Oblomovka

2003-03-11»

When I first came to Silicon Valley, I joked to people in back in the UK that I wanted to be the Kate Adie of the upcoming dotcom collapse. It was a nice funny shorthand to explain less what I was doing, and more what I thought would happen to the Valley in the next few years. Adie is famously the reporter who the BBC used to send into the midst of any major disaster, all flack-jacket and pearls, from the Iranian embassy siege to Lockerbie to Tiananmen square. She's more than an icon of war reporting in the UK. She's the fifth horsemen of the apocalypse. When Kate turns up, you know you're in trouble.

So when she starts talking about a senior officer in the Pentagon telling he that all TV uplinks from journalists will be fired upon, and that the American forces are asking the press who go with them whether "they have feelings against the war" before they let them tag along, and that she is "enormously pessimistic of the chance of a decent on-the-spot reporting, as the war occurs.", I sat up and listened.

Adie says "You will get it later." I hope so. I hope someone watches it.

(from robin @ ambiguous)

2003-03-09»

I promise I'll get to more interesting topics than this old sore at some point, but it's only Monday, and I think it counts as an update to the previous entries.

The story so far: the RSPCA encouraged people to send cut and paste faxes through faxyourmp.com, the volunteer service I'm part of. We specifically ask people not to do this, but they did it anyway, in such numbers that it broke our service. We wrote them an angry letter, and they wrote one back, formally apologising.

I say "formally" here in its "not exactly racked with shame" sense. They said they wouldn't do it again, and stuck in a little lecture about how we really should have legal terms and conditions because what's a big organisation to do? Mail us and ask before you shot your big gallumphing campaign emails out was my potential snappy comeback. But we kept schtum. True to our word, we wanted them to say they were sorry and promise not to do it again. And they did.

(I may be misrepresenting the tone of their mail, incidentally, but you'll never know, because they also stuck a "Private & Confidential" note at the top of it. I imagine the enemies of the Royal Society For The Prevention of Cruelty to Animals have their spies everywhere.)

Cut to this Friday. I get mail at NTK, pointing me to this posting on news.admin.net-abuse.sightings. It's a sample of a suspected spam mail, advertising another RSPCA campaign - one against fireworks.

The guy who received it says: "Address obtained by harvesting. No prior relationship. No address confirmation is ever sent from this address." A couple of other people have since complained about the same mail.

Perhaps they have all forgotten that they opted-in to receive RSPCA campaign updates? Well, one is in Texas, and the other is in North Virginia, so that seems unlikely.

There's more. The mailouts have links to Unsubscribe page that doesn't work.They get their click via a site registered in Guatemala. The mailing company itself appears to be based in Boca Raton, Florida. One spam was mailed via an NTL dialup machine; another was sent from a server in Argentina. No offence to Boca Raton et al, but I do not think this is a very above-board double opt-in solicited mailout . This is bargain-basement, tear up the Data Protection Act, fake-opt-out five million email addresses on one CD, save on ink toner, spam.

But what has this to do with us? Check out what the spammed message asks people to do:

...

We are asking you please, to make the effort to write a letter or send an online fax your MP asking them to support the bill. Just click here here to find out who your MP is and follow the simple instructions to send them a fax.

It will only take a few minutes of your time.

If you click there now, you'll be relayed (via Chicago, as it happens) to the RSPCA's Fireworks site. Currently, and peculiarly, there's barely a mention of faxing your MP, let alone simple instructions.

Now. I know there used to be simple instructions, because I spent a few minutes of my time going through our FaxYourMP referer log, and found the page where they originally told their spammed "customers" how to use our system.

This mailing, as far as I can see from the FYMP logs, was going out at around the same time as we were bitching to the RSPCA about their "Ban Hunting" campaign. They never mentioned it or apologised. And they didn't even bother to change the wording of the spam - which is still being sent, as recently as March 8th - after they finally removed our connection to it.

Sigh.

What do we do now? Well, we've done one thing - we've banned links to FYMP from the RSPCA's site. Their link to us on their Ban Hunting site no longer works. There's no way we want to be associated with anyone's lamebrained, borderline illegal, sordid little spamfest. Banning the RSPCA is our only way of steering very clear of this rogue charity's behaviour until they clean up.

But there's something else I want to pin down here. One of the reasons we forgave the RSPCA initially was because, in our communications with its managers, they came across as a bit misguided about how the Net works. They never relied on this defence - in fact, quite the contrary, they took time out to lecture us on how the grown-ups really operate to correct our charming naivety. But in their wording and actions, the newbieness shone through. Newbies make mistakes, even giant quasi-corporate newbies, and that's forgivable. It's hard to find a rule book for the Net, after all.

On the other hand, it's also hard to be ignorant about the dodginess of spam while simultaneously signing up with a company from Boca Raton to do your dirty mailing list work. Somebody in the organisation was Net-savvy enough to set this up, and therefore Net-savvy enough to know that it was a bad, bad thing they did.

I really want to find that person, and ask them what the hell they thought they were doing.

Here's a little discussion quicktopic to talk about this, because I imagine I'm not the only one wanting to vent at this point.

2003-03-06»

My first job was in the early nineties at a small programming magazine called .EXE. I would sit in front of a Osborne-style luggable, squinting into its tiny screen and typing into Borland Sprint. I don't quite remember the set-up, but I keenly recall having the USENET feed from cix scrolling past me on a screen to my left. I'd try and scan it for ideas, but I'd usually end up reading it all. That, and the hundreds of press releases that it was my job to decipher and sort. I had terrible filters: every bit of data from the world passed straight through me, catching slightly on the sides of my brain on the way out. I'd walked into the job from University finals, where I'd crammed three years of study into two months, and I tried to do the same thing in the real world, every day, every hour. From almost scratch, I attempted to learn C++ and bits of Unix, DPMI and Windows programming in about six months.

I burnt out pretty spectacularly. I spent the next few months in my bedroom, lying in bed with a portable TV that looked just like the luggable on my lap, looking to television for answers. When Manhattan Cable was on, my flatmates complained that it was too jerky, too data heavy. "I want to drown in information", I told Paddy, "I want to die watching TV".

I'm a lot better these days: my memory is still shot to hell, but sometime just after Wired UK and just before NTK, the splitting headaches went away; I don't rear in shock and confusion when interrupted me while PgDning through 500K text files. And I've slowly upped my tolerance to horses' doses of data, while still keeping sane. There was a brief period in 1997 I think when I worried I might not ever stop reading mail ever again - that I might spend the rest of my days hammering on Ctrl-M in Eudora, checking mail, checking mail. But that, too, passed.

I sometimes went on holidays; a little context had changed while I was away, but I could readjust. I could keep up with whatever distant horizon it was that I was chasing. I have filters.

I don't know what prompted me to think or write about this - except that I've just kicked up my RSS reader after a long hiatus, and noted how much had changed in the last week or two, to the point where I felt the shock of the new again. And I have this feeling that my life - or the world my life is embedded within - is accelerating again, like a speedboat rearing, like that first job.

I'm not sure it's entirely the birth of Ada that's prompted this. I think we may just be entering one of those periods of great activity, of nodality and tippings, after a prolonged lull. I think the game may be afoot.