely what Jack Thompson was trying to accuse his rival of when the gay porn scandal came up. Whatever else I might believe, I'm in favour of any ruling that highlight's Jackie-boy's idiocy.
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November 22nd, 2007
02:02 am - Will the stupidity never end? UPDATE
(Continued from this previous entry.)
I just found this, a Guardian Technology article on something called StupidFilter - the subtitle of the StupidFilter project is "Because the Internet needs prophylactics for memetically transmitted diseases."
From the Grauniad article:-
... the folks behind StupidFilter sound like any other Grumpy Old (in Internet Years) Men. But what they're doing is, in itself, interesting: they plan to build some open-source filter software that can detect rampant stupidity in written English.
"This will be accomplished with weighted Bayesian or similar analysis and some rules-based processing, similar to spam detection engines. The primary challenge inherent in our task is that stupidity is not a binary distinction, but rather a matter of degree. To this end, we're collecting a ranked corpus of stupid text, gleaned from user comments on public websites and ranked on a five-point scale."
Where did they get all that raw stupidity from? Why, the place that Homer Simpson would call "my new TV" - YouTube. As you know, you could put a Richard Feynman lecture up there and it would attract comments that you'd think something barely smarter than a thumb tack had posted.
StupidFilter.org also has a page called 'Concentrated Stupid' where you can see a random stupid comment (from over 255,000, mostly taken from youtube - obviously!) that they're using to calibrate their filter.
It all sounds very interesting, even if they're currently only in the analysis and design phase. I hope it makes it all the way from inception to implementation and beyond, partly out of technical admiration (I am, after all, a Computing Science student) and partly because the subtitle I quoted above is so true.
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November 21st, 2007
09:59 pm - Youtube comments: Will the stupidity never end?
I think someone stole the idea! aGame [A Great & Majestic Empire] did they have this in it
I can't figure out whether this commenter was saying aGaME stole the idea of this video or this video stole the idea of aGaME, but it's pretty much irrelevant because the comment was found in the comments thread of episode 2 of... A Great & Majestic Empire!
Does stupidity like this really exist in the world? The internet is at times a terrifying place.
 I do often wonder if the giddy rush of web-anonymity encourages people to think less about what they're saying, or if such stupidity is a genuine reflection on the state of affairs in the so-called 'real world'.
I know I've said some stupid things on the internet, even in this LJ, but youtube comments make my stupidity seem like a positively transcendent intellect. Is that because the places I post are far more community-oriented, and therefore have that degree less anonymity? Or is it (as I prefer to think) just that I'm a little less stupid than the majority?
Or else, is it that there's something about youtube itself that inspires such idiocy, perhaps supporting the traditional wisdom that television will rot your brain? Or maybe it's just the site design rather than the content that turns people into gibbering idiots?
Maybe (and I know I'm reaching here) it's the transition from plain old web to 2.0. A traditional idea of POW is that there's a lot of buzz, and you have to be exceptional to be heard above the noise. Perhaps in this transition to a more community-oriented paradigm, that compulsion to try and be heard above the noise hasn't completely died out. Being exceptional by saying something smart is effortful, but being exceptional in stupidity is easy. Perhaps it's like an animalistic urge to scent the internet with one's uniqueness - uniqueness that is easiest to achieve by being a total moron.
As much as Mela and I have argued over whether or not the words of Aïboforcen's 'Not Unique' are accurate, I think it's something people need to be told every now and again, because - whether or not it's the cause of the stupidity - I think there is some bestial compulsion to mark the internet with one's own imprint. The web really needs its own gom jabbar to weed out those who aren't civilised enough to refrain from pissing all over my internet.
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November 2nd, 2007
08:51 am - pickleclicky 0.6a
Yes, pickleclicky is still being updated.
Changes:-
- Now contains a rudimentary Steve-blocker so we can all ignore the troll and get on with our lives.
Get pickleclicky
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October 29th, 2007
06:44 am - My name.
This week's Word Nerds is on the subject of nicknames, and "Goose King" is chosen as the example of a nickname as an Internet identity. Go me.
In other news, I haven't slept. Power-nap time!
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October 13th, 2007
08:10 pm - Community!
I'm not deleting my Myspace account. Recent events have shown me it's a good way for old friends I've fallen out of touch with to reach me again. But I don't like it, and I don't use it.
