neuro.me.uk

The BBC, along with BSkyB, have decided not to air an advertisement for DEC’s Gaza appeal, asking for donations to go towards essential aid from thirteen charities for those affected by the Israeli offensive in Gaza.

Not only have they linked to the bloody DEC website in a news story about how they won’t promote DEC’s appeal — and thus are promoting DEC’s appeal — they’ve now been schooled by Tony Benn, whose cachet has risen even further since yesterday. Spare three minutes and watch Tony absolutely stomp all over Maxine Mawhinney on BBC News.

[via Graham Linehan]

After Microsoft and Novell’s announcement that they are to start collaboration on tighter integration between Windows and (admittedly SuSE) Linux, there has been a lot of bollocks kicking around from people squealing “this will be bad“, “this will be really bad“, “oh no, it’s the end of the world as we know it“, and so on. $deity forbid two old-school rivals want to bury the hatchet and do something that’s in the best interests of both their customers.

It is good for Microsoft, as it gives them an “in” into both the FOSS community and corporate arenas, and it’s good for Novell, as it helps them solidify their role in the enterprise Linux market. An associated patent agreement, where Novell pay licensing fees Microsoft for specific patents, and Microsoft agree not to litigate on those patents, is just a cherry on the cake, although cynics may suggest that the patent part is the meat of the deal. I’m unconvinced. The patent deal is to keep shareholders happy; the collaboration deal is to keep customers happy. And isn’t that what FOSS operating in a corporate environment is all about?

Just sifting through some tech stories on the BBC News site this morning, and chatting about it to folk on IRC, there are some reporting discrepancies that really wound me up. Hey, what’s new; I love railing on the BBC for minor screw-ups, but for BBC News to get things wrong like this doesn’t bode well.

• File-sharing ‘darknet’ unveiled
  “A “darknet” service that allows users to share music files anonymously on the web has been launched in Sweden”, squeals the first paragraph. The problem is, that the service — Relakks — costs €5, or 49 swedish krona per month. How can something be anonymous when you have to pay for it? However, the critical part is that it isn’t a “darknet”. Wikipedia currently defines darknet as “a private virtual network where users only connect to people they trust”. Relakks is a PPTP VPN service which allows all your Internet traffic to be sent via a PPTP server in Sweden, where you will appear to all intents and purposes for IP lookups. This isn’t a darknet, this is a proxy service. Eeshk.
• Blogs buzz on Dell battery recall
  Stop me if I’m wrong, but of the sites they mention — The Inquirer, The Register, Slashdot, Ars Technica and Engadget — only one, Engadget, is by definition a “blog”. I’m pretty certain Slashdot would refute the blog label, and The Inquirer, Ars and el reg are news outlets. Is the BBC trying to belittle online tech news sites by calling them “blogs”, and in the process attempting to lead naive readers to see the Beeb as one of the only authoritative news sites? Thanks to sporkle for that one
• Smash hit for internet chav guide
  Decapitalizing “Internet” (it’s the Internet, not an internet) aside, this is a story about two girls from Somerset who got 30,000 hits on their YouTube-submitted video called “How to Be a Perfect Chav”. A quick flick onto YouTube reveals videos about a cat crapping into a toilet (~ 646,000 hits), a dog humping a cat (~ 260,000 hits), someone making pancakes (~ 299,000 hits), and Gizmodo showing off the new Sony Mylo (~ 820,000 hits). Really, 30,000 hits is a drop in the bucket – many popular YouTube submissions have millions of hits, some even only a week or two after being uploaded.

Come on, BBC, do yer job.

I finally caught up with the new Clerks II trailer at apple.com. It bodes well that it received an eight minute standing ovation at Cannes last month, but after seeing the first 20 minutes of Jersey Girl again on Sky, I can’t get over the dichotomy that Kevin Smith is a dick.

Let me rephrase, as that comes across as I don’t like or respect the guy. He made Clerks and Mallrats, two movies I love. He’s a maverick independent film-maker. He’s best buds with Tarantino and Rodriguez. He talks openly yet eloquently about his productions, his life and his friendships. But here’s the rub: he made Jersey Girl and he consistently whores his wares across all his company’s websites in such a fashion to make said sites almost unreadable. Maybe I’m just jealous — teeth-grindingly, shaking-fist-wildly-in-the-air jealous — but for a guy with such clue, he seems to fumble the ball more often than most in recent years. This galls me, because as I said, it’s not that I don’t like or don’t respect him.

I’m struggling to find a point here. Perhaps I just need to get these two minor points off my chest: people will buy Kevin’s stuff regardless of how heavily or lightly it’s pimped on his websites, and Jersey Girl really, really licked balls. Seeing another Smith production making its way towards the cinema merely returns those emotions to mind and gives me the chills that the Jersey Girl Effect could happen again: great cast + shit script = shit movie.

viewaskew.com reports that Kevin will be in the UK in August to promote Clerks 2’s likely end-of-August release date over here, and with the first leg of the trip being in Edinburgh, that seems to co-incide with the Fringe (or more specifically the Edinburgh International Film Festival). I may just have to wander across and ask these very questions in a less vulgar manner. “Oi, Smith, you’re a dick: explain” may not be received too well in person!

PlayStation3 Goes On Sale: I may be a bit twiddled from two bottles of particularly nice French red wine, but even I can see that this is one of the most useless, preposterous and bullshit-filled news stories ever. A UK games site has decided to start taking pre-orders for PS3 units, just as hideous amounts of sites did when the PS2 and Xbox360 were on the horizon. This is not “going on sale”, this is pre-ordering, a now-common event in the games console world. Christ, I pre-ordered my PlayStation2 6 years ago, how is this news?

The website says the games shipped with the console may change due to availability.

That’s because the games, never mind the console, aren’t even available for public sale yet. The BBC, yet again, disappoints me in their video games coverage. Why don’t they leave it to professionals such as EDGE or 1UP.com?

Bollocks, utter bollocks.

BBC News: Extent of child net porn revealed — BT proactively block sites identified by the Internet Watch Foundation assessed as “illegal to view” under the 1978 Child Protection Act, presumably blocking such sites at the IP level, as they don’t use transparent proxies any more.

However, an interesting comment in the article is:

BT said in its first three weeks its new system, which bars access to particular sites, registered nearly 250,000 attempts to view web pages containing images of child pornography.

[...]

A BT spokesman added: “It could be that one dedicated pervert is making hundreds of attempts to get on websites each day.”

I never thought I’d hear the phrase “one dedicated pervert” anywhere, much less in a BBC News article!