I did indeed write in the wake of January 6, and the lengthy opâed appears in Lucire, quoting Emily Ratajkowski, Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden. I didnât take any pleasure in what happened Stateside and Ratajkowski actually inspired the post after a Twitter contact of mine quoted her. This was after President Donald Trump was taken off Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
The points I make there are probably familiar to any of you, my blog readers, pointing at the dangers of tech monopolies, the double standards that theyâve employed, and the likely scenario of how the pendulum could swing the other way on a whim because another group is flavour of the month. Weâve seen how the US has swung one way and the other depending on the prevailing winds, and Facebookâs and Twitterâs positions, not to mention Amazonâs and Googleâs, seem reactionary and insincere when they have had their terms and conditions in place for some time.
Today, I was interested to see Chancellor Dr Angela Merkel, referred to by not a few as the leader of the free world, concerned at the developments, as was President LĂłpez Obrador of MĂ©xico. âGerman Chancellor Angela Merkel objected to the decisions, saying on Monday that lawmakers should set the rules governing free speech and not private technology companies,â reported Bloomberg, adding, âEurope is increasingly pushing back against the growing influence of big technology companies. The EU is currently in the process of setting up regulation that could give the bloc power to split up platforms if they donât comply with rules.â
The former quotation wasnât precisely my point but the latter is certainly linked. These tech giants are the creation of the US, by both Democratic and Republican lawmakers, and their institutions, every bit as Trump was a creation of the US media, from Fox to MSNBC.
They are natural outcomes of where things wind up when monopoly power is allowed to gather and laws against it are circumvented or unenforced; and what happens when news networks sell spectacle over substance in order to hold your attention. One can only hope these are corrected for the sake of all, not just one side of the political spectrum, since freedomâactual freedomâdepends on them, at least until we gain the civility and education to regulate ourselves, the Confucian ideal. Everything about this situation suggests we are nowhere near being capable, and I wonder if homo sapiens will get there or whether weâll need to evolve into another species before we do.
Posts tagged ‘law’
This was the natural outcome of greed, in the forms of monopoly power and sensationalist media
11.01.2021Tags: 2000s, 2010s, 2020s, 2021, Amazon, Angela Merkel, antitrust, Big Tech, competition law, Confucius, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Emily Ratajkowski, EU, Facebook, free speech, Germany, Glenn Greenwald, Google, law, López Obrador, Lucire, media, México, monopoly, oligopoly, philosophy, politics, Twitter, USA
Posted in business, culture, internet, leadership, media, politics, technology, USA | No Comments »
The US, where big business (and others) can lie with impunity
31.12.2020One thing about not posting to NewTumbl is I’ve nowhere convenient to put quotations I’ve found. Maybe they have to go here as well. Back when I started this blog in 2006â15 years ago, since it was in JanuaryâI did make some very short posts, so it’s not out of keeping. (I realize the timestamp is in GMT, but it’s coming up to midday on January 1, 2021 here.)
Here’s one from Robert Reich, and I think for the most part US readers will agree, regardless of their political stripes.
In 2008, Wall Street nearly destroyed the economy. The Street got bailed out while millions of Americans lost their jobs, savings, and homes. Yet not no major Wall Street executive ever went to jail.
In more recent years, top executives of Purdue Pharmaceuticals, along with the Sackler family, knew the dangers of OxyContin but did nothing. Executives at Wells Fargo Bank pushed bank employees to defraud customers. Executives at Boeing hid the results of tests showing its 737 Max Jetliner was unsafe. Police chiefs across America looked the other way as police under their command repeatedly killed innocent Black Americans.
Yet here, too, those responsible have got away with it.
I did offer these quotations with little or no commentary at NewTumbl and Tumblr.
