log

Robert Gibbs, US Presidential Press Secretary:

We should never be afraid of one guy who plopped down $35 and bought a web address. … Let’s not be scared of one guy with a laptop.

Julian Assange, in the Guardian Q&A:

The Cable Gate archive has been spread, along with significant material from the US and other countries to over 100,000 people in encrypted form. If something happens to us, the key parts will be released automatically. Further, the Cable Gate archives is in the hands of multiple news organisations. […]

The basic problem with Gibb’s assessment, along with Lieberman’s, is that they don’t understand the technology or the infrastructure involved in the Wikileaks effort. These are not dumb people easily swatted with a single favour from a US hosting service or political connection at ICANN. Any government bravado in this situation is at best pretence. And as for underlying message in Gibb’s statement — that we have nothing to fear — who said we do in the first place?

Today I received an invite to join Domino’s new media venture, the Ideas Lab, a place where you can sell your potentially lucrative ideas for nothing but extensive media exploitation by a multinational pizza brand for infinity time + 1. From their scary Terms and Conditions:

Except as expressly provided otherwise in the Privacy Policy, you agree that by posting messages, uploading files, inputting data, or engaging in any other form of communication with or through the Website, you grant us a royalty-free, perpetual, non-exclusive, unrestricted, worldwide license […]

Whoa!

[…] to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, translate, enhance, transmit, distribute, publicly perform, display, or sublicense any such communication (including your identity and information about you) […]

Whoa!

[…] in any medium (now in existence or hereinafter developed) and for any purpose, including commercial purposes, and to authorize others to do so.

Holy shit! All this so I can give free ideas to a multinational corporation and (possibly) win a $100 gift voucher! Count me in, guys!

(Yo, seriously, don’t sign up for stuff like this.)

WikiLeaks means it’s easier to run a good business and harder to run a bad business, and all CEOs should be encouraged by this. I think about the case in China where milk powder companies started cutting the protein in milk powder with plastics. That happened at a number of separate manufacturers.

Let’s say you want to run a good company. It’s nice to have an ethical workplace. Your employees are much less likely to screw you over if they’re not screwing other people over.

Then one company starts cutting their milk powder with melamine, and becomes more profitable. You can follow suit, or slowly go bankrupt and the one that’s cutting its milk powder will take you over. That’s the worst of all possible outcomes.

The other possibility is that the first one to cut its milk powder is exposed. Then you don’t have to cut your milk powder. There’s a threat of regulation that produces self-regulation.

It just means that it’s easier for honest CEOs to run an honest business, if the dishonest businesses are more effected negatively by leaks than honest businesses. That’s the whole idea. In the struggle between open and honest companies and dishonest and closed companies, we’re creating a tremendous reputational tax on the unethical companies.

Source: An interview with Wikileaks’ Julian Assange (Forbes.com)

My all-time favourite US Senator Joseph Lieberman (he who doth protest video gaming) makes an amusing call to shut Wikileaks down. Oh man, for the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee you sure don’t have a clue about the “enemy” you’re engaging here.

The IE Blog marketing machine spews forth:

We started by thinking about what the IE8 logo (and prior IE logos) mean to our customers. When we asked customers what they think of when they see our logo, we heard professional, trusted, and familiar.

Emphasis not mine.

Addendum: someone posts:

Offtopic snarky comment: Removing the progress bar from the status bar is deranged and criminal. Please bring it back in the next release. This is why Windows XP and IE8 was last good pieces of software. Microsoft removes features like a fad. What a complete joke IE9 UI is. Trading features for sake of minimalism. Status bar can be turned on but it doesn’t have the progress bar. I feel like shooting the GUI people.

Exactly how I feel about every browser’s desperate attempts to shed every pixel of interface.

Meanwhile, inside the article under the heading “Blue e = Internet”:

[…] The IE logo is well known as the way to the web. Internet cafés around the world use the IE logo on their signage to invite people in. Some of our teammates have snapped photos while passing cafés during their travels. The IE logo is right on the front of the buildings! It’s always fun to see that to many people, the blue e means the Internet.

The emphasis, this time, is definitely mine.

Sometimes I wonder where corporations like Microsoft get employees so steadfastly blind to the world outside the corporate product line. What kind of thought process genuinely leads a person to believe it’s good to encourage monopolistic control of a market, especially when history not five years gone tells a story of stagnated innovation and crippling compatibility problems? Having delivered such an appalling seven years of stagnation to web developers worldwide with IE6, maybe Microsoft should educate their marketing department on that period so that they chose their words wisely instead of appearing as brainless corporate blogging automata blind to basic history and oblivious to their target audience’s general dislike of their monopolistic tendencies.

tldr;: Don’t post about how great it is that you ran a monopoly to the people whose lives were adversely affected by it. Duh.

This trailer makes me want to end it all. Sonic Team will never learn. Seriously, make a 2D game. 2D! With the characters from Sonic 2! No more stupid side quests, no more random quirky characters, no more guessing which direction the camera will move in next.

The government should step in and regulate this company.