Google will cease to support FTP publishing on Blogger on May 1, extending the previous deadline of March 26 by a few weeks. As this blogâs posts between 2006 and 2009 were done on Blogger, it means that you will not be able to comment on them after a certain date.
It probably doesnât matter, anyway: I have noticed that very few comments come to posts older than three months. Readers will confront dead âPost a commentâ links.
The reason? With the end of FTP publishing, Google says it will migrate the 0¡5 per cent who took the trouble of hosting our own material on to its servers. Given that I donât trust Google with my private information, and with the support on its forums about as delightful as Darth Vaderâs breath, I am choosing not to allow the company to migrate this blogâs 2006â9 data on to its machines. Rackspace over Google any day.
So before the May 1 deadlineâpossibly even this monthâI will take this blog off the Blogger Dashboard, whereupon commenting on pre-2010 posts will become impossible. That way you wonât need to put up with me moaning about how Google took this blogâs data wrongly.
I am enquiring now (since the FAQ does not address this issue) on how best to remove the blogs from the transition, while ensuring the old data remain where they are. Ironically, I have put this question on the Google support forums (letâs hope for better service this timeâthey were never able to answer my Beyond Branding query about our missing home page, and the Social Media Consortium matter you all know about), and on the Blogger Buzz blog, which Rick Klau writes on.
PS.: As expected, no joy from the forums (anything thatâs out of the ordinary seems to be ignored), while Rick Klau responded within a day (this man is a saint). He wrote: âYou donât need to delete anything, but if you do your remote files will not be affected in any way. The archival blog(s) will continue to be viewable by the world.â Thank you, Rick.âJY
Can someone please explain to me how I have a Google Buzz account?
Yes, I know, all those people complaining about Google Buzz found that their Gmail contacts where, all of a sudden, added to the service.
And Google, this week, apologized for messing up.
Well, Google, please explain my scenario, because I donât have a bloody Gmail account.
Yet, youâve seen fit to provide me with a Buzz accountâsomething I do not wantâand, like so many others, added 19 followers to it.
Above: Buzz has been the centre of complaints for Gmail users these past few weeks. Google now extends that to non-Gmail users.
This was today. This was after your supposed apology for messing up peopleâs privacy.
I guess youâve figured that after messing up Gmail usersâ lives, youâre now going after non-Gmail users.
Incidentally, can someone also please explain to me why I have 18 requests for Google Reader followers when I have done everything possible to remove every last piece of information out of there? Just where did these 18 suddenly come from?
Above: Despite deleting everything out of my Google Reader account, today I have 18 people wanting to be the followers of an empty account. Nice one, Google.
Above: A new field was added to my Google Profile, checked by defaultâto ensure less privacy. Less than a day after it apologized for breaching peopleâs privacy. Hypocrisy much?
Are your people so stupid that you would introduce a new field dealing with privacy and turn it on by default? The week after your Google Buzz dĂŠbâcle? Who did you hire? People from Facebook?
Does your HR department hire bottom-of-the-class guys, or do you find morons and train them down?
Rather ironical, considering that this week, I have been de-Googling my life. Looks like Google doesnât like my removing myself from its services, so itâs forcibly put me on to new ones and created new options which it has checked by default, decreasing my privacy.
It wasnât enough that you had put me on to Reader and turned on Web History after I turned it off.
Consider my profile deleted, dickheads. You are not getting any more of my personal information from me.
Really, Google, WTF?
Above: I donât have Gmail. Look, Google, itâs in my ânew products to tryâ section.
PS.: Deleting my profile has made no difference to my Buzz account: it remains there, complete with followers.âJY
P.PS.:Scootley at the Gmail forums explains that anyone can get a Buzz account, even if they do not use Gmail. Hereâs what I donât get (correct me if I am wrong):
⢠Buzz is part of Gmail.
⢠If I have never signed up to Gmail and agreed to its terms and conditions, what governs my relationship with Google over Buzz?