What came up with the above was a Twitter exchange with a netizen in the US, and how some places still touted three- to four-day shipping times when I argued that it was obviousâespecially if you had been looking at the COVID positivity rates that their government officials relied onâthat these were BS. And that Amazon (revenue exceeding US$100 milliard in the fourth quarter of 2020) and Apple (profit at c. US$100 milliard for the 12 months ending September 30) might just be rich enough to hire an employee to do the calculations and correlate them with delaysâwe are not talking particularly complicated maths here, and we have had a lot of 2020 data to go on. But they would rather save a few bob and lie to consumers: it’s a choice they have made.
The conclusion I sadly had to draw was that businesses there can lie with impunity, because they’ve observed that there are no real consequences. The famous examples are all too clear from Reich’s quotation, where the people get a raw dealâeven losing their lives.
Tags: 2008, 2020, Amazon, Apple, Big Tech, Boeing, corruption, deception, finance, law, pharmaceuticals, racism, Robert Reich, Twitter, USA, Wells Fargo
Posted in business, culture, internet, politics, USA | No Comments »
Old-school Brexit
29.12.2020I was led by this Tweet to have a peek at the Draft EUâUK Trade Cooperation Agreement and can confirm that on p. 931 (not p. 921), under âProtocols and Standards to be used for encryption mechanism: s/MIME and related packagesâ, there is this:
The text:
The underlying certificate used by the s/MIME mechanism has to be in compliance with X.509 standard. In order to ensure common standards and procedures with other PrĂŒm applications, the processing rules for s/MIME encryption operations or to be applied under various Commercial Product of the Shelves (COTS) environments, are as follows:
â the sequence of the operations is: first encryption and then signing,
â the encryption algorithm AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) with 256 bit key length and RSA with 1024 bit key length shall be applied for symmetric and asymmetric encryption respectively,
â the hash algorithm SHA-1 shall be applied.s/MIME functionality is built into the vast majority of modern e-mail software packages including Outlook, Mozilla Mail as well as Netscape Communicator 4.x and inter-operates among all major email software packages.
Two things have always puzzled me about the UKâs approach to getting some sort of a deal with the EU.
There are two Davids, Davis and Frost, no relation to the TV producer and TV host. As far as I can tell, despite knowing that the transition period would end on January 1, 2021, failed to do anything toward advancing a deal with the EU, so that the British people know there are new rules, but not what they are. The British taxpayer would be right to question just what their pounds have been doing.
If I may use an analogy: thereâs an exam and the set date was given but no one has done any swotting. Messrs Davis and Frost havenât even done the coursework and sat in the lectures and tutorials blankly.
The person who has done the least is Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, the British prime minister, who stumbled in to the exam room at the last minute without knowing the subject.
But never mind, sneaked into the room with his clobber is an earlier graduateâs paper! Surely he can plagiarize some of the answers out of that should the same questions arise!
I donât know much about SHA-1 hash algorithms but the original Tweeter informs us that this had been âdeprecated in 2011â as insecure. However, I can cast my mind back to when âNetscape Communicator 4.xâ was my browser of choice, and that was 1998â2001. (I stuck with Netscape 4·7 for a long time, as 6 was too buggy, and in 2001 a friend gave me a copy of Internet Explorer 5, which I then used in Windows. This pre-dates this blog, hence Netscape is not even a tag here.)
This is a comedyâtragedy from the land of Shakespeare, and I wonder if it means that the British government is expecting things to get so bad that they will have to wind up using computer software from 20 years ago.
Or they just couldnât be arsed over the last four years (yes, count âem!) to do any real work, and hoped that no one would read the 1,259 pp. to find the mistakes.
To conclude, another bad analogy: itâs not really oven-ready despite all this time baking. However, it appears the ingredients aren’t as fresh as we were led to believe. The proof of the pudding will be in the eating.
Tags: 2020, Boris Johnson, Brexit, EU, law, Mozilla, privacy, technology, Twitter, UK
Posted in politics, technology, UK | No Comments »
Why con?
07.12.2020During the course of the 2010s, I came across two con artists. One thing that united them was they were men. But they could not have been more different: one was rather elaborate and was the subject of a Panorama documentary; the other was a rank amateur and, at least in the situation we were in, never fooled us.
