PreshBlog

Jack Thompson, the muppet who made money-grabbing attempts to sue game producers for producing adult games has now decided to attempt to sue Facebook as he’s unhappy they haven’t immediately defended him from gamers speaking their mind on his stupid, money-grabbing antics.

Facebook groups he objects to include ones like:

Muppet.

Edit: I should add that this guy was permanently disbarred by the Florida Supreme Court after it ruled he “abused the legal system by submitting numerous, frivolous and inappropriate filings.”

Paul Dixon, owner of pastebin.com, received a DMCA takedown order from Texas Instruments, relating to a pastebin post that a user had submitted to pastebin.com, "containing the signing keys for a range of Texas Instruments calculators which, if I understand correctly, allow you to digitally sign a replacement operating system so that the hardware will accept it"

They seem to overlook the fact that Paul is in the UK, and pastebin.com is hosted in the UK, so throwing DMCA notices around is a little pointless, acheiving nothing more than making themselves look bad.

In fact, the Streisand Effect pretty much guarantees that such attempts backfire, and result in nothing more than causing the material they desire to censor to be more widely distributed.

In fact, with information leaked to wikileaks, it’s a lost cause already.

When will companies learn that attempting to artificially control what people can do with their devices which they bought and legally own needs to stop, and that the Internet routes around censorship attempts?

I got a text message on my old mobile phone (which I’ve moved to PAYG, to keep the number active), purporting to be from Vodafone, received 15-Sep-2009, and stating:

Thanks, for being a Vodafone customer, we'd like to give you £1 free credit. Just text REWARD to 97888 for free by 24Sep09. To stop texts send STOP to 9774

This made me immediately suspicious, as it’s trivial to fake the sender of a text message to appear to have come from “Vodafone” or whatever name/number you like, and it sounded like a reverse-billing SMS scam.

However, I recognised 9774 as the number Vodafone really use to stop receiving texts, so if it was a scam, they’d at least done their homework.

Googling reveals that the shortcode 97888 is indeed a Vodafone number, used, among other things, to request their “Vodafone Passport” deal, and turns up a forum thread on the subject.

(Amusingly, the forum thread includes a nice little rant:

I GOT NOTHING and its annoying i cannot believe voda sending these messages then again , yes i can..
its like the annoying canvassing phone calls.
can we do anything to stop them ? from voda.
one annoyed voda customer.

Um, what? The clear, simple “To stop texts send STOP to 9774″ at the end of the message too hard to understand, perhaps?)

And the Guinness World Record for failing at Internet PR goes to… Guinness World Records Ltd.

Recently, FAIL Blog posted a story with a screenshot of the Guinness World Records website, showing the record for “Most Individuals Killed In A Terrorist Attack”. Underneath details of the record, was a link cheerily inviting the reader to “Break this record!”.

It’s clearly a standard part of their site template, but was amusingly unfortunate appearing on that particular record.

However, in a show of complete lack of humour and PR, Guinness World Records Ltd decided to send the owners of FAIL Blog a legal bluster email stating that the GWRL logo is trademarked and demanding that it be removed from the page in question.

I’d like to think that use of a company’s logo when talking about them would be covered by fair use, but fair usage is increasingly murky and hard-to-define legally.

FAIL Blog have decided to comply by blurring out the GWLR logo, but I can’t help thinking GWRL have really shot themselves in the foot by bullying FAIL Blog into removing the logo (even if the GWRL name wasn’t mentioned, you’d easily guess).

This is how *not* to do PR in the Internet age, folks.

Michael Jackson was a true legend, one of the best musical entertainers for a long time, and of cause his untimely demise was a big shame.

But, what’s with the number of his songs in the charts?

I don’t understand this – the real fans who will really miss him will already *have* his albums, so why are his singles now suddenly selling so much? Who are these people who presumably didn’t think much of him when he was alive, but now want to buy his music so much now he’s passed on?

Granted, it’s good to see the quality of the music in the charts inproving, but how’s this for mad (this is looking at the chart for the week of 2009-07-06):

That’s just those within the top 50 – there’s a few more between 50 and 75 too.

It’s a fitting tribute to a great entertainer, but it still puzzles me.

Ryanair passengers could soon fly for free – if they want to stand for their journey

Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary told Sky News the low-cost airline was considering ripping out the back few rows of seats on some flights.

Um, what? I’m pretty sure that won’t fly.

