Two years on, the mainstream media wake up over BYD’s ethics

I said it in 2009, and apparently, so did a diplomat whose note was leaked via Wikileaks: BYD might not stand scrutiny in a non-Chinese court over its vehicles.    When I raised it, a few BYD fans (agents?) came commenting, trying to pick holes in my post, though they were unable to deny that […]

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Not all American hosting companies get it right

While there was a British company that took months to respond to the equivalent of a DMCA complaint (under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act), generally American firms are very on the ball.    There are exceptions. I won’t name this outfit but the weekend’s responses were laughable. March 21: Pirate puts up a copy […]

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My holiday as a car anorak

Since New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day are about the only two days I actually take off, I spent some time adding entries on Autocade, a site that doesn’t seem like “work” to me. It’s my hobby.    The randomizer, which my friend Peter Jobes installed for me on the site’s home page, came […]

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Giving a toss about web hosting: Americans 2, Brits 0

© Generally, I turn a blind eye to people who use thumbnails of our work or take an excerpt from an article and link the rest to us. Pity, then, that so many of these sites are splogs, but at least they stop short of outright piracy.    It’s when someone takes an entire article, […]

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TPPA could turn the clock back

During the campaign trail, people tended to ask me if I was left or right. While I cheekily said, ‘Forward,’ many a time (and had at least one imitator), there’s something to be said for abandoning what are, effectively, nineteenth-century constructs.    And unless you are DI Alex Drake in Ashes to Ashes, you need […]

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It pays to read the terms and conditions

Hopefully we can get an answer on this from Doubleclick. I fed the following in to its publisher form tonight: Hello there: we currently deal with Gorilla Nation Media, an ad network that calls Doubleclick code … While we can control the ads that we get via GNM—as we can equally do with Burst Media—we […]

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The ‘Wellywood’ sign: people power gets things done

That was a very interesting 30 hours. I found out about the ‘Wellywood’ sign yesterday afternoon, through Twitter, and Tweeted to say I hated it. Little did I know then that there was a huge Facebook group—6,000 strong at the time of writing—where Wellingtonians were making their voices known.    And when I got there […]

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A way to delete your Google Wave account?

For those trying to leave Google Wave—and who have had no satisfaction whatsoever from the Google forums (what a surprise)—there might be one way.    There are quite a few reasons people want to leave Wave. One netizen had this concern: ‘It appears I have been linked to former associates who I have kept in […]

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If Google Images does it, is it legal?

If you pop down to the comments at an earlier post, you’ll 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, I’ve done exactly the same in this post with another gentleman’s work (albeit this one is under Creative […]

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