Category: Media

TV, Internet news, Web 2.0 and anything that doesn’t fit into the other categories.

I’m speechless

~ Inquisitor

The Media Guardian “Media Monkey” section (may need free registration) reports on the ‘Shaftas’, a negative award ceremony for the worst sort of hack…

Heat magazine won worst magazine of the year for their infamous tasteless stickers stunt.

This was a sticker featuring a picture of Katie “Jordan” Price’s profoundly disabled five-year-old son with the insignia “Harvey wants to eat me!“. This was so amazingly dreadfully out of tune – and, what’s more, widely reported – that Heat were forced into apologising. Words cannot describe how uncommon an event that is.

Media Guardian then however report an incident that didn’t make it to the press at large, unless you’re a reader of Loaded “magazine” (a publication that, all else being equal, should have been snuffed out at birth):

But they failed to show up so the award was given to Loaded instead for the magazine’s “110 birds we’d like to bone” feature. Even the hardened Shaftas audience shook their heads at Loaded’s inclusion of Kate McCann in this list, with a caption which read: “Sensitive one this but there’s nothing more erotic than a pained woman in need of some good lovin”. Hmmm.

Hmmm is about right. “Sensitive one this”? Kate McCann? That’s gall. That’s so amazingly tasteless I’m actually mostly speechless. Even most b3tans won’t go down to that level, and those that do at least are usually trying to be funny rather than creepy.

And that is creepy. It’s practically on ‘sick stalker’ level.

Loaded editor Martin Daubney bounced onto the stage to accept the award, saying: “I would love to blame a reporter but I wrote that myself.” After it was pointed out that made him a “truly dreadful human being”, he countered: “And I’m paid for it.” Monkey predicts future Shaftas greatness for this man.

Why do people buy Loaded magazine anyway? It’s not even very good porn, and it’s obviously from this not at all funny, so why bother?

The rest of the awards are interesting, bashing Richard Desmond and the usual suspects; worth a look.

If this actually happens…

~ Inquisitor ~ 2 Comments

Virgin Media can get fucked. I am not having every web site I visit sent to China so some server can send back ‘targeted’ advertising, “anonymous” or no. It’s effectively unavoidable, ISP level spyware with a crap “anti-phishing” (read DNS hijacking) justification. The first thing I will be doing if this happens is getting a BT phone line installed and any non-BT ADSL ISP that doesn’t subscribe to this shit, probably Be.

This is of course assuming that this is even legal, and if it is it shouldn’t be. Who the hell thought this was a good idea, and why the hell haven’t they been fired already?

Edit: See here, here, here and here (the latter two contain a lot of great detective work about how dodgy Phorm actually are.) Let’s hope resistance isn’t futile on this one.

Mel Gibson has a lot to answer for

~ Inquisitor ~ 2 Comments

Scotsman.com: Hero Wallace voted greatest Will in history (8th January 2008)

SCOTS legend William Wallace has been voted the “greatest Will of all time” in a new poll.

English poet William Shakespeare, often considered the best playwright in literary history, was pushed into second place in the Co-operative Legal Services (CLS) survey of 3000 people.

Nothing whatsoever in Braveheart is actually at all anything like what Wallace actually was and did; he was from a Borders noble line and would thus have been an English/French/Latin-speaking non-clansman, his family wasn’t massacred when he was a kid (which is a massive corruption made by the movie from even the hideously unreliable Blind Hary), he spent much of the period 1298-1303 in France lobbying the Pope rather than hanging out with a useless guerilla army as the movie implies (which he only did for a matter of months in 1304-05 before stupidly getting himself captured, and he wasn’t betrayed either), ordered a series of slash-and-burn raids on northern England’s villages and monasteries that would nowadays be seen as a war crime and he didn’t shag Isabella of France – and a good thing too, as she was ten at the time he died and hadn’t even met the future Edward II yet.

Worse than all the historical inaccuracies, the movie isn’t even any good; it’s clichéd rotten, has some awful acting (only Patrick McGoohan seems to be having any fun, hamming it up as Edward I, or “Longshanks” as the movie keeps on repeating) and is quite possibly the worst film in my lifetime to win the Oscar for Best Picture. At least the battle sequences work, and Hollywood hasn’t made a hagiography of Robert Bruce yet (although Braveheart does go some way in that direction).

