Showing posts with label Web. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Web. Show all posts

Monday, May 09, 2011

Celebrities, The Media , Privacy, Rumour and the fallout.

Once confined to a certain type of Publication, all areas of the media now have an insatiable need for, and an addiction to Celebrity news, gossip, or rumour. A need so great, that in some cases they appear to have made someone a Celebrity, just so they can report on them.

A large number of celebrities have used this insatiable need, to form a symbiotic relationship with the Media to enhance, extend, or rejuvenate their careers and in some cases made considerable money from doing so.

The result is that in the eyes of the Media, a Celebrity regardless of whether they actively court the media, or not, does not have the right to separate their private and public lives, if it sells Newspapers, Magazines, or fills a broadcast News slot.

Every action has a reaction and the result is a law designed to protect Children and other Special Cases against being named in the Media, is being used to protect rich Celebrities from having their indiscretions revealed. As usual a Law drafted by Lawyers, has been perverted by Lawyers to enrich themselves and as a by product, protect their clients.

Unless the a criminal law is being broken (or in the case of Politicians, National security compromised), I have little or no interest in the indiscretions of those in Public Life, but the effect of, what I see as the misuse of the Super Injunction did irritate me.

My irritation was increased as in some of these cases there is an element of; 'It's the rich wot gets the pleasure. It's the poor wot gets the blame', where the Celebrity's privacy is protected, but the other person involved is not. As they are not rich enough to obtain their own Super Injunction, the media focus on them. So they are 'named and shamed' but the Celebrity remains hidden behind a legal screen.

What has finally pushed my irritation level to the point of writing this has been how, in the absence of facts about who is protected, malicious rumours and gossip, over Social Networks and Blogs,( on servers outside UK Jurisdiction) have gained a following at the expense of People who have not obtained an injunction and apparently having nothing to hide, but have been forced to use both the Mainstream Media and the same Social Networks that falsely named them, to defend themselves.

The law can do nothing to protect those falsely accused and ironically can also do nothing if someone who is protected by a Super Injunction is named!
So a law that was passed for good reasons, but since perverted by Lawyers, has now due social networks and blogs outside British Jurisdiction, not only being subverted, but has resulted in people being falsely accused of using it. My late Father used to say the Law is an Ass, but I suspect he would, if still alive replace I s with an r and append an e.

Saturday, April 02, 2011

Fotopic - Amateur Photographer Magazine gets on the Case

Amateur Photographer Magazine has been active in trying to discover why the Fotopic Photo Site has disappeared from the Web and the result of their investigation is three articles by Chris Cheesman:
I suggest that the above are read in order..

Other Links:
An up to date Wikipedia Page on Fotopic
The Fotopic User Group (Google Groups)

Fotopic Related Posts in this Blog
Fotopic - Gone and this time forever? 25th March 2011

A series of Posts on this Blog from 2009:
4th Jan 2009:
Fotopic Disappears - followed by a Deafening Silence
5th Jan 2009: Fotopic Disappears - But the Silence is broken:
5th Jan 2009: Fotopic Reappears

Friday, March 25, 2011

Fotopic - Gone and this time forever?

Fotopic Servers have disappeared (again), unlike the major outage in January 2009, this time it appears this is terminal and Fotopic will be history. Companies do fail and their Websites disappear overnight and this is just part of business life. So is the case of Fotopic different?

In business terms not really, but as a Photo Sharing site started back in 2001 it developed a loyal following and by 2007 was hosting over 76,400,000 Images, with Members across the world. The outage in 2009 seriously dented confidence, not just because it happened, but the poor customer service in telling Members what was going on.

Although never a member of Fotopic, several of my Friends are/were members and through them I am aware of others. They all spent considerable effort over many years putting together interesting Photo Galleries, many of which attracted considerable numbers of repeat visitors. Because of the amount of work that had been put into creating their Galleries, they stayed with Fotopic, even though the site owners seemed to unwilling to communicate with the Member Base.

But over the last 12 Months the situation further deteriorated , with frequent drop outs, lack of development  and even poorer than usual communications from the site owners. So there has been a 'drift' to other services, but this all takes time and again considerable effort and on the 8th March 2011, time ran out when Fotopic, without warning went dark!

No information has been received at time of writing from the Site Owners: Snappy Designs Ltd, who in turn are part of the ANY-Web Group

Even Businesses that fail at least try to communicate the fact to their Customers, but even to the end it appears Snappy Designs treated the Members of Fotopic with contempt.

