I see a labour party supporter has used her web savvy to seed the Google search results for "clueless" such that a NZ specific search brings up the leader of the national party, John Key.
It seems like a case of an overly exuberant labour Party member (OK OK she says she’s an ex-Labour Party member - but does anyone really buy that) not realising the possible consequences of a seemingly harmless prank.
This election sees the Labour Party on the back foot in terms of credibility - stunts like this don’t help - me thinks the powers that be might have had a word with this young lady!
Just finished reading (and being depressed by) this report on the ICT issues panel. From Maurice Williamson saying that what he said wasn’t actually policy to David Cunliffe’s no-show we get a fairly good indication of just how important this stuff is to the mainstream political parties.
Williamson’s very inspiring statement (that wasn’t policy) went;
was to get New Zealand into the top half of the OECD’s GDP per capita rankings. Only then could the country afford to pay for the infrastructure and services we all demand
Nice to see he’ dragging out the same feel-good platitudes that have been circling around for the past decade - it’s like the knowledge wave conference all over again.
The end result seemed to be an agreement from the industry participants that a skills shortage is the major issue - unfortunately NZ manager of Sun, John Mazenier reminded people, realistically if a little depressingly that;
the industry was struggling to form its own representative body did not bode well for a collective approach
Oh God - is there any hope? I guess there is but it will come from neither central Government nor industry groupings. It will come instead from cool companies doing cool things here and motivating students to study towards working in the industry, and to stay here once they graduate.
We need to help ourselves - because no one else will.
I posted a few weeks ago about the battle of words between the organisers of the TechCrunch50 and Demo conference organisers.
You’ll recall that there was much bitching between the respective organisers over who stole whose ideas, whose thunder ad whose business advice posts.
The latest development in the battle (and bear in mind that the conferences are both over now) came from both sides of the divide. TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington said that demo was an unethical set-up. Over at Demo Kara Swisher from the Wall Street Journal replied saying that ;
Being lectured on journalism ethics by Michael Arrington is like getting parenting advice from Britney Spears
Ouch - and pathetic - on both sides.
Let’s see a little balance here - this is a small (albeit lucrative) industry. The tech bloggers and conference organisers are a niche of a niche of that industry - people turning themselves into rockstars is frankly just sad. I mean if your life claim to fame is that 30k people follow you on Twitter - I’d like to humbly suggest that you need to get out a bit more.
Sure it’s exciting being known and recognised (hell a few famous peeps knew of me at Office 2.0) but I mean really - we’re not up to Bono’s freaking level yet - balance boys and girls balance.
I read this amazing post over on ZDNet that details the massive operations out of India providing contract CAPTCHA solving services.
It seems the contractors pull down hundreds of thousands of CAPTCHAs automatically from the likes of Craigslist, Gmail, Yahoo, MySpace, YouTube and Facebook, charging around $2 per 1000 solved CAPTCHAs.
Call me naive but it would be so nice if we had a perfect interweb where I didn’t have to spend collective hours typing CAPTCHAs to register on websites, where Indian contractors didn’t offer to break them and where dodgy Eastern European phishing operators didn’t then use those CAPTCHAs to make everyone’s lives less pleasant.
Yeah yeah - naivete I know…
The post came to the conclusion that text based CAPTCHAs are on their deathbed. I guess that means they’ll be replaced by something similarly annoying, that the underworld will crack in five minutes. There has to be a better way.
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