Question to the Internet-Savvy Regarding Spamposts

Has someone invented a spam-posting program that enables spammers to post on your blog in a way that the blogger can’t delete it because it doesn’t appear on his/her browser or what? Someone using the names of actresses has been posting the following message on my old posts according to Blogspot notices but the spamposts don’t appear on my browser. If anyone knows anything about this phenomenon and ways to get rid of the garbage, I’ll be very much obliged.

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I Further Interrupt My Work to Bring You This Warning

Seriously.

I received a very authentic-looking email from the "GOOGLE TEAM" telling me that they were going to block my account for "unusual account activity" and that I'd have to type in my username and password in the sign-in box, the usual one, except that it appeared in the email. The email address of this "GOOGLE TEAM"? NOREPLY at glmail .com! HAR! I rebooted the browser and immediately received it again, so someone (or more likely something) may have planted a cookie or spyware on my PC. Their objective is obvious. Thought I’d pass this on.

Did I Tell You I Don’t Twitter?

Money quote:

[Kristen Nagy, an 18-year-old from Sparta, N.J.’s] reluctance to use Twitter, a feeling shared by others in her age group, has not doomed the microblogging service. Just 11 percent of its users are aged 12 to 17, according to comScore. Instead, Twitter’s unparalleled explosion in popularity has been driven by a decidedly older group.

Actually, Roland was a dead giveaway.

Online MSM Embracing Tabloids

I think I noted that Sankei—alone among the mainstream dailies, or so I believed at the time—had embraced the Internet in its entirety, at least after it replaced Mainichi as MSN’s main squeeze in Japan, and that it was supplementing its online content with its less prestigious sister (mainly) sports & entertainment publication Sankei Supootsu. In recent weeks, I found to my amazement that both Asahi and Mainchi were also been carrying articles from their tabloid siblings, for how long I have no idea. Industry leader and most populist Yomiuri, apparently, has not.

I hope that someone, somewhere, is chronicling these developments. I fear that most of the history of the online media in Japan will be lost forever—like TV programs of the 50s and 60s—literally vanishing into thin air, leaving little but oral testimony to go on. Google can cache only so much.

Air Yakiniku

Chances are, you may have already seen the Air Yakiniku website. It’s creating a little buzz on the Internet—21,700 Google hits when I checked just now—and came to me by way of this NYT blog post. What most people haven’t taken note of till now is the fact that it’s brought to you by Recruit Media Communications, a media production company and member of the Recruit group. This means it’s an innovative form of corporate viral self-advertisement that is also intended to bring in revenue, as Sapporo and other food & beverage businesses set up shop in this virtual food court. Note that you have to BYOB to the Sapporo “restaurant.” I don’t see the virtual food court having a long shelf life—it’s not really addictive, unless RMC keeps adding new features and new advertisers, which may be difficult to do.

Sorry, I’ll respond to you later, Matt. And my lack of attention to your previous comment, Mark, continues to weigh heavily on my heart.

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Perhaps not by pure coincidence, I found the link in my email box on the same day that I’d seen on the subway for the first time a Smirnoff Ice Spice ad featuring three circular panels of a man mixing an air cocktail. Each of the panels was entitled (somewhat misleadingly) “air cooking story.”

Biting the Hand that Feeds Me? Yep, Sounds Like Me Alright…and a Public Announcement on Behalf of PBS

I have been asked to add my voice to Perspectives, a feature on the World Focus website. I consider it an honor, and have gladly accepted. But:

Perspectives highlights the best of the blogosphere by cross-posting columns culled from a network of contributors. We cut through the noise of tens of millions of bloggers worldwide and bring you commentary from experts and voices on the ground.

?

So I guess my question is: Should I consider myself fortunate no longer to be considered noise, or should I show some compassion for the riff-raff, the clamorous multitude from whose cacophonous midst I have so recently emerged?

How about:

We sift through the voices of the tens of millions of bloggers worldwide

I think I could have lived with that.

