To those who haven’t yet had the opportunity to read about Loic LeMeur’s efforts in bringing together the loose ends of the Germanic blogosphere, I say – do so.
When I went to meet him and some other bloggers I had never seen or even heard of before, I was not too sure what to expect beyond a pint of wheat beer. But what developed were indeed very intristing debates about the future -as we develop it.
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I have a friend who’s working in Nigeria for a European company like, say, P & G. After some difficult two years of learning by doing (and not dying while being robbed by a militant gang somewhere in the middle of nowhere) he has now come to the conclusion that Nigeria actually does have to offer more and, at least for him, even Lagos, the place he would not have wished on his worst enemy only two years ago now seems to hold a certain attraction, despite occasional ammunition depot explosions right next to his window.
However, whenever I proposed to pay him a visit he said, ‘listen, mate, no need to, really. Let’s meet in London when I’m on vacation. You can die a happy man without having ever been to this place.
Fair enough. So for me, as for millions of others, igeria will remain a country struck and progressively torn apart by the discovery of Oil, Religion, Ethnic strife. And, of course, a country widely known for its Industry of “419” spam, the reason for this post, and – although not all spammers are from Nigeria or even use Nigerian aliases in their emails – something the Nigerian government is embarrassed about and has accordingly promised to eradicate, most recently at this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos.
The notorious “419” spam asks people to advance money to a person identified in an email (or fax) in order to receive a much larger sum for their help in the safe transfer of embezzled money to some offshore account. It’s obviously not the kind of industry people have in mind when they speak about economically empowering Africa.
But for all efforts, this kind of spam is going to be around for a while. That’s actually not too hard to predict, as there are only two major reasons for this spam to exist anyway: Greed and Stupidity. Both vices have reportedly been a steady companion of humanity, so it’s hard to believe any verbal or even actual efforts on the part of the Nigerian government are going to eradicate the incentives for this kind of crime. Nor are the continuous efforts of Dutch police.
Of course, the victim’s stupidity can never be a justification for a crime. But it helps a lot in explaining it, don’t you think? I mean, who, if weren’t for greed having switched off any remnants of a rationality, who would buy into an offer like the following? Annotated for your reading pleasure… [Oh wait, let’s make this foolproof… NOTE: THE FOLLOWING PARAGRAPHS ARE A QUOTE FROM A 419 NIGERIAN SPAM EMAIL. ONLY FOR DOCUMENTATION! THIS IS NOT A REAL PROPOSITION!]
Dear Friend,
[“friend”? Oh look, you don’t remember my name but, hey, you want to entrust me with $52 million. That sounds like really serious offer, c’mon…?]
I am HAJIYA MARYAM ABACHA, wife of the late Nigeria Head of State,
[ah, thanks, now I remember. Yeah, didn’t we have a great time after your husband’s funeral… But as you know, I’m ‘friends’ with the wives of so many military strongmen I usually tend to forget them after a while. No offence…]
General Sanni Abacha who died on the 8th of June, 1998
[now that’s a lot of detail to back up your story, and if it weren’t for the BBC I would have almost believed you…]
while still on active duty. l am contacting you in view of the fact that we will be of great assistance to each other’s likeness developing a cordial relationship.
[and I almost thought you meant ‘friend’ when you said friend…]
I currently have within my reach the sum of FIFTY TWO MILLION US Dollars (US$52,000,000.00)
[thanks for the verification and your trust, but as you’ll certainly remember I’m not that good with the digits. So don’t be mad if I lose a zero somewhere along the line…]
cash which l intend to use for investment, like Real Estate Development or import/export business specifically in your country.
[Oh, now I’m a little disappointed Hajiya, you don’t remember my name, and now you don’t even remember where I come from. Now I think I might start sulking…]
…
NB: Because of the security being mounted on the members of my family, l have decided that this transaction be kept in utmost secrecy, remember to include your private Telephone or fax number for easy communication.
[You lost my number – again??? Can’t you be a little more responsible with these things. Now I’m going to get enourmous amounts of stupid spam…]
You can also contact my trusted friend and family attorney, barrister Richard Lithuli and is email address is lithulirichard1@justice.com
[Wow, and you do have a fake email address. That’s so great. You know what? I do, too. But I’m not sharing ;)]
Update – Just saw that Brad DeLong also has a recent 419 Spam post. It’s called “419 Spam as Literary Art”. Alas, my little oeuvre above does not fit this category… have a look.
on the information superhighway: Reuters reports that European Nuclear Research Institution “CERN, whose laboratories straddle the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, said it had sent 1.1 Terabytes of data at 5.44 gigabits a second (Gbps) to a lab at the California Institute of Technology, or Caltech, on October 1.” And I thought my DSL connection was fast…
France Telekom offers a service to access the French Minitel system from the Internet in order to ease some 20million citizens’ transition to the internet. (from Forbes.com)
Thomas Friedman must have had too much sun lately. In today’s NY Times column he wonders if Google is like God citing citing Alan Cohen, a V.P. of Airespace, a new Wi-Fi provider, who clearly had too much sun lately –
“If I can operate Google, I can find anything. And with wireless, it means I will be able to find anything, anywhere, anytime. Which is why I say that Google, combined with Wi-Fi, is a little bit like God. God is wireless, God is everywhere and God sees and knows everything. Throughout history, people connected to God without wires. Now, for many questions in the world, you ask Google, and increasingly, you can do it without wires, too.”
