My partner Amanda and I are part of Medingeâs presence at Dutch Design Week this year.
Since Medinge couldnât celebrate our 20th anniversary due to COVID-19, some of our Dutch members, helped by many others, took the opportunity to get us into the event, which is virtual this year.
We had done a lot of work on Generation Co earlier in 2020, thanks to a load of Zoom meetings and emails. This takes things even further, but builds on it. The programme can be found here, and is titled âPutting the Planet First: a New Orientationâ.
The description: âInstead of thinking about the 3Psâyour challenge is to adopt a new perspective. Always put Planet first. Then people. Then profit.â
After signing up for free, you can head into our virtual rooms.
From the page: âOnly 21/10/2020, 10:00â13:00 lectures and livestreams from members of the Medinge Think Tank: a group of brand experts and visionaries from around the world whose purpose is to influence business to become more humane and conscious in order to help humanity progress and prosper. With international speakers who have worked on these rights and bring in the perspective from indigenous people who co-exist with the rivers.â
On Tuesday the 21st at 10 a.m. CET is Amandaâs presentation on the Whanganui River, which was given the rights of a legal person in legislation enacted in March 2017.
Amanda worked at the Office of Treaty Settlements at the time, so this is really her talk. I just set the laptop on the table, with a microphone generously lent to me by my friend Brenda Wallace. Then I edited it in video-editing software with all the skill of an amateur.
But thatâs the year of COVID-19 for you.
The way the talk came about was in discussion in 2019 with my colleagues at Medinge Group. The concept of legal rights on natural resources and indigenous rights came up, as did the case of the Whanganui River, which is known beyond our shores.
They had no idea Amanda worked on it, and proudly I mentioned her role.
From then on she was part of the programme, and it all came together last Friday.
In the talk, youâll see me on a much lower chair than her, propped up by a bag of rice that slowly sags as the recording wears on.
Thereâs only so much furniture at her Dadâs studio but it was the most comfortable place we could think of for the filming.
More important are the contents of her talk, which I thoroughly recommend. She worked really hard on the responses over a few weeks to make sure it was thoroughly rigorous.
Itâs followed by a talk from my good friend and colleague Sudhir John Horo. Pop over, itâs going to be a really eventful day in virtual Eindhoven.
Something is crashing my PC and taking Eudora mailboxes with it.
The latest is losing my Q3 outbox table of contents, which I suppose isnât as bad as losing the inbox, outbox, and all third-quarter emails, though being at the end of the week, there was still some repairing from the weekend back-up I made.
The outbox was there but the table of contents was corrupted, and when Eudora rebuilds, for some reason the recipient isnât recorded, only the sender.
Once again I was faced with a line-by-line (or, rather, group-by-group) comparison of the back-up and the existing mailboxes, to see what changes had been made since the 11th.
Above: What remained of the third-quarter outbox. I can no longer group this âbox by recipient, since Eudora doesn’t rebuild sent email folders with the recipient in the relevant column.
There were about three dozen emails that werenât in common.
The below Windows crash appears to have happened just after the last recorded ârecipient-lessâ email in the corrupted table of contents.
That was a while back, but I do remember another crash that slowed the computer to a crawl, with the non-closing app on restart being something to do with an AMD capturing window error.
Could AMDâs software be crashing and deleting mailboxes? If so, itâs cost me many, many hours of frustration and the knowledge that I have a corrupted table of contents for this quarterâs emails that will never be fixedâa rare imperfection among years of perfectly archived âboxes.
I was also able to trace it to when I sent a message to a friend on Facebook who is not easily reachable by other means. Since I rarely use the site it was pretty easy to pinpoint when I was last there.
Considering my phone died after installing Whatsapp what’s the bet that running Facebook on a desktop browser kills your desktop’s data?
Itâs as I always say: the newer the software doesnât mean more reliable. Just ask anyone using Facebook today.
I have updated the AMD driver so letâs see if the bug recurs. Iâm considering running Eudora back-ups on a daily basis but the weekly Windows back-up takes in many other work folders, and I donât believe thereâs a way to run a second job through the default service.
I visited a dental surgeon earlier this week and noticed his software didnât perform as he wished. He couldnât edit things in his billing software due to a bug. He had to return to the file minutes later and repeat the task before the program let him.
I dispute those who say I encounter more bugs than the average user. Watching the surgeon, he just lived with the bug, and knew that if he waited long enough, his program would allow him to make edits again. It seems to be a bug affecting the most basic of tasks. The difference, I imagine, is that he didnât document the stupidity of the software developer in preventing him from doing a fundamental task, whereas I regularly call them out, especially when it comes to common sites such as Google or Facebook where the (misplaced) expectation is that they must hire the best. Not always.
