Sim-O

Eh?

Can I just congratulate Paul Staines on a recent-ish appointment.

The alter ego (and what a fucking ego) of Guido Fawkes is running Messagespace…

Staines is founder of the Guido Fawkes blog Order-Order and also runs the MessageSpace network which sells ads across around 30 political blogs.

It wasn’t too long ago that Messagespace were denying any connection between them and Paul…

The official line is that; “Paul Staines is neither a shareholder, director or employee of MessageSpace and never has been.”

But for some reason they both had access to each others sites. It was alleged that Paul was hosting stolen images on the Messagespace site and Jag Singh of Messagespace offered to remove alleged lies and smears from order-order.com …

Read that bit again; Jag Singh offered to log into the order-order.com website and delete these comments himself!

Why would Jag do that on order-order and how would Paul be able to host stuff on messagespace if they have nothing to do with each other?

I know peoples’ circumstances change, and Paul may have joined the top team at Messagespace in the last two years, but after that, would you trust them?

So, Huffington Post or Messagespace? Would you rather be fucked in the arse or the eye?

ht Tim

I have previously written about Istyosty.com and with it being one of my more active posts, I thought I would write about it again, thanks to a Patrick Hayes at Huffington Post UK.

Up until recently, the liberal Twitterati have been faced with a dilemma. By tweeting links of Daily Mail and Sun articles to their followers in order to engage in a collective two minute hate against the idiocy of the tabloid press (and their millions of gullible, easily manipulated readers), they end up sending traffic to the despised article and boosting the tabloid’s web traffic and potentially aiding its advertising revenue.

First off, ‘the Liberal Twitterati’. Who’s that then? I’m presuming Patrick means anyone that doesn’t like the bullshit the tabloids come out with. The dilemma, though, is a very real one not just for Twitterers, but for bloggers and anyone that shares links, like bloggers. Bloggers, or good bloggers, link to the source of their information they are sharing or the subject of their posts. This is so that the reader can either check the facts the blogger puts forward or see what the blogger is writing about so that the reader can go and make their own mind up, even if the content of the source is erm, not very savoury. This is something that newspaper websites very rarely do which enables them to put forward articles that can twist the truth or not tell the whole truth or take things out of context. What’s a blogger to do, eh? Link or not link? Let the reader decide for themselves the validity of their facts and opinions or behave like a tabloid?

It’s even argued that the Mail is intentionally using what’s termed ‘flame bait’ to lure liberals to its site, helping it get 10 million hits more than the Guardian’s website each month. This has led to some claiming they’d rather remain in the dark about the content of Daily Mail articles being discussed, because reading them online could make a small contribution to the Mail’s swelling coffers.

That argument about flame bait is not a hard argument to win.

The choice to remain in the dark and hope the Mail withered away is ok for some, but it obviously isn’t doing anything to diminish the Mail in anyway. Others, though, want to call out the lies and the spin and the abusiveness and so in steps the dilemma.

Now a solution has been found. IstyOsty allows you to link to a cached version of a Daily Mail article (alongside other tabloids) that doesn’t display advertising and won’t register as a hit on the website or appear on search engines. IstyOsty claims this process is ‘entirely legal’.

Yay, Istyosty! What a beautiful, elegant solution it is, too.

The website has also been an immediate hit among the Twitterati, who are beginning to childe one another if they link to the actual Daily Mail website. Times columnist Caitlin Moran, for example, was ticked off by TV presenter Lauren Laverne for giving them [the Daily Mail] the ‘click through’ to an article, prompting Moran to respond: ‘Must. Remember. @istyosty.’

I’m presuming Patrick means ‘chide’ as in to scold or express disapproval, as opposed to ‘childe’ which is a disused term for a child of noble birth, and quite right too. I would hardly say it has been an immediate hit, though (no offence Istyosty). I regularly see bloggers and Twitterers not using it, including ones I presume Patrick would include as a Twitterati, like media bloggers. But then how do I know, I have never seen Istyostys’ stats.

When a Twitch Hunt began against Melanie Phillips on Monday for a Mail article she’d penned attacking the BBC, IstyOsty links were widely used with Twitter users imploring others to deprive the ‘Daily Fail’ of ad revenue. As one Tweet said: ‘Dear Twitter, If Melanie Phillips must be linked to, please could it be through the @istyosty safe link? http://is.gd/fQplZD Thanks. :)’ Another suggested, ‘someone needs to design a WW2-style poster reminding people to use istyosty & not direct-link to the Mail.’