Wallace is only #1 on this list because of the publicity around Braveheart making people believe that it was actually the True Story; what I’m bitter about is that this has pushed Shakespeare, a figure of infinite importance to English-speaking culture who happened also to write some bloody good plays, to #2 in favour of a minor historical figure blown up by romantic delusion, hagiography and Mel bloody Gibson.

And as for the Scotsman’s headline, one thing is definite: he was no hero. Hardly anyone actually is.

Idiots at the BBC

~ Inquisitor ~ 5 Comments

This news article on a recent parenting case is alright in itself, but falls apart in two respects.

The only weblinks it provides in the related links section are to “father’s rights” organisations, one of which is the infamously horrible Fathers 4 Justice, a bunch of people whose favoured tactics for gaining support were dressing up as superheroes and scaling public buildings, performing occasional security breach stunts and committing serious vandalism on family court offices. (As an aside, I don’t link to their Wikipedia article here as I usually would do because it’s very very poor. Even for Wikipedia. You have been warned.) This should at least be balanced by a link to someone who’ll actually tell the truth rather than just ill-informedly rant. They’re also given far too much time in the article itself.

Worse, the “Have Your Say” boxout, giving a sample of the latest drivel from the BBC’s should-have-been-shut-down-years-ago comments section, currently has a quote from a “Jon” interspersed with the actual article:

So I presume the mother will expect the state to be paying for the childs upkeep, instead of the father!

The article itself, however, points out that

[The woman] said she wanted the baby girl, who is now 19 weeks old, adopted at birth without the knowledge of either them or her father.

So no, Jon, she bloody well doesn’t, you presume wrong, you’re a woman-hating berk who believes all that Fathers 4 Illiteracy tell you about the family courts system and whoever picked that entirely wrong quote out from the Have Your Say Fascist Wannabe Comments Pile should really think about what bias actually means the next time they do such a thing; the place where the comment quote is positioned makes it look a lot like an actual quote from the story, which is way wrong.

Besides, it’s worth pointing out the context of the story: the woman is an adult. She lives on her own. Why should a court anywhere in Britain even consider forcing her to tell her parents (which is how it got to the Appeal Court for this ruling), which we can assume from the context to be something that would cause a massive amount of embarrassment or possibly serious repercussions? That they would decide to do so is in itself worrying; this appeals decision, on the other hand, is probably the right one for everyone involved, hence why the F4J crowd think it’s wrong. Still, can’t win ’em all.

Edit 26/11/2007: Also note this much better Guardian article, with the detail that the idiot local authority actually wrote to the woman’s parents by mistake and without half the article taken up by comments from pressure groups.

Poor “wi-fi security” BBC News article

~ Inquisitor

Not entirely accurate:

More holes have been picked in the security measure designed to protect the privacy and data of wi-fi users.

Of course, when you actually read the article, it turns out to be yet another attack on WEP.

WEP is not the security measure. WEP is a security measure, and it’s an extremely poor one. WPA, which is on pretty much every ADSL router that people in the UK actually own because it’s been around for about as long as WEP’s been useless, is the security measure that people should be using, but this article only actually mentions that close to the end and then adds a bunch of confusion about WPA2.

It’s also incorrect on operating systems: since Windows 2000, for example, has no native wireless support, everything depends on the driver. Therefore the Ralink-chipset PCI card my brother uses on his Win2K-running room PC can connect to the home WPA network with absolutely no difficulty.

If you have Windows XP, you can update to SP2 unless it’s a pirate copy; and even then, you should be able to find a mate with a copy that will. If you have Vista, Linux or a Mac running recent OS X there’s no difficulty with WPA or WPA2. And the only current, mainstream device I can think of which isn’t WPA by default is the Nintendo DS; the 360 through its wireless adapter, the PSP (above firmware 2.0, which you’ll have had to update to play any games anyway), PS3 and Wii all support it fine. And yet the guy from BT who they question says:

A spokesman for BT said that it used WEP on its home hub products because of the compatibility issues.

