While itâs true that Nissan is worth more than Renault now, we canât 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, itâs 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 Ghosnâs arrest, stories in the western media began appearing: Nissanâs 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.
Weâll see if there has been financial impropriety as things proceed, but to me thereâs 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.
Iâve 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 canât be based solely on consensus, as itâs not a way to propel a company forward.
Iâm keeping an open mind and, unlike some of the reporting that has gone on, maintaining that Ghosn is innocent till proved guilty. Itâs dangerous to hop on to a bandwagon. Itâs 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 âFacebook-killerâ. Ghosn deserves to be heard.
At the weekend, 40,000 to 50,000 took to the streets of MoskvaâMoscowâto protest their governmentâs actions in the Ukraine, at the Peace and Freedom March. I understand that media called the countryâs actions âthe shame of Russiaâ.
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 Iâve 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 materialâdespite 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 complainedâand Iâm hardly a target for those interested in Russian politics.
I have since uploaded the album to my Facebook fan pageâwhere it has not been deleted, but stats for it do not show up. Thanks to Facebookâs actions, Iâve uploaded the five images to my Tumblr as wellâand here they are again, for your interest.
We can credit Facebook for ensuring that these images were more widely shared.
This one hasn’t happened for a while (over a year), and, the last time I blogged about it, I managed to solve the issueâafter putting up with it for years prior to that. (The solution before December 2009 was to wait for the computer’s foul mood to passâhardly 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.