![Click here to read What "Free Public WiFi" Is and Why You Should Avoid It](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_vDUeHkxwgVmSkd2Bzqg5OKqWTJpG_lRnV_1Gos3UPN9opE22dHMJEAJrAV7iwc4c6tDltp6yL0F-93Wu1wfac9D4Am7jUKIlzMKNWIlJPNlWwRJBzItOsidTr2IYfbK_dTm72gTw-YXPpPsZ4rgdICBKFb7U1C7aKb=s0-d "Click here to read What "Free Public WiFi" Is and Why You Should Avoid It")
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A web interface might be the easy way to get text adventures onto the Kindle, but those on the plane can now go native too.…
"If you’ve ever worked in tech support, you’ve probably lived this.
Do me a favor: if you enjoyed today’s comic, please share it with your friends and coworkers. That’s all I ask. Thanks!
-Krishna
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This 'reverse fountain' is called Charybdis, as in to be caught between Scylla and. Briton William Pye designed it for Seaham Hall, in Sunderland, England, using a massive acrylic cylinder to give the appearance of a containerless volume of water.
More:
The obituaries for Norman Wisdom have again highlighted lazy journalists' reliance on Wikipedia. This time, bogus information was inserted not by a drive-by prankster, but by a Wikipedia Administrator - and reprinted by newspapers including The Guardian and The Mirror.…
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Last week I posted a spoof of science journalism that to my complete surprise went viral. Since then, I've been trying to find answers. What's wrong with science journalism, and how do we fix it?
Bizarrely, the most read article on the Guardian website last week wasn't about Ed Miliband or the Labour party conference, but a quirky special-interest piece spoofing science journalism which I assumed only about three people would get. Apparently I hit a nerve, but why? What's wrong with science journalism? How did it become so dull and predictable? And how do we fix it?
My point was really about predictability and stagnation. The formula I outlined – using a few randomly picked BBC science articles as a guide – isn't necessarily an example of bad journalism; but
science reporting is predictable enough that you can write a formula for it that everyone recognises, and once the formula has been seen it's very hard to un-see, like a faint watermark at the edge of your vision.
To see what I mean about predictability, take a look at the BBC Science & Environment news page. At the time of writing I can see the following headlines. Spot the recurring theme:
I could go on, but you can see 'the pattern'. They're called 'Scare quotes' and they are used by writers to distance themselves from the words inside, or to indicate paraphrasing – unless you're a cynic, in which case scare quotes are a get-out-of-jail-free card that allows journalists to absolve themselves of any responsibility for the words mentioned.
This habit is so deeply ingrained at the BBC that even the question of whether 'effects' are 'interesting' is deemed too thorny an issue for the headline writer to give an opinion on. God forbid that in calling a piece of research 'interesting' the BBC should sully its reputation for robotic impartiality.
The defence from some corners is that reporters should be neutral, that their job is simply to report what has been said without passing judgement on it or challenging it in any way.
Cobblers. Ed Yong recently explained how daft this is:
If you are not actually providing any analysis, if you're not effectively 'taking a side', then you are just a messenger, a middleman, a megaphone with ears. If that's your idea of journalism, then my RSS reader is a journalist.
A science journalist should be capable of, at a minimum, reading a scientific paper and being able to venture a decent opinion. A more reasonable excuse is lack of time. Full-time reporters are expected to cover breaking stories quickly, and churn out several articles a day. Under that sort of pressure, even if the journalist wants to delve deeper into the murky depths of a story they may simply not have the time to do it justice.
Ultimately, though, if all you're doing is repeating press releases, and not providing your own insight, analysis or criticism, then what exactly is the point of paying you? What are you for? What value do you add for me? What right do you have to complain if you're going out of business?
Many of the problems in science reporting come not from the journalists or editors themselves, but as a result of the pressures and constraints they're under, and journalists at the BBC are under more constraints than most.
The Curse of the Undead (Ceefax)
Have you ever wondered why the first few lines of any BBC website article are often particularly stilted and awkward? It's because thanks to the BBC's multi-platform publishing guidelines, the first few paragraphs of any news story need to be written in such a way that they can be cut and pasted into a Ceefax page.
To see an example of this in action, take a look at this article and then this Ceefax page.
It also means that there's a pressure for things like the journal, university, and so on to be mentioned by a certain point so that everyone gets proper credit in all versions of the article. In 2010, news stories on a website are actually being optimised, and reorganised for Teletext. Seriously.
Science for All
Another issue affecting style is the need to reach a diverse audience. This puts pressure on commercial media groups who need to secure page views to generate advertising revenue, but also on the BBC which has a mandate not only to provide news accessible to as many people as possible, but to represent the UK, its regions and communities to an international audience.
At the Daily Mail, that pressure manifests itself in the form of acres of female flesh and breathless, lascivious descriptions of barely contained breasts, toned tummies and voluptuous, sun-kissed thighs. At the BBC, it means expressing things as plainly and simply as possible, avoiding any slang, cultural references or colourful language that might obscure things for those with poor literacy, or who speak English as a second language.
The cynics among you might use the pejorative phrase 'dumbing-down', while others might talk approvingly of 'plain English'. It seems pretty fair to me, but does the same formula have to be relentlessly applied to every article? Could the BBC not, amid the vast sea of simple, clear reporting find space for a modest island of meatier, spicier prose for those of us hungry for something a little richer?
Arbitrary Word Limits
As a writer, word limits are both a blessing and a curse. Many bloggers would have their writing immeasurably improved if they stuck to a word limit – doing that forces you to plan, to organise your thoughts, and to avoid redundancy and repetition. On the other hand, some stories need more time to tell, and sticking dogmatically to an arbitrary 800-word limit for stuff that's published on the internet doesn't make a lot of sense. The internet is not running out of space.
