links for 2009-03-17

Nearly 1,500 people are signed up to write a blog post about women in technology next week. Are you?

"Many IT departments, taking their network security responsibilities seriously, have secured their networks so tightly that they are no longer functional for the very people who need to use them. And those people now have options - they can go elsewhere, and they are going elsewhere. Let me put it another way: People see IT restrictions as damage and route around them". Ahem, I spend most of my working day with both my work PC and my personal MacBook running.

"Barclays Bank obtained a court order early today banning the Guardian from publishing documents which showed how the bank set up companies to avoid hundreds of millions of pounds in tax. The gagging order was granted by Mr Justice Ouseley after Barclays complained about seven documents on the Guardian's website which had been leaked to the Liberal Democrats' deputy leader, Vince Cable".

"With 2.7 million readers free daily 20 Minutes is again the best-read newspaper in France according to the latest EPIQ/Audipresse study". So, at least some numbers, somewhere, are still going up.

"Although it is generally uncommon for websites to use fake Server headers, there are some cases that stand out more than others. One relatively prevalent example is ZX_Spectrum/1997 (Sinclair_BASIC), which is used by a Russian company to serve 0.02% of the world's websites. The ZX Spectrum was an 8-bit personal home computer released in 1982, but it was discontinued two years before the World Wide Web even existed". Awesome.

Chris makes a great point, and also uses the phrase "the need for different magic words"

"Damazer said that this year Go4it sometimes registered zero viewers from its target 4-to-fourteen age range with an average of about 20,000 listeners in that age bracket tuning in. The average age of its 450,000 listeners was between 52 and 55, Damazer said". WTF? 430,000 adults listening to the children's radio strand?

"The loon in charge of the website is one Timothy Johnson from Sheffield, and he's rather miffed. He believes the actions raise concerns about civil liberties and the free discussion of controversial and provocative subjects on the internet. Whatever your opinion of the dribbling cracker-necker’s religious convictions, you have to admit he has a point. If MPs and ISPs think we need protecting from this kind of drivel, it won't be long before the whole country is given over to Satandom". Timothy Johnson himself appears to have joined in the comments on this post...

"ITV executive chairman Michael Grade has demanded an apology from the Times over an article by former BBC director general Greg Dyke". Let's just say that I thought Dyke was pretty strident in that article!

What started off as an interesting discussion has quickly veered into "Since I work on Open Source projects for free, I think the way forward for news production is that all journalists should work for nothing in their spare time producing content formatted for my iPhone".

In his article Robin Goad puts in some caveats which have mostly been ignored by people re-publishing the findings. To me, this is really not much more useful as a comparison exercise than 'email vs people who listened to the news on radio' would be.

"The library believes almost all have not been stolen but rather mislaid among its 650km of shelves and 150m items - although some have not been seen in well over half a century". I have a series of blog posts about the British Library starting tomorrow