October 2009

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Who needs a Hummer, really?

24 October 2009 in Ecology, Engineering, Human Nature by Stilgherrian | Permalink

Photograph of Hummer vehicle

A year-old post HUMMER to WANKER, originally a silly little piece of wordplay, has triggered a fascinating stream of comments today.

Does a suburban family of four — two adults and two children — really need a big vehicle like a Hummer to get around? I recall that as a kid we didn’t. A normal-sized Holden station wagon, which would even be considered small by today’s standards, did just fine for two adults and two kids and the everyday business of running a farm

Even with a farm, we didn’t need 4WD for the car. That’s what we had a tractor for.

If you want to have your two cents’ worth, do feel free to comment over at the original post.

Byteside Tech to cover dark side of Internet

23 October 2009 in Internet, Politics by Stilgherrian | No comments

Byteside logo

I’m on the panel for the next Byteside Tech, to be recorded live at the Shelbourne Hotel in Sydney next Tuesday 27 October. Subject? The dark world of hackers and cyber criminals.

The rest of the panel has yet to be announced, but you can book for the audience now. Go on, you know you want to.

Meanwhile, you can watch the incriminating video from last time.

Tweeting the Windows 7 launch

21 October 2009 in Human Nature, Internet by Stilgherrian | 1 comment

Windows 7 logo: click for live video stream

Tomorrow morning I’ll provide live Twitter coverage from Microsoft’s Windows 7 launch at the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney.

There’ll be plenty of people covering the event from a technical viewpoint, so I’m going for the anthropology. The culture. The fashion.

The style is bound to be a lot like my Gonzo Twitter 1: Saturday Evening in Newtown, but with more focussed snark.

The event officially starts at 9.30am Sydney time, but I’ll start the commentary on my Twitter stream from 9am. If you’d like to play along at home, you can watch Microsoft’s live video.

I’ll use the official Twitter hashtag #win7. To see everyone’s tweets, use this Twitter search or, for a prettier version, use this Twitterfall search.

Update 3.25pm: It’s been pointed out that using the hashtag #win7 will mean our coverage of the launch event will be lost in the global chatter. We will therefore use #win7au, which you can track on Twitter Search or track on Twitterfall.

McDonald’s pranked with second fake memo

20 October 2009 in Internet, Marketing by Stilgherrian | 2 comments

Reddit listing of second fake McDonald's memo

The supposed leaked memo from McDonald’s that I wrote about on Saturday is itself a fake.

The memo, which like the original fake by serial prankster David Thorne was posted on Reddit, purported to be an email from McDonald’s Australia’s Corporate Communications Manager Bronwyn Stubbs outlining their response.

Someone also attempted to post the text of the memo as a comment to my original post.

However Stubbs emailed me yesterday to say it’s a forgery.

The Purported McDonald’s Memo that you include as part of the article is based on a piece of internal communication that I sent out to my colleagues, however, it has been doctored and changed in various places. Most particularly the final paragraph regarding David Thorne has been completely made up.

That made-up paragraph read:

According to recent news articles and other information we have been provided, the fabricated letter was created by an Adelaide man named David Thorne. At no time should any member of McDonald’s mention the name David Thorne to any media representative. We have spoken to police and are in the process of filing charges against Thorne. We are also speaking with legal regarding a possible law suit. At no time should any member of McDonald’s contact Mr Thorne or engage in any correspondence with him. Should Mr Thorne contact you in any way please let me know immediately or forward any emails.

This certainly kills our speculation as to why someone at McDonald’s would have leaked this memo — they didn’t.

The question now becomes who posted this fake memo, and why? If we’re talking opportunity and motive, well, anyone on the entire Internet has opportunity. Motive? How about a certain prankster seeking attention for his book?

Bugger. I just linked to it myself.

Another question is how businesses can respond to fakery like this, particularly when it’s a brand which people already love to hate.

Links for 15 October 2009 through 19 October 2009

20 October 2009 in Daily Links by del.icio.us | No comments

Stilgherrian’s links for 15 October 2009 through 19 October 2009, gathered with bile and soaked in vinegar:

  • 50 Years of Space Exploration | Flickr: A brilliant infographic summarising interplanetary exploration. In an excellent demonstration of Chaos, the landing on asteroid 443 Eros is accidentally tagged as “443 Eris”. All hail Discordia!
  • They Shoot Porn Stars Don’t They: Susannah Breslin’s fascinating and somewhat challenging feature article on the recession-hit US porn industry.
  • ISP in file-sharing wi-fi theft | BBC News: UK ISP TalkTalk staged a wireless stunt, illustrating why it thinks Lord Mandelson’s plans to disconnect illegal file sharers is “naive”. It’s easy to blame others just by hacking WiFi connections.
  • Prince Philip tussles with technology | ABC News: This story is a few days old, however I found it curious that a perfectly good story about the design of technology was tagged as “offbeat” and the teaser written to make Prince Phillip look like a silly old man.
  • NPR News Staff Social Media Policy: Another example of a good corporate social media policy. There’s plenty of these policies around now, so there’s no excuse for any big organisation not to have caught up.
  • Federal Court of Australia Judgements: Some judgements have been recorded on video. “The Court is keen to continue to improve public access with the use of live streaming video/audio. Further live and archived broadcasts of judgement summaries are posted on this page as they become available.”
  • Televised Patel trial an Australian first | ABC News: The trial of Dr Jayent Patel for manslaughter to be held in a Brisbane court will be shown in Bundaberg, where the deaths happened, via closed-circuit TV. Given this “local interest”, one wonders why it couldn’t also be available anywhere there were interested parties.
  • Vivian Maier – Her Discovered Work: Maier was a Chicago street photographer from the 1950s to 1970s who died earlier this year. Some 40,000 negatives have been found, and they’e now being blogged.
  • 100 years of Big Content fearing technology — in its own words | Ars Technica: Copyright-holders have objected to pretty much every advance in media technology, it seems.
  • Mac Sales Spike When A New Version Of Windows Comes Out | Business Insider: A curious interpretation of the figures, but they reckon that when Microsoft releases a new version of Windows it drives people to buy Macs instead.
  • The Federal Trade Commission’s Coming War on Bloggers | Valleywag: While I normally don’t read Valleyway, I caught someone mentioning this article and was caught by one useful new term: conceptual gerrymandering. If the US FTC wants to give tax breaks to “news organisations” they’ll have to define what they are. Could it be old journalists versus bloggers battle writ large?