I decided to find out.
Answer: none.
On visiting Google Buzzâs home page, and following the links at the bottom of that page to the terms and conditions and privacy policy, I encountered these two pages:
Above: Google has no terms and conditions for Buzz (URL accessed 2.27 p.m. GMT [and again at 10.26 p.m. GMT]).
Above: Google has no privacy policy for Buzz (URL accessed 2.27 p.m. GMT [and again at 10.26 p.m. GMT]).
Ironically, I re-created a new profile and unchecked the âDisplay the list of people Iâm following and people following meâ option, and now, Buzz has finally disappeared. (This did not work earlierâand Scootley confirms that that should have had no effect on Buzzâs presence in my Google Dashboard. Still, itâs gone, so Iâm happy.)âJY
P.P.PS.: One consequence of having no Google profile is that Google punishes you in the search results. In an ego-surf of my name with quotes, I dipped 10,000 results because of the missing profile. (I also dipped 10,000 after an earlier attempt a few days ago of having my profile turned off.) Like one page on Google really counts for 10,000 hitsâbut apparently, Google gets pissy at you for turning your profile off!
Well, Iâd rather have a drop of 10,000 references than have weird services appear in my Google profile!âJY
While Iâve been a LinkedIn member for many yearsâmy LinkedIn ID has six digits, which gives you an idea of how long agoâI have to confess that I did not browse the brilliant Wellington, New Zealand group till quite recently.
And free wifi is being talked up there, too, as something Wellingtonians genuinely want.
We hear from expats who feel Wellington needs this as a major city, from Wellingtonians who believe this would be great for growing business, and from some concerned citizens who wonder where the money comes from.
Fortunately, two of the posters there have experience in the wifi space, and can attest to the fact that the infrastructure already exists. As mentioned on my mayoral campaign site, we can make this profitable for the city. Secondly, it will provide an additional avenue for Wellington businesses to be found.
Indeed, one of these experts notes that it was exceedingly rare for anyone to go mental over downloading things; in any case, I propose there will be a daily data cap on the service.
When I made wifi one of my core issues last year, I knew instinctively it would be right for Wellington.
I donât live in a bubble, and Iâm not part of the political ĂŠlite. Which means I havenât learned how to distance myself from the needs of Wellingtonians. Iâve been engaging with people for a long time with an eye on this campaign. Anyone with oneâs pulse on the city knows that free wifi and new jobs are things that a world-class city needsâand I firmly believe Wellington is potentially world-class. I would hate for us to miss the opportunities that are before us right now, which can catapult us into the big league to become one of the worldâs great cities.
As those of you who came out to the two Asian Eventsâ Trust shows at TSB Arena in Wellington over the weekend know, I have returned to our shores after a wonderful trip to Europe. The warmest it got, I should note, was 2°C, which makes even a foggy, overcast day like today seem dreamy. (The coldest was â15°C.)
Some of the conversations I had in Sweden still canât be revealed yet (this isnât about transparencyâthis is about legality), but I was there studying some benchmarks for transportation and the environment. I want Wellingtonians to know I travel on my money and I use the opportunity to benefit my city. I donât miss these opportunities. (And yes, I was in København, too.)
As some of you who have followed my career know, I am not talking about incremental improvements.
After all, as early as 2001 I was talking about Fair Trade and social responsibility. By 2003, I had talked to the United Nations Environment Programme and convinced them that the best way of making environmental issues cool was to mainstream them through the world of fashion and celebrityâand Lucireâs partnership with them was born. The same year, we at the Medinge Group decided that Beyond Branding should be a Carbon Neutral book. The previous decade I was doing everything from web publishing (1993) to launching the countryâs longest running online fashion title (1997).
So when I talk about these ideas in Sweden, I am talking about game-changers that can benefit Wellington.
