And that’s OK

have been writing a new series in Techrights since about 10 days ago. It concerns what I call the GGG brigade (“Restricted Boot” Garrett, “Microsoft Plagiarism” Graveley & “Gas The Jews” Lozza). It now looks like the next hearing on the matter will be at the end of this year or next year. I initially thought next year would only be needed for an appeal to the Court of Appeal, which is a slow process. As their site puts it: “The Civil Procedure Rules and their related practice directions govern the procedure for the initiation and progress of civil claims before the County Court, High Court and Court of Appeal (Civil Division) in England and Wales.”

For media, the County Court is not applicable unless it is about privacy.

I’ll likely say more about timetable or expected plan some time next week or next month.

walked past the above Manchester pub today. There were still some remnants of its top floor in the morning. By midday? No more. It’s down to rubble no taller than the man who cleans up the mess, tossing about remnants of the bricks. Shirtless, tanned man. Last “work” on that very old building.

In more recent years it was owned by a friend’s relative. My friend stored his things there while moving between apartments. It was about 8 years ago.

Years later the place got trashed by the reasons specified last month in the local news.

The replacement building will look nice. This is the plan:

What does a man get for jeopardising his life for a computer? He gets arrested. How insane is that?

have been a very vocal critic of the BBC, which is still perceived by many as the Auntie that can never do any wrong and can also always be trusted (de facto stance). For a variety of reasons, the BBC has been aligning with many commercial interests and you are warned that the channel (like many other broadcasting/publishing companies including Fox News and CNN) are serving agenda, not news.

In my personal case of criticism, I am most aware of the BBC’s ties with Microsoft and battles against common rivals. Now that Ashley Highfield is out, it’s claimed that he has moved to a place where could do more damage, so we should keep an eye on him.

An official complaint that was served against the BBC was returned recently as they responded to the official complaint with a “F*ck Off”. The European Commission (Neelie Kroes’ departments) should investigate this further along with similar cases involving Public Broadcasters.

The reason for writing this is actually my return from a short encounter with the Chinese protest against the BBC. It’s still taking place in Manchester and about 1,000 people attend. The BBC seems to have rubbed many people the wrong way for their commercial slant and national agenda. They continue to portray the Olympics torch’s journey as one that is filled with loud protesters instead of focusing on the millions of protesters that rally along. In order to increase damage to the reputation of the Chinese nation, which seems like the next superpower of the world, there is also an inaccurate portrayal of the incidents in Tibet.

Keep an eye on what you watch and remember that most broadcasters, including the BBC, serve you propaganda (or personal point of views, approved by moderators and funding sources). To many readers, this won’t be news, but it’s worth a quick reminder. Don’t trust anyone. See different points of view for yourself and make a balanced judgment. It will make you smarter and will simplify your understanding of seemingly complex situations.

Perfect 10, which is an erotic magazine, has successfully sued Google for infringing some rights with its image search facility. This is not the first time a story as such emerged.

A federal judge has ruled that portions of Google’s popular image search feature, which displays small thumbnail versions of images found on other Web sites, likely violate U.S. copyright law.

I abide by my belief that Google make fair use of the material, yet erotica might be the exception. Image search in Google draws over 10,000 visitors to my Web sites every month, so I dare not complain!

I am still catching up with some news that I have missed due to absence. I would like to write about more pressing stories and some important recent developments:

• Cellphone from Microsoft to help developing nations: challenging the good cause of a $100 laptop that is based on free software
• Virus to wipe important files off Windows machines on February 3^rd
• Internet Explorer 7 beta goes public, but careful attention is needed from careless users
• Google’s stocks crash (a 19% drop overnight)

The infamous Google cookie

Google have once again hit some big headlines. The context is often a negative one.

• Napster To Be Acquired by Google?
  Peer-to-peer is in question; Specifically, one of the father applications, wgucg put piracy at the hands of the common man. What was that slogan again? “Do no evil”?
• Newspaper Lobbyists Take Aim at Google News
  This comes after book scanning and some subsequent court battles. It revolves around Google’s scraping of content. This probably peaked with their snatching of UseNet content, which goes a few decades back and predates Google itself. Another similar lawsuit was recently unfruitful, as the court titled Google’s content delivery a case of “fair use”.
• Google Working on Desktop Linux
  Commercialisation of Linux (no exception to Red Hat and SuSE). I do not like the sound of that, yet I hope that they at least extinguish Microsoft after endless rumours about Google O/S and the recent Windows Distribution (software pack) from Google. Google’s affinity for Linux has been known for some time. Some false speculations about Google Linux were shattered recently too.

In relation to older news

• Google Toolbar v.4
  No controversy here, but I still abide by my belief that GoogleBar is better, among combination of other tool/searchbars. Google recently began to forbid greedy requests for search results from their Web interface, after years without any such restrictions imposed. Third-party Google toolbars are badly affected by that.
• Poor Spelling Beats Google’s China Filter
  The censorship of results in China has been discussed to death in the media. It was criticised across the blogsphere while I was away on holiday. Typos have always been a soft spot for search engines. I once noted that typos have SEO potential

More related items (primarily Google in a negative light):

• Search Engines and Biased Results
• Google Finally Invade Sites
• The Google Cookie
• Death of Privacy
• Search Engines and Spying
• Dangers of RSS Sitemaps
• Google and Pet Peeves
• Google: A Monopoly?
• Google Blind to Controversy

UPDATE (1/2/2006, 7:49): Google denies plans to distribute OS based on Ubuntu (Goobuntu)

UPDATE (1/2/2006, 7:57): Google Denies Napster Tie-Up, Music Store Plan