“We use WEP for a very sensible reason,” said the spokesman, “there are a number of devices out there in the marketplace that do not use WPA.”

So why not supply it WPA as default (as Sky and Be Unlimited do) and then tell people in the manual or on an information sheet how to scale it down using an Ethernet cable and a web browser if they actually have some of the ancient crap they worry about? By supplying WEP you are supplying a product that is broken and gives a false sense of security – WEP is about as secure as covering a broken window with tin foil.

A better way to go about this from a consumer protection point of view would be an article talking about how WPA improves your security, how to put it on and at the end say that if there’s any difficulty with it, update your devices and if that doesn’t work, WEP might have to be your least worst option if you can’t put an Ethernet cable out to them. At least the ISPs have stopped supplying routers which default to unencrypted now, but there’s still a long way to go and articles like this one are not helping.

Giving with one hand, taking with another

~ Inquisitor

Sony have cut the price of the PS3 in the UK to something a little more reasonable, months after they did so in the States. Previous to this price cut, the £425 60GB PS3, which excluding VAT (the right way to compare these things) is £361.70, was the only model in the UK. In the US, this model is $499, which when converted to pounds is £244.65 – so an entire £115 (a little over $230) was going directly into Sony’s pockets as a stupidity tax on Brits. Now the 60GB is £349, £297.02 excluding VAT, meaning the ripoff is now only £50.

Never give Sony an even break however – they’ve also introduced the 40GB cut-down PS3 we’ve been hearing about, for £299 (removing VAT and converting, $520), but it’s a serious ripoff – they’ve reduced the number of USB ports, removed the SD card etc. slots and even worse than that, they’ve removed PS1/PS2 backwards compatibility.

Which was in software anyway so doesn’t cost them anything to include whatsoever. And of course this crocked model is going to be the only PS3 in Europe in the future. Always give it to Sony to mess things up big time – the US’s only PS3 in the future will be a $600 80GB model with the same backwards compatibility and sockets as the original Euromodel.

And there still aren’t any games. If you want a console, buy a 360 and/or a Wii. If you want to play PS2 games, buy a PS2 – you can buy it very cheaply. If you want a Blu-Ray player, buy a Blu-Ray player. Do not buy the PS3; if you must, buy the 60GB, but it only encourages them.

iPhone UK launch, deconstructed

~ Inquisitor
  1. Provider: O2. Appears to be no pay-as-you-go option, unlike the States. Also unlike the States, a fair usage plan – however, O2’s reference to “1400 web pages a day” indicates a pretty decent daily cap, especially since it’s still EDGE.
  2. Price: £269, plus £35/£45/£55 a month plan including said ‘unlimited’ data. Does include free access to The Cloud’s wi-fi points, however. Comparing to the US prices: our plans are over-expensive as normal, but if you remove VAT and then convert,

    £269/1.175 = £228.94 = $461.49

    which is really pretty acceptable on the usual rip-off Britain scale, especially when compared with that of the PS3 (US PS3 price, $499=£247.54; UK price still £425, albeit with an extra controller and one of those copies of the giant enemy crab game Sony are trying desperately to get rid of.)

  3. Phone: Exactly the same as the US iPhone, only with the new firmware so iTunes Wi-Fi Store included. EDGE and Wi-Fi. To be honest, since hardly anyone with a 3G phone actually uses any of the 3G features on their phones, Apple’s use of a 2G/EDGE/Wi-Fi combination as a battery-saving measure is little short of genius. No doubt a UMTS/HSDPA iPhone will come out eventually, however, once smart people at electronics companies finally work out how to reduce its energy consumption.
  4. Contract: 18 months. Again, fairly normal. That month-on-month cost is pretty hefty, however, although it does include unlimited data (not common here, excepting T-Mobile.)
  5. Overall: Let’s wait and see if anything interesting happens in France or Germany, or other European areas where unlocked phones are a bit more common. If you want one and you don’t mind O2, however, then there’s no reason you shouldn’t go for it.