Current_Events: August 2007 Archive Page

David Lazarus describes the Time Lady's end in California.

"It was always there," said Orlo Brown, 70, who for many years kept Pacific Bell's (and subsequently SBC's) time machines running in a downtown Los Angeles office building. "Everybody knew the number." Richard Frenkiel was assigned to work on the time machines when he joined Bell Labs in the early 1960s. He described the devices as large drums about 2 feet in diameter, with as many as 100 album-like audio tracks on the exterior. Whenever someone called time, the drums would start turning and a message would begin, with different tracks mixed together on the fly. (LA Times)

AP:

A court on Friday fined a 15-year-old schoolboy for posting a video on YouTube of his teacher singing karaoke without her permission and claiming she was a lunatic. In the first case of its kind in Finland, Nurmes District Court found Toni Vesikko guilty of intentional defamation and fined him $120. He also was ordered to pay $1,000 in damages for "causing harm and suffering," and $3,000 in court costs.

Just because she sings at a party does not give people permission to publish video footage without her permission. I don't think it's possible that anyone would think the "lunatic" claim was factual, but it still exposed her to ridicule. This is a very different thing from posting a video of a public figure, or yourself.

I wouldn't actually call it a site redesign, since I just selected a canned template supplied by MT.

There are many things I love about the interface, and there are many things that annoy me to no end.  I'd like to give people the option of filling out a CAPTCHA and publishing a comment right away, or leaving the captcha blank and letting the usual anti-spam rules kick in.  It's not clear that I can do that without running into some problems with a very poorly worded message that first asks a loyal reader to log in, and then says "You do not have permission to comment on this blog," when it really should say "The blog owner will hold your comment for approval."

I hope those bugs will eventually work out.

I've been experimenting with MT4, and have in fact imported 5 years of blog entries from the indie software created by my former student, Will Gayther. I got used to the particular rhythms of Will's software, which was very fast and configurable. But I got tired of having to fight the spammers on two different fronts... so I'm throwing my lot in with MT for the time being.  MT4 was just released, though I've been playing with the beta for a while.

I'm used to sub-second responses to almost every button in my old blog.  This one has a rich-text editor, which will probably encourage me to start using bold keywords again.  I think it's going to be a lot easier to include images, too.  We'll see how it goes.

The internet news audience -- roughly a quarter of all Americans -- tends to be younger and better educated than the public as a whole. People who rely on the internet as their main news source express relatively unfavorable opinions of mainstream news sources and are among the most critical of press performance. --Internet News Audience Highly Critical of News Organizations (Pew Research Center)

The statistic I found most interesting is that those who prefer to watch TV news were twice as likely as internet news consumers to say news organizations care about the people they report on. Of course, that statistic might also mean that people who prefer empathy end up watching TV news, or that the TV news includes more emotional content.

We're a long way from the time when popular culture was full of heroic reporters who righted wrongs and stood up for truth.

A pity effort to hack into the hacker-only conference DEFCON was attempted by the NBC reporter Michelle Madigan. Apparently the Associate Producer for Dateline NBC entered the DEFCON with a hidden camera and tried to film attendees confessing to illegal activities. According to some sources, Madigan was working on an investigative piece called "Hackers for Hire" which would have shown the underground world of the hackers community.

The DEFCON folks quickly picked up the scent (some claim they were tipped off) and told the audience that there is a reporter among them with a hidden camera. Michelle Madigan quickly left the conference room, chased down by over 100 of the participants. The tables turned on Madigan on exit, when she was chased down by a dozen of reporters trying to interview her. --Michelle Madigan attempts to hack DEFCON (OG Paper)

Mob justice.

I don't think the "chased down by a dozen of reporters" is accurate -- it sounded to me like it was a small gang of hackers who half-heartedly pretended to be reporters. One said "Thanks for playing!" and others chorused "Bye!" when she left the parking lot.

While the video is credited to "Elizabeth Safran," there is something very discomfiting about a gang of men mocking and poking fun at a woman as she makes a beeline for her car. Having said that, Madigan had attended under false pretenses, and while the small crowd escorting her to her car was annoyed, they simply counted on their presence in numbers to give them authority, and -- like any hackers would hack any system -- used the tools of the existing system in order to upset the status quo. The TV news "perp walk" is a media event designed to shame a suspect and celebrate the power of the authorities, and here we see a reporter making that walk of shame.

An octopus with a porcelain plate stuck to its suckers has led to the discovery of a hoard of ancient pottery, South Korean scientists say. --Treasure trove 'found by octopus' (BBC)

Thanks for the link, Rosemary.