Seriously, Perspectives must be following hundreds of blogs every day, so don’t expect my posts to show up there any time soon. Of more interest to me is the fact that this is part of the move the mainstream media have been making in the blogosphere for some time now, pushing forth their own journalists and columnists professional writers and journalists, and roping in solitary bloggers like wild horses—I was asked to suggest some blogs, which I did, reminding myself of yet another equine parallel. I am far from going professional—one of hundreds, one of hundreds, but am I being domesticated nonetheless? What will the lure of a broader readership do to my content? My choice and interpretation of events? This is going to have me thinking for a while.

In the meantime, Perspectives has asked me to plug Talk to Us, a “World Focus Citizens Initiative”. There’s always a quid pro quo, it seems. Kidding. They want you to give advice to President Obama. Take a look.

Google�s Big Shadow, Small Feet

According to this Telegraph article, for about thirty minutes, a Google search was flagging every non-Google web site and some of its own with the warning �This site may harm your computer�. What caught my eye, though, was the following sentence:

Google is so popular worldwide, earning �3bn in income during 2008, that it has been claimed 750 megawatt-hours of electricity could be saved every year if the home page was changed from white to black.

Now that sounds like a lot of money and electricity. But by way of comparison, look at Toyota, whose latest operating income forecast (January 6) for 2008.4-2009.03 shows a precipitous 73.6% year-on-year drop, yet still clocks in at 0.96 trillion yen, or �7.3 billion (�1=\131). Google must be well ahead of Toyota in terms of its ubiquity as well as its lead over its competitors, but even in a bad year, it still has a long way to go before it can overtake the manufacturer. And there�s a much, much greater gap in revenue.

Now let�s see what kind of equipment it takes to produce 750 megawatt-hours per year. Assume a power generator that runs 24/7, 300 days a year. 750 MWh�24h�300d)=104.16 kW, which gives you the output of this generator. Yanmar is a leading manufacturer of small power generation systems and equipment. It offers a series of standby diesel generators, of which the smallest one has an output of 100 kW*. In other words, the electricity savings from the home page color switch would be barely enough to run a small hospital, if that**.

I bring this to your attention not to trivialize Google in any way; rather, I was struck by the fact that the economic and environmental footprints of something that has such an enormous impact on our lives are so small. Also the fact that the Telegraph threw out a number that made no specific point as such, but I�m beginning to bore myself with my incessant rants against the mainstream media.

* Yanmar also has a range of smaller emergency systems to meet minimum safety requirements. The minimum here is 17.6 KW. The Yanmar web site is inconsistent so I went with the catalogued items.

** The Google home page savings occur over 365 days, so the actual day-to-day savings and the corresponding capacity requirement for the standby system would be proportionately smaller. But downtime needs to be absorbed into the overall demand on the public power grid, so I believe that my example gives a better sense of the dimensions.

Dana Goodyear ♥ Cell-Phone Novels

An acquaintance sent me a link to Dana Goodyear’s December piece on the Japanese profusion of keitai shosetsu, or cell-phone novels. Here’s my riff on it.

In the classic iteration, the novels, written by and for young women, purport to be autobiographical and revolve around true love, or, rather, the obstacles to it that have always stood at the core of romantic fiction: pregnancy, miscarriage, abortion, rape, rivals and triangles, incurable disease. The novels are set in the provinces—the undifferentiated swaths of rice fields, chain stores, and fast-food restaurants that are everywhere Tokyo is not—and the characters tend to be middle and lower middle class. Specifically, they are Yankees, a term with obscure linguistic origins (having something to do with nineteen-fifties America and greaser style) which connotes rebellious truants—the boys on motorcycles, the girls in jersey dresses, with bleached hair and rhinestone-encrusted mobile phones. The stories are like folktales, perhaps not literally true but full of telling ethnographic detail.