You have to be a few years ahead of your time, given what politics is like. No one who seeks public office can afford to be reactive or behind the times. And I hope that in the last 23 years, Iâve managed to demonstrate a fairly good record of identifying the next big thing.
And I owe a debt of gratitude to my good friend (and one of Swedenâs outside-the-box marketing thinkers) Stefan Engeseth for arranging my speeches and meetings. Thank you for entrusting me, Stefan, for being your first speaker in your Unplugged Speeches sessionâit was an extremely good, interactive morning. Itâs not every day I get to interact with someone who works for NASA. (If you thought I was good, you should see speaker number two, who has a Ph.D. and is very easy on the eyes.) But mostly, thank you for inspiring me even more, because you, too, always seem to be a few years ahead of the game.
As to France, the other country I spent heaps of time in on this trip, it was an honour to talk at the SorbonneâCELSA campus with my colleagues at Medinge.
While part of the Paris trip was occupied by a board meeting and with the 2010 Brands with a Conscience awards, I had the opportunity to discuss my mayoral campaign with the worldâs leading brand thinkers in a meaningful, collegial presentation. Medinge, too, is filled with those forward-thinking from people who are nearly always right about their predictions of how the world would look in three to ten yearsâ time.
And the session at La Sorbonne was, in my mind, a true highlightâwhere, again, Wellington got plenty of promotion, and I was able to share some thoughts with a smart, young audience.
Iâll be letting voters know ahead of time what else was discussed with the Swedish companies, so you can be even better armed when you fill out your ballot forms for the local elections later this year.
In the meantime, let me give my Facebook campaign page another little plug: click here for more. My heartfelt thanks to all those who have joined and have given me amazing encouragement for this campaign.
For those trying to leave Google Waveâand who have had no satisfaction whatsoever from the Google forums (what a surprise)âthere might be one way.
There are quite a few reasons people want to leave Wave. One netizen had this concern: âIt appears I have been linked to former associates who I have kept in my contacts list in case I need to take legal action against them; I want nothing to do with them. I am concerned now that I am going to appear in the Wave contacts of everyone in my contacts listâthis is a nightmare scenario. This is a serious breach of my privacy.â Others have found total strangers among their Wave followers who are not part of their Gmail contactsâ list or any others. Still others have found hackers and abusers who are writing extensions and other things to crash their accountsâsomething that has happened as early as October 2009.
With me, I canât find much reason to keep Wave if I am de-Googling my life right nowâitâs one service too many, and I am increasingly Google-sceptic these days. I also donât like the fact that a brand-new email account at googlewave.com has been set up for me without my consent (this probably accounts for the appearance of âstrangersâ in peopleâs Google Wave accounts).
Today, Google announced that s. 11.1 would change insofar as its terms and conditions for Wave are concerned. It now reads, just for this service (and does not appear on the site-wide terms and conditions linked from your Google account settings, and to date, there is no separate set of terms governing Wave):
Google does not claim any ownership in any of the content, including any text, data, information, images, photographs, music, sound, video, or other material, that you upload, transmit or store in your Google Wave account. You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold to Content which you submit, post or display on or through the Service. By submitting, posting or displaying the Content, you give Google a worldwide, royalty-free and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through the Service for the sole purpose of enabling Google to provide you with the Service in accordance with its Privacy Policy.
Therefore, I wrote to Googleâs Privacy Policy people saying I disagreed with the above change, and would they please cancel my Wave account?
You can find a link to the Privacy Policy here. Thereâs a further link from there to a form which goes to the Privacy Mattersâ department.
I concluded the email with this paragraph:
Please be advised that I do not accept this change to our agreement insofar as my Google Wave usage is concerned, and request that my Google Wave account be terminated. However, please retain my other Google products until further notice.
You never know, it might work. Itâs the only area where there still seems to be a form thatâs read by human beings at Google.
