links for 2009-11-18

Bloke posts sweary comments to newspaper website. Newspaper tracks IP address to school, contacts head, and bloke loses job. Newspaper publishes post about how pleased they are with what they've done. Seems surprised when the internet turns round and says "you did what!?!".

Seemingly pointless, but nevertheless an act of genius - make real graphic diagrams from command line ASCII art

"This move comes days after the regulator failed to find in favour of the Guardian in its inquiry into the paper's allegations about phone hacking".

Study extrapolates habits of 5.5million users from sample of 200. In the words of Simon Day from that Valentine's Day advert: "Are you sure, postie?"

If you thought I was being obtuse about newspaper comments yesterday, here is something in the way of clarification - the original bullet points of how the post was supposed to pan out before I inexplicably mangled it during writing...

"Signing up to a Facebook page in protest or support doesn’t take much effort. People have been hoodwinked. As a part of a psychological experiment, Anders Colding-Jørgensen created a Facebook protest group that went from 125 to 27,500 members in two weeks. The cause, “Save the Stork Fountain” was a totally fictitious protest against the demolition of a famous Danish fountain. He wanted to understand if political campaigns like that could work. His conclusion was that they don’t. People sign-up to the headline not the issue."

I liked this in the comments: "I should think it's extremely exciting for that man to think that he's 'in the know' when it comes to such a major global conspiracy. And actually doing something about it must seem to be the most exciting time of his life, entrenched as he no doubt is in an isolated in-group of mutually supportive and equally cuckoo denialists. It's ironic that the memes they're spreading - along with all the crafty protective memetic coatings that all good conspiracy theories have - can spread about as quickly as the biological viruses they mention"