Dana Goodyear’s I ♥ Novels is par for the course for The New Yorker, which I suppose isn’t bad at all. It’s well researched, and there’s an intimacy to the interviews that goes beyond the merely illustrative. Goodyear doesn’t overanalyze. A few quibbles:

I have problems with her depiction of the milieu of the typical keitai shosetsu as “rural” and “rustic”. In fact, I looked at descriptions of five keitai shosetsus. They all had urban or unidentifiable settings. True, none of them were obviously located in Tokyo, but… Inaka=country may be “provincial”, but not necessarily “rustic”. People forget that even in the most “rustic” prefectures, only a small fraction of the population actually engages in agriculture. Japan is a profoundly urban nation.

Then why the purportedly non-Tokyo setting? (In one of the five that I looked at, the action appears to take place in Osaka and Kishiwada, a satellite community with a population of 200 thousand.) I think that it’s mainly a plot device that forces separation, with the older boyfriend (or brother—incest appears to be a popular subtheme) going off to college or work in the big city. And how often haven’t we heard that? You can see that a lot in American novels and TV dramas too. Another, not necessarily mutually exclusive explanation is the one’s own transition to an unfamiliar, impersonal milieu and the estrangement often triggers the creative instincts. In fact, modern Japanese high literature has been constructed on that fertile mixture of rapture, rejection, disillusionment and longing.

And Yankees? “Lower and lower middle classes”, sure (though you wonder who’s left), but the fashion she depicts (and more importantly the lives of the heroines from what I gather) has a much broader appeal to Japanese youths than what we understand as the Yankeee lifestyle (itself an evolving, sometimes hard-to-define subject).

Goodyear appears to link the profusion of a cell-phone culture to a personal computer deficit. But an online report based on a 2006 World Bank survey of 28 countries (likely OECD members) puts Japan in 12th place, behind the Swiss, Anglos, Teutons, and South Koreans, but ahead of Latin countries including otherwise well-off people such as the French and the Italians, as well as Austria, Belgium and Ireland, three other high-income nations. I suppose this tells us that Catholics, compared to Protestants, have a life. But I digress: my point is that there’s nothing here to suggest that there’s a link between a cell-phone culture and purported computer use. In fact, my guess is that the typically youthful cell-phone addicts are the very kind of people who are inclined to access the Internet on regular PCs. Then why the mass cell-phone addiction? Two words: commuter trains; they’ve been replacing weekly magazines and tabloids and more reputable dailies.

Unrelated to the main theme of the essay, but an important assertion nevertheless:

Mone’s withholding is consistent with the ethos of the Japanese Internet, which is dominated by false names and forged identities.

Perhaps. And I’ve laid out my thoughts before on the corrosive effects of anonymity. But I should note that almost all of the comments on the American political, sports, and other blogs that I’m aware of are also pseudonymous.

Finally, what does the future hold for keitai shosetsu? To repeat a sentence from the initial quote:

In the classic iteration, the novels, written by and for young women, purport to be autobiographical and revolve around true love, or, rather, the obstacles to it that have always stood at the core of romantic fiction: pregnancy, miscarriage, abortion, rape, rivals and triangles, incurable disease.

And “incest” too. Add war, subtract abortion, and you might as well be describing Homer, the Greek and Jacobian tragedies, Shakespeare, Kabuki, the Arabian Nights… Oh yes, and mistaken identities and lookalikes too. And The Tales of Genji was in form and function the soap opera of the day. So don’t write off the keitai shosetsu just yet. High culture is nothing but pop culture that has acquired historical context.

ADD. 15 January: I correct myself in the comments regarding my temporary lapse of judgment on the distinction between anonymity and pseudonyms.

This is a New One

Yesterday, I received a message from “Gmail Customer Care” stating that my email account would be shut down unless I confirmed my intent to continue to use my account by logging in with information including my password. It got through my spam filter and has an official-looking layout and all so I thought that I’d mention it here. Not that I think anyone who reads my blog would be taken in by such a fishing attempt…

Some Thoughts on Patrick Smith’s Takedown of Malcolm Gladwell

You’ve already heard me complain about articles in the general-purpose media that dress up unfounded, sometimes downright false, assertions with one-sided vignettes and quotes, expert and non- to sell a story. In fact, the media both good and bad always rely heavily on the anecdotal approach to reach the general public. This is not an ideal situation, but there is no way to get around this, short of rendering the news on any given subject inaccessible to all but the truly initiated. Thus, we rely on the journalists to get the underlying story correct even as they entertain, and on experts both pro and amateur to call them to task when they don’t.

