In October, there was outrage when UK libel lawyers Carter-Ruck prevented a newspaper from repeating questions asked in Parliament. The issue was regarding the lawyers’ client, Trafigura, which several media outlets including The Guardian and the BBC reported had dumped toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, leading to many deaths and other health issues.

Trafigura took a very aggressive stance, using the UK’s outdated libel laws to gag the media, and questions in Parliament. When the Guardian reported that it had been served with a “super-injunction” that didn’t allow it to name Trafigura, or Carter-Ruck, *or* the fact that they had taken out an injunction on them, the Internet took up the case and plastered the details everywhere. Twitter in particular came into play.

That moment was hailed as a victory of the Internet over efforts to clamp down on free speech and comment, but Trafigura and Carter-Ruck simply bided their time and have again launched into an aggressive clampdown, this time removing an article from the BBC website that covered its Newsnight investigation.

And so, people on the Internet are again picking up the baton and posting the information online, including a video of the Newsnight programme that covered Trafigura and its toxic waste dumping scandal. It is posted above. Presumably, Trafigura will now direct Carter-Ruck to take action against YouTube, at which point I am sure this will take another turn around the roundabout. Hopefully until Trafigura’s learns a valuable lesson.

I would encourage any bloggers or twitterers out there to disseminate this information.

Purely by accident I just came across a “technobile” column piece that I wrote for the Guardian a few years ago. I have to say I amused myself. Posted below but grabbed from the Guardian site:

Technobile

Concerns grow about internet users who are dangerously addicted to Google. Quick, read it now!

I can’t believe Google gives no results for “Internet Derived Lethargic Episode”, because the search engine is a major cause of IDLE. It is a particularly destructive illness where the victim, having spent days working at their computer, awakens to discover they can barely recall a single event, save a joke about the Lib Dems.

Bombarded by stimuli, the victim ends up in a state of highly excited lethargy where any activity taking longer than 30 seconds is too tiring to tackle. The brain, fizzing with chemicals, produces an effect similar to a caffeine overdose but combined with dangerously high levels of pathos. Overfilled with trivia, the sufferer can often be found transfixed in front of his computer.

Electronic doubt and pixelated anxiety drive some to self-harm – purchasing worthless articles of nostalgia from auction sites or entering into fruitless chatroom discussions.

Doctors are concerned about the spate of otherwise normal adults presenting with an array of symptoms and emoticons, and have called for an independent commission into IDLE. Many fear it is too little, too late.

“I receive over 3,000 headlines through RSS feeds every day,” one man posted on a site dedicated to sufferers. Another spoke of how he hadn’t correctly spelt the word “great” in two years.

Matthew, 26, boasted of how he would know the details of a major news event minutes before his peers. “I used to have all the facts, plus a witty analysis on my blog before anyone had even heard of it.” Now he cuts a forlorn figure in the Berners-Lee hospital in Waddington and can’t even remember what the current version of Firefox is.

Victims often don’t realise they have the disease until it is too late, Idle specialist Professor John Trillian told me. Worst of all, it strikes hardest at those with creative minds. “Ginsberg wrote: ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness’,” Trillian explains. “Now young minds are being destroyed by the ability to discover within seconds that fact, the date it was first said, where, and who Ginsberg was sleeping with at the time through a simple Google search. As a result, knowledge is built in a haphazard, disconnected fashion with no effort made to discover context. We are building a generation of cultural magpies.”

As if to explain, Trillian handed over a poem written by an Idle patient.

The emails are not wanted now; delete every one,
Pack up the Apache and dismantle the Sun,
Tear up the superhighway and power down the net;
For nothing online will ever give what you get.

“WH Auden would have flamed him,” Trillian said gravely.

I forgot to mention yesterday that I had an article on IDNs in The Guardian: “How engineers tamed the internet’s Tower of Babel“, which was basically an attempt to explain one of the other sides of the Internationalised Domain Names by referring to Patrik Fältström’s comment at the IGF that the technical side of things had now been agreed.

The article actually started out as coverage of the domain “£.com” but rapidly led to covering the issue of symbols on the Net, hence IDNs. I might post up my original article here as I had to cut out a lot of stuff in the rewrite focussing on IDNs. I might as well get that info up. I tried to use £.com to get across to English readers the concept of approving some “symbols” and not approving others. I think I managed it but not as clearly as I had hoped.

Anyway, the vital issue of IDNs is very complex and far more than one or even three or four features can cover properly. In July, I did a long piece also for The Guardian trying to explain what IDNs were and why they were so important (“Divided by a common language“).

In both cases it was extremely difficult to simplify such a complex issue without bringing in what look like inaccuracies but are in fact simplifications that people with alot of knowledge don’t like the look of.

Ha! In fact I have just this second noticed that ICANN complained to The Guardian about my piece. There is a clarification on it that reads: “In the article below we mistakenly gave the impression that there are no non-Latin alphabet internet domain names. Icann – the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers – has asked us to point out that non-Latin characters have been permitted for some time except at the top level (as in .com, .net, .uk, and so on) and that they are working on changing that during the course of this year.”

I also remember there was a complaint that I hadn’t mentioned Unicode only Punycode in the first article. The second article was all about Unicode – what’s the bet someone complains I didn’t mention Punycode?

You know, I could write an all-encompassing, entirely accurate article about IDNs covering every area. But it would be 30,000 words long and the only people that would read it would already know everything in the article. Such is the lot of the journalist. Anyway, there is another IDN article at least in ICANN’s IDN testing and efforts at the moment.

