I haven’t blogged much about Carlos Ghosn, though I’ve Tweeted aplenty since his arrest last November. Earlier this week, his lawyers released a video of Ghosn stating his position, and it echoes much of what I had Tweeted. He couldn’t make a personal appearance at a press conference himself, thanks to some conveniently timed (for Nissan) evidence that prompted another arrest by the Japanese authorities.
The way the original exposé was done and the way the Japanese mainstream media lapped up the one-sided story and propagated it verbatim told me immediately that something was rotten inside Nissan. A lack of investigation should always tell you that not all is what it seems.
While it’s true that Nissan is worth more than Renault now, we can’t forget what a terrible shape it was in at the time the alliance was forged. While Nissan could have declared the Japanese equivalent of Chapter 11, it’s interesting to speculate how it would have emerged: would it have saved face or would consumers have lost confidence, as they have with Mitsubishi? And in the wake of Ghosn’s arrest, stories in the western media began appearing: Nissan’s performance was faltering (‘mediocre,’ says Ghosn). It had had a recent scandal and a major recall. More likely than not, it meant that certain heads were going to roll. To save themselves, they rolled their leader instead.
We’ll see if there has been financial impropriety as things proceed, but to me there’s an element of xenophobia in the way the story has developed; and it was a surprise to learn at how ill-balanced the Japanese legal system is.
I’ve been vocal elsewhere on how poorly I think elements of both companies have been run, but Ghosn does have a valid point in his video when he says that leadership can’t be based solely on consensus, as it’s not a way to propel a company forward.
I’m keeping an open mind and, unlike some of the reporting that has gone on, maintaining that Ghosn is innocent till proved guilty. It’s dangerous to hop on to a bandwagon. It’s why I was a rare voice saying the Porsche Cayenne would succeed when the conventional wisdom among the press was that it would fail; and why I said Google Plus would fail when the tech press said it was a ‘Facebook-killer’. Ghosn deserves to be heard.
At the weekend, 40,000 to 50,000 took to the streets of Moskva—Moscow—to protest their government’s actions in the Ukraine, at the Peace and Freedom March. I understand that media called the country’s actions ‘the shame of Russia’.
A friend provided me with photos of the protest that he and his friends took, which I uploaded to my personal Facebook profile this morning. Within minutes, they vanished from my wall. Facebook has replaced them with a message to say my page cannot be loaded properly, and to try again. Seven hours later, the problem persists.
They are still on the mobile edition but I’ve noticed that, for a public post, very few people have seen them.
What is curious is whether Facebook has some mechanism to remove content. I remember some years ago, video content vanished, too, with Facebook making false accusations that I had uploaded copyrighted material—despite my having express authorization. I had to fight Facebook, which had adopted a guilty-till-proved-innocent approach, to keep up content I was legally entitled to upload and share. Facebook presented me, for months, with a massive notice on my home page each time I logged in, where I had to fill in a counter-notification daily to their false accusations.
I had understood that generally copyright owners had to complain first under US law, unless, of course, your name is Kim Dotcom and US lobbyists want to make an example of you.
So we know that Facebook does have mechanisms to take things off without any complaint being filed. And we also know there are algorithms limiting sharing.
Given the speed with which this vanished today, I doubt anyone would have complained—and I’m hardly a target for those interested in Russian politics.
I have since uploaded the album to my Facebook fan page—where it has not been deleted, but stats for it do not show up. Thanks to Facebook’s actions, I’ve uploaded the five images to my Tumblr as well—and here they are again, for your interest.
We can credit Facebook for ensuring that these images were more widely shared.
The ‘tea tape’ that’s been on the news for the last week or so seems like, if you’ll pardon the analogy, a storm in a teacup.
PM John Key and Epsom candidate John Banks invited the media to record them chatting, then dismissed them. One cameraman, Bradley Ambrose, left a recorder on the table. From what I can gather, he did so accidentally. I believe him, and this country, the last I looked, believed in a presumption of innocence. Except when it comes to the internet.
Unfortunately, the PM didn’t see it that way, and because, by his admission, the police have so much time to investigate matters these days, claimed that the recording was illegal. Four media outlets were searched by police over the matter, and over interviews with Mr Ambrose.