I take no responsibility for othersâ use of this informationâitâs provided simply as a chronicle of what Iâm trying. I would rather be Wave-free immediately than wait the nine months that Google claims a cancellation would take. (Thatâs right: officially, if you want to leave Wave, you have to be inactive for nine months, and then Google might cancel your account. No word on whether you also lose your googlewave.com email account.) I had hoped it could be done in nine seconds by surfing to a page, clicking âCancelâ and having some processing time.
In related news, you now need three entries in your Google profile in order to be listed in search results. This is an increase of one: over the weekend, you only required two.
PS.: A month later, I can report that the legal route does not work.âJY
Iâve heard it all before. In the 1980s, the New Zealand Government promised that, with the introduction of Goods and Servicesâ Tax (GST), people would be better off, because it would mean more money in our pockets.
With the proposal to hike GST to 15 per cent under the current government, Prime Minister John Key is singing a similar tune: that somehow, this will be better for us, offset by a reduction in income tax.
Itâs the same tune that was sung 25 years ago by another technocratic government, clueless on actually how to grow the economy without stealing from the general public.
Economies are grown through innovation and creating circumstances that allow that to happen, which was what the National Party promised with its broadband strategy. Weâve since heard less about that and more about putting some cycle tracks through the country for touristsâall short-term projects from people who have never had to start a long-term business in their lives.
Unemployment is now up to 7¡3 per cent. Before you say itâs not that bad compared with overseas, itâs still pretty terrible. Itâs why this has been the core of a lot of my mayoral campaign messages: we need to get unemployment down. How? By creating the environment through which innovation can be fostered.
In Wellington, that means building on the creative and technological clusters people have been creating. What this city should have in the next three years is a mayor and council that support thisâbecause it is in the national interest.
When Dr Alan Bollard, Governor of the Reserve Bank, said we should not bother trying to match Australiaâs standard of living by 2025 because we lacked the natural resources, I was shocked at what I would call a defeatist attitudeâone that the PM seems to share with trying to take from everyday New Zealanders.
I hope that Dr Bollard can inform me of the context, as I was out of the country when he made his statement on television.
But I will say that we already are among the most innovative people in the world, both out of our natural creativity and out of necessity.
We also know that economies are built on industry clustersâsomething that already exists in Wellington and needs just enough encouragement from a supportive mayor and council.
We also know that in the 21st century, trying to grow an economy based around primary products and natural resources is an outmoded idea. They are important, of course, and New Zealand will always need a vibrant primary sector, but the real growth is in intellectual capitalâsomething which people in national politics seem to lack.
What we donât have are enough people seeking public office who can see this. People who want to grow the economy. People who believe enough in the intelligence and innovation of New Zealanders.
Well, I believe in us, and I believe in our potential. I also donât believe in robbing everyday New Zealanders of their hard-earned cash.
While some ratesâ increases are already planned by this current administration, let us try to minimize future increases by creating real businesses for Wellington, and for this city.
Letâs also show the defeatists that they are yesterdayâs men. We know better, and we can do better.
I was surprised to learn that Toyota still has not issued a worldwide recall of its troublesome Prius NHW30 model, even though one had gone out in New Zealand.
In laymanâs terms, the brakes allegedly donât work when you want them to. In more complex terms, the software has trouble distinguishing between different types of braking, and drivers may experience a delay in âpedal feelâ.
I was always a bit sceptical about the recalls over the unintended acceleration, given that the last time I heard those words, they were in relation to a falsified report from CBSâs 60 Minutes, a show known to me for making up stories (Killian memoranda, anyone?). Hearing them again, I thought it was just another excuse for the clumsy driving of a few individuals who couldnât figure out where the accelerator was (which was what happened with Audi in the US). But it seems this matter has been around for a long time, and recalls were being done even last year.
But the Prius matter, something that has not come under a global recall, appears more serious than carpets getting in the way, which is the problem behind the unintended acceleration complaints. AFP reports:
The Transport Ministry has received some 80 complaints in February about malfunctions in the brake system of the latest model of the flagship Prius, the Tokyo Shimbun reported without quoting sources.
