A few people have asked for a way of getting messages from Private Clubs in the RSS feed for My Clubs. So now you can.

Add &pword=YourEcademyPassword to the end of the URL for the RSS. If the uid and pword match, you get to see the messages from all the clubs that uid belongs to including the private ones.

The same trick can be used to export all your profile data, including sensitive contact info, via FOAF. But there's probably only 3 people in the world who might want to do that at the moment. More on that story later... [from: JB Ecademy]

Last night in the Marriott Marble Arch I stupidly got stung by STSN for their WiFi. Here's the catalogue of shame.

Marriott have outsourced their WiFi access to STSN. There's nobody in the hotel who understands it and the only detail is a single photocopied sheet behind the reception desk althought there was a 5 foot sign in the bar advertising it.

When I first tried to connect I got endless captive portal errors that always ended with a 404 page not found error.

So I eventually found a support telephone number on one of the signs. This turned out to be a premium rate number to a call centre in the USA. After running round the usual useless menus and stock responses followed by call waiting music, I finally got to an operator, explained the problem and then was cut off. That support call cost me £8.00.

A few minutes later I went back to the WiFi and got through to the credit card entry screen which I think was IE6 only. This got me online with a popup window that had the logoff button on it. There was no indication that I had to logoff to kill the session, only that if I didn't I wouldn't get an email confirmation of the cost.

With the bar full, the wifi was seriously flaky despite apparently having good signal. Somewhere in there and what with suspending the laptop to wander up to the meeting, back to the bar and rebooting the laptop once, the popup window was lost. I got into conversation with a couple of people so it was 25 minutes later that I found out I was still on line.

I thought I'd better make sure I was logged out so I went to the STSN site and despite lots of FAQs about configuring WiFi on XP, there was nothing about killing the session. By chance I managed to find the popup window URL in the browser history. Sure enough I was still logged on so I did a final email collect and logged off. Imagine my surprise when I saw the bill.

£27.25 for 88 minutes online!

This surely plumbs new depths for ripping off customers. Given the prices in the bar as well, clearly London Marriotts are designed to fleece expense account travellers unmercifully. But frankly given the hoops I had to jump through, I wonder what I would have been charged if I hadn't found the logout button. I've got no reason to believe that I wouldn't still be racking up credit card charges.

Ironically while sitting in the bar I could just get signal from a free, unprotected WiFi AP somewhere across the street but not good enough to use.

One further thought. I've had problems before with commercial WiFi that has a signup page. It's often IE6 only and not browser neutral. It often involves a popup page when we all now block popups. If you lose the popup