The FAA regulations definately require suitable seats with safety belts:

Sec. 121.311 – Seats, safety belts, and shoulder harnesses.

(a) No person may operate an airplane unless there are available during the takeoff, en route flight, and landing –

(1) An approved seat or berth for each person on board the airplane who has reached his second birthday; and

(2) An approved safety belt for separate use by each person on board the airplane who has reached his second birthday, except that two persons occupying a berth may share one approved safety belt and two persons occupying a multiple lounge or divan seat may share one approved safety belt during en route flight only.

(b) Except as provided in this paragraph, each person on board an airplane operated under this part shall occupy an approved seat or berth with a separate safety belt properly secured about him or her during movement on the surface, takeoff, and landing. A safety belt provided for the occupant of a seat may not be used by more than one person who has reached his or her second birthday.

Pretty sure the CAA/JAA will have similar rules.

My first instinct was to check whether this story was published April 1st, but clearly not.

Now, does someone think this will really work, or is it just a PR stunt to get people talking about Ryanair again (much like previous suggestions on charging to use toilets etc)?

Heh, just read this Exam bosses target faster cheat takedowns article on El Reg.

The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), which is responsible for producing national curriculum assessments and the security of papers, said it was worried that normal procedures for removing illegally posted copyright material online were not fast enough.

“Previous instances of unlawful publication of QCA copyright material have demonstrated that the usual public routes for the notification of a copyright breach (which may be sufficient for dealing with post-exam publication of papers) may not react swiftly enough to limit the damage in an emergency pre-test publication,” the QCA wrote.

To help speed up the process, the authority has asked hosting firms to supply it with an emergency hotline phone number, staffed by employees authorised to take down pages. It also asked for the hotline to be manned outside working hours.

So, they can’t manage to prevent information being leaked, but expect UK web hosts to have staff on call 24/7 ready to jump into action to remove any pages they want removed?

What planet are they on?

Oh, do fuck off: Swine flu name branded offensive

The outbreak of swine flu should be renamed “Mexican” influenza in deference to Muslim and Jewish sensitivities over pork, an Israeli health official has said.

Deputy Health Minister Yakov Litzman said the reference to pigs is offensive to both religions and “we should call this Mexican flu and not swine flu,” he told a news conference at a hospital in central Israel.

Just fuck off, how pathetic can you get?

Apparently, Neilsen has disabled reply-all for all their Outhouse users, to “eliminate bureaucracy and inefficiency”.

What an incredibly stupid idea. Removing a very useful feature, just because a few people use it incorrectly? Stupid, stupid, stupid.

If people were CC’d on a mail you receive, then that mail was relevant to them, and contained info they needed. There’s a good chance your reply will also be something they should read; if that’s the case, you hit Reply All. If your reply is only relevant to the original author, just hit Reply. Really not that hard, is it?

Just read a post likening shutting down websites to eviction (see also the follow-up here).

I’m saying that, like a real eviction, there should be practices in place. When you open your doors to hosting user content, you should have rules in action that, unless it’s a complete and total fire sale and you have no hope of even staying open that long, then you should be required, yes by law, assholes, to make the data available to customers for an extended period of time.

I’m sorry, but I think that’s a terrible idea. If a site or hosting service is free, you have no rights to demand things from it. If the site/service owners cannot afford to continue running it, or do not want to do so, it’s their prerogative. It would be nice and polite of them to do whatever they can to help you retrieve any content you had submitted there, but bollocks should it be a legal requirement.

Making laws like this will achieve one thing: dissuading people from knocking together valuable sites, for fear of the hassle of having to follow these laws if they ever want to shut it down. It’s not at all uncommon for sites which are huge these days to have started out as a one-person operation hacked together in their spare time.

At the end of the day, if a site/service becomes unavailable, the very most you should be legally entitled to is a refund of the amount you paid (pro-rata for the remaining paid-up service term). Morally, if the site owners are able to keep the data about for a while for people to download, that’d be a very nice gesture, but should certainly not be required.

The author of the posts above cites a few “heartbreaking” comments by people who used AOL Hometown, which shut down. AOL provided four week’s notice of the closure. Who the hell treats data placed online as their only copy? I’ve uploaded a fair number of photos to Flickr and Facebook, but the originals stay on on my hard drive (RAIDed and backed up to another drive also). If Flickr or Facebook had to shut down for whatever reason, I’d not have lost anything, and wouldn’t consider them responsible for my data.