Conventional wisdom says that after a few hundred words, people start to lose attention. Conventional wisdom is a load of bollocks, as online magazine Slate neatly demonstrated with their experiments in long-form writing. Detailed, investigative pieces running to tens of thousands of words netted millions of page views, and proved that audiences aren't quite the infantile content-junkies they're often made out to be.
Another set of problems spring from the attitude journalists seem to have towards science – or at least those who aren't still describing researchers with the faintly bigoted and dehumanising term 'boffins'. Science is all about process, context and community, but reporting concentrates on single people, projects and events.
The Race to Mediocrity
A couple of months ago I happened to be in a meeting at The Guardian's headquarters in King's Cross as news of the most massive star ever found broke. It's no exaggeration to say that half the newspaper's staff were involved in covering the story for various sections.
Well okay, it's a big exaggeration, but it's true that the media went into a sort of bizarre mass hysteria as newspapers, TV, radio and magazines raced to cover a slightly-larger-than-normal ball of gas with feature articles, diagrams showing small circles next to bigger circles, video packages showing small circles moving next to bigger circles, and interactive fact panels. Probably someone somewhere was staging a re-enactment with two appropriately rotund celebrities.
The result was a self-propelling explosion of journalistic effort that resulted in hundreds of virtually identical articles scattered across the face of the internet like some sort of fast-growing weed. What did all this effort and expense achieve? Hundreds of interesting things happen in science every week, and yet journalists from all over the media seem driven by a herd mentality that ensures only a handful of stories are covered. And they're not even the most interesting stories in many cases.
In the Shadow of The Event
Members of the public could be forgiven for believing that science involves occasional discoveries interspersed with long periods of 'not very much happening right now'. The reality of science is almost the complete opposite of this. We spend centuries incrementally building little piles of knowledge, and it's extremely rare that an individual paper or piece of work is really that profoundly important.
One of the biggest failures of science reporting is the media's belief that a scientific paper or research finding represents a conclusion of some kind. Scientists know that this simply isn't true. A new paper is the start or continuance of a discussion or debate that will often rumble on for years or even decades.
Often we can only assess the importance of research with hindsight. It was several decades before the full significance of the 1896 observation by Svante Arrhenius that increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere would lead to an increase in global temperature became obvious. Or at least obvious to all but a minority of ideologically driven morons.
Trying to report science by picking out random interesting papers to look at is like a food critic attending the opening of an Indian restaurant and deciding to sample a bit of cumin, then a splash of ghee, and maybe a few grains of rice. All sense of meaning, of context, of the whole dish, is lost.
The world wide web is built from links. That's why it's a web, and not just a library of pages like, well, Ceefax. Bloggers have understood this since even before anyone had made up the word 'blog', but for some reason links – especially links to the research itself – have remained mostly alien to online media. Why?
Journals Behaving Badly
No discussion of science journalism would be complete without a mention of The Dreaded Embargo. It works something like this:
And that's sort of okay, except for two snags. Firstly, with tedious regularity it turns out that many journals don't publish the paper when the embargo ends, some waiting days or even weeks to get it online. Secondly, many of the papers are pay-walled in any case, and organisations (like the BBC until recently) decide there's no real benefit from linking to a pay-walled site.
This matters for two reasons: firstly, it means that the journalist can't provide a link to the study, which is annoying for people who want to see more; secondly, it destroys accountability by preventing other journalists, bloggers, scientists or interested people from seeing the source for themselves and judging the merits of the claims made by researchers, university departments or reporters.
The Blue Revolution
As I said recently, links are beautiful. They take us beyond whatever we happened to be looking for, on journeys to places we never even imagined existed. Every minute of every day, millions of curious apes click billions of links, each tracing their own miniature voyages of discovery.
By providing links to sources, journalists can show that they're honest, open and trustworthy and allow the reader to judge whether the interpretation they've presented of someone else's work or words is the correct one. They can also open up avenues for exploration and discovery to their audience, providing the reader with far more value than one journalist could provide on their own.
It's taken a long time, and a considerable amount of lobbying to get the BBC to take links seriously, but they have begun to move in the right direction, and for that they should be praised. It would be brilliant if other news media could do the same, and bring traditional media up to the standard set by bloggers.
A number of people responding to my spoof set me a challenge. Could I write an example of a good piece of science journalism? At the risk of ducking the challenge (which I'd be lousy at, since I tend not to do much reporting on research anyway), that misses the point, because I don't think there should be a set way of doing things.
But what does that mean in practice? What should, say, the BBC do to improve their coverage? I can think of a few things that would make an impact right away.
What happens in the next five or ten years is anybody's guess, but the point is that while some rules are useful, trying to stick religiously to them now would be like someone in the 16th century declaring that they'd found the best way to write a print article. Rules can be useful, but don't be dogmatic about them, let people break them – not every day, but from time to time.
Science is crazy. The things that we can do are absolutely ridiculous; whether it's peering trillions of miles into the void of space in the search for new life, deciphering our own genetic code, pulling apart the stuff that the universe is made of, or halting the spread of disease, or just enabling this article to be sent through light beams and thin air to your computer.
And there are hundreds of beautiful, amazing writers who can take this craziness and put it in a way that we can all cope with, whether it's Dawkins bringing evolution to bloody life, the genius of Feynman bringing particle physics to the masses, David Quammen's heart-wrenching descriptions of the death of the last dodo, or Ed Yong and his life-long obsession with writing about animal sex.
