Keep political correctness where it belongs — in politics

olitical correctness — like politeness in a sense — is one of those buzz terms that can be invoked to silence opinions we do not wish to hear or at least discourage messengers, marginalising them or leading to self-censorship (through deterrence). Political correctness is an overused term, much like “racism”, “homophobia”, “anti-Semitism”, and so on.

In an ideal world, people should be free to express themselves and those who choose to be insulted by words can shut their ears. One of their “defences” — if it qualifies as such — is that there is incitations in words, but this becomes akin to imposed censorship, where one finds a messages or image too objectionable for the public and thus wants to impose central censorship.

We live in a world where people are not tied to a television set with just 5 channels. People choose to subscribe to one of a plethora of sites or channels or books. There is abundance. Trying to limit ourselves to particular messages based on their “political correctness” is not going to achieve much except add some “allure” to the suppressed messages. People who seek particular types of speech will ultimately find it anyway, especially on the Internet (even if encrypted).

Political Correctness (PC) — like the Personal Computer — is outdated. It is for politicians to know what will attract funding and what may alienate potential voters. But political correctness need not belong on the Web; it’s incompatible with the values of freedom, including freedom of expression. Sadly, however, in a world full of hardcore conservatives, there will always be pressure to impose draconian rules of speech.

INYURL used to be one among few services that shortened long URLs for people (snipurl was another). These services would typically be used only when a URL was exceptionally (and perhaps irregularly) long — to the point of being incompatible with some mail/news readers. The landscape has changed somewhat and nowadays, with people becoming lazy and phone-tied, folks assume that original URLs don’t matter, even though they indicate their source, their date, and perhaps title as well, at least most of the time (if properly designed at CMS level). URLs are not merely barcodes, their visibility contributes a lot toward expectation and even the ability to recover broken URLs in the future (based on their source or title). Now that every John and Jane creates his or her own shortener, there is less incentive to keep those services up in the long run, especially once they drive a lot of ‘legacy’ traffic and do nothing for revenue (mere redirections). As the creator of the World Wide Web put it about a year ago, there is also the danger that authorities of TLDs will sooner or later be misusing their power to censor some popular shorteners and immediately break a whole lot of linkage, upon which much of the Web is based. In a sense, short URLs break the Web, but when there are limitations on the number of characters in services like Twitter, people are pressured to use them, even by default.

Best practice is, avoid URL shorteners unless there is absolutely no way around it. And if you must use a shortener, choose one which you believe is most likely to survive the next 5, 10, or maybe 50 years (very unlikely). Otherwise, the URLs will be as useful as a random string, i.e. disposable garbage. As wary as I am of Google, I recently started using Google’s shortener when no other choice exists (identi.ca/Twitter have length limitations). Being a tracker, it’s one service that Google is unlikely to axe any time soon.

s we have seen here before, when BT messes things up, it messes up royally [1, 2, 3]. Yesterday was another reminder of this. At 9AM, without any warning or notification, the connection went down, apparently affecting entire large areas in Manchester and perhaps Bolton. The helpline which is only ‘manned’ by a recorded message preferred to draw attention to some Yahoo! (E-mail access) problem and there was no estimated time for return of service (for those who may resort to contingencies). The less advertised number through which one can speak to an actual person later contradicted the automated messages, which preferred to pretend the connection problems were over long before these were over (the connection was said to have been resorted at 3PM). The actual person whom I eventually spoke to (based on India) was very kind, but he used the same strategy of emphasising that the phone line is fine (while knowing perfectly well that the problem is the Internet connection, not the landline). It was very hard to actually ‘squeeze out’ information and empty reassurances from the rep I spoke to. Why not be honest and forthcoming? BT was seemingly reluctant to even acknowledge that this was a large-scale failure at its end. Does reputation or the customer come first?