Did you read that Phillips article? No? Well, Angry Mob tears it to pieces as it is a proper piece of WTF-ery, and yes, he links to it via istyosty, so I’m guessing he is a Twitterati too.

If you’re going to say that tweeters are scolding each other for not using Istyosty links, the example Patrick gives is a pretty weak one: ‘Dear Twitter’; ‘Please could’; ‘Thanks’. Ooh! Scary. That’s a serious telling off that is.

The embracing of IstyOsty on Twitter reveals much about the mindset of the liberals that use it. As one Twitterer put it, ‘may I commend istyosty to you? A proxy that enables us to point furiously at evil papers without them getting page hits.’

Yeah, great. Someone’s a bit sarcastic but they’ve hit the nail on the head.

At first glance, you might think that the IstyOsty strategy is for the ‘evil’ Daily Mail website and the like to be starved of advertising revenue and being forced to wither away. It would also be understandable to think that in the eyes IstyOsty enthusiasts, the world would be a better place if the Mail and other ‘nasty’ papers ceased to exist and everyone was forced to read the Guardian by default. (Tellingly a request on its website that IstyOsty also covers the Guardian has so far gone unanswered).

I have no idea what Istyostys’ strategy is. You’d have to ask him (he’s @istyosty, if you couldn’t guess). I think it would be a shame if the Mail and the Sun disappeared. Most people don’t want that. Most people realise that a plethora of opinion in the media is A Good Thing, they just want All. The. Bullshit. to stop. There’s nothing wrong with saying that Britain is going to be over run with foreigners in ten years time, or that eating 0.5grams of cheese a week raised your chances of cancer by 35 times or whatever, as long as it is true, or the studies actually suggest it. If you’re gonna write bullshit, or a spiteful column about someone less than a week after their death, then people are gonna call you on it.

But, here’s the rub: In such a world, who would liberals have to ‘point furiously’ at? Their lives would become dull and empty if there weren’t columnists like Melanie Phillips to Twitch Hunt. Even IstyOsty recognises that the Mail plays an important service in allowing liberal Guardian-reading types to feel smug by ‘point[ing] out how ignorant they are’.

Yeah, yeah. Nice one. People are all one dimensional and don’t have other shit to be getting on with except to be outraged by what ever the right wing press are saying. That is so humourous, oh, hang on. That’s not link bait I’ve fallen for is it? Damn.

And what’s wrong with pointing out how ignorant someone is when they’re spewing bile and bullshit?

Of course, their finger-pointing doesn’t just stop at the ‘ignorance’ of writers such as ‘Mad Mel’, Jan Moir and colleagues. It’s also, by extension, aimed at the Mail’s 4.7 million readers. The brainwashed, ill-educated, Beta minus drones who inhabit Middle England and read papers such as the Mail not to feel superior, but to actually get news.

Yes, fingers get pointed at the Mail. Why shouldn’t someone be called out when they’re being ignorant and spewing bullshit? The ‘brainwashed, ill-educated, beta minus drones’ are not a big part of the mails readership though.

As you can see in the screen shot from the Newspaper Marketing Agency…

(Key:
A upper middle class Higher managerial, administrative or professional
B middle class Intermediate managerial, administrative or professional
C1 lower middle class Supervisory or clerical and junior managerial, administrative or professional
C2 skilled working class Skilled manual workers
D working class Semi and unskilled manual workers
E Those at the lowest levels of subsistence Casual or lowest grade workers, pensioners and others who depend on the welfare state for their income

The column on the right is percent of readers.)

As you can see, the Mails readership isn’t really the ill-educated, supposedly easily led, or beta minus folk, is it? And is it news if it’s not actually true, or presented truthfully? No, it’s bullshit.

When, for example, IstyOsty says those who advertise in the Mail are ‘companies who should know better’, it is implicitly saying that companies shouldn’t be spending their cash trying to raise awareness of their products among the poor thickies that read it.

But the vast majority aren’t ‘poor thickies’, are they? The companies should know better. They should know better than to associate themselves and help pay for the poisonous, divisive, hateful output of these papers.

IstyOsty, realistically, is unlikely to make much of dent to the massive number of hits the Daily Mail gets each month. Even if the whole of Islington, Hackney, Haringey and the small handful of other liberal bastions (i.e. the places that voted ‘Yes’ in the AV referendum), decided to switch to IstyOsty en masse. It’s more a way the chattering classes can ensure that the continued success of these ‘evil’ publications is not done in their name. As well as being a convenient way to differentiate themselves from the dunderheaded tabloid-reading masses.

And?