Links:
An up to date Wikipedia Page on Fotopic
The Fotopic User Group (Google Groups)

A series of Posts on this Blog from 2009:
4th Jan 2009:
Fotopic Disappears - followed by a Deafening Silence
5th Jan 2009: Fotopic Disappears - But the Silence is broken:
5th Jan 2009: Fotopic Reappears

Thursday, May 14, 2009

cc All Emails to Jacqui Smith Day - Not A Good Idea

An internet group is urging internet users to send a copy of all emails they send and receive on the 15th June to Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary in protest against the government's plans to monitor internet communications (emails, VoIP calls, texts, internet usage etc). Actually the email address is Home Office Address for comments regarding the Policy Consultation Document and not Jacqui Smith Directly.

Firstly I see the policy, which is in the Consultation Phase, as an extension of existing powers covering 'traditional means of communication'. Probably because I have spent much of my professional life in an industry where Terrorism has been the 'Elephant in the Room', not discussed, but always there, I understand the need for extending current legislation to encompass the internet and am in many ways concerned that this has not been dealt with earlier.
However I can understand that for many people this is an issue, and their concerns have both an emotive and intellectual basis and accept my viewpoint is a pragmatic one because of my background.

Secondly the Consultation Document covers the alternatives methods of achieving what is required, whilst at least giving some consideration to privacy concerns. Despite what some Online Articles and Blogs have indicated, HMG is NOT considering a Central Mega-Database (although the consultation document indicates that this would have been a good solution but not a viable one for non-technical reasons - Note: from the Governments Record on actually implementing major IT projects I see this as non-option anyway). So the alternatives revolve around the collection and storage of the required information by: ISPs, Social Networking Sites and VoIP providers.

Moving on from Policy to Emailing the Home Office. Emailing a Government Department regarding a particular issue, or policy statement is the right of every citizen. Encouraging what is effectively email spamming of a department, is at the very least juvenile and distasteful.

I
am not a fan of Jacqui Smith as Home Secretary and really don't believe she should be in that job, nor indeed a Minister of the Crown in any capacity.
Unfortunately the flood of pointless emails will be directed at those trying to put together the comments concerning the Consultation Document and I suspect the effect will be to harden Jacqui Smith's resolve that the policy is necessary and urgent.

Thus the Idle Man finds himself in the awkward position of agreeing with Jacqui Smith that legislation is needed and the consultation document makes sense.

Links:
Protecting the Public in a Changing Communications Environment
If having read the above you want to comment then:
Email the Home Office (But do it before 15th June, as any valid considered comment will be lost in the spam),

In the interests of balance here are some links to sites which have a very different viewpoint to mine:
Henry Potter's Blog - Guardian
NO2ID

Finally of course, you may wish to be Juvenile and Distasteful:
cc all your emails to Jacqui Smith day


Monday, January 05, 2009

Fotopic Reappears

This forms a follow up to my previous posts on Fotopic:
1st Fotopic Disappears - followed by a Deafening Silence
2nd Fotopic Disappears - But the Silence is broken

As Joel Rowbottom hoped the Fotopic Service resumed early this morning.

Whilst the Fotopic Operational Status Log has posted the following:
Mon 05 Jan 2009, 10:41 (logged by jon)
We apologise for the extended outage this weekend which was caused by a technical fault. There will be a full statement coming soon. Thanks for bearing with us.
Here is the Statement from Snappy Designs:
QUOTE:

STATEMENT FROM SNAPPY DESIGNS LTD, 5TH JANUARY 2009

Dear Fotopic User,

On Friday 2nd January 2008 photo sharing site Fotopic.net suffered a core equipment failure while upgrading the server and network capacity. As a result of this the Fotopic.net website was unavailable from approximately 9am on Friday 2nd January.

Despite our best efforts to resolve the situation the gallery service remained unavailable until approximately 10:30am on Monday 5th January 2008.

As a result of this outage we are examining our hosting capability and contingency plans, but wish to assure customers that Fotopic.net has not ceased trading and will be enhancing its services during 2009. No data or images have been lost during this time and all systems are back to normal.

Additionally we will be extending Plus and Premium subscriptions by an extra 2 weeks as a goodwill gesture.

We apologise for the situation which was ultimately out of our control, and would like to thank customers for bearing with us.

Best regards,

The Directors
Snappy Designs Ltd trading as Fotopic.net
UNQUOTE

Even though the promised full statement has been issued, users will be asking Snappy Designs some hard questions about why they didn't release some information via Internet News Services to mitigate the Fear Uncertainty and Doubt across the Fotopic User Community, that resulted in wild rumours and speculation.

However from the Idle Man's viewpoint with Fotopic back online, this will be the last post on the subject until...




Fotopic Disappears - But the Silence is broken:

There is NOW an update covering the restoration of service here: Fotopic Reappears
This Post forms a follow-up to my previous Post:
Fotopic Disappears - followed by a Deafening Silence

Thanks to one of the co-founders of Fotopic and former owner Joel Rowbottom there is NOW concrete information on the Fotopic Situation.

