BLOG - Currents - Mar 23

Currents - Online

First a warning. There are a number of malware and spam items floating around the networks aimed at getting money from people for the Japanese disaster. Treat all of these as cons unless you can prove otherwise.

Over the past week or so I have disgusted by the term journalist. Journalism for me means writing about my experiences or investigating some event, or checking the facts on some story I have read and want to write about. Occasionally I get it wrong, everyone does, and if so I try and find the real information and post a correction.

Some time ago this was also the attitude of the mainstream media but increasingly in present times anything they report should be treated as dubious and unverified until you check it yourself. The latest round of this has been the reporting on the danger of a meltdown and radiation in the Japanese reactors damaged after the recent Tsunami. Note that I did not include the word earthquake here for good reason, no damage to the reactors themselves was reported as occurring from earthquake damage but rather because of the Tsunami.

While this may not sound like an IT related subject one of the most comprehensive coverage of this issue I found was the series provided by theRegister IT news site. It also relates to the easy availability of information on the Internet, in Wikipedia, and the increasing amount of copy and pasting that the newest batch of reporters seem to do without any further work or verification. When it comes to the Japanese situation to quote Charlie Martin “The only thing to fear is the sensationalist reporting that has the world panicked.”

Reporting is about the sources used and the bias that those sources may exhibit. When I report on Apple products I try not to use any Apple loving sites because they automatically filter out any negatives.  The same goes for Microsoft products, some magazines for example always produce a glowing review.

In the case of reporting on all things nuclear there are a few common sources that are used for almost all media information. Anti-nuclear politicians like Senator Ed Markey and anti-nuclear activists from groups like the Institute for Policy Studies should not be used but they are, often.  Robert Alvarez, who works on nuclear disarmament at the Institute for Policy Studies is one often cited as are people like Ken Bergeron the author of Tritium on Ice: The Dangerous New Alliance of Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear Power. There are a handful of similar individuals who are the only ones polled in such situations. Sensible physicists also make comments but since they are not sensational they are ignored.

As for me, I’ll keep trying to reports on the facts and the data in a world where such pursuits have mostly moved to the blogsphere.

Industry News

Remember that final release candidate for Firefox? Well Mozilla has managed to squeeze a second RC out before perhaps final release.  The reason was a couple of issues that appeared during the last RC. Mozilla is describing them as “very small, isolated fixes.”  The fixes will be included in the Windows, Linux, OSX and Android versions of RC2 that will be available as you read this. This will have no impact on the planned 22 March release that will sport a new JaegerMonkey Javascript engine extension, hardware acceleration and will allow for user generated plug-in-free 3D graphics.  

There are dangers in bad reporting. Just ask Chen the 31-year-old Hangzhou computer company worker who redistributed a radiation warning he picked up off the internet. Supposedly a ‘reliable source’ of information told him that the sea off China's eastern Shandong province was contaminated by radiation from Japan's Fukushima plant. It eventually triggered a panic in  he area and so he now has 10 days in jail and a 500 yuan ($76) fine to pay.

The extended edition of the Lord of the Rings trilogy will be released in Blu-ray in the UK soon. The only reason this is news is because anyone who wanted it would have downloaded the files as torrents a long time ago. There is something very strange about the movie people they hoard their products as they are freely available online. I have never worked it out.  

The Adobe Flash Player has a rather nasty vulnerability at the moment and Google has already fixed it, wait, what? Yes Google stepped in and fixed it for Chrome users. The rest of the world, including me, will have to wait until next week for the fix from Adobe.  The reason is simple, Google has advance access to Adobe builds because of an agreement the two have. This means that Google is able to push the changes to their users faster than the others can. Adobe has the test their builds on as many as 60 platforms before they can push it out.  At the moment the exploit only attacks Windows operating systems so the rest can relax, for the moment. Office 2010 users are also safe.

It seems that Australian online publishers have been playing fast and loose with their audience numbers, the reporting of at least. The advantage of pushing up their numbers is to attract the advertising revenue. The greater the numbers the more advertising you get.  According to the Australian Business Association some have been double counting page views, counting pages before they load and even counting pop-ups. "This practice has been found to significantly inflate key audience metrics, including page views and session times. As a result, media buyers are spending money on display ads that are going unseen on background browser tabs and even unattended computers."

Some sites are also using an auto-refresh facility to push up numbers.  They are also counting spider crawlers, bots, and syndicated traffic. All of these are not normally counted for the basic stats used to entice advertisers.

Yet another petty suing event, not unsurprisingly from Apple who like to sue people for using basic English words. This time it is “App  Store.”  There have been application stores since the beginning of computer time but Apple is suing Amazon for ‘stealing’ their term.  “App” can of course stand for application but I guess in this case Apple thinks it stands for “Apple.” Apple claims that they own the terms since 2008, wow all the way back until then. The really sick part of this challenge is that the Patent Office in the US is so hopeless that Apple may win.

Amazon are using the term for their Android application marketplace in competition with Google. Developers will pay $99 to join and they take 70% of the purchase price, Amazon gets the rest. Like Apple’s iTunes store Amazon will be keeping an eye on what is being sold through their store.  As you would expect Amazon is challenging Apple on the grounds that the name is too generic to be trademarked.

Finally for this week a little on the Australian National Broadband Network or NBN.  One side of government is pushing for a monopolistic, expensive solution to their perceived problem of broadband bandwidth. On the other side is the groups pushing for a non monopolistic solution that involves a real retail market like the one that exists today.

One issue is the definition of what a customer is. If you read the proposals The Coalition wants to ban carriers from buying from the NBN for internal use. That sounds Ok until you remember that carriers need to at least carry out diagnostics and billing across their networks. The proposed legislation will need to be very careful about the definition of what might be necessary and exempt.

The ones hit the most will be the smaller carriers. An organisation like Telstra already has a national fibre network in place. Even the major ISPs don’t have anything like that or even comparable access. The Labor government has it wrong in that we even need an NBN in the form they are proposing. The Coalition is wrong in how they want to control it. Hopefully the whole thing is dropped before it goes too far and costs too much.