Five of them were actual crashes in which the drivers claimed the brakes did not work properly, the daily said, adding that the ministry would urge the company to launch an investigation.
It was not possible to immediately confirm the report.
Already Toyota has been berated by top management for going too far from its core principles by its honorary chairman, Shoichiro Toyoda. The company had been trying to sell big cars in China during the financial crisis, and spent a good part of the 2000s developing large pick-up trucks for the US market. Bloomberg reported last June that a meeting was called:
Shoichiro scolded the president [Katsuaki Watanabe] for being so anxious to boost sales and profits that heâd let Toyota emulate now bankrupt General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC. Toyota had become addicted to big, expensive cars and trucks and had forgotten the customersâ need to save money, Shoichiro said, according to the personâs account.
In other words, Toyotaâs culture has been suffering, and we all know what happens when salesâ volume and profit are pursued at the expense of quality or engineering. (Ask Mercedes-Benz.)
Toyota may be an example where too many niches were created, simply to get consumers in the showroomsâand now thatâs coming to bite it on the rear end. Having too many niches has one immediate drawback: consumers no longer understand the structure of the range. Is the small car the iQ, Ist, Vitz, Porte, Belta or Passo? Do I move from that to a Corolla, Auris, Blade, Corolla Rumion, Probox, Raum, RAV4 or wotsis?
The mistakes are understandable in some ways. Toyota had to create more new models as attention spans shortened. While a car might be able to be presented as ânewâ for two years in the Japanese market 10 years ago, consumers expect something else within half a year. To fund this appetite, the company looked for ways to maximize profits in every marketâwith the US one fuelled by bigger and bigger vehicles. It had to take costs out of cars, especially with electronics (by combining as many functions on to one system as possible) and architectureâand it may be these areas where the Prius suffered.
But no company can really afford to pursue too many nichesâMazda overextended itself in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as did Nissan in the early 1990sâwhen times are tough. Toyota should have forecast a downturn, as many business experts did. The question that the company needs to ask itself is: what made it so blind in the 2000s?
Even ignoring the idea of unintended acceleration for now, Toyota ends the lunar year on a low. It will always have its diehard followersâthere are many models not affected by these issuesâbut the company must refocus its brand for the New Year toward its traditional principles. There is every sign the company knows that, with Akio Toyoda, the founderâs grandson, now at the helm, and doing spot checks down on the production floor. (Iâd rather Toyota have someone like that than a âcelebrity CEOâ who gives good press. The era of the celebrity boss is over for now.) It is simply a pity that the company did not get on to its mounting problemsâthere are claims that unintended acceleration reports began surfacing with Toyotaâs Lexus ES model as early as 2004âsooner.
Few buy a Toyota because the cars make oneâs heart beat faster. They are a default choice for many people who want the simplest conveyance from A to B. Akioâs job has been reminding his own team of that, and reinstituting the âToyota Wayâ and kaizen, terms that many of us who went to business school during a certain era recall.
Blogger has announced that it will cease supporting its FTP publishing service, which means the shifting of this blog to Wordpress was well timed. It seems I would have had to shift in any caseâthe fact that this happened just over a month ago was fortunate.
I received an email about this for the first time from Rick Klau, the gentleman who helped Vincent Wright and I restore his Social Media Consortium blog, today. I was surprised to learn from Rick that âonly .5% of active blogs are published via FTPâ and âOn top of this, critical infrastructure that our FTP support relies on at Google will soon become unavailableâ.
After personal experience, I can say Rick is one of the good guys at Google, and I have no doubts about what he says. It highlights that Google wants to host as much of our data as possible, which, as readers of this blog have seen over the last year, is a dangerous proposition. If Blogger decides to pull your blog, then good luck getting it restored: you wonât have ready access to your data.
