Digitalia Alasdair’s workblog and linkdump

Massive collection of random-thing generators, handy set of tools.

This is kinda saddening. Women beats all the men in the male dominated sport, press indifferent. OK, so it's bowling, and that's hardly a sport that gets lots of coverage. But still: Woman beats men at the ultimate man-sport, it being the one normally done with beer and crisps and so on. Maybe it should get a lot of sports coverage, but I would have though it would have got lots of human interest/chat-show coverage. Sad, like I say.

I've got a system prefs thing set up to do this, but it's unrelaible, and I wonder if this would work better…

Trying to think if there's anything I can say other than "wow". Give it a handful of years, and this will be available in real time, too.

The IFPI have sent a bunch of copyright infringement notices, and Google have killed a bunch of music blogs. Here's the thing: at least some of the blogs that have been taken down are not infringing. Even absent arguments like fair use, they actually had permission to post the MP3s. I particularly like Cory Doctorow's comment on this one: "IFPI will argue that it was just trying to help artists, that everyone makes mistakes, that copyright is complicated. But these are exactly the same arguments that the musicbloggers whose sites were vanished by IFPI's abusive lawyering would have made, if they'd been given a chance." We desperately need to stop the culture that an infringement notice constitutes legal proof that infringement is taking place – we need ISPs and bodies like Google to grow a spine and stop being evil. And if you think this is edge case stuff, I should point out that something like this happened to a friend of mine in the last month. It'll happen to you, too, just wait.

Alinea and The French Laundry are both only a step behind El Bulli as places I really want to go and eat, and it's lovely to see Achatz paying tribute to Adria.

The tech details will be lost on most of you, but in brief: if an attacker can get your card cloned, then they can also pretend to know your PIN – fraudulent transactions they make will be reported to the bank as "Verified by PIN". This is bad, because if a transaction is reported as "Verfiied by PIN" then as far as the bank is concerned it's legit, and not disputable. Chip and PIN is, and always was, design to protect the banks, and not the consumers. Just y'know, saying. You might want to write angry letters to your banks, and suchlike.

Well, what did you expect when you all voted for the fuck? Someone who might be good for public services in London? I know Ken was a weasel too, but he was at least London's weasel, with the interests in London in his weaselly little heart (possibly some distance behind his own interests, but they were *there*), and every time I read a story about Boris, my blood pressure spikes something dreadful.

This, I feel rather neatly sums up some key differences between the UK and the US. Just occasionally, I'm happy to live in the country I do.

And this is why google buzz is poorly implemented, badly designed, and generally a massive fuck you to all google's users. I'm still trying to work out how to switch it off completely.

Not sure if this is available to people in the UK yet, but if and when it is, this is could make life a lot easier.

Interesting set of metrics for judging the game-ness of something.