In the past, the general public only became aware of the lie when the clamor from the experts became loud enough to past through the filter of the mass media. The Internet has changed this, as it unleashes, unites, massive hordes of online Mavens—to use a term popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his bestseller The Tipping Point—who gleefully expose the lie. Much of this activity takes place on blogs and in chat rooms, filtered by online debates and by what I’ll call super-Mavens, experts who play the role of arbitrators in the cyberspace market of ideas. From the consumer’s perspective, online magazines can be seen as filters that save the general public the time and effort of identifying these super-Mavens. From the experts’ point of view, they may not pay much, but keep plugging away, and more munificent deals for deadwood publications and personal appearances will (hopefully) come their way, analogous to what is happening in the indie music world with open-sourced outlets and gigs and recording deals.

And that is a long way of coming to my main point, which is the latest from Patrick Smith, an airline pilot by trade and most entertaining and informative writer of Ask the Pilot, as he takes down—politely, unlike this blog—that same Malcolm Gladwell for his claim that “[t]he single most important variable in determining whether a plane crashes is not the plane, it's not the maintenance, it's not the weather, it's the culture the pilot comes from”. I gather from what Smith says in his essay (I have to take it on faith that he’s not playing with the facts as well) that when Gladwell talks about “culture” as the cause of more accidents, he is talking about “hierarchical” cultures that he see in places like Columbia/Latin America and South Korea/Asia.

Gladwell’s mistake was that he did not bother to check the facts. He created a nice story involving culture, found some cases to fit the facts or labeled the facts to fit the story—does anyone have an operative definition of “hierarchical” cultures and a scale to measure them?—and just winged it the rest of the way. But a quick check of the facts by Smith shows that he was in essence just making it up.

Smith is careful not to knock Gladwell’s work entirely; he dispassionately stays within his competence; that is another measure of his particular value as a super-Maven. I myself am reading The Tipping Point now, for the second time. Galdwell clearly the knack of taking good, innovative thinking and making it easily accessible to the general public. Thomas Friedman is another such, if far less skilled, writer. But at the end of the day, they are journalists; it is hard for them sometimes to let such simple things as facts get in the way of the story. This is where super-Mavens such as Patrick Smith and the intellectual filters such as Salon (as long as you stay aware of its liberal leanings where political issues are concerned) come in for people e like me, who find more specialized publications such as Nature often above my head.

SOS

For some reason, I cannot open my blog, though I can open the account itself, as you can see from this post. My gmail account opens normally. The link to my AOL account is broken too. Please email me if you know anything about this phenomenon.

ADD: As soon as I posted this, it went back to normal. I'm going to leave this post here just for the record.

Browser Wars…KILL KILLKILLYEESSS… but in the Meantime…

Farhad Manjoo’s article on Google Chrome tells me that I wasn’t the only one who’d been crashing and losing his memory with Firefox. My problem now is, how do I make the bookmarks on my Google toolbar appear on Chrome?

… please?

Anonymity, Pseudonym, Identity, Individual

I’ve always wondered why so many people in liberal democracies choose to post and comment anonymously. I have nothing against consistently-used pseudonyms, even multiple ones, though I have chosen to adopt a single Internet identity under my own name. A pseudonym confers an identity on the user. The user must maintain the integrity of that persona; to the extent that its integrity is diminished, the user is proportionately diminished. An online pseudonym is analogous to a real-world! stage name adopted by entertainers. Public fickleness takes its toll on the very best; family and friends may love the individual as much as ever, but the public persona suffers, and the individual is diminished accordingly. The user suffers the consequences.

Anonymity has no such identity. There is no persona to connect the consequences—good or bad—of an expression to the individual. In principle, someone living in a liberal democracy usually does not have an ethically defensible reason to choose anonymity. If you have thoughts that you cannot share with general public, keep them to yourself, or among people that you feel safe sharing them with.

