An open letter to the UK Internet

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To all my friends and the rest of the Internet in the UK,

 It probably hasn’t escaped your attention that in a few months time we’re going to be having one of those general election things. In theory, this gives us a chance to change who governs us, the direction the country is going in and all that sort of good stuff. Generally speaking, I don’t think we have a very good track record with this; in part, I think because we’re too afraid of the wasted vote boogeyman – however, to improve our track record it would probably be a good thing if we debated the issues that are important to us and discussed the alternatives. As you are all intelligent people who try to keep themselves informed about the important issues of the day, I’m sure you’re going to have a lot to share on the various topics that present themselves in the run up to the election.

 It is on this matter that I wish to talk to you. I’m sure that you have thought carefully about the positions you hold on the important issues facing us and are eager to share that with your friends and acquaintances. I’m sure you consider at least the majority of your friends to also be intelligent, informed, civilised people – yet despite this, some of them are going to disagree with you. They may in fact hold quite opposing views to you, which they have also reached by careful consideration and examining the evidence. This is ok. Seriously; your friends holding opposing views to you is more than ok; it’s a good thing ™. It’s only by the tension of opposing ideas and by testing our opinions against those that hold differing views, that we can check for errors and make sure that we haven’t overlooked a flaw in our thought. Some of your friends may even share things you find quite objectionable. They may hold those views or they may be sharing it for the purposes of discussion – this is also a good thing. It’s far better that ideas are shared and discussed and tested rather than suppressed (The suppression of thought and ideas has a really really bad track record).
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The years news in cards against humanity

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Greenpeace is now banned in UK porn! As other people have observed this year has been the year of the offended and looking back through all the stories I’ve muttered about here or over on Facebook the amount of offense taken this year has been quite impressive. So what better way to look back at the years news and all that offense than with the Anonymong 2014 review Cards Against Humanity? See how many stories you recognise, remind yourself of who offended who and why, plus a few other things that happened. Plus of course mix up the stories in new and even more offensive fashions. It’s all really rather fun especially with a drink in hand.

Download the cards below:

2014 black cards
Black cards

Low ink black cards
Low ink black cards

2014 White cards
White cards

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Facebook blackout day

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Recently Facebook started enforcing its real names policy, in a particularly cack handed fashion. Facebook has for an awfully long time had an “authenticate name policy. It’s a slightly confused policy as it states:
“The name you use should be your authentic identity; as your friends call you in real life and as our acceptable identification forms would show.”
But the types of ID they accept are basically state ID of your current legal name which often is the name “your friends call you in real life”. Add to this a very healthy dose of American cultural assumptions to what is now a global service and well it was a recipe for drama. If Facebook paid a bit more attention they’d have seen that Google had already tried the real name thing and had had to back down, but nope Facebook missed that one. Alternatively Facebook did see what happened to Google and decided that they could cope with the loss of a percentage of users in return for the increase in data quality they could provide to their customers. Regardless of the reasons the unannounced and heavy-handed enforcement of the policy , was promptly abused by people reporting the names of people they didn’t like, and Facebook compounded the problem by blocking accounts first and asking later – only they didn’t even always bother to ask.
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