Prof Sir Geoffrey Palmer once said in one of his lectures, âThe more lawyers there are, the more poor lawyers there are.â The analogy in software is, âThe more software developers there are, the more thick software developers there are.â Like any profession, and I include law, not everyone who graduates is smart. Just look at some of our politicians who claim to have law degrees.
I havenât read the full judgement of the Land Rover Defender case, where Jaguar Land Rover sought to protect the shape of the original Defender under trade mark law, to prevent Ineos from proceeding with the Grenadier.
According to Bloomberg, as reported in Automotive News, âThe judge upheld the findings by the IP Office that while differences in design may appear significant to some specialists, they âmay be unimportant, or may not even register, with average consumers.ââ
On the face of it, this would appear to be a reason for upholding JLRâs claimâbut the Indian-owned Midlands car maker seems to have muddled the cause of action it was supposed to have taken. Iâve already taken issue with its inability to protect the L538 Range Rover Evoque shape in China under that countryâs laws, and while that judgement was eventually overturned in JLRâs favour, the company could have saved itself a great deal of stress had it filed its registration in time. It had been ignorant of Chinese law and wasted time and resources pursuing Ford Motor Company affiliate Landwind for its Range Rover Evoque clone, the X7. I sense Landwind could have afforded the ultimate fine.
Here I think arguing copyright might have been a better method. The Land Rover Station Wagon shape hails from 1949, and with 75 yearsâ protection, the company is covered till 2024. You donât need to show a registration, and the onus of proof, once objective similarity is found, is on the defendant. That test of objective similarity, unlike that in trade mark, is not based on what the average consumer thinks, but on what specialists think. And the scenes Ă faire doctrine has been adopted by precedent in the UK.
Maybe that was the game plan all along: to fail here, and to proceed using copyright later. Iâm sure the plaintiff knows this. Now, armed with the judgementâs findingsâthat the differences are insignificantâ Jaguar Land Rover can pursue a copyright claim using these as evidence.
To me, the Grenadier is sufficiently similar. Some point to the Puch G as another source of inspiration but I canât see it. And since a court has ruled that they canât see it, either, then Jim Ratcliffe and Ineos had better not break out the champagne just yet.
What a pleasure it was to be back on The Panel on Radio New Zealand National today, my first appearance in a decade. That last time was about the Wellywood sign and how I had involved the Hollywood Sign Trust. Iâve done a couple of interviews since then on RNZ (thank you to my interviewers Lynda Chanwai-Earle and Finlay Macdonald, and producer Mark Cubey), but it has been 10 years and a few months since I was a phone-in guest on The Panel, which I listen to very frequently.
This time, it was about Hong Kong, and the new national security legislation that was passed last week. You can listen here, or click below for the embedded audio. While we begin with the latest development of social media and other companies refusing to hand over personal data to the Hong Kong government (or, rather, they are âpausingâ till they get a better look at the legislation), we move pretty quickly to the other aspects of the law (the juicy stuff and its extraterritorial aims) and what it means for Hong Kong. Massive thanks to Wallace Chapman who thought of me for the segment.
I said it a long time ago: that the Carlos Ghosn arrest was part of a boardroom coup, and that the media were used by Hiroto Saikawa and co. (which I said on Twitter at the time). It was pretty evident to me given how quickly the press conferences were set up, how rapidly there was âevidenceâ of wrongdoing, and, most of all, the body language and demeanour of Mr Saikawa.
Last week emerged evidence that would give meâand, more importantly, Carlos Ghosn, who has since had the freedom to make the same allegation that he was set upâcause to utter âI told you so.â I read about it in The National, but I believe Bloomberg was the source. The headline is accurate: âNissan emails reveal plot to dethrone Carlos Ghosnâ; summed up by âThe plan to take down the former chairman stemmed from opposition to deeper ties between the Japanese company and France’s Renaultâ.
One highlight:
the documents and recollections of people familiar with what transpired show that a powerful group of insiders viewed his detention and prosecution as an opportunity to revamp the global automakerâs relationship with top shareholder Renault on terms more favourable to Nissan.
A chain of email correspondence dating back to February 2018, corroborated by people who asked not to be identified discussing sensitive information, paints a picture of a methodical campaign to remove a powerful executive.
Another:
Days before Mr Ghosnâs arrest, Mr Nada sought to broaden the allegations against Mr Ghosn, telling Mr Saikawa that Nissan should push for more serious breach-of-trust charges, according to correspondence at the time and people familiar with the discussions. There was concern that the initial allegations of underreporting compensation would be harder to explain to the public, the people said.