I think Momus pinned down exactly what I don't like about it in his Wired article on Myspacecide (that is, deleting his Myspace account, rather than the prickly topic of suicide on Myspace). In justification for why he deleted his Myspace profile but continued (and still continues) to use Livejournal for his blog, he wrote:-
I felt like a sheep, letting social pressures, memes and fads herd me around. I wondered why I needed yet another social networking website to check: After all, I was already on Friendster and Japanese network Mixi, not to mention LiveJournal, a network organized around daily content rather than mere profiles and links. [Emphasis mine]
That's exactly it, of course. Myspace is structure-heavy, content-light (and what content there is is not easily or intuitively accessible) while lj has a light but effective structure and an emphasis on new content - and I don't even need to make one click to see it, since I have my flist as one of my home page tabs in Firefox.
I have little experience of Facebook and Bebo, but my impression of them is that they're copying exactly the same maximum-structure, minimum-content approach of Myspace. It might be a fun way to pass the time, but I never really feel tempted: it just doesn't seem useful or terribly interesting.
Of course, no entry of mine about internet community would be complete without a look at Second Life. Second Life is based on user-generated content. As a result (and with 900,000 active unique users), it can seem like it suffers from too little structure - which is a bad thing when technical issues like lag can actually discourage you from exploration.
Ultimately, that comes back to what I've been wondering about video games recently: the more freedom you give a player, is it not true the more directionless the game may feel, and hence the less fun it will be? And is it possible that, as with games, so with community: more freedom is, in fact, just as boring as less?
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September 19th, 2007
12:32 pm - :-)
Today is the 25th anniversary of the venerable smiley, so Happy Birthday :-)
Reportedly, after a bad joke on Carnegie Mellon University's bulletin boards in 1982 about a mercury leak caused "mild panic", it was decided that something had to be done to flag messages that were intended as jokes, the electronic medium lacking the tone-of-voice cue for humour.
It was suggested, rather mundanely, that these messages should be flagged with an asterisk in the subject line. Boring. Research programmer Keith Wright disagreed and suggested the ampersand: "Surely everyone will agree that the “&” symbol is the funniest character on the keyboard. It looks funny (like a jolly fat man in convulsions of laughter.) It sounds funny…I just know if I could get my nose into the vacuum [tubes of the computer monitor] it would even smell funny!” Other symbols were suggested, including the hash, because # looks like lips and teeth... apparently.
Then, at 11:44 on the 19th of September, Professor Scott E. Fahlman made a hurried post on the bulletin board:-
I propose the following character sequence for joke markers:
:-)
Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given curent trends. For this use:
:-(
And the rest, as they say (whoever they are), is history.
I knew it was old; I didn't realise it was five days older than me!
ETA: Oh, and yes, it is coincidence that International Talk Like a Pirate Day falls on the smiley's birthday. Yarr!
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September 8th, 2007
07:10 pm - pickleclicky 0.512a
Changes:-
- pickleclicky will now parse https links as well as http. Leaving the protocol off a link will cause it to default to http, though.
- Er...
- That's it.
body massage pickleclicky
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September 5th, 2007
04:44 pm - pickleclicky 0.511a
In case you've forgotten what pickleclicky is, it's a Greasemonkey script for the Radiohead Message Board. It checks posted messages for URLs, and transforms them into clickable links.
Get pickleclicky at my site.
Changelog:-
- Now shows the IP address of the poster after their username.
- Text should no longer show up in Times New Roman. However, this ignores the font you have chosen in your profile and shows it in the default board font. Looking for ways to fix that.
- Fixed a bug where URLs would sometimes be followed by the word 'undefined'.
- Fixed the 'http://' in URLs being eaten from the displayed text of the link if it was typed in.
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September 4th, 2007
03:15 pm - This site is pretty awesome.
MIN: God of Lettuce and Sex.
This fertility God is a very popular phallic deity. He is mostly depicted as a stick man — with one of the sticks sticking out somewhat crudely. Taking part in a sexy threesome with QADESH and RESHEP, he has a plumed headdress and in his right hand he holds a whip. Best not to ask why.
There's more to lettuce than you might think. It was regarded as a powerful aphrodisiac — huge bunches of lettuce leaves were eaten in MIN's honor in the hope that increased stamina would result.
You can try this for yourself. Lettuce is cheap and a few salad sandwiches may bring unexpected benefits.
Lettuces also feature in the conflict between SET and HORUS. Fed up with the never-ending fights, RA ordered them to be at peace. Seemingly compliant, SET invited HORUS to stay with him for the weekend, but on the first night SET crept out of bed and attempted to sexually assault HORUS, who awoke just in time and managed to catch SET's discharge in his hand, whereupon he fled home to his mother crying 'Look what SET has done now!'
ISIS cried 'The filthy beast!', hacked off the sullied hand and threw it in the Nile. (She soon made him another one — replacement parts were her speciality).
