Marketing teams at both newspapers discovered a new super-segment of the declining newspaper market they have informally dubbed ‘the new authoritarian’. According to one circulation manager, this is a reader who “wants to find out what everybody is doing, and stop them doing it”

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Attending the RSA conference, Maggie reports on the race to offer ‘cloud computing’ services:

ensuring security is not a “Johnny come lately” idea and that the clock was ticking for the industry to grasp the nettle before it was too late.

And Maggie continues:

While the drive to the cloud seems like a runaway train every business must hitch a ride on, the security concerns are clearly hampering it travelling in the fast lane.

So basically, cloud computing is a runaway train that’s prevented from running where it should be: in the fast lane of the motorway. Yes, you could say Maggie’s prose is an unexploded bomb with its volume turned up to 11.

Mixed metaphors have been an inspiration to us before. Older Reg readers will remember that for a while, the telecoms regulator (as then was) OFTEL was referred to as the “winged watchdog”.

According to folklore, Tim Richardson was inspired by an article at ZDNet now lost in time, which described how BT was “sheltering under the wings of the telecoms watchdog”.

Maybe there’s something in the water, but the author of that pileup later joined BBC Online.

So join us in embracing the runaway, high speed nettle of Cloud Computing.

A T-shirt goes to the most elaborately contrived metaphor pileup in the best, breathless BBC Online style.

Read more at The Register

…Read more at The Register

The rest of the world, however, completely ignores it. But with the journalists’ attention fixed firmly on each others’ navels, they don’t seem to realise what a fringe activity Twitter is. Now we can quantify this a little.

A much-trumpeted charity event called “Twestival” (from the people who brought you blooks, perhaps) received breathless coverage worth hundreds of thousands of pounds this week. 175 cities around the world took part. And it’s raised just a measly $4,180 from the Twestival.fm pledge.

Whether it reaches the goal of $1m in a month remains to be seen. According to one Twitterer at the Guardian, Twestival is “a global charity event that has become the Live Aid of the tech world.”

Um, let’s hope not, since $4,000 isn’t going to save many lives.

As everyone knows, Twitter is a bit of a charity-case itself: both technically and financially, it’s a lost cause. That’s plain to everybody, it seems, except the journalists who use it and who can’t stop Twittering about Twitter.

They’ve formed a perfect cybernetic feedback loop, or “information cascade”, to give it the current fashionable name. So while there are interesting stories to be written about the phenomenon, you’re unlikely to see one from the current users … or the BBC.

Some sort of mass intervention is probably required to save the poor hacks from this situation, but given the er, … quality of talent there, it’s probably not worth the trouble. ®

Incoming! Outraged yuppies:

‘I was offering a professional courtesy before I write my column on Tuesday tearing you and the Reg new one, and you’ve responded by calling me an idiot. Courtesy ends.’

Not only was the vast body of evidence of the Clanger civilisation never formally acknowledged by NASA, but neither was a great deal of natural lunar vegetation (sentient music trees) and unique geographical features (soup wells).

Another more plausible theory is that cock-up, rather than conspiracy, is to blame for the public’s lack of awareness of this lunar civilisation. The Clangers first aired on British television four months after the Apollo 11 moon landing, and the final part of the series was broadcast two months before the final lunar lander returned to earth. Admittedly, NASA’s technology was primitive at the time – certainly more primitive than the Clangers’ own, which was capable of propelling a spaceship using only musical notes – but couldn’t NASA’s finest even spot the dustbin lids?

British TV licensing company Coolabi was widely reported today to have acquired the rights to the documentary series. When El Reg rang to enquire if the series would ever be broadcast again, a spokesperson told us the stories were premature, as the deal wouldn’t be finalised for another month.

The truth must eventually come out.

Under Federal racketeering laws, introduced in 1970 to counter organised crime, “any property, real or personal, which represents or is traceable to the gross proceeds obtained, directly or indirectly,” can be forfeited from indictment for specific criminal activity.