Please
Note: Joel has worked hard to obtain this information despite NOT being an employee, director or Shareholder in the company that now owns Fotopic.He has done this to assist and he deserves to be thanked by all users of the service.

Here is the main elements of Joel's post on:
The Former Fotopic Users Group on Google (any highlighting is mine NOT Joel's):
QUOTE:

I've just got off the phone after managing to track down one of the directors of Snappy Designs. I asked them to post here but they have declined (I reckon because they can't get in touch with their PR people at this hour).

Therefore here is the news as I understand it:

  1. The reason it's unavailable *is* a hardware fault with the interface to the outside world. The gentleman I discussed the situation with isn't an IP engineer so was unable to give me solid details on how it's failed but if I can be of assistance in getting it back up I will be - sadly the old Cisco 4000 series in my garage won't cut the mustard with at least a partial routemap! The router is intentionally powered down which could mean anything from a router failure to a cabling fault.
  2. Snappy Designs is solvent - and they're injecting more cash into it to sort out Printshop and the rest. At that point (apparently) the Printshop system will change somewhat and be more "automatic". I don't have any more on that so please don't ask me for further details.
  3. There is a plan to give Plus/Premium users at least a fortnight extension across the board.
  4. It's 'hoped' that it (Fotopic) will be back in the early hours of Monday morning. I make that a 72-hour outage. I will keep track of what's going on and see if I can get further information tomorrow.
  5. The architecture for Fotopic.net is still largely the same as when we left in May. This means that when it comes back it should be mostly OK - the image servers will probably take about 20 minutes to populate their caches during which it'll be a bit slower than usual. I have volunteered to be on standby to help the engineers if required.
  6. There will be a full statement going out to all Premium/Plus users when it's back, which will explain things. I did ask if they had any plans to email their users prior to the recommencement of service but there are no facilities to email upwards of 60,000 people without the servers to handle it (which I can well believe, we have some "interesting" issues emailing Yahoo people en-masse for instance). SD said a statement will come pretty sharpish tho.
  7. I'll be having discussions with Snappy Designs about the future of Fotopic.net, but please remember that myself and Nicky have been away
    from the front-line since May (with the exception of assisting with the odd support mail nobody else could answer, or when I've tried to assist with things they didn't understand yet). So please, please, please, the "Mr Angry" emails have to stop or I'm going to have to put this down again. I'm just trying to help here.

UNQUOTE
I think Joel is a star, but the fact that someone who is no longer has any formal connection to the Company has out of a sense of loyalty to his former customers performed the Customer Support task that was the responsibility and indeed duty of the current owners, I find frankly almost beyond belief.

Snappy Designs are going to have to answer questions which are going to be a lot harder to answer than providing the technical explanation of the problem.


Sunday, January 04, 2009

Fotopic Disappears - followed by a Deafening Silence

Please Note: There is now a follow up to this post here:
Fotopic Disappears - But the Silence is broken:

Fotopic is one of the most popular photo sharing gallery sites especially for transport enthusiasts, which by 2007 hosted 76,400,000 Images from users in 204 Countries.
The site disappeared from the internet early on the 2nd January 2009 and at time of writing is still down!

There has been NO information from the UK registered owners of the company Snappy Designs Limited, their parent company Any-Web, and as for the Media, not even the specialist Internet/Computing Sites have picked up on what should be a major story!

The result has been Fear Uncertainty and Doubt across the Fotopic user community, with rumours and speculation rife.

This Deafening Silence is amazing when in normal times a two hour outage for one popular site results in stories appearing across the Internet News Pages with quotes from Company Representatives, Network Operator and a complete list of previous problems.
So why this time around nothing?.
Many Blogs are carrying the latest rumours, speculation and unverifiable comments from ex-Fotopic staff, but nothing concrete.

Someone somewhere MUST know the situation, but in the meantime, one place any Fotopic User should keep an check-on is the Former Fotopic Users Group on Google, which in the absence of anything useful from the Company, or Media is trying to keep people informed.

Even if Fotopic magically reappears, as David Beilby says in the Support group:
Quote:
If the Fotopic service resumes, there has been a loss of confidence which will take some restoration. In particular the complete lack of communication during an outage in excess of forty-eight hours is not good customer service.

If the business model is proving to be a bit shaky this affair will not do anything to make it
more robust. A single e-mail to all subscribers explaining what was going on would have been enough for most subscribers, although there are those who use it for business who will expect something more.
Unquote
Which summarizes the entire appalling lack of Customer Care and Service Extremely well!
But the question is why haven't the Media, or at least the specialist Media taken this sstory up?


Wednesday, September 03, 2008

Gustav and Civilian Telecommunications

This post is related to my more general comments on the
Handling of the Gustav Hurricane Emergency
Whilst in the US the Emergency Services, Police National Guard and Coastguard, have dedicated Radio Networks and Landlines to maintain their Communications, Civilians are dependent on their normal service providers.