Using an IstyOsty link is like a 21st century Twitter version of a Masonic handshake. It makes it clear you’re one of the Enlightened Ones and not one of them. On the flip side, however, it is an remarkably accurate identifier of members of the contemptuous, intolerant, masses-hating, clique of illiberal liberals who are – worryingly – becoming increasingly influential in shaping British political life today.

That metaphor doesn’t quite work. The Masonic handshake is supposed to be secret. Istyosty works better the more people know of it and use it.

Oh, what a wit Patrick is. ‘Illiberal liberals’ ho ho. Masses hating, heh. Yeah, of course.

Hackers have hit The Sun newspaper, and not the sort of hackers to hack your phone.

The URL http://thesun.co.uk redirects to http://new-times.co.uk/sun/ with a fake story about Rupert Murdoch being found dead. At the end of the story there is a cartoon which explains it.

h/t to @scaryduck, who I first head if from.

Update: TechCrunch has a little more.

And Again (23.18): The admins at new-times.co.uk have revoked access, but Lulzsec still have control of the Suns’ site and have redirected it to their Twitterfeed.

And another (23.45) Lulzsec just tweeted that News Internationals’ site, containing a statement about the hack, has been hacked to direct back to Lulzsecs Twitterfeed too. http://newsint.co.uk/statement_regarding_the_sun.html

I said earlier I was going to write a post but now it actually comes to it, like it seems so many other times lately, what do I write a post about?

The News International/News Corp./News of the World hacking scandal (I fucking hate the the term ‘hackgate’)? Well, I don’t have any news that you can’t anywhere else, and be more accurate and more recent too. An incisive bit of opinion that’ll make you think? Not that either.

So what do I have instead? Not a fucking lot. To give my mind some time to think while I type go and check out Septicisles’ musings on the Murdoch situation and Tim is doing his own digging in the archives to give the FBI somewhere to start looking to help bring the Murdoch empire down. Give him some support, would you. (See? even the first two links I have for you aren’t exactly original, are they? What hope have I got of writing an interesting blog post?)

Oh, and Unity at the Ministry of Truth has been kicking the absolute shit out of Nadine Dorries too, which is always a joy.

The PCC are running scared. Uponnothing hits the PCC bang on the head with just why, exactly, they are a bag of shit and are less than pointless and irrelevant using the example of a couple of women, who were raped, that had had their anonymity revealed by a paper. The PCC condemned the actions of the paper and adjudicated against them in, for the PCC, the strongest terms. What was the strongest punishment that could be handed to the offending paper?

[The PCC} contacted the owners so that they could ensure it never happened again. All well and good you might think, but imagine of this kind of adjudication happened in any other walk of life. Would the tabloids be happy if a teenager found guilty of doing something ‘exceedingly serious’ was not punished in any way, instead the judge just passed on his thoughts to the parents in the hope that they could take the appropriate action?

What if the Chief Executive of Trinity Mirror doesn’t do anything? What would the PCC do in that case? What could they do in that case?

And that is the problem with the PCC. It can do fuck all else except point a finger and that doesn’t seem to be stopping the usual suspects and transgressing the code, as the more prominent media bloggers highlight on a daily basis.

Anyway, this post about bugger all has taken me far, far longer to write than it’ll take you to read, and I’m sorry to have wasted your time waffling on about fuck all, so I’ll leave you with a link to a site that should’ve gone on my blogroll ages ago, but you know what sort of waste of space I am. It’s called Stuff and Nonsense, written by jdc325. Enjoy.

Internet Explorer 6 is a piece of shit for a variety of reasons that, but mainly because it is dangerously flawed.

But now, at last, it is being killed off completely.

What I don’t understand, not being much of a techie, is what all the fuss about it being killed of is for. Microsoft even has a site dedicated to it with how to help – educate, encourage, join the cause and other stuff.

Microsoft could kill IE6 in one go. No fuss. No bother.

All Microsoft have to do is issue one last update. Make it a security update that when installed installs IE8 or whatever the latest version is that MS has cobbled together.

The majority of savvy non-commercial users don’t use IE anyway, the mojority of non-commercial users of Windows have the auto-updates set so it will do it itself when the user clicks the prompt when asked and if a security update is issued rather than just ‘an update’ any one looking after a commercial IT system would have to be a muppet not to update. Job done.

Those people left that don’t want to upgrade from IE6, well, fuck em.

As I say, I’m no whizz when it comes to these things so it may be a little more involved than that, but still, the premise remains unchanged. Doesn’t it?