How he twists that story to say something about American national security is rather impressive. But how he does that and nonetheless misses the real point that ITC is not only challenging “national security” but the very notion of “national” is even more impressive.
You know how people say that there’s nothing you can’t find on the internet? Well, a quick look at the page of the “Body Modification Ezine” increases the likelihood of you believing in that statement, too. And doesn’t their logo sports someone wearing handcuffs for earrings?
A quick note to everyone experiencing problems to send authenticated Email from Eudora 5.2.0.9. The new realease fixes this truly annoying problem! And it works!!!
Lillimarleen links to “pro-gun” tirade by Rachel Lucas called just like this entry. Rachel furiously tries to point out why previous cases of civil strife, ethnic persecution, or class warfare are valid arguments in favour of uninhibited gun ownership in general, and specifically in the USA –
“If you make self-defense illegal, or even problematic, you’re making life easier for criminals and tyrants.”
Well, if I were living in a Hobbesian state of nature I would probably have to subscribe to the strict version of that theory, too. But, luckily, I am not. Maybe she is – she lives in Texas, according to her webpage – that would explain her position.
In the real world however, it just doesn’t make much sense. But just like I am, Rachel and everybody else is entitled to tell the world about his or her opinions.
So when there’s nothing to argue, what am I doing here? Well, I am not really concerned with the substance of her rant, but rather with the style.
Unfortunately, Rachel (although she’s far from the worst) seemingly believes in the bizarre discourse theory a lot of bloggers, in my experience predominantly American right-wing bloggers, are spreading these days – that calling people who don’t share their opinions “idiots” as frequently as possible is making their points more convincing. Generally, they seem to follow the rule “the more aggressive, and insulting, the better.”
Rachel herself admits this practice on her FAQ page
“Q: ‘How does Rachel expect to make her point by insulting people she disagrees with?’
A: Easy. I don’t expect to make my point to people who can’t see past the insults. Also, this is just a blog, not the New York Times op-ed page.”
Don’t get me wrong here, there are instances for the application of “idiot”. But the word’s inflationary use is a kind of verbal pollution, is simply annoying, and possibly preventing a good deal of the debate theoretically made possible by advances in communication technologies – who likes to talk to people who begin the discussion by saying “shut up, you idiot”? In Rachel’s words – why should they want to see past the insults?
I wonder if some phd student is already trying to capture the early changes personal publishing is making to the style of written opinion in general – can anyone imagine a NY Times op-ed headline that reads “Stupid, stupid, stupid idiots”? Probably not – for the time being. But who knows what the future, and the effects of personal publishing will have on other forms of media?
although it’s actually only 30m. The city of Munich’s decision to use Linux not just on its servers but on all the 14,000 city computers, despite a personal marketing (and allegedly price-cut) intervention by MS CEO Steve Ballmer earlier this year, is almost unanimously interpreted as a huge blow to Microsoft’s grip on the market. Cynthia L. Webb of the Washington Post even calls her press survey “The Munich Revolution”.
My sister is doing a masters degree in journalism these days. You know, masters programmes are the hype at German universities these days. It doesn’t matter that there have never been any other degrees offered by German universities, except for the name, of course. The programme she’s doing has been taught since 1993 and was previously described as an “journalistic add-on” programme. Surely, it sound a lot better to bet teaching and studying a “masters” programme, especially as pretty much no human resources department in Germany is able to tell the difference between one kind of masters or the other. Yup, it’s all about bullshitting these days, long gone the days when people strove to follow the idea of “mehr sein als schein” – to be more than one appears to be.
Well, her programme is not that bad, to be fair. It might be a tad bit boring for people with some media experience, as far as I can tell, but for others it compiles an interesting range of common sense knowledge about publishing that would nonetheless take quite a while to acquire left on one’s one devices.
So I had dinner with my sister tonight and she told me about this online publishing project she’s doing and asked for a hand with the coding bit.
While I have continuously followed the internet’s development since I saw the first hypertext pages in a gopher-browser, and then Mosaic 1.0, back in 1994 and even do have some knowledge of web coding, I would never dare to call myself an “expert” in any meaningful sense of that word – knowing that a lot of people are not as cautious when it comes to slef-ascribing said status.
And one of the latter group of people might well be the person teaching online publishing for my sister’s class. On the assignment paper the person unmistakably wrote that she would, until the next class, “check if the server [on which the project is going to be published] supports Cascading Style Sheets”.
Did I miss something?