Eventually, 14 hours after the disruption had occurred, the connectivity was suddenly restored, no sooner than 11PM. So en entire day from morning to night was essentially without Internet and with very unreliable estimates of recovery time (if any estimates at all).

Now good, BT, not good…Many people’s job these days depend on the Internet. If you cannot provide an Internet connection for an entire day, then please at least provide reasonable status messages and estimates for restoration of service. If one expects the connection to be down for so long, a dongle or another PC (elsewhere) can be approached and used.

or those who have not heard, the government looks into censorship of the Web as miserable and counter-productive means for suppressing real grievances. The Prime Minister surely learned nothing from Egypt, which had this famous cartoon produced. I decided to do some GIMPing of the original to show the equivalence.

oogle Plus (G+) and Google Profiles look very similar and almost identical. Is Google merging them? It seems possible. It actually goes deeper than this. Google has become a major content network and not just a gateway to information. Not anymore anyway. Will Google use people’s personal data to push ads? Well, it’s already doing this. The transaction is hosting in exchange for changing one’s perception on behalf of advertisers, but the real problem is the proprietary nature of G+).

“As of 07/01/2011,” say a lot of older profile pages, “Groups profiles have been disabled. Your profile information will be available for export from your profile until 11/01/2011. This change will not affect the nicknames you might have chosen for yourself to participate in groups. It will only affect the custom profiles fields, such as your photo, location, and occupation. More details are available here.” The cited page says: “Beginning July 1, 2011, you will not be able to change your Google Groups profiles. You will be able to download the contents of your profile until November 1, 2011, at which time your Google Groups profile will be deleted.” Just deleted, eh? Unless Google Groups is shutting down, it seems possible that a migration route to G+ might be offered with an ultimatum of sorts.

The date is very close to that of G+. Might it be the reason for change? Groups profiles were ripe to abuse by trolls who abuse the scoring system (Google allows the same user vote an infinite number of times and thus game the system). The key question is, will Google try to convert many users to people with a G+ account, without going through conventional routes? Other than privacy invasion, there is not much to be gained from such networks. The way Google treats personal information matters because Google is… well, Google.

was never a major user of Skype. Heck, I only started using it on occasions around 2008, after I had repeatedly rejected invitations to join it. The reasons were multiple, e.g.:

• It was non-standard (the protocols)
• It was proprietary (it still is, but they openwash it for PR purposes)
• It sucked on GNU/Linux
• (Questionable: It offered no real privacy through decentralisation)

Now I have a fourth reason to abandon it altogether and move back to SIP, which sadly enough not many people are using as network effect matters. Microsoft has a very poor track record when it comes to privacy, retaining GNU/Linux support when acquiring software, and generally speaking, Microsoft is a convicted monopolist which continues to engage in crimes such as racketeering, bribery, and extreme market distortion.

Thank you, Skype. It was good while it lasted. And thank you, Microsoft, for giving me a reason to abandon this piece of malicious software and also encourage others to do the same, obviously to come over to SIP. Today I had a half-hour conversation over SIP (the codec is as good if not better than Skype’s). I also have a physical SIP phone connected to my hub. The future is SIP. Skype is going down the same path as Hotmail.

Being a Bastards Telecom customer means a lot of things, some of which include:

• Waking up every morning for two weeks only to test a phone line
• Being told by a Bastards Telecom agent that it’s OK if the line is not working, it’s just part of how it’s supposed to work (it’s not, they made an error and then arrogantly disregarded my advice)
• Taking two complete days off work to wait by the intercom from 7AM to 6PM, thinking that perhaps within a minute the delivery person will arrive (but in vain, surely)
• Waiting on line (in a queue) for one hour to reach an actual person. This is not like holding the phone for one hour knowing that after one hour someone will answer it. This is a case of a one-hour anticipation for answer on the other line (you don’t want to miss an actual real person who doesn’t just ask you to enter digits after waiting for half an hour).
• Not doing proper exercise for a week, just making phonecalls at the gym and waiting for calls back (nearly having to apologise for being a polite (but mistreated) customer
• Having to travel for half an hour just to get to a phone with a working line so that about 20 phonecalls (like the above) can be made
• Having to ask friends and business ownerz for an apology for using the line for hours and hours, draining battery, taking up their time, and costing them telephone charges
• Not being able to get in touch with friends (except using slow medium like E-mail)
• Having your friends receive unwanted and unexpected phonecalls from Bastards Telecom, which somehow decided one’s friend can also be treated like someone’s secretary
• Bastards Telecom contacting someone’s friend on the work telephone, which in turn causes this friends problems at work
• Having general problems at work not just due to lack of an Internet connection (I do both my jobs primarily from home) but a telephone line, too
• Being told a 12 month contract is suddenly an 18 months contract despite being told and then confirming contradictory information by sales staff and signing a deal based on that information
• Being put on hold for 15 minutes while one agent listens to the recording of an older call with another agent, only to then misrepresent the customer and put all blame on the customer, obviously to defend Bastards Telecom. Humility is a disallowed term among Bastards Telecom.
• Having an agent hang up despite the customer being patient and polite
• Friends arrive and leave in anger because they cannot get in contact and therefore cannot access the building or discuss times
• Missing a few nights out for being off the telephone grid and thus unable to coordinate
• Being away from some of one’s crucial belongings, such as work equipment
• Being unable to wish the parent a “happy birthday”
• Failure to contact businesses for crucial transactions, which leads to a lot of trouble
• Having to travel by foot to a lot of places because there is no other way to make contacts
• Having to leave “telephone number” fields blank in a lot of place, then having to come back later to fill those missing parts
• Making family and friends worried that contact cannot be made (which leads to false assumptions)
• Failure to accept the shipping of a hub (for broadband) because there is no working line at home for Royal Mail to get through to the customer

In conclusion, don’t choose Bastards Telecom. Their monopoly is far from deserved, it’s more like a government franchise and they will also Phorn your phone, spying on your every activity online for for benefit of marketing companies that will pressure you to buy things you do not need and share personal information about your life and your loved one.

Bastards.

And the worst part remains ahead. They may bill me for someone else’s phonecalls, in which case more bureaucracy will be required to resolve issues relating to refunds.

What does it mean when Bastards Telecom makes false promises about broadband services and due date? It’s getting late, so the following list will be very incomplete (imagine being offline for 3 weeks when all your work is online, employers included):

• pay through the nose for mobile broadband, having had to spend hours finding an appropriate package at the shop (25 British pounds or nearly 40 dollars for just 2 gigabytes)
• struggle for hours to bring back up a failed mobile broadband connection
• work on single-head rather than dual-head display for a while, being away from one’s crucial files for several more days too (impossible for getting work done)
• not being able to make VoIP calls and make up for lack of landline (which worked fine until Bastards Telecom botched it, then claimed it’s just fine)
• not being able to blog, manage sites, etc.
• not being able to transfer any large files
• changing one’s browsing habits to account for caps
• being throttled and taking an entire night to upload just 2 audio files while the computer stays connected and uses up valuable resources
• many other Internet-related implications, as expected (I’m getting tired just thinking about it)

Bastards.

The whole thing is confirmed to be BT’s own fault. They admit it now, albeit shyly. Their staff totally messed up (maybe at risk of being fired), so right now one of them is constantly phoning my friend’s work phone (4 times today), asking urgently to meet me on Saturday, some time between a range of 5 hours (great! A fourth day having to be stuck at home, without connection to anything). So he now puts my friend’s work in jeopardy, not just my own. I don’t want anybody fired, but I know BT has been running around with the axe quite a lot recently (given their poor standards, no wonder). I am not asking BT for much, all I want is my life back, please.

N.B. – In case anyone from BT reads this, please look up VOL011-479058023564 and VOL011-47251182944.