And yet, somehow we're left with mainstream media coverage that's often sterile, formulaic, unimaginative. Writing covered with the stench of the intellectual decay that inevitably comes from the meek acceptance of often-arbitrary rules. Science deserves better, and as science blogs rack up ever increasing millions of readers every month, traditional media companies still dragging their feet will need to respond, sooner or later. That, or face irrelevance.
Anyway, that's my opinion. Tell me yours in the comments.
Commenters who claim I tell artists to give their work away for free are wrong – and they should focus on the real online villains
Last week, my fellow Guardian columnist Helienne Lindvall published a piece headlined The cost of free, in which she called it 'ironic' that 'advocates of free online content' (including me) 'charge hefty fees to speak at events'.
Lindvall says she spoke to someone who approached an agency I once worked with to hire me for a lecture and was quoted $10,000-$20,000 (£6,300-£12,700) to speak at a college and $25,000 to speak at a conference. Lindvall goes on to talk about the fees commanded by other speakers, including Wired editor Chris Anderson, author of a book called 'Free' (which I reviewed here in July 2009), Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde and marketing expert Seth Godin. In Lindvall's view, all of us are part of a united ideology that exhorts artists to give their work away for free, but we don't practice what we preach because we charge so much for our time.
It's unfortunate that Lindvall didn't bother to check her facts. I haven't been represented by the agency she referenced for several years, and in any event, no one has ever paid me $25,000 to appear at any event. Indeed, the vast majority of lectures I give are free (see here for the past six months' talks and their associated fees – out of approximately 95 talks I've given in the past six months, only 11 were paid, and the highest paid of those was £300). Furthermore, I don't use an agency for the majority of my bookings (mostly I book myself – I've only had one agency booking in the past two years). I'm not sure who the unfortunate conference organiser Lindvall spoke to was – Lindvall has not identified her source – but I'm astonished that this person managed to dig up the old agency, since it's not in the first 400 Google results for 'Cory Doctorow'.
It's true that my stock response to for-profit conferences and corporate events is to ask for $15,000 on the grounds that almost no one will pay that much so I get to stay home with my family and my work; but if anyone will, I'd be crazy to turn it down. Even so, I find myself travelling more than I'd like to, and usually I'm doing so at a loss.
Why do I do this? Well, that's the bit that Lindvall really got wrong.
You see, the real mistake Lindvall made was in saying that I tell artists to give their work away for free. I do no such thing.
The topic I leave my family and my desk to talk to people all over the world about is the risks to freedom arising from the failure of copyright giants to adapt to a world where it's impossible to prevent copying. Because it is impossible. Despite 15 long years of the copyright wars, despite draconian laws and savage penalties, despite secret treaties and widespread censorship, despite millions spent on ill-advised copy-prevention tools, more copying takes place today than ever before.
As I've written here before, copying isn't going to get harder, ever. Hard drives won't magically get bulkier but hold fewer bits and cost more.
Networks won't be harder to use. PCs won't be slower. People won't stop learning to type 'Toy Story 3 bittorrent' into Google. Anyone who claims otherwise is selling something – generally some kind of unworkable magic anti-copying beans that they swear, this time, will really work.
So, assuming that copyright holders will never be able to stop or even slow down copying, what is to be done?
For me, the answer is simple: if I give away my ebooks under a Creative Commons licence that allows non-commercial sharing, I'll attract readers who buy hard copies. It's worked for me – I've had books on the New York Times bestseller list for the past two years.
What should other artists do? Well, I'm not really bothered. The sad truth is that almost everything almost every artist tries to earn money will fail. This has nothing to do with the internet, of course. Consider the remarkable statement from Alanis Morissette's attorney at the Future of Music Conference: 97% of the artists signed to a major label before Napster earned $600 or less a year from it. And these were the lucky lotto winners, the tiny fraction of 1% who made it to a record deal. Almost every artist who sets out to earn a living from art won't get there (for me, it took 19 years before I could afford to quit my day job), whether or not they give away their work, sign to a label, or stick it through every letterbox in Zone 1.
If you're an artist and you're interested in trying to give stuff away to sell more, I've got some advice for you, as I wrote here – I think it won't hurt and it could help, especially if you've got some other way, like a label or a publisher, to get people to care about your stuff in the first place.
But I don't care if you want to attempt to stop people from copying your work over the internet, or if you plan on building a business around this idea. I mean, it sounds daft to me, but I've been surprised before.
But here's what I do care about. I care if your plan involves using 'digital rights management' technologies that prohibit people from opening up and improving their own property; if your plan requires that online services censor their user submissions; if your plan involves disconnecting whole families from the internet because they are accused of infringement; if your plan involves bulk surveillance of the internet to catch infringers, if your plan requires extraordinarily complex legislation to be shoved through parliament without democratic debate; if your plan prohibits me from keeping online videos of my personal life private because you won't be able to catch infringers if you can't spy on every video.
And this is the plan that the entertainment industries have pursued in their doomed attempt to prevent copying. The US record industry has sued 40,000 people. The BBC has received Ofcom's approval to use our mandatory licence fees to lock up its broadcasts with DRM so that we can't tinker with or improve on our own TVs and recorders (and lest you think that this is no big deal, keep in mind that the entire web was created by amateurs tinkering with systems around them). What's more Apple, Audible, Sony and others have stitched up several digital distribution channels with mandatory DRM requirements, so copyright holders don't get to choose to make their works available on equitable terms.
In France, the HADOPI 'three strikes' rule just went into effect; they're sending out 10,000 legal threats a week now, and have promised 150,000 a week in short order. After three unsubstantiated accusations of infringement, your whole family is disconnected from the internet – from work, education, civic engagement, distant relatives, health information, community. And of course, we'll have the same regime here shortly, thanks to the Digital Economy Act, passed in a three-whip wash-up in the last days of parliament without any substantive debate, despite the thousands and thousands of Britons who asked their legislators to at least discuss this extraordinarily technical legislation before passing it into law.