I wonât name them as Iâve no wish to add to their notoriety, but hereâs the real kicker: both had the means to do well legitimately if they each followed through honestly.
The first one was clever enough to rope in people from very different parts, essentially setting up a publishing operation. But it was a swindle, and people were left in debt and jobless.
However, if it had been legit, it would have actually done quite well, and if the con artistâs aim was money, then he would have made some, over a long period, which would have sustained him and his lifestyle.
The second was not clever but came to a business partner of mine with a proposal to become a shareholder. We heard him out, he proposed an amount, and we drafted a cast-iron contract that could see him get a return on his investment, and protect the original principal. The money never came, of course, and we werenât going to alter the share register without it. He might have hoped that we would.
Again, he would have got something from it. Maybe not as good a return as property but better than the bank.
The first is now serving time at Her Majestyâs pleasure after things caught up with him and he was extradited to where he had executed an earlier con; the second, after having had his face in the Sunday StarâTimes, was last heard from in Australia where he conned his own relatives. He’s wanted by the police here.
I donât know where the gratification is here. And rationally, leaving honesty and morals aside (as they do), wouldnât it be better making money regularly than swindling for a quick fix that nets you less? Is it down to laziness, making them less desirous to follow through?
On the first case, I did have the occasion to speak to one lawyer pursuing him. I asked him about my case, since my financial loss was relatively small compared to the others taken in (namely a FedEx bill that a friend of mine helped me get a decent discount on because of her job). Whereâs the con? I was told that it might not have been apparent as the con artistâs MO was to draw different strands, sometimes having them result in something, and sometimes not.
Whatever the technique, it failed him anyway.
And what a waste of all that energy to create something that not only looked legit (as in the TV series Hustle) but could have functioned legitimately with so many good people involved.
That did make the 2010s rather better than the 2000s when the shady characters included a pĂŠdophile (who, to my knowledge, is also doing time), a sociopath, a forger, and a US fashion label that conned a big shipmentâs payment out of us. I doubt Iâd be famous enough to warrant a biography but they would make interesting stories!
Tags: 2010s, 2020, Aotearoa, Auckland, Australia, Bahrain, BBC, business, deception, Fairfax Press, fraud, Jersey, law, New Zealand, newspaper, police, publishing, TÄmaki Makaurau, TV
Posted in business, New Zealand, publishing | No Comments »
Another mailbox bites the dust from another crashâwhat is taking out Eudora’s data?
17.09.2020Something 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.
Tags: 2020, bugs, Eudora, law, Microsoft Windows, Sir Geoffrey Palmer, software, Victoria University of Wellington
Posted in New Zealand, technology, Wellington | No Comments »
How Jaguar Land Rover can still win its Land Rover Defender IP case against Ineos
09.08.2020I 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.
Tags: 2020, car, car design, car industry, copyright, copyright law, Ineos, intellectual property, IP, Jaguar Land Rover, Jim Ratcliffe, Landwind, law, Tata, UK
Posted in business, cars, design, India, UK | No Comments »
Back on RNZ’s The Panel: on Hong Kong’s new national security legislation
08.07.2020
Public domain/Pxhere
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.
Tags: 2020, China, democracy, free press, freedom of speech, Hong Kong, law, media, news, press freedom, radio, Radio New Zealand, Wallace Chapman
Posted in business, China, culture, Hong Kong, media, New Zealand | 1 Comment »
Nissan’s own documents show Carlos Ghosn’s arrest was a boardroom coup
22.06.2020I 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.
Tags: 2010s, 2018, 2019, 2020, Bloomberg, Carlos Ghosn, corporate culture, coup, crime, deception, email, Hiroto Saikawa, Japan, law, media, Nissan, Renault, Renault Nissan Mitsubishi
Posted in business, cars, culture, France, globalization, leadership, media | No Comments »