She then planned revenge. She persuaded HORUS to self abuse himself into a jar, and sprinkled the contents over SET's favourite piece of garden. The Lettuce Patch. Every morning SET started off the day with a row of fresh lettuces, and he swallowed all the 'dew fresh' ones. When the story got out, how the Gods laughed — 'How's the pregnancy going SET?'
So always wash lettuces very carefully before consumption.
www.godchecker.com
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03:00 pm - Vertigo! BANG BANG!
I use Vertigo for Firefox, because I tend to have a lot of tabs open. This removes the tabs and instead places a list of currently open pages down the side. I'm finding it a lot easier, since I often have too many tabs open to fit on one screen (and, ladies and gentlemen, Firefox is still only using 146MB of memory), but they all fit on with Vertigo.
The one problem I have with it is that I'm also using Google Sidebar, so my horizontal screen real-estate is rapidly shrinking. It does mean I now sometimes have to scroll side-to-side, which is a lot more frustrating than scrolling up and down and is pretty much a no-no from a usability point of view. Oh well.
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August 15th, 2007
05:22 pm - New Study Dispels Asocial Online Gamer Myth
Apparently, people who play inherently social games are not asocial. No shit!
A new study conducted by researchers at Nottingham Trent University in the UK, and published in U.S. journal CyberPsychology and Behavior, has found that three quarters of online role-playing gamers make good friends with the people they meet in their virtual worlds, with almost half meeting in real-life situations and one in ten going on to develop physical relationships.
Other findings from the study, entitled “Social Interactions in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Gamers” indicate that more than 30 percent of participants found themselves attracted to another player and 40 percent chose to discuss sensitive issues with online friends rather than their real-life friends.
One in five participants believed that massively multiplayer role-playing games (MMORPGs) had a negative effect on their relationships if their partner was not a player, while more than two-thirds felt they had a positive effect on their relationships with those who did play.
Women were significantly more likely than men to be attracted to other players and were far more likely to go on to date them. Most women gave “therapeutic refreshment” as their main reason for playing, whereas most men stated “curiosity, astonishment and interest” as their reasons. Around a third of gamers suggested they could be more themselves in the game than in real life.
The study interviewed almost 1,000 online gamers from across the world and found that the average number of hours played per week was 22.85. The most popular MMORPG in the study was World of WarCraft, with almost half of participants naming it their favorite game.
Professor Mark Griffiths, from Nottingham Trent University’s School of Social Sciences, said: “This study has revealed many aspects of MMORPGs that were not known before. Previous research has suggested that gamers are socially inactive, but MMORPGs are actually extremely social games, with high percentages of gamers making life-long friends and even partners.”
“As well as making good friends online, 81% of gamers play with real-life friends and family, suggesting MMORPGs are by no means an asocial activity, nor are the players socially introverted,” he added. “The virtual world that these games offer, allow players to express themselves in ways they may not feel comfortable doing in real life because of their appearance, gender, sexuality, age, or other factors.”
Some of this I think is probably a bit behind the times; the gender assessment wasn't exactly 'previously unknown' - the only new thing here is that it's been subject to a formal study.
The same goes for the fact that MMOs are a social activity. I'm surprised, actually, that a games industry site would make such a big deal out of that: MMOSGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Social Games) have been around almost as long as MMORPGs. There is debate as to whether or not they actually count as games, and have instead recently have turned to branding themselves 'virtual worlds', but the idea of a 'game-world' where there isn't any precise goal other than socialising is not by any means new; and these are often as popular if not more so than their MMORPG counterparts.
Personally I prefer the 'non-game' version. The 'game' part of MMORPGs is often the dreaded grind; repetitive actions only undertaken to farm levels. The social aspect has always been far more interesting.
Anyway, the thing I found most interesting about this article was: "Around a third of gamers suggested they could be more themselves in the game than in real life." I'm not so sure that's true, but I can see the direction it's going. I can quite easily be myself in real life, and can also quite easily be myself ingame or online, but 'myself' as a variable doesn't refer to the same thing in both situations. As I've said before, I have a problem with the idea that anything that's on the internet is somehow 'not real', but most opinions I've seen on the matter suggest either that it's real or that it's not real. I think that's a totally false dichotomy: I think they're both real, but not the same.
My identity online is different to my identity offline, but they are both my identity, or at least different aspects thereof. The online world, to me, is an extension of reality. It may have different rules and attributes to the rest of reality, but those are special-case rules and attributes, not individuating rules and attributes.
Sorry about the rambling post...
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