Viacom is just one of the many entertainment giants suing companies like Google for allowing everyday people to upload content to the internet without reviewing its copyright status in advance. Never mind that there's 29 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, that there aren't enough lawyers in all the world to undertake such a review, and that throttling the videos (by charging uploaders for legal review, for example) would put practically every person who finds in YouTube the opportunity for personal and creative expression out of business.
Never mind that if this principle were passed into law, it would shutter every message board, Twitter, social networking service, blog, and mailing list in a second. That's bad enough, but in addition to these claims, Viacom has asked the court to order Google to make all user-uploaded content public so that Viacom can check it doesn't infringe copyright – it thinks that its need to look at my videos is greater than my need to, say, flag a video of my two-year-old in the bath as private and visible only to me and her grandparents.
Meanwhile, the entertainment industries continues their push around the world for a series of China-style national firewalls (in the UK, former BPI executive Richard Mollet boasted of getting this legislation inserted into the Digital Economy Act).
This is an approach that millionaire pop stars like U2's Bono wholeheartedly endorse – last Christmas, he penned a New York Times op-ed calling for Chinese-style censorship everywhere. And just this month, MPAA representatives told the world's governments that adopting national internet censorship regimes for copyright would also allow them to block information embarrassing to their regimes, such as WikiLeaks.
The MPAA was addressing a meeting for the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret treaty that is being negotiated away from the UN, behind closed doors, and which includes proposals to search iPods, phones and laptop hard-drives at the world's borders to look for infringement.
So yeah, if you want to try to control individual copies of your work on the internet, go ahead and try. I think it's a fool's errand, and so does almost every technical expert in the world, but what do we know?
But for so long as this plan involves embedding control, surveillance and censorship into the very fabric of the information society's infrastructure, I'll continue to tour the world, for free, spending every penny I have and every ounce of energy in my body to fight you.
Helienne, I can't fault you for not reading my Guardian columns; after all, I've never read yours. And while I do fault you for not correcting the record, I won't ask the Guardian's reader's editor to intervene or make silly, chiropractor-esque noises about libel. I'm a civil libertarian, and I have integrity, and I believe that the answer to bad speech is more speech, hence this column.
But you really ought to familiarise yourself with the ideologies of the people you're condemning before you tear into them. I don't agree with everything Chris Anderson says, but he hardly tells people to give their stuff away: mostly, Chris talks about how different pricing structures, loss-leaders, and sales techniques can be used to increase the bottom lines of creators, manufacturers, publishers and inventors, and he cites case studies of people who've made this work for them.
I have no idea what Seth Godin is doing on your hitlist: Seth's a marketing consultant. The last three times I've heard him speak, he's been talking about how to improve corporate communications and brand identity – that sort of thing. Sure, he apparently charges a very large sum of money for this advice, but that's the topsy-turvy world of marketing for you. If your point is that creative people deserve to get paid, then presumably you're all for Seth charging whatever the market will bear.
Now, Peter Sunde is an interesting case. He really does advocate something like totally unrestricted copying. But as you note yourself, this is a belief that he's prepared to go to jail for, which is generally considered the gold standard for sincerity (the only higher standard I know of is being prepared to die for your beliefs – you should ask Peter where he stands on this). If your point is that Peter is only shamming about his politics, how do you explain this willingness to be imprisoned for them? Also: given Peter's latest startup, Flattr, exists for the sole purpose of making it simple for audiences to pay artists, I think you might reconsider his place in your parade of villainy.
I understand perfectly well what you're saying in your column: people who give away some of their creative output for free in order to earn a living are the exception. Most artists will fail at this. What's more, their dirty secret is their sky-high appearance fees – they don't really earn a creative living at all. But authors have been on the lecture circuit forever – Dickens used to pull down $100,000 for US lecture tours, a staggering sum at the time. This isn't new – authors have lots to say, and many of us are secret extroverts, and quite enjoy the chance to step away from our desks to talk about the things we're passionate about.
But you think that anyone who talks up their success at giving away some work to sell other work is peddling fake hope. There may be someone out there who does this, but it sure isn't me. As I've told all of my writing students, counting on earning a living from your work, no matter how you promote it or release it, is a bad idea. All artists should have a fallback plan for feeding themselves and their families. This has nothing to do with the internet – it's been true since the days of cave paintings.
You know who peddles false hope to naive would-be artists? People who go around implying that but for all those internet pirates, there'd be full creative employment for all of us. That the reason artists earn so little is because our audiences can't be trusted, that once we get this pesky internet thing solved, there'll be jam tomorrow for everyone. If you want to damn someone for selling a bill of goods to creative people, go after the DRM vendors with their ridiculous claims about copy-proof files; go after the labels who say that wholesale lawsuits against fans on behalf of artists (where labels get to pocket the winnings) are good business; go after the studios who are suing to make it impossible for anyone to put independent video on the internet without a giant corporate legal budget.
And if you want to find someone who supports artists, look at organisations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who have advanced the cause of blanket licences for music, video and other creative works on the internet. As a songwriter, you'll be familiar with these licences: as you say, you get 3% every time someone performs your songs on stage. What EFF has asked for is the same deal for the net: let ISPs buy blanket licences on behalf of their customers, licences that allow them to share all the music they're going to share anyway – but this way, artists get paid. Incidentally, this is also an approach favored by Larry Lessig, whom you also single out as 'ironic' in your piece.