So, what’s the DoJ doing grabbing IP? Well, the DoJ’s Thomas O’Brien says it’s because the gang initially trademarked the name Mongols and the distinctive design as part of their patch. In a statement, he explained:

“We have filed papers seeking a court order that will prevent gang members from using or displaying the name ‘Mongols.’ If the court grants our request for this order, then if any law enforcement officer sees a Mongol wearing his patch, he will be authorized to stop that gang member and literally take the jacket right off his back.”

But not so fast.

Trademark law requires the owner to assert authority by continuous lawful use of the design. The Department of Justice must now fulfill this obligation. It could do so, for example, selling mugs or T-shirts with the Mongols MC logo. Or perhaps even incorporating it into its own “patch”.

So today the Department of Justice’s seal looks like this:

But it may need to look like this:

Or even this:

“The Internet is becoming more and more widespread and will increasingly represent a scientific random sample of the population”
– Joi Ito

“Igor, to the machines – we have a sample”

One thing seems to have been forgotten following AOL’s careless, but quite magnificent data dump of the internet’s “hive mind” at play this week.

AOL’s assiduous documentation of the private thoughts of over 600,000 web searchers has certainly added some much needed sparkle to a public internet that of late, has been in dire need of a tonic. Now, internet users’ most private thoughts are revealed, in all their banality and creepiness, and we must count ourselves fortunate.

“AOL’s data sketch sometimes scary picture of personalities searching Net,” was the headline USA Today newspaper chose, but this barely conveyed the voyeuristic frisson, or glee we felt as the AOL database made its way across the net.

Nothing in recent months has made the net come alive quite like these queries, and it’s not hard to see why. Recently, the net has been drowning in banality. Billions of identical blogs – some human generated, some machine generated – spring up every day, with identical opinions to match the identical templates each blog hoster seems to provide. This outpouring of new recorded writing has been trumpeted as a new era in human expression. But the truth is, in practice, the consequence of all this is that it’s getting increasingly difficult to tell which is which. Human, or machine?

But let’s focus on an aspect lost in the “scandal”. The thing that everyone has overlooked is that this wasn’t an accidental or negligent data loss by AOL. The search query data was sincerely released in the name of science.

Boffins at AOL Labs published the data for boffins at similar “labs” to peruse.

That’s strange enough in itself, and it should make you yearn for white-coated frontiersmen of yore. Things have changed a bit since then and now.

Behold: the Mighty Atom
Fifty years ago, scientists did things like, oh… split the atom, and deduce the shape of the DNA double helix. Today, working off the hottest and freshest evidence available, scientists proclaim breakthroughs such as “People get more drunk at weekends”.

Once upon a time scientists set out to describe the unknown, and make it understood in
mechanical terms. But now, like a group of well meaning, but slightly simple lifelong in-patients making their first tentative steps into the real world, they venture out to find what’s on their doorsteps.

Now, if science is to have any useful purpose in society, it’s in describing the unknown, not the bleeding obvious. No wonder it has gotten such a bad name recently.

How much easier it would have been, we suggest, if internet companies had from the outset sought what they would eventually publish anyway: the boring and creepy things that people type into their computers.

If good jokes can tell us truths that are otherwise unmentionable, then perhaps satire can offer us a glimpse of the future that futurologists dare not mention.

In fact, it just has.

AOL’s privacy fiasco was foretold by a splendid prank some Register readers will recall from a few years ago, which looks even better this week than it did at the time.

Brian Del Vecchio created a spoof site called AIMSearch, announcing it with the following:

“In November of 2001 AOL Time Warner, responding to a subpoena from Attorney General John Ashcroft, made available to the Justice Department a complete archive of all private conversations held over AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). Through the power of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), Google was able to obtain a copy of this entire logfile, totaling over 2 terabytes of conversations previously thought to be private.”

Then came the kicker:

“This unique resource provides insight into the minds of potential anti-American terrorists, cheating spouses, and countless computer neophytes.”