Is McDonald’s doing comment spam now?

17 October 2009 in Internet, Marketing by Stilgherrian | 10 comments

[Update 20 October 2009: It turns out this new purported McDonald's memo is itself a fake. The comment spam attempt was not from McDonald's.]

Fake McDonald's memo: click to embiggen

Well-known burger-tossers McDonald’s would be pissed off about that fake email tarnishing their reputation, and understandably so. But are they now responding with unethical tactics?

I don’t know. But here’s my little bit of evidence, and maybe The Power of Crowdsourcing [read: "expecting everyone else to do your work for you"] can fill in the gaps.

  1. A document purporting to be a leaked internal memo outlining McDonald’s response policy, and claiming they’re taking legal action against prankster David Thorne, was posted on Reddit — which happens to be where Thorne promoted the original fake memo. The account used to post this new memo, the oh-so-revealing 9911882882288, was created at that time and this is their only post. I’ve included the full text of the purported memo below.
  2. This morning someone tried to post a comment here which was merely a copy and paste of that same memo. They used a clearly false email address, which is presumably what caused their comment to be tagged as potential spam, and an Apple Mac running Safari sitting on an IP address on the Hutchison 3 mobile network.

This strikes me as rather curious.

Since McDonald’s is the big fast food chain that haters of big fast food chains love to hate, I don’t see that many anonymous bystanders rushing to its defence. Something in my waters says this is more likely to be someone acting on McDonald’s behalf — but that’s just a gut feeling.

And since McDonald’s is a big company, presumably they have a big respectable PR firm too.

So why, therefore, the anonymity?

The Public Relations Institute of Australia’s Code of Ethics talks about “dealing honestly”, which in my books means identifying yourself — although I’ll admit I’m hazy on how the PRIA itself would interpret that.

Has anyone else had someone attempt to post this memo as a comment? Is anyone seeing McDonald’s posting official comments in their own name?

And what do you make of the fact that prankster David Thorne works for a design agency which lists McDonald’s as a client?

Read the rest of this entry »

Byteside Tech: Future Broadband

15 October 2009 in Internet, Politics by Stilgherrian | 1 comment

Byteside logo

Tuesday night I was on the panel for Byteside Tech episode 3, discussing the future of broadband for Australia with freelance journalist Alex Kidman; Simon Sharwood editor of Tech Target; Ben Grubb from iTnews; and host Seamus Byrne. And here’s the video.

We all seem to be very enthusiastic, especially as the beers were re-filled during the breaks. And I for one seem to have opinions about things. Who knew?

If the embedded video doesn’t work, click through.

Internet pranks: a random collection

15 October 2009 in Humour, Internet, Politics by Stilgherrian | 11 comments

Fake McDonald's memo: click to embiggen

Following yesterday’s news that a memo claiming McDonald’s deliberately rips off customers was a fake (pictured), I spoke about Internet pranks on ABC Radio 891 Adelaide this morning. I figured you might as well see my notes.

Oh, and the audio is below.

The fake memo was the work of Adelaide-based satirist and prankster David Thorne who, amongst other things, runs the website 27bslash6 as troll-bait and is flogging t-shirts and a book of his pranks called The Internet is a Playground.

Personally, I reckon pranks that just waste people’s time or otherwise annoy them without making any more significant point about society are pretty cheap.

Thorne’s attempt to pay a bill with a drawing of a spider is perhaps amusing, and it’s good that the victim saw the joke. But I put it at the same level as The Chaser bringing a horse into shops. Whereas The Chaser‘s breach of security at APEC, which you can see on video, made an important point about security theatre and social engineering attacks.

Anyway, this is what I discovered while poking around…

Read the rest of this entry »

Links for 15 October 2009

15 October 2009 in Daily Links by del.icio.us | No comments

Here are the web links I’ve found for 15 October 2009, posted almost automatically. Almost

Conroy’s political choices on Internet censorship

14 October 2009 in Internet, Politics by Stilgherrian | No comments

ZDNet Australia logo: click for story

A report from the Australian Computer Society’s Filtering and E-Security Task Force, the drab-named but quite readable Technical Observations on ISP Based Filtering of the Internet, is going to be a handy weapon in Communications Minister Senator Stephen Conroy’s battle over internet censorship.

Well, so I reckon.

In a backgrounder for ZDNet today, ACS filter report just what Conroy needs, I run through a quick history of Labor’s mandatory Internet filtering policy, and show how Conroy can use the report to kill the project or kill the criticism — depending on what he needs at the time politically.

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