It's been 15 years since the US National Information Infrastructure hearings kicked off the digital copyright wars. And for all the extraordinary power grabbed by the entertainment giants since then, the letters of marque and the power to disconnect and the power to censor and the power to eavesdrop, none of it is paying artists. Those who say that they can control copies are wrong, and they will not profit by their strategy. They should be entitled to ruin their own lives, businesses and careers, but not if they're going to take down the rest of society in the process.
And that, Helienne, is what I tell people when I give my lectures, whether paid or free.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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The publisher of Grand Theft Auto has been awarded 'substantial' damages after taking the Daily Star to court over an inaccurate news story. Will this prove a benchmark moment?
As blogged by Roy Greenslade earlier today, Take 2 Inc has accepted substantial undisclosed libel damages from the Daily Star in relation to the paper's 'entirely false' story about Grand Theft Auto. On July 21, the tabloid alleged that Rockstar was planning to release a new version of the hit action adventure game, based around the life of Raoul Moat, who earlier this year shot three people, wounding his ex-girlfriend and a policeman, and killing his ex-girlfriend's new partner.
But of course, no such game existed. The reporter responsible for the piece (which can be viewed here) appears to have seen a crudely mocked-up cover of an imaginary game entitled Grand Theft Auto Rothbury – no doubt posted on a chat forum by some sneering teenager with a crude sense of humour and limited Photoshop skills. Without contacting Rockstar for clarification, it seems the decision was swiftly reached that this was a legitimate source.
When it became abundantly clear that the story was nonsense, however, the piece was quickly removed from the Star's website, and replaced with a grovelling apology, which included the following confession: 'We made no attempt to check the accuracy of the story before publication and did not contact Rockstar Games prior to publishing the story. We also did not question why a best selling and critically acclaimed fictional games series would choose to base one of their most popular games on this horrifying real crime event.'
Quite. But the question is, how could a national newspaper believe that such a bizarre development project was possible in the first place?
In part, what the story typifies is a doggedly persistent belief that the games business is some sort of shadowy black market operation, rather than a major entertainment industry that contributes many millions to the UK economy. It is tempting to believe that, thanks to the rise of the family-friendly Wii console and the gigantic explosion in social titles like FarmVille, games are no longer demonised as essentially evil and corrupting in nature. But this fear and loathing appears to exist to this day, at least in the agendas of media purveyors who are happy to exploit the perceived technophobia of their audience if it means an easy scare story.
The article appeared a couple of months after a notorious edition of The Alan Titchmarsh Show in which Tim Ingham, editor of game news site CVG was harangued and insulted by a panel of 'experts' including ex-Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie and actress Julie Peasgood, while attempting to defend video games that contain violence. Titchmarsh himself seemed to be labouring under the belief that the games industry has no age rating system, and was backed by a braying studio audience who gave Ingham's reasoned arguments short shrift.
'I'd be lying if I said at any stage I thought I was walking into a fair and balanced debate,' says Ingham. 'But I wasn't quite ready for something so one-sided and, to be frank, aggressive. There was one deliberate antagonist in the shape of Julie Peasgood, and it was pointless to get into a firefight with her. Her accusation that somehow games are racist was something I could sit down and think about for hours on end. But then there was MacKenzie who appeared to be there as a middleman – until he brought up the Bulger case... The point that annoyed me most though was when the presenter got involved. It felt as though he was deliberately painting me as an enemy of the programme.
'I mean, I can't be sure of this, but before the section, there was a floor manager who told the audience that if anyone on stage made a point they agreed with, they should applaud, but if someone said anything they didn't like, they should let him know – and he did seem to be gesturing toward me...'
With the Daily Star story, the reporter's alleged response to the controversy also spoke volumes about the contempt often felt toward the industry and gamers in general. According to MCV and other sources, the writer answered the growing controversy by posting the following on his Facebook page:
'Baffled by the fury of adult gamers. These are grown (?!?) men who sit around all day playing computer games with one another who've today chosen to enter the real world just long enough to complain about my story slamming a Raoul Moat version of Grand Theft Auto! You would think I'd denied the Holocaust!!!'
It would seem from this outburst, as odd as it was, that the journalist at least believed in the story – he did, after all, source a comment from a grieving relative of one of the victims. It is hard to imagine the monstrous apathy this would have required if the article was knowingly false.
The question, though, is whether the ludicrous GTA Rothbury case will provide a turning point for tabloid coverage of games. Certainly, there are less 'ban this sick filth' splashes now than there were in the mid-90s, when the likes of Doom, Duke Nukem and GTA were being routinely blamed for the collapse of western society. And with the daily newspapers now competing for lucrative advertising from the games industry, while writing for a growing audience of game-literate readers, such stories are surely unlikely to have the desired impact in the future.
'There seems to be a blind arrogance in the tabloid media,' says Ingham. 'They assume that their audience will see that games are something to fear, that their only knowledge of them will be from prior reporting in The Star, The Mail and others. But I don't think that's the case. The majority of non-game playing mothers are aware of what Xbox 360s are, and they think about it far more sensibly than tabloid editors would assume.
'After the Alan Titchmarsh show I had several emails from people who explained that they weren't gamers but felt I had been treated poorly - that said a lot, really. We've reached a point where you can't just fictionalise these stories anymore – there's a wider public understanding of, and a respect for, video games. And because of that understanding, game publishers aren't as scared to defend themselves anymore. In the mid-90s, if Rockstar had tried to sue a tabloid, it would have been, 'look at these monsters, they're corrupting our kids, and now they're coming after your dear old newspaper!''
Then again, if page impressions can be boosted massively by an international community of gamers, all blogging and tweeting about your articles while posting handy links to the source material, the motivations are certainly going to be muddied. Perhaps the Daily Star took a calculated risk, and maybe that risk paid off. But maybe it spectacularly didn't.