As my interest in telecommunications is both professional and personal, my attention was quickly drawn to an article by:
Rajani Baburajan on TMC Net entitled Service Providers Step up to the Challenges Presented by Hurricane Gustav.

Most of this post is made up of comments on extracts from her article, which starts:
The strength and weaknesses of communications technologies are revealed during disasters. People depend on these technologies during emergencies, and during such times offering flawless services is of utmost concern to providers.
The impact of Hurricane Gustav is the latest example of such a situation. Maintaining telecom infrastructure during hurricanes is a difficult task, made more difficult by increased volume of calls from people checking on friends, colleagues and loved ones in the hurricane zone — volume that can result in overloaded networks.
Extremely well put, I wish I could write as clearly and concisely as Rajani. In the UK we tend to forget how easily Mobile Networks can be overloaded especially when a very large number of simultaneous calls are attempted from the same cellular cluster. In the US this can be exacerbated by operator coverage limitations, which in the UK are only experienced by a relatively small percentage of users regardless of operator.

As for Landline Telephony, both in the US and the UK, there is an almost religious belief we will be able to connect a landline to landline call, but actually this is NOT the case. Whilst landline networks normally have a large contingency volume handling capacity they can under certain circumstance reach this. Especially if there has been damage to local, or enroute network infrastructure. Whilst my limited knowledge of the UK Disaster procedures for Landline Networks is at least 15 Years out of date, I assume the Cascading Priorities still apply with at its most extreme only Government and nationally vital telephone numbers will be allowed to connect calls.

Back to the Gustav Emergency: The two dominant operators in the affect areas are the resurgent AT&T and T-Mobile. Again quoting from Rajani's article:
In anticipation of power outages and network jams that can occur during hurricanes, major service providers including AT&T and T-Mobile this weekend prepared their teams to deal with hurricane Gustav in a competitive manner.
The last two words which I have highlighted caused me to raise an eyebrow! Dealing with a disaster of potentially massive proportions in a competitive manner, hmm, surely this is a typo, obviously this should be cooperative manner.

No it wasn't a mistake as the next few paragraphs relating to AT&T revealed:
AT&T on Sunday announced the availability of more than 2,000 GoPhone devices with $15 airtime to people who were ordered to evacuate. The phones were made available on a first-come first-serve basis to residents who live in areas where mandatory evacuation was ordered.
AT&T distributed the phones through its retail locations in Houston and San Antonio, Texas, where a large number of evacuees from Louisiana and southeast Texas were staying. AT&T said it planned to make the phones available as early as Monday evening.
Chris Penrose, vice president and general manager for AT&T's wireless unit in south Texas, said this initiative will help people connect with family and friends or take care of critical needs in times of crisis.
This is what I consider to be 'a nice gesture', but with more than one eye on the PR value than actually being a good corporate citizen and now surely having got that out of the way, AT&T will tell Rajani what they have been doing to maintain service to customers!

Apparently not, as Rajani moves onto the practical efforts being made by T-Mobile inc (part of T-Mobile International AG, the mobile communications subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom AG) to deal with the emergency:
T-Mobile deployed an incident command team to Birmingham Command Center and locations throughout the Southeast and in Texas, to mobilize its team of engineers and technicians in case the hurricane affected networks. The company said it fortified its network switch operations that serve the Gulf Coast. Additionally, it planned to beef up its microwave radio equipment and send out Cell-on-Wheels (COWs) teams to facilitate wireless communications affected areas.
Good practical engineering and command control planning and implementation. No instant PR value, but what I would expect a reputable Telecommunication Provider to do in a Disaster Situation. Well done T-Mobile.

This good corporate citizen stuff is followed by some practical (and what I consider commonsense) advice to evacuees which I hope was made available via PBS, Public Service Advertising and handed out on the Evacuation Buses:
Service providers also requested people to adopt wise communication strategies to help them serve better during such crises. For example, instead of making voice calls to their friends or relatives, providers suggested using text messages, which use fewer network resources. Providers also asked customers to use landline phones as a backup since they do not require electricity to operate.

Finally Rajani covers what the Web (providing access is available) can do to help:
With advanced Web communication technologies such as Google Maps, weather, news, and alerts available on mobile phones, customers can utilize these resources to determine the status of weather conditions and handle emergency situations wisely. Examples of such services include AT&T’sMobiTV, AT&T Mobile TV and My-Cast Weather. Wireless data devices such as Apple’s iPhone and BlackBerry smartphones allow sending of messages to large groups of people simultaneously. However, these services are available under special subscriber plans and limited to a few subscribers.
All good practical stuff.

For More Articles by: Rajani Baburajan<

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