There are, of course, many cases, even in a liberal democracy, that the positive societal consequences of the disclosure of the information so outweigh the potential negative personal consequences of the disclosure of the identity that anonymity is justified. Sometimes, a comment is so inconsequential—like a catcall at a rock concert—that failing to adopt an identity for that specific occasion is trivial. In other cases, it may be nothing more than the kind of casual rudeness associated with the lack of preexisting social connections. But, so often, online anonymity breeds irresponsible, harmful, and even criminal expressions without any consequences to the persona of the originator. There is something supremely unethical about that—corrosive to the soul (if there is such thing). And with that thought I must satisfy myself.

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I suppose I should be happy with any traffic, even some of it happens to be hostile, poorly-reasoned comments of the anonymous kind. However, I was prompted to gather my thoughts on this point by a particularly insidious form of anonymity that came my way, fairly recently. I began receiving on this blog a series of not-so-favorable comments anonymously and under a variety of pseudonyms, apparently from the same person. I would figure out where they were coming from—I have my ways—and indicated as much on counter-comments without exposing the originator. Eventually, while implicitly (though not outright) admitting to the fact, the originator sought to meet me and I agreed. The meeting turned out to be cordial, and we continued our correspondence. However, there were, if I remember correctly, a couple of anonymous comments on this blog later appeared, apparently from the same source. Accordingly, my correspondence became more brutal and direct, though not as potty-mouthed as that of the originator. Fortunately, a misunderstanding on the part of the originator ended the correspondence; I had referred to certain Congressional and parliamentary bodies as moral cowards with regard to certain acts and omissions of theirs and the originator took it as a personal accusation, a mistake no one who had actually been reading my blog instead of just scanning it to confirm preconceptions would have made. Which, I suppose, is the silver lining on a small if unfortunate cloud.

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But why now, this moment, you may ask?

That is for me to know, and the curious to find out.

Mor on Browsers!

Firefox 3, I dub thee Sir Crashalot. Internet Explorer, thou shalt be known forever and a day as: The Great Freeza.

Actually, Firefox 3 is more like Wile E. Coyote. It bounces back in an eyeblink, resumes where it left off, as if nothing had happened. Until the next disaster. Internet Explorer takes more time to restart, and you have to do it all over again, passwords and everything.

You know what? The software industry is in perpetual beta state. It’s the only industry of its kind known to humankind. Imagine if automobiles came with the same kind of bugs and incompatibility issues? Like, if your satellite-guided navigation system caused the fuel injection system to malfunction…

… uh oh…

Firefox Rocks!

Some of you know that I’ve been having problems with my Windows Vista PC. Specifically, I could not send messages from my Eurasia Group webmail account (software: Outlook) on the Internet Explorer browser. Firefox did let me send email but transformed all the Japanese language characters into question marks. Well, Firefox 3 is out and, you know what, it works perfectly with my EG webmail.

I’m posting it here, just in case anyone else has had the same problem and hasn't tried Firefox yet.

The More we Saw of Prime Minister Abe…

Correction (May 24, 17:28): I made a huge, huge mistake with this post. Somehow, I managed to misread Mr. Abe's comments on his website. In fact, he claims that Bunshun identified the wrong murder victim as the person Mr. Abe had in mind, and went to that victim's mother, took her comment, and wrote up the article. This undermines the fundamental premise of this post. My apologies to Mr. Abe. I'm leaving this here, though, since one of the worst kind of online experiences is coming back to an online source to find that it has been surreptitiously and substantively altered. That's intellectual fraud, a breach of online ethics. So my embarrassment needs no caching, as long as this bog exists.

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Julián Ortega Martínez gives us an off-topic heads-up (see comments) on Shinzo Abe’s trip to Columbia. A show of solidarity for a democracy pushing back what was once a leftist guerilla movement but has long since deteriorated into a massive criminal operation? Good thing, even if you have to go to President Uribe’s website to find out about the visit. Heaven knows it’s being ignored by the Japanese media too. I looked at Mr. Abe’s website, and it isn’t there either. Could it be that he doesn’t think it’s a good idea to be too conspicuously out-of-town while the “twisted” Diet is in session?