Anyway, what do you think? Might this case bring about a new era of respect and caution when it comes to video game news stories? Or, as the games industry grows in terms of mainstream interest, is it just as likely to pull in ever more salacious attention? Today, it's the world famous football players, filmstars and pop singers who have to fend off intrusions into their lives. Tomorrow, could it be the biggest game designers?
Accused broadband users look to group action against controversial law firm – as lawyers explain whether claims of infringement would stand up in court
Hundreds of UK broadband users accused of sharing copyrighted content are preparing for the prospect of coordinated legal action against ACS:Law, the controversial solicitors' firm at the centre of a huge row over file sharing and leaked data.
Those contemplating the action claim to have been wrongly identified as breaking the law, insisting that the methodology behind identifying illegal file sharers is deeply flawed and the pursuit of alleged file sharers classifies as harassment. ACS:Law and other lawyers chasing the accused insist the methodology is sound. Not so, rings the cry from just about everyone else.
A recap. Private information about thousands of broadband users held by ACS:Law spilt out onto the web last week. The data, obtained through court orders to internet service providers, was leaked online in the aftermath of a 'denial of service' attack on the website of ACS:Law. An investigation by the Information Commissioner will establish whether or not the data was held in a secure, encrypted format – if not, the company could face a fine of up to £500,000. The ISPs involved – BT-owned Plusnet, O2-owned Be Broadband, and BSkyB – have joined Virgin Media and TalkTalk in saying that they will challenge court orders brought by the company until it can prove the security of its data handling. Quite a mess – yet the court orders live on. Two fresh developments as of Monday afternoon:
• BT said it will ask for an adjournment at the 3pm court hearing at which Gallant Macmillan, acting on behalf of Minstry of Sound, is seeking a court order to obtain personal details of hundreds of Plusnet customers. BT told the Guardian:
'We will be asking the court to adjourn to a later date to give the opportunity, and enough time, for the serious issues raised to be properly considered. The incident involving the ACS:Law data leak has damaged people's confidence in the current process. It's in everyone's interests to repair this and to ensure that broadband users' interests are safeguarded – we are determined to do this. We are actively reviewing our approach to these disclosure requests to achieve this objective.'
(We'll update this as we get more information today.)
• Zen Internet, one of the internet service providers issued with court orders brought by ACS:Law, has said it will not provide any customer information to them until it is satisfied that data is being held securely. Zen Internet told the Guardian:
'We are aware of the recent media interest in ACS Law and as a result have investigated the situation thoroughly. Following our investigation and after speaking directly to ACS:Law we understand that no personal information about Zen customers to date has been leaked or published. We have received court orders from ACS:Law but will not provide any customer account holder information to them until we are satisfied that their systems are secure and our data will be protected in accordance with all relevant laws.'
In the document embedded below, a broadband user is accused of sharing the copyrighted work of music artist Cascada on a peer-to-peer network, a claim the recipient strongly denies. Speaking to the Guardian on condition of anonymity, the accused said: 'I find it amazing that the UK finds itself in a situation where it is considered justifiable for a solicitor and his company to bring great distress and worry on people, myself and my family included.
'Their accusations are based only on evidence that ACS:Law collects and to which there is no real method of proving one's innocence. ACS:Law act as investigator, judge and jury without any regard for who their actions affect.'
(A 67-year-old church elder was similarly featured in today's Metro having being accused of illegally downloading the Cascada dance tune. 'At the time I was supposed to be committing this offence on my computer in Scotland, I was actually in Dorset putting my mother into a care home,' he said.)
In this case, the accused duly writes back to ACS:Law, denying the claim:
But the solicitors' firm isn't impressed, claiming the wording of the response has been 'matches a template response that is available on the internet' and therefore: 'we are disinclined to accept at face value what you have said'.
Michael Forrester, of Manchester-based Ralli solicitors, is involved in assessing the claims of more than 200 people who say that ACS:Law's pursuit of them was harassment. 'These people are extremely distressed,' he said. 'People have told us of fights between partners, numerous sleepless nights, and visits to their GPs because of the stress. We have been informed that even though people have explained how it cannot possibly be them, they are often still pursued.
'Many people are so embarrassed just telling us about files they are alleged to have downloaded and shared, I cannot see them wanting to draw further attention to the issue if they were not innocent'.
Only a handful of the cases brought by ACS:Law have made it to court, despite the company sending thousands of letters. The company uses technology from a third party firm to get hold of the IP address – rather than the physical addresss – of people it suspects of file sharing copyrighted content, then applies for a court order requiring the relevant broadband provider to hand over customer information including names and addresses.
It is then incumbent on the rights holder to prove that a named individual shared the copyrighted content at a specific date and time, breaking the law as set out in the Copyright & Patents Act (1988). But pinning the identification down to a named individual is tricky, given that an IP address identifies only the connection at which the computer connects to the internet. However, because it would be a civil case, the standard of proof would be the "balance of evidence" – rather than "guilt beyond reasonable doubt" as in a criminal case.
'We entirely support the need for copyright owners to enforce their rights. We are often instructed by rights holders who wish us to assist them protecting their works,' Forrester says. 'However, the current system is fraught with problems.
'Dependence on an IP addresses to target infringers appears to cause many false positive identifications, as the current situation seems to highlight. The vast majority of the people who had contacted us say they are entirely innocent of downloading the material alleged and believe they have cogent arguments to support this.'
Sarah Byrt, partner at law firm Mayer Brown LLP, added: 'Once you've got the data about who the users are, you need technical evidence, for example by looking at people's PC hard drives to see what sites they've been on and what files they've copied.'