In fact, if this blog was not self-hosted, I would have faced far greater concerns with my shift to Wordpress; and the fact that Vincentâs was hosted at Google almost saw to its total demise, if it had not been for Rickâs intervention.
With hindsight, if it were not for the issues with the Social Media Consortium, my offer to help, and the subsequent stonewalling I received on the support forums, I might never have made the move when I did. Funny how things work out in the long run.
If you pop down to the comments at an earlier post, youâll find that a chap called Mark was very upset I used a thumbnail (100 pixels wide, 67 high) of one of his photos. In fact, Iâve done exactly the same in this post with another gentlemanâs work (albeit this one is under Creative Commons), so you can get an idea of what happened. Mark is well within his legal rights to complain, though we thought it was rather funny and slightly hypocritical that he spent all that time investigating me and my company when he could have written a polite message.
But this post isnât about how short his fuse is or how he uses his time. I have written to people who have taken my work before, too, and have been far more effective, but theyâre cases of entire duplication (a new copy on their server, no acknowledgement and no links back). I responded to him both privately and publicly, explaining that he was credited (though it could have been done better), and the thumbnail was hosted on and linked back to his Flickr account. I take with the non-response that he has conceded my point, but how do others feel in 2010 about thumbnail linking?
The law basically says that even thumbnail linking is illegal. It is technically a copyright infringement in most jurisdictions (the claim of âtheftâ is wrong) although one could easily use fair use as a defence. Mark, as any photographer, also has a moral right over his work over which he can determine how it is to be used.
As I explained to him, my approach is to look at how I would feel (and Iâm OK with a linked thumbnail, even without credit), and since his is the only complaint of this kind in four years of this blog, Iâm going to have to take his position as a minority opinion in the days of Google Images and the like, which do even less with acknowledgement.
But it raises a fascinating question. Itâs probably not as major as the controversy over Google Books, and it has been covered elsewhere before, but evidently itâs an ongoing issue.
How do people feel about thumbnail linking? Internally we are fine with it, but we are too small a sample to base a judgement on. Or, for that matter, what about the reproduction (and often uploading) of âfoundâ items on Tumblr, where such behaviour is the norm?
Rick Klauâs action today in restoring Vincentâs Social Media Consortium blog got me putting things into perspective.
We know sites like Blogger and Vox are free, but what happens when they fail? Vox, the Six Apart blogging service, had been where I had put my personal postsâas well as a bunch of private ones inaccessible to the general publicâfor three years. I built up good friendships there, before social networking became everyday.
Yet when that service failed, I went from Vox evangelist to someone who became acutely aware of the siteâs failings. Those who dissed Vox months before I did, and whose complaints I thought little of, suddenly seemed to be visionaries.
I donât think things were handled brilliantly. While I was still there and keeping up my rate of complaints about their service being dodgy, I got replies. The minute I left, that was it.
âPhew, we donât have to talk to that nut again.â
All the claims about wanting to get to the bottom of the problem suddenly seemed insincere. And itâs worth noting that the bug I experiencedâwhere a compose screen would take between 15 minutes and 48 hours to loadâis still present.
They had lost quite a few users, as I had noted, and itâs obviously something deep within their code.
The damage had been done.
Meanwhile, Google hasnât exactly helped, either. While Vox had me pursuing its problems for six weeks, Google was damaging its brand for six months.
When Vincentâs blog was first blocked in July, the company promised two-day reviews. These promises were all broken. Iâm sure Vincent and I, and many other bloggers who contributed to the Social Media Consortium, would have loved to have known why. As it turned out, the blogâs reviewers agreed with the computerâs decision to render the blog inaccessible, and then to delete it altogether.
By the time I got to the Google support forums to argue the case in November, there were more broken promisesâas well as downright obstruction by someone who probably gets his kicks from it.
It got me wondering: people who do things in Googleâs name arenât very intelligent, if they canât grasp some of the basics of their role.