One of the things about researching IDNs is it makes you feel so uneducated. I started learning Chinese characters about a year ago out of interest but have let it lapse. But I have always been intrigued by Arabic. When you start looking at the issue at IDNs though, you realise that even your best languages skills often aren’t up to the job.

I kinda like that. I love feeling stupid. Reminds you to keep learning and to never start believing you’re wise about anything, just slightly better informed than you were.

So earlier this week I received not one but two emails offering to sell me back a recently expired domain of mine – back2black.com – for a very reasonable $199.95.

I had decided to let the domain go, and I had never actually put up a site at the domain, so its shows how sophisticated domainers have become in exploiting the millions of dollars that expire every year – some in the full knowledge of their owners, many not.

Of course the email told me it was a “Limited Time Offer…!!!” – and we all know why that is – because if Webnamesolution.com doesn’t hand it back within five days, it isn’t going to get its $6 back. All of this of course neatly fits into the hot news of the moment: domains and their rightful owners.

There is of course the Spamhaus.org issue – can ICANN shut it down? No. Will Tucows? Possibly. Should a US judge be *able* to do that to a UK company. Ah… well…

The Guardian wants a feature on why people’s websites suddenly disappear and are replaced with porn site links. Which of course also ties neatly with…

The domain tasting issue which the ICANN Board should have been voting on an amendment to help tackle yesterday but instead bypassed it (or didn’t get around to discussing it) because — yet more domain issues — the contracts for .info, .biz and .something-else were up for voting. Most controversial was the possibility that a registry would be allowed to charge different amounts for different domains.

And the result? Well, perhaps, inevitably and quite possibly, wisely, ICANN decided it has to have an independent report into what the hell domain names are and how they actually function.

The Board minutes show that they want a “reputable economic consulting firm” to look at five main issues:

• Whether the domain registration market is one market or whether each TLD functions as a separate market,
• Whether registrations in different TLDs are substitutable,
• What are the effects on consumer and pricing behavior of the switching costs involved in moving from one TLD to another,
• What is the effect of the market structure and pricing on new TLD entrants, and
• Whether there are other markets with similar issues, and if so how are these issues addressed and by who?

This should prove interesting. I wonder how much such a team would be allowed to look at .coms. And I’ll be very interested to see who gets chosen, who’s on the expert panel, and how much influence ICANN gets over the final report. Domain names are ICANN’s living – can we honestly expect a report to be allowed through that doesn’t fit in with ICANN’s philosophy?

It is definitely a report I will follow very closely. I wonder if there have been proper studies of domains before – must have been – but how many of them remain relevant anymore with the recent huge changes in the domain name market.

And what about the next group of new gTLDs? Everywhere you look it’s domain names. Oh, and .asia was finally approved yesterday as well. Another interesting one to watch, especially because of the huge boom in online activity from Asia, and the ever-threatening issue of IDNs.

I have a long list of people I’m trying to speak to today: Ed Viltz, David Maher, Paul Stahura, Roland La Plante, Edmon Chung, Siarhei Chyzhevich. And I feel terrible. I have a dreadful cold. Can some of them call me back soon, I want to go to bed with a hot toddy and a book.

One of the very worst facets of modern journalism is the use of “surveys” as a news item.

Such surveys are nearly always produced by a company with a vested interest and they usually have a hopelessly small survey group, making the “results” doubly pointless. What they are, however, is free and neatly packaged in news language by professional PR staff to make it as easy as possible just to slip into the newslist.

Looking through the Guardian today, I found the best example for some time: “Gay men earn £10k more than national average.” It was given a half-page on page seven, and its own specifically produced graphic.

The usual rules apply. The “survey” was carried out by two gay magazines, Diva and Gay Times. What is their vested interest? The entire “conclusion” drawn by their survey is that gay people have lots of money. The Guardian swallows this hook, line and sinker and points out in the very first sentence: “The true power of the pink pound was revealed today…”

And where would you therefore advertise if you wanted to get some of the money off this affluent new social group? Why, a gay magazine of course!

Survey size: 1,118. There are 60 million people in the UK. Taking the other great unchecked figure that one in 10 people are gay, that means six million UK citizens are gay, giving the survey an incredibly accurate representation of 0.02 percent.

But since the survey was of readers of the two magazines what you are actually producing is a survey of a sub-set of gay people – those that buy these two magazines. Diva and Gay Times have a estimated readership of 100,000 – so the survey represents only a 1/100th of this already tiny sub-set.

It is no surprise that the survey gives an above-average wage because these two magazines aim – as most other magazines do – at the ABC1 social groups and professional market because that is where the advertising money goes.

Put simply, the survey says that people that buy Gay Times earn more than the average wage across the whole UK. The same is true of most magazines on the market.

But what puts this survey and news story as a cut above the rest in terms of sheer, unadulterated pointlessness is that its assertions are all obviously, logically and blindingly untrue.

How on earth can you say that gay people earn more? Sexuality has very, very little to do with getting a job. In fact, it is against the law to discriminate against or for people on the basis of their sexuality. Not only that, it is impossible to tell someone's sexuality in the same way you can tell if someone is fat, or black, or has a regional accent.

As such, if you were to take this nonsense survey's “results” as fact, it can only point to one of two things: pro-gay discrimination in high-paying jobs; or a hitherto unnoticed fact that gay people are more intelligent.

The broader question though is why is a newspaper carrying something that is patently untrue when it could be covering all manner of actual real news?