An issue that will surely be swept away with the torrent of technology news? Don't count on it. At 3pm, chief master Winegarton will choose whether or not to grant a court order brought by solicitors Gallant Macmillan acting for Ministry of Sound relating to hundreds of Plusnet customers the firm suspects of illegal file sharing – and one which BT has already challenged. Hold on to your hats.
A dropped Tory tax pledge and BT's drive to spread high-speed fibre-optic broadband are resulting in a monopoly
The Conservatives' abandonment of a manifesto tax pledge is set to cement BT's position as the dominant provider of next-generation broadband via fibre-optic cable, because it makes it prohibitively expensive for rivals to compete in laying new cable – which can be charged thousands of times more in tax than BT is.
BT says it will carry out a 'nationwide survey' to establish the demand among communities for high-speed broadband based on fibre-optic cable – setting areas in competition against one another, with the prize being an upgrade to faster internet connectivity.
The company will be running the survey as a competition, which will continue to the end of the year: BT says it will 'enable communities to express their desire for the service. This will help BT identify 'hot spots' where demand is high and influence the company's future deployment plans.' So far, 4m premises are 'within reach' of BT's fibre broadband, but that must grow beyond 16m for BT to reach its target of delivering high-speed fibre-optic broadband to two thirds of the UK by 2015.
But the effect, with the abandonment of the Conservatives' manifesto tax pledge, may be to cement the telecoms operator's monopoly in the provision of next-generation broadband, because of the way that rivals are charged for laying new fibre-optic cable.
BT's move looks calculated to drive adoption of, and interest in, its fibre-optic broadband in order to avoid forced deregulation by the coalition government. The Conservative party, in its technology manifesto published in March, promised to drive the adoption of 'superfast broadband' with connection speeds of up to 100 megabits per second (Mbps)- by breaking BT's 'local loop monopoly'.
In January, the then shadow chancellor, George Osborne, said that the Conservatives would allow other operators to lay their own cables to get fibre-optic systems: 'I think the best way to deliver this is by breaking up the British Telecom monopoly at the moment, which holds back companies such as Carphone Warehouse [owner of Talk Talk, one of the UK's biggest internet service provider] or Virgin [the UK's only fibre-optic network provider].'
But since taking office, the Conservatives have reneged on a key manifesto pledge that could affect competition in the fibre-optic market: a commitment to review the taxes imposed on new fibre-optic cables by the Valuation Office Agency (VOA) – which presently favour BT hugely over would-be rivals – has been dropped. That gives BT a financial edge over rivals in laying new cable: at present the VOA assesses business rates on non-BT companies that lay short stretches of new fibre-optic cable outside London at £2 a metre – £2,000 a kilometre – plus £20 per home attached to the cable.
By contrast BT is charged about £15 a km by the VOA for its fibre. A number of court cases are now in progress challenging the VOA's approach and valuation scale, alleging that it unfairly favours the incumbent operator. The VOA recently proposed an additional £20 a month levy on properties that receive fibre-optic broadband from a non-BT provider.
Fibre-optic cable is assessed for business rates on the basis of its usefulness to businesses. It is charged per 'pair' of connections. If a company first lays a length of cable to connect a number of premises – say, 20km – it is treated as a significant addition to its network. But BT already has a large fibre network, so that a 20km addition is treated as unimportant and the incremental difference in taxes due, where it already benefits substantially, can be rounded down under VOA rules.
Fibre-optic cables carry signals using light and are not affected by distance in the way that standard copper cables, presently used to distribute broadband signals from exchanges to homes and premises, are. But replacing copper cables to every home with fibre-optic would be enormously expensive; even replacing the copper cables from exchanges to the 'cabinets' in every street, as BT appears to be suggesting, requires huge capital investment. That has to be recouped by charges to the user.
The problem is greater for rural areas, where larger distances between premises means that there are fewer potential subscribers per kilometre of cable, in effect increasing the investment per user.
BT Retail, the ISP arm of BT, says it will promise funds 'if needed' to help enable the five exchanges where people show the highest demand.
BT pledged in May this year that, subject to there being 'an acceptable environment for investment', it would spend £2.5bn on rolling out fibre broadband to two thirds of UK premises by 2015. This is one of the most ambitious fibre programmes in the world that isn't reliant on public sector support. Such support will be required, however, for exchanges in the 'final third' of the UK where deploying fibre is commercially not viable.
The 'Race to Infinity' will run from early October to the end of December 2010, with the five winning exchanges being enabled by early 2012 at the latest. The competition will be supported by a marketing campaign that will direct participants towards a web page at bt.com/racetoinfinity where they will be able to register their interest in fibre broadband. This will enable BT to contact them as soon as the service is available in their area.
BT Group is also pledging to engage with any community that gathers 75% of possible votes for their exchange but hasn't won the competition. This is in the hope that those exchanges can either be included in future commercial phases – if the exchange is deemed commercially viable – or enabled as a result of either public sector or community support as has already happened in some parts of the UK.
Britain lands a national record four wins at awards for scientific research that makes people laugh first and think later
Britain has once again proved a country to be reckoned with in science after landing a national record four wins at the annual Ig Nobel awards ceremony at Harvard University.
Researchers from across the UK were honoured for achievements that included proof that swearing relieves pain, a means of collecting whale snot with a remote-controlled helicopter and the first documented case of fellatio in fruit bats.
Not to be confused with the real (and more lucrative) Nobel prizes, which are due to be announced next week, the 'Igs' are awarded to scientists whose work makes people laugh first and think later.