They were also not particularly courteous or understanding. As the frustration grew, things in my world got un-Googled. My Firefox default search engines became Cuil or Bing. I shifted my blogs away, including this one, or simply stopped blogging at Blogger. (The Medinge Groupâs press room went to Wordpress late last year.) While once upon a time I would recommend Vox, Blogger and Wordpress to people depending on their blogging needs, I would only now say, âWordpressâ.
I never was sold on Gmailâand I notice friends are beginning to have problems with that service, including being locked out. People using Gmail to commit fraud and use Lucireâs name were allowed to continue to do so, even after we reported them. Even before this incident, but within the same calendar year, I discovered that Adsense was a load of rubbish.
All this began making me think: Google has jumped the shark.
If someone like Googleâs Rick Klauâwho, if you read his blog, is an incredibly intelligent guy, not to mention an incredibly courteous oneâhad known of our case earlier, Iâm sure we wouldnât have allowed the Google brand to become so tarnished in our minds.
Rick fixed things in 24 hours and saved the day as far as the Social Media Consortium was concerned. Heâs also given himself a lot of good karmaâIâve seen other blogs heâs gone and restored in the last few days. But itâs a couple of days of Google goodness versus six months of its own brand-wrecking, through either bad service done in its name, bad products, or not having much of a human touch.
Given that I was one of the first people to use Google in the late 1990s, and abandon AltaVista, Infoseek and the others in its favour, itâs a disappointing end to the 2000s.
The trust I once might have had for Google has evaporated into the ether. It would be stupid to say that I would never use the companyâs services againâyou can hardly avoid itâbut Iâll be thinking twice about anything new that it introduces.
The internet leadership vacuum is becoming a reality, because I donât see Facebook or Twitter dominating (especially not the former, with its questionable practices). And that means a new company can fill the void in the 2010s. It could even be a New Zealand oneâor, better still, a Wellington one.
Thereâs enough world-class thinking here which can be used as a base. And, if elected this year as Wellingtonâs mayor, Iâd like to build on that and see if we can create an online world-beater.
I know of a couple of Kiwi ventures already that have world-beating capabilities, currently seeking capital. The ânext Googleâ might be among them, if we can make sure that they can grow the way they should.
I wanted to add a comment to the Reuter post from Felix Salmon (see previous blog post), and, as always, I read the small print.
The Thomson Reuters terms and conditions have this, inter alia:
If you have agreed to such contact, the Reuters Group may contact you about those of its other services to which you do not subscribe but which may interest you. We may for example invite you to join a free trial of a service. Sometimes we may invite you to client entertainment and similar events. Such contact may be by post, fax, email, instant message and (in certain limited circumstances) by telephone from time to time. You have a right to ask us at any time not to contact you by way of direct marketing.
I scrolled to the bottom of the page, where it instructed us to email esupport.global@reuters.com if there were any further queries about the terms and the privacy policy.
Just to be on the safe side, I asked:
Does the act of signing up constitute an agreement for this âcontactâ? (From my point of view, it doesn’t, but I’d like to hear it from you so we can have some consensus.)
I received this reply:
Thank you for your email.
For efficient service, please re-submit your query using the âContact Usâ form available at the following link:
The text is a bit small in the screen shot, but it reads:
We have detected that you are using a browser that is not fully supported by the Reuters Account Administration system. At present full functionality for registration and account management is only offered to users of the following browsers:
:: Microsoft Internet Explorer versions 5.01, 5.5 and 6.0
Please note that Beta versions of browsers are not supported.
If you are already using Internet Explorer, you may still need to download the Internet Explorer High Encryption pack. To upgrade or install Internet Explorer, please click on the the button below to visit the Microsoft website for further assistance.
Oh, nuts. Anyone have the Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 installation files? (That was a rhetorical question.)
Looks like I wonât be commenting at Reuter any time soon.
For those trying to leave 