Maybe, maybe not. For Mr. Abe’s website is somewhat unusual, even for a Seiwa-kai-related blog. Half the space on his home page is currently (May 23) taken up by an explanation of his complaint against a tabloid weekly over its treatment of his comments regarding crime victims’ rights—a decidedly proper subject of public discourse in its own right. Now he’s dead serious, but However, as far as his own complaint is concerned, as dead serious as he is about it, I don’t think that he would have a case in the courts; the way I see it, he’s splitting hairs as far as allegations of misrepresentations by the media go. More troubling, comparing the two sides of the story as scrupulously related in his commentary reminds me very much of his ill-fated efforts to parse the Kohno Statement on the comfort women.

The other major item on his home page happens to be an exposition on his reference to human rights in Tibet and Xinjiang-Uyghur. Over all, there’s little to no effort to proactively highlight his policy initiatives as well as his public activities. His latest “news” item dates back to January 7. My, the site does not have a blog.

And I used to wonder how he fell apart so quickly.

As you might have guessed, Mr. Abe's site does not have a blog.

May 24 edit in italics

Beware of the Ekxdvft Toolbar

At some point within the last 24 hours, my computer was infected by the Ekxdvft toolbar. Possibly as a side effect, when I rebooted my computer, I had to log in as a new user, which meant among other things that I had to work with a new desktop. I rebooted a couple of times to no avail. (Memo to self: Never again use the desktop as parking space for unfinished documents.) I had been using the Google toolbar for all my browsing for some time, so at least I didn’t lose any bookmarks of significance.

I wound up using the SmithfraudFix freeware off this website. This and other websites had detailed instructions for removing the files manually. If you know your way around computer software, it’s probably safer. However, I am strictly WYSIWYG as these things go, so I took my chance with the freeware. The toolbar is gone; I only hope that this incarnation of yours truly will be back the next time I reboot.

SmithfraudFix worked for me; that does not mean that it will work for you. But I’m posting this, just in case you have the same problem and are even less capable around computers than I am. Oh, and since I had to use a new desktop every time I rebooted, I saved the freeware into a file of its own in the hard disk and copied it to the desktop after I rebooted.

I hope you never have to go through this, but in case you do, I’ll be happy if this will be of help.

I couldn’t boot in Safe Mode according to the webpage popup instructions. If you have the same problem and your computer, like mine with its generic Windows Vista OS, does not come with a hardcopy manual, just kill it before it boots up properly, then reboot. The computer will ask you what mode you want to boot it in.

Recently, I’ve become ever more reluctant to support the death penalty. Having said that, I must confess that I would not be too unhappy to learn that whoever wrote the code for the Ekxdvft toolbar dies a gruesome death.

Media Watch 070714: Let's See What's Cooking on the BBC Front

1. Support for Japan PM "at New Low"

I don't see any reason to have quotation marks around "at New Low"; is that a Britishism? Other that that, nothing to find fault with in the article, I suppose. Two points:

1) The LDP is doing even worse than the Abe Cabinet, which may put some doubts into the minds of his intra-party rivals who might challenge him in the event of a likely post-election scramble to scrape together a working majority. In fact, I have been doing some thinking, and we could be seeing the Abe administration lasting at least into the early months of 2008, even if he fails to achieve it. I'll try to put my thoughts together later.

2) The latest Yomiuri poll (July 10-12) shows a jump in DPJ support since the last one (July 3-5). The percentage of people choosing DPJ candidates in the district (as opposed to proportionate) seats improved from 23% to 27% while LDP supporters fell from 24% to 22%. This latest shift is particularly evident in the townships and villages, which are traditional LDP strongholds, where the DPJ leapt from 15.4% to 29.8%. The last, small-town figures are particularly astonishing. I have been among those who feel that Ichiro Ozawa spending most of his time out of the media spotlight has been bad campaign tactics. But if the DPJ win big, he will be able to make a plausible claim that his strategy of roaming the countryside to wake up voters has been a great success.