The ceremony, hosted by the Harvard-based journal Annals of Improbable Research, took place last night with the much-coveted prizes handed out by real Nobel laureates. Recipients were allowed a maximum of 60 seconds to deliver their acceptance speech, a time limit enforced by an eight-year-old girl.
Commenting on the strong showing of UK scientists this year, Marc Abrahams, the master of ceremonies, told the Guardian: 'The nation may agonise over its place in the world, but in this one thing at least, Britannia rules.'
The Ig Nobel 2010 winners were:
Medicine prize
Psychologists Simon Rietveld and Ilja van Beest at the University of Amsterdam share the award for discovering that breathing difficulties brought on by asthma can be alleviated by repeated rollercoaster rides.
Physics prize
Awarded to Lianne Parkin and her team at the University of Otago in New Zealand for demonstrating that people are less likely to slip over on icy footpaths if they wear their socks outside their shoes instead of inside.
Biology prize
A description of the sexual antics of the short-nosed fruit bat earned the award for Gareth Jones at Bristol University and collaborators in China. The team showed that females who performed oral sex on their mates copulated for longer. 'It is the first documented case of fellatio by adult animals other than humans to my knowledge, and opens questions about whether female animals can manipulate males via sexual activity, perhaps in this case to improve their chances of successful fertilisation,' Jones told the Guardian. He planned to demonstrate the behaviour at the ceremony using puppets.
Writing about the research for the Huffington Post last year, the primatologist Frans de Waal said: 'The fellatio story on bats is a bright spot in an otherwise miserable record that denies animals the pleasure principle, homosexuality, and other forms of non-reproductive sex.'
Peace prize
Awarded to psychologist Richard Stephens and others at Keele University for confirming that swearing relieves pain. Stephens, who began the study after striking his thumb with a hammer, found volunteers could tolerate more pain if they repeated swearwords rather than neutral words. He suspects that 'swearing induces a fight-or-flight response and nullifies the link between fear of pain and pain perception'.
Engineering prize
The task of monitoring dangerous bugs in whales at sea is a formidable one. Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse and others at the Institute of Zoology in London developed a way to collect fluids ejected from whales' blowholes by attaching petri dishes to the underside of small, remote-controlled helicopters and hovering them overhead.
Transportation prize
Working with Japanese scientists, Mark Fricker and Dan Bebber at Oxford University used slime mould to model an effective railway network. In the experiment, cities were represented by porridge oats that were linked to one another as the slime mould grew. 'The Ig Nobel awards are great. They are a wonderful vehicle for putting some science into the public domain in a fun and interesting way,' said Fricker.
Management prize
To Alessandro Pluchino and team at the University of Catania for demonstrating mathematically that companies work more efficiently if staff are promoted at random.
Public health prize
Awarded to Manuel Barbeito at the Industrial Health and Safety Office in Maryland for scientific studies that found microbes cling to beards, making more hirsute men a potential laboratory hazard.
Chemistry prize
For research in 2005 that overturned the long-held belief that oil and water do not mix, the prize was awarded to Eric Adams at MIT and others, including researchers at BP.
Economics prize
Awarded jointly to the executives and directors of Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, AIG and Magnetar for 'creating and promoting new ways to invest money – ways that maximise financial gain and minimise financial risk for the world economy, or for a portion thereof.'
With Star Wars and Inception returning in stereoscopic vision – and three-dimensional HBO due to launch – is 2D dead?
The intriguing thing about 3D is that even after the enormous success of Avatar nobody knows yet how extensive its use will become in modern film. Might 2D eventually become the exclusive preserve of low budget or independent film-making, with virtually all mainstream fare pushed into stereoscopic vision? Or, once all the fuss and hype dies down, will we see 3D only where its use is sensible: in features with the kind of content that lends itself to the experience?
Up until recently, most observers have seen the second outcome as the more likely one. But there appears to be a rabid frenzy going on in Hollywood right now, with every project under the sun seemingly being green-lit in 3D. Today, the US trades confirmed the rumours that George Lucas is to bring his entire six-film Star Wars saga back to the big screen in stereoscopic vision, starting with 1999's The Phantom Menace (because blooming Jar Jar Binks' fizzog will naturally be infinitely less irritating in three dimensions than it was in two) in 2012. And, in a separate report, I read that Warner Bros is considering retro-fitting Christopher Nolan's Inception for a 3D re-release in cinemas and on the small screen, via US network HBO's soon-to-be-launched 3D TV channel.
Yes, that's right, 3D TVs are very much here. You can buy one now, though you may have to remortgage your house to do so. Naturally, however, as more people grab one the prices will come down. And before long you won't have to wear glasses in order to see that extra dimension: new technologies are already in place which use a different system to trick the eyes into picking up extra depth.
Whether we actually want all this extra gimmickry is a moot point, but it has to be a concern if Hollywoodinhidef.com's report is correct and a film-maker such as Nolan, who specifically chose not to make Inception a 3D project, is now being pushed into doing so retrospectively. Even worse, the article suggests that the film-maker's forthcoming sequel to the Dark Knight, the third in his excellent Batman series, will be shot in three dimensions – whether Nolan likes it or not.
Imagine that. In a few years' time, you sit down for an eight-hour Batman marathon, watching all three films back to back (I'm sad enough to have done this with Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, so I'm confident that this is a genuine potential scenario) and when it comes to the final movie everything suddenly goes all 3D. Or will Warner insist that the first two films are also refitted? What a bunch of jokers.
Monkey Island joins Star Wars.
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II will let you play as Monkey Island hero Guybrush Threepwood.
Well, you'll be able to wear a Guybrush Threepwood skin, but it's a convincing and stylish one nonetheless.
'Yes, this is real,' confirmed the game's Facebook page. 'We just could not resist!'
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