The PM has his right to advance his opinion and I will defend any citizen’s right to do so. However, I’m not that convinced that both Messrs Key and Banks could expect that their conversation took place in private.
The submission in court yesterday—the time-worn one of the reasonable person’s expectation that they would be overheard—would have got a nod from me, though Winkelmann J. has declined to rule on the matter.
Both men are public figures, and while we Kiwis are generally very good at giving people the space they need to chat, it’s reasonable to assume portions of the conversation, though not the whole thing, would be overheard by a bystander, with or without a tape recorder.
I ran for a much smaller office than the PM and for the duration of the campaign—and even a year before it began—I watched myself over what I talked about in public places. I still do. And I didn’t even win.
When you put yourself out there, sadly, you sacrifice a little of your privacy. The two Johns have put themselves out there for a lot longer, and with a much greater profile, than I ever had.
During the campaign, one of my advisers warned me that if I were to chat to any opponent, I must do so in private, because you simply never knew who could hear you. That’s for a local body election. You’d reasonably expect the stakes to be higher for a General Election.
I am reminded of one private conversation from a public figure that took place in Wellington, which was shared with me by a member of the public. He revealed that that public figure was a potty mouth, complaining about a family member. He was, consequently, shocked to notice that such a discussion would take place in a café setting.
To me, that’s the typical sort of thing you’d reasonably notice of a recognizable public figure.
It is only reasonable that we would have been interested in what they had to chat about. If we were there, not as a member of the media, the odd key phrase would have caught our attention. If we walked by, we might have been accidentally picked up a bit ourselves.
The issue, for me, is whether a recording made of the conversation in its entirety is private—but I think back to the Wellington incident where the member of the public overheard the whole thing.
If it were anyone who had never run for office, then the reasonable expectation is that the conversation was private. But we are talking about two men who have plenty of experience—and who should know that private conversations take place in private forums. You don’t invite the media along, and once things get sensitive, follow the same rule as with uncomfortable public displays of affection: get a room.
This one hasn’t happened for a while (over a year), and, the last time I blogged about it, I managed to solve the issue—after putting up with it for years prior to that. (The solution before December 2009 was to wait for the computer’s foul mood to pass—hardly scientific.)
Unfortunately, this fix no longer works on Firefox 4. Deleting mimetypes.rdf does nothing and the error remains.
Here’s the bug: when accessing Autocade, I got this message many times today on Firefox, Seamonkey and IE8. If I Tweet about it and ask others to head there, they don’t experience it, so, you might think it’s confined to me only. However, a search reveals that it happens to other people, but on other sites, and usually, only temporarily.
The error, which I’ll note here for the search engines, is that the PHP page is an ‘application/opensearchdescription+xml’ one and cannot be opened.
The last few times I confronted it over the previous 12 months, I added www to the address (to get www.autocade.net) and I was fine again. This fix worked this afternoon, but it doesn’t work any more.
I don’t think it’s the browser. If I use a proxy server, the page opens fine. I’ve tried this on two computers now, each with a different OS.
Since it’s on our own dedicated server, I can assure you we haven’t made any changes our end, other than add content. Last time, I checked with our hosting provider and they can’t see anything wrong there.
Which, in my mind, due to a process of elimination, leaves the ISP. They denied (last time I enquired, in 2009) that they were to blame.
So no one admits it’s their problem. Any clues on whodunnit?
Incidentally, and maybe this is related since it’s all on the same server, I have had two New Zealand-based friends over the last few weeks say they cannot send emails to me any more. The emails all bounce back and they have had to resort to using the telephone. If it keeps up, I might suggest they buy a fax machine.
Our server is based abroad, and I have to wonder if some of our ISPs no longer resolve DNSs properly any more. I’ve had the same email address since 1995 and we haven’t had reports from other countries having difficulty emailing us. Considering this government has now sneaked in a copyright legislation change under urgency(presumably to help American and foreign lobbyists), after PM John Key flip-flopped on the issue in 2009, very few things surprise me about the poor state of the internet here.
The new law, which has likely passed by now, says a rights’ owner merely needs to allege an infringement for the accused to be automatically guilty. It is then up to that person to disprove guilt.
If you find that my Twitter avatar has been blacked out, this is why.