2. Toilet Cash Mystery Grips Japan

It appears that someone has traveling around Japan, leaving money in men's toilets in government office buildings, together with nice letters of encouragement. As a former bureaucrat, I'm happy for this show of gratitude from this anonymous benefactor. The story also has cultural resonance; much, if not most, of Japan's greatest classic literature from Kojiki(the national creation epic, officially compiled, but retains its primeval power) to The Tosa Diaries (the first in a long line of great kana (as opposed to Chinese-language) diary literature) to The Tales of Genji (no explanation) to Oku no Hosomichi (the most famous of Matsuo Basho's haiku travelogues) to Tokaidouchu Hizakurige (the great Edo Era comic travelogue and spiritual ancestor of all those Hope-Crosby road movies) is mainly or significantly travel writing. The moralistic dimension of the money giver's act also evokes the travels, real and imagined, of Koubou Daishi, Gyouki Shounin, and other great religious figures. Surely this cultural resonance must have had a substantial role in steering our collective unconsciousness towards this story. Not that the story continued beyond the three to four day flurry of new revelations, as the local news bureaus, following HQ orders, made inquiries at all the town halls and the like. But grip the nation? That's O.J. Simpson, Lacey Peterson, Terry Schiavo. BBC is displaying mutton and selling dog meat.

3. Japanese Interest Rates on Hold

Not much to say here. Just this useless quote:

"But many analysts believe policymakers will act at their next meeting in August, after July's parliamentary elections are out of the way.

This does not mean an August hike is off the cards," said Sharada Selvanathan, currency strategist at BNP Paribas."

Really? In any case, if they do not raise the overnight lending rate, Mr. (Ms?) Selvanathan can always claim, "I didn't say they'd do it either." So what's the point?

4. Japan's Old-Fashioned Campaigning

This article tells the story of the incredibly detailed and restrictive electoral campaigning regulations and does it mainly through the freeze on Internet action during the official campaigning period. It does miss out, however, on the leakage through the political party home page. It seems the authorities are frowning on any alterations during the campaign period, but are in practice letting it slide. Both the LDP and DPJ are on the move, and Komeito and the Communist Party are following suit. The smaller parties likely will follow to the best of their abilities.

And off-topic, but since we are talking about the Internet:

5. China Firm Sues Google over Name

"[Beijing Guge Science and Technology Ltd. Co.] is suing Google Inc.'s China subsidiary for copying its name, saying the U.S. search engine's registered Chinese name is too similar to its own and has harmed its operations."

Apparently, the misdirected calls are wreaking havoc on its telephone service, and it just wants Google to stop using its name. But this is China, and a clue lies in something BBC left out when it lifted the news item from the Reuters wire service. To quote via The Boston Globe:

Tian[ Yunshan, a Beijing Guge official,] declined to comment on [its] operations or its products or services, saying it was "not convenient" to disclose such details.

Oh, inconvenient fact. This not being the US, Mr. Tian did not have to add the otherwise mandatory "It's not about the money" statement either. And the entire Beijing bureau was on its summer holidays, so it couldn't go and check Beijing Guge out. It's not as if BBC lacked space; it did add the following, totally out-of-context paragraph at the end:

"[Google] and other major IT firms such as Microsoft and Yahoo have been criticized for censoring themselves in order to enter the Chinese market."

And rightly so. But what's the point here? Then you realize that the BBC desk is savoring the irony. Fine. But to deliberately ignore what should be the main thrust of this story, which is the possibility that Beijing Guge is part of a much larger phenomenon in China, on the Internet, and indeed on any other economic frontier that have yet to cope adequately with property rights protection, and deliver an underhanded sermon against Google's choice of money over principle in the guise of straight reporting is not what BBC should be doing. Leave that to the editorials and op-eds.

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Lot's of petty peeves? Maybe. But you do agree that the picture is not too encouraging, don't you?