This is how I should blog…

You all know how to use the internet. I will always attribute original content, but I will not spend my precious time googling every potential reader query. I’m the writer, you’re the reader. If you here on Rational Geekery, I assume a level of understanding of the subjects I write about (or at least, you have the competence to use a search engine).

Maybe then I would blog more rather than fucking about trying to foolproof my posts (I get usually get so far then get bored/distracted/confused/lose the will to live and give up).

The ‘hacktivist’ group Anonymous have had a change of tactic, so we’re led to believe if this image that’s been popping up about the internet is anything to go by (lick to enlarge):

This change of tact away from trying to bring The Enemies of Wikileaks to their knees to distributing the information Wikileaks is releasing is A Good Thing.

Anonymous have been attacking Amazon, Visa, Mastercard and PayPal for supposedly bowing to pressure from the US government and withdrawing their services. The reasoning behind the attacks, using an opt-in botnet, is…

We are trying to keep the internet open and free but, in recent years, governments have been trying to limit the freedom we have on the internet

This is all well and good, but if it’s to keep the internet open and free like the good old days then they were going for the wrong target.

The whole point of an open and free internet is letting people/companies/entities interact with who ever they want. No censure and no coersion or being bullied into dealing with anyone you don’t want to.

Not only are the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks illegal but are they are completely at odds with the ‘open and free internet’ethos.

Of course, some companies need to grow a backbone and not cave in to government pressures when told to stop business with any particular organisation with out a court order. It’d probably be better for their reputation to be seen to be supporting something that is generally seen as A Good Thing rather than withdrawing services at the first whiff of alledged pressure from government under the guise of broken terms and conditions, especially when those terms and conditions must have been being broken for sometime.

But if those companies are being leaned on then they are victims just as much as Wikileaks are.

The people Anonymous should be attacking are the people leaning on companies to stop a lawful activity. With this new direction, it looks like they are doing just that, legally.

This is a bloody travesty.

The man convicted of “menace” for threatening to blow up an airport in a Twitter joke has lost his appeal.

Paul Chambers, a 27-year-old accountant whose online courtship with another user of the microblogging site led to the “foolish prank”, had hoped that a crown court would dismiss his conviction and £1,000 fine without a full hearing.

But Judge Jacqueline Davies instead handed down a devastating finding at Doncaster which dismissed Chambers’s appeal on every count. After reading out his comment from the site – “Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!” – she found that it contained menace and Chambers must have known that it might be taken seriously.

I’m not sure what I can add that hasn’t been said elsewhere. So I say anymore except to point you to Scepticisle and the Heresiarch.

Oh, and this business with Gareth F Compton. Yeah, I said I’d be bloody upset if someone ask for me to stoned to death, but would I call the cops? If it was on Twitter and a one off, a opposed to series of comments like that, then no. OK, Gareth maybe a dick and a hypocrit, but still, just like Paul Chambers, he doesn’t deserve more than a ticking off.

Do you notice anything a little out of place in the following Twitter timeline?

A timeline full of links to the Daily Mail itself, since it started on Twitter and then, *pop*, a tweet to somewhere else.

Ooh, curious, I thought. It didn’t sit right. News outlets, the BBC, Guardian, Telegraph, the Sun etc, all use twitter as a broadcast medium, as variation on the RSS ‘thingy’. They are simply there to give a link to a news item. They don’t retweet, they don’t #ff and they don’t direct you to anywhere except their news pages.

There are exceptions to this, for example Guardians Comment is Free Twitterfeed has an actual person manning it that replies to you and everything, but that isn’t the main feed for it’s news items. The feed for the news item is always just a broadcast.

So when a link to somewhere not the Daily Mail appeared it made me think wonder what’s going on. Had the Mails’ feed been hacked cracked compromised? Has a Mail employee got his own site to promote and thought he’d get a few hits from the Mails followers?

Nothing quite so exciting, I’m afraid.

thisismoney.co.uk is the website for the Mails’ City & Finance section of the paper and they’re running a competition, obviously, to win an iPad.

To enter you’ve got to fill in a load of details about money stuff and search for an independent financial advisor. Once you’ve found the advisor nearest to you, you can enter the competition. Presumably you’ll also get a call from said advisor in the very near future as well (as the whole thing is in the ‘advertising-feature’ section of the site, as indicated by the URL).

So, it may be nothing dodgy going on but what does it say about the Mail when the only thing it can tweet about that isn’t sending you to it’s main website is not how to reduce your mortgage or how to play the stock market but a competition.

I hope whichever Mail reader wins the iPad isn’t stupid enough to use it to preen themselves on cancer-giving Facebook.