Tetherd Cow Ahead

Dear All,

I apologize for the idiotic behaviour of The Cow over these last few days, even though it really has nothing to do with me. Blogger/Blogspot is having some kind of spak attack and all manner of craptacular behaviour has resulted. I checked with the Status Page just now and apparently ‘everything is back to normal’.

Well that’s a new reading of the word ‘normal’ anyway, which seems to include the fact that the formatting on The Cow may or may not work, you may or may not be able to make comments, and if you do, they may or may not actually appear.

This is just another incident in a long line of crappy service that has occurred as a result of, or in coincidence with Google’s takeover of Blogspot. It seems that Google has hit that inevitable part on the rising curve where companies (or Empires) get too big too fast and everything goes to shit.

I’ll probably port everything over to an independant site pretty soon, to my great regret. I am philosophically very much inclined toward this wonderful egalitarian model of free shared information, but Google of all people should be aware how important reliability is to such endeavours. And now they’re gunning to get us all to trust them with our personal data.

Well, not me chaps. You just blew it. You were doing good for a while there, and I used to be a big fan. Now you’re starting to look just like any other money-hungry capitalistic venture.

If you have been trying to make comments on The Cow and have been thwarted (by lack of any facility for doing so – wha??), once again I apologize. Please don’t stop visiting me – you’re the only friends I have.

Well you’ve probably all read that Google has made a deal with the government of China to provide a google.cn portal that is censored according to that government’s whims. Yes, the corporate honchos behind Google, self-proclaimed Doers-Of-No-Evil and outspoken advocates of free speech and freedom of information are making a deal with a government that holds those values in contempt. Tsk. Shame.

To mark this occasion in Capitalistic line-blurring, my friend Kirke has launched a t-shirt that sums up the kind of thinking you can use if you want to take dubious moral stances in your day-to-day life. He can’t promise you’ll feel better about such ethical wavering, but at least you’ll be being honest.

Which is more than we can say for Google.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is currently running an awareness campaign to raise funds and gather support across the blogosphere. I urge all my fellow bloggers, and also all you lurkers out there (oh yes, I can see you, you know) to get behind this great organization by either joining up, making a donation or carrying some EFF badges on your sites (or all of the above).

The EFF is a non-profit organization which actively campaigns to protect freedom of speech (and other human rights) in the digital world. If you’ve never heard of them, you should go to their site and check them out. If you are a blogger, these are some of the rights the EFF is fighting to protect for you:

♦Your right to blog anonymously.
♦Your right to allow people to comment on your blog without being held responsible for those comments (oooh yes, now couldn’t that be troublesome?).
♦Your right to make fair use of intellectual property (to protect you from, say, being sued because you reviewed a book and quoted from it in that review).
♦Your rights in relation to blogging about your workplace.

And there are many others.

I live in Australia, and most of the law the EFF is helping to define relates only to US law. Nevertheless, as the net evolves, it is extremely likely that the legal scaffold that the EFF sets in place will be used as a guide elsewhere. So even if you live outside the US, I urge you to support the EFF if you are able.

Yes Sir!

Tetherd Cow Ahead Critical Thinking 101: Lesson #1

Over the last few weeks three people with whom I have some acquaintance have fallen for an internet scam of the ‘Send This email to 20 People You Know and We’ll Give You Something Really Valuable Entirely for Free’ variety.

What is most perplexing is that these are all people who I would consider intelligent, savvy folk under normal circumstances, and who all have at least a modicum of internet experience.

I just can’t comprehend why they, and so many others, fall for these blatantly obvious swindles.

OK, as a Tetherd Cow Ahead Public Service I’m going to inscribe an internet truism here. Got a felt pen? Write it on your mouse-mat:

★ If someone offers you something of material value for free in an email, IT IS A SCAM.

There is no exception to this rule. I have yet to hear of a single instance of someone being offered a freebie of any value and actually getting it.

The kinds of emails we’re talking about come in a variety of different flavours, but they’re basically riffs on the same theme. Sony is the latest victim of this hoax and they have even taken the fairly extreme measures of posting a warning on their site, and an example of the offending email. Let me reproduce it for you here:

Subject: FW: PSP GIVEAWAY!!!
Importance: High

Dear all

Sony is giving away PSP consoles “FREE”!! Sony is trying word-of-mouth advertising to introduce its products. And the reward you receive for advertising for them is a PSP free of cost!

To receive your free PSP all you need to do is send this email out to 20 people for a PSP value pack(see attached picture).

Within 2 weeks you will receive a free PSP! (They contact you via your email address).

What makes this so compelling? I don’t know about you, but when I read this kind of thing, my critical thinking mechanism takes less than an attosecond to file it under Hogwash.

Nevertheless, this phenomenon intrigues me, so here’s the deal: In an effort to understand what kind of person falls for these things I’m going to give a two-week all-expenses paid holiday, flying First Class to Vatulele to the first Cow reader who comments on this post.

Now. Hands up who believed me, even for an instant. (Put your hand down Jam, you’re just being silly).

See? Just because it’s written in proper words on the internet doesn’t mean it’s the truth.

BTW, if anyone from Sony is reading this, I didn’t get my Playstation yet.

Mr David Byrne is still not accepting comments on his blog. I thought I’d just post an update every now and then so we can monitor how long it is before he eventually gets it.

This is a Tetherd Cow Ahead Blogging Service Announcement

I just visited the blog of rock singer and Renaissance Man Mr David Byrne (because I think he is an interesting person, and has insightful opinions) and had a bit of a revelation. Mr Byrne has a blog, is an interesting person and has insightful opinions, but he just doesn’t get the concept of blogging. Oh, I know, the headline says “Don’t Call It a Blog” but I’m sorry Mr Byrne, calling it a ‘Journal’ is just attempting to weasel out of being lumped in with the hoi polloi – it’s a blog by any other name.

Except for one significant difference. At first glance it looks like pretty much any other blog you might stumble across in your explorations of the blogosphere. But hey, what’s this? He doesn’t allow readers to comment on his posts!

Let’s think about that for a moment. The nature of a blog is at least slightly interactive. You post a thought, people read it, and if they feel like it, they leave a pearl of wisdom or a few pellets of scat. They leave their alias, which is a link that can be followed back to their own blog so that you, in turn, can read and comment upon their pontifications. They mark their territory in the blogosphere. These are the basic rules that any blogger knows. Disallowing any comment on your pronouncements is the blogging equivalent of hanging out a sign that says “No Riff Raff”.

I was reading down Mr Byrne’s latest post when I noticed the absence of a Comments field and I had the eerie and almost corporeal feeling of a door being slammed in my face. I had to stop and think about why I felt so put out. I didn’t even intend to post a comment.

What I believe has happened is that Mr Byrne has failed to understand the concept of community that blogging, by tacit agreement, encompasses. There’re no rules, of course, you can do anything you want on the net, but there are understandings in the cyberworld, just as in RL you understand that it’s bad manners to fart in an elevator or park in the disabled bay at the supermarket.

When I realised that Mr Byrne did not care about my, or any other reader’s, opinion, I completely lost interest in what he had to say. If I want that kind of experience, I have many books to choose from.

By contrast, Mr David Brin, a person who is at least as erudite and well known as Mr Byrne, has a blog where he makes commentary on all manner of worthy subjects, and cultivates a thriving culture of opinion, humour and insight. Mr Brin also participates in the comments from time to time, making his blog not only entertaining and informative, but a kind of living dialogue. I believe that this is what blogging is about.

Mr Byrne may indeed have many profound and wonderful things to say, but in my opinion he suffers from an excess of hubris. We are no longer living in the world where a Creative Person speaks, and the Great Unwashed throw flowers in obeisence. A Lofty ‘Journal’ he may have, but he lives in poverty without a blog.

UPDATE: Neil Gaiman’s doing it too. C’mon chaps, you look like pretentious prats. Tsk.