The effort should be âsupported by media campaign for insurance of destroying CG reputation hard enough,â Mr Nada wrote, using Mr Ghosnâs initials, as he had done several times in internal communications stretching back years.
Finally:
The correspondence also for the first time gives more detail into how Nissan may have orchestrated [board member] Mr Kellyâs arrest by bringing him to Japan from the US for a board meeting.
Nissanâs continuing official position, that Ghosn and Kelly are guilty until proved innocent, has never rang correctly. Unless youâre backed by plenty of people, that isnât the typical statement you should be making, especially if itâs about your own alleged dirty laundry. You talk instead about cooperating with authorities. In this atmosphere, with Nissan, the Japanese media duped into reporting it based on powerful Nissan executives, and the hostage justice system doing its regular thing, Ghosn probably had every right to believe he would not get a fair trial. If only one of those things were in play, and not all three, he might not have reached the same conclusion.
I donât profess to be an expert on how Hong Kong law functions these days with its mix of old British ordinances and the laws made after 1997, but one thing that struck me with at least the news reports covering the criminalizing of insults against âMarch of the Volunteersâ, the national anthem of the Peopleâs Republic of China, is whether parodyâa fundamental part of free speechâwill still be permitted.
I donât have a problem with the anthem being taught to children as it was sung long before 1949, the establishment of the PRC. It was a wartime anthem, which people like my father knew, having been born in the 1930s at the time of the SinoâJapanese War. It is historical, and it has meaning. It is arguably even more familiar to older Chinese than the Republic of Chinaâs anthem generally sung on the island of Taiwan. But, even back then, âMarch of the Volunteersâ had picked up this parody:
辡äž! 財ĺżçčč¸čąč!
If I recall correctly, the parody emerged when the Communists and Nationalists were trying to entice the citizenry over to their side, and the Communists were promising food.
I wonât go in to parody and its relationship to freedom of speech here; there are plenty of resources on it online.
But does it mean that repeating the parody lyrics would put me at risk in Hong Kong?
Of course it has escaped no one that the law was passed on June 4, a ballsy move by Beijing.
Meanwhile, a few members of the UK government have talked about giving BN(O) (British National [Overseas]) passport holders a pathway to British citizenship, leading some to say there would be a brain drain. What I will say here is: the British have talked about defending the rights of Hong Kong people under the joint declaration ever since 1997âindeed, even before, with the Blair-led oppositionâand nothing has happened. Iâve gone into my issues entering the UK with this passport before, so youâll excuse me if I say that actions speak more loudly than words. British politicians have been high on rhetoric for over two decades on this issue and I have no reason to believe the least trustworthy lot they have ever elected.
I disagree that they are interfering with Chinese affairs if they are simply looking after those that identify themselves as British, but at the same time I donât think Beijingâs foreign ministry has anything to be concerned about. The British have their own doorstep to think about, and the prospect of millions of Hong Kong Chinese heading there was too hard for them to stomach under Major or Blair, and I do not expect that attitudes have changed.
Not withstanding that I canât edit my advertising preferences on Facebookâthey took that ability away from me and a small group of users some time ago (and, like Twitter, they are dead wrong about what those preferences are)âI see they now lie about what ads Iâve seen and clicked on.
I can categorically say I have not seen an ad, much less clicked on an ad, for the US Embassy.
Itâs pretty hard for a person who doesnât use Facebook except for work to have clicked on any ads on their platform.
And as Iâve largely quit Instagram itâs highly unlikely I accidentally swiped and clicked on an ad there, too.
On the remote chance that I did, then it shows that either Facebookâs or the US Embassyâs targeting is appallingly bad since Iâm not American. I doubt that the US Embassy would have had such a wide market as to include me.
I theorize, and I do so with zero proof, that Facebook is so deep in its con to claim certain advertising reach numbers that itâs falsely attributing hits to random users across the site. These may have been hits done by botsâbots that it endorses, incidentallyâand now they want to pin them on legitimate people.
Itâs a hypothesis but given that Iâve been right about a few way-out ones (false user numbers, bot epidemics, malware downloads), Iâm going to advance it. Now letâs wait four years for this to blow up into something.
Above: The only way I can view my advertising preferences on Facebook is through the mobile version. But here they cannot be edited. (The web version won’t show them at all.) They are also quite wrong that these are my interests, but since when have they been right anyway?
Hereâs quite a funny one for you this Easter weekend: Facebook apparently has filed suit against companies that do the following, according to Social Media Today.
⢠Companies that sell fake followers and likes, which Facebook has pushed harder to enforce since New York’s Attorney General ruled that selling fake social media followers and likes is illegal last February
⢠Two different app developers over ‘click injection fraud’, which simulates clicks in order to extract ad revenue
⢠Two companies over the creation of malware, and tricking Facebook users into installing it in order to steal personal information
In other words, Facebook has filed suit against people who do things that are variations of what Facebook itself does.
The first. This has long been proven by Veritasium, and one would hope the defendant points out that Facebook has endorsed such behaviour, and that its terms and conditions have generally meant squat. Facebook allows hate groups (hate speech is âcounter-speechâ, they tell me), hates drag queens and kings, drags its heels in removing illegal content (eight clips of the Christchurch massacre are still on there, a year later), and preserves bots, fake accounts and phishing pages, all contrary to what their own terms and conditions say. These happen with such frequency that one might say they are Facebook policy.
Now, Facebook mightnât do the second but it certainly extracts ad revenue from customers, and not necessarily fairly. Click fraud? How about audience fraud? Thatâs been the subject of lawsuits against it. Weâve gone through this before on this blog, least of which is Facebookâs lying about its user numbers. It cites heaps of people but we know among them are bots; and we know that it claims more people in certain demographics than there are people. I’ve said this for a long, long time.
Third: Facebook tricked users for years into installing a âmalware scannerâwith purposes it would not go into. But it essentially admitted their scanners collected data from users (as reported in Wired, ‘Facebook tells users when they agree to conduct the scan that the data collected in the process will be used “to improve security on and off Facebook”ââit seems reasonable to conclude this is personal information). The scanner never appeared in oneâs installed programsâ list, either, and in my case, knocked out my real antivirus software. We also know that when Facebook accused certain people of having malware, the company was lying. The scanner took a long time to run, so what was it sending back to the mothership? Conclude from all of that what you will, but tricking Facebook users into installing software that is hidden on a userâs PC and takes data off it is right out of a fraudsterâs playbook.
Given the amount of crooked activity that Facebook itself engages in, and the lies its team tells, criminals would be forgiven into thinking that it was a website that collected and ran scams, and that Mark Zuckerberg was a kindred spirit.
The hypocrisy remains strong at Facebook.
PS.:This fake page has been up for days, and its posts, promoting a phishing link, apparently do not violate Facebook’s standards. Duly reported, but what really is the point since Facebook seems to love these?
Iâll be interested to read the judgement, should it get to that point: Facebook is being sued over allegedly inflating its audience numbers, and COO Sheryl Sandberg and financial officer David Wehner are also named.
The plaintiff alleges that Facebook has known this for years. The suit dates from 2018 but there are new filings from the lawsuit.
Iâve blogged on related topics for the majority of the previous decade, and in 2014 I said that Facebook had a bot âepidemicâ.
Finally another publication has caught on this, namely the Financial Times. The FT notes something that I did on this blog in 2017: âIn some cases, the number cited for potential audience size in certain US states and demographics was actually larger than the population size as recorded in census figures, it claimed.â Its own 2019 investigation found discrepancies in the Facebook Adsâ Manager tool.
The complaint also says that Facebook had not removed fake and duplicate accounts. Lately Iâve found some obvious fake accounts, and reported them, only for Facebook to tell me that thereâs nothing wrong with them. On Instagram, I have hundreds, possibly thousands, of accounts that I reported but remain current. Based on my user experience, the plaintiff is absolutely correct.
Facebook only solves problems it puts its mind to, and all seem to be bolstering its bottom line. This is something it could have solved, and since itâs plagued the site for the good part of a decade, and it continues to, then you have to conclude that thereâs no desire to. And of course there isnât: the more fakes there are, the more page owners have to pay to reach real people.
Over a decade ago, I know that it cost a small business a decent chunk of money to get an independent audit (from memory, we were looking at around NZ$6,000). Facebook doesnât have this excuse, and that tells me it doesn’t want you to know how its ads actually perform.
As I said many times: if a regular person like me can find a maximum of 277 fakes or bots in a single night, then how many are there? Iâm surprised that not more of the mainstream media are talking about this, given that in 2018 Facebook posted an income of US$22,100 million on US$55,800 million of revenue, 98¡5 per cent of which came from advertising. Is this one of the biggest cons out there? Hereâs hoping the lawsuit will reveal something. Few seem to care about Facebookâs lies and erosion of their privacy, but maybe they might start caring when they realize they’ve been fleeced.