And so we have it. Within a fortnight, Google had objected to the misuse of its trademark, and the prank ceased.

But how much easier it would have been, for this new generation of “scientific” sociologists, who thanks to data sets like AOL’s query database claim to know so much more than we do about ourselves, and who place so much value on the internet’s “hive mind”, (cf. technology utopian Joi Ito) if it had been clear at the time who was speaking to whom.

The author of the prank, Del Vecchio told us, today -

“Back in 2002, just a few months after 9/11, we wondered how people would react if AOL were to cave to demands from the government and massively betray user privacy. We wanted them to feel that betrayal like a kick in the gut, even if just for a brief second,” he wrote.

“Four years later, there is still a huge gap between the privacy that users imagine they have, and the laxity with which service providers like AOL guard that privacy. I think users like 711391 may be feeling that kick in the gut right now.”

Indeed. We all are.

On the other hand, user 711391 (“christian women caught in extramarital affairs”) really needs help.

And spare a thought for the fellow who typed in “how to murder your wife” dozens and dozens of times. Surely, by now, he’ll be feeling some disappointment that the much vaunted internet, this fabled electronic communications medium, hasn’t yet conjured forth an elite squad of Ninja Assassins to finish her off.

People will always type dark and dirty thoughts into computers – we guess that’s why public, open computer networks were invented, as a kind of public sinkhole. But to turn these private writings into a basis for a new sociology seems to be a little presumptive.

In fact, taking anything that’s typed into the public sinkhole seriously ought to worry us. The “murder my wife” chap is a staple of Northern folklore – he may well one day die a peaceful death having done nothing more harmful than forget to feed his cat. Meanwhile, there are law enforcement agencies, who following the same scientific principles of guesswork and presumption as the “AOL scientists”, who may be keen to argue otherwise.

So if science is to devote itself to this collection of data, may we suggest it be careful. Or preferably, find more pressing issues with which to concern itself.

Scientists have been able to identify human DNA for over 40 years. And here at The Register, we have access to our own stock of Martian DNA – courtesy, of course, of cult commentator and philosopher amanfromMars.

The startling discovery that DNA may have leaped across planetary boundaries comes courtesy of literary agent John Brockman.

Brockman runs an online groupthink “salon”, called Edge.org, where his indentured science authors and a select band of ideologically-correct journalists are invited to congratulate each other on their insight. (Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of Edge before – it’s only ever mentioned by Blokes who are already in it, or Blokes who would sell their mothers to get in.)

But it’s here, at Edge, that Brockman may have unearthed the greatest scoop of his lifetime; for here at least, one Martian-human hybrid walks amongst us.

New Year’s Day found a curious declaration credited to one “Kevin Kelly” – editor in chief of WiReD magazine.

“The success of the Wikipedia (sic) keeps surpassing my expectations. Despite the flaws of human nature, it keeps getting better,” he writes.

Of course, that’s an easy mistake to make… if you’ve just arrived from another planet. Here’s a more accurate measure of success, from earth-bound observers SomethingAwful.

Yet the alien visitor must be impressed by the high ethical standards exhibited by the project, its fair-mindedness, tolerance and generosity, and of course, its uniquely bottom-up democratic nature, for he is mightily impressed. So much so, that he sees in it a new way of organising society:

“The reality of a working Wikipedia has made a type of communitarian socialism not only thinkable, but desirable… I hate to say it but there is a new type of communism or socialism loose in the world.”

Alarm bells really ought to be clanging by this point. The Martian-Martian hybrid is using terms he has apparently heard, but doesn’t really understand – and can’t relate to the world around him.

The next statement can be construed as a promise that the hybrid DNA is here to stay:

“It may take several decades for this shifting world perspective to show its full colours …

Finally, here’s the clincher:

“I am convinced that the full impact of the Wikipedia is still subterranean, and that its mind-changing power is working subconsciously on the global millennial generation, providing them with an existence proof of a beneficial hive mind, and an appreciation for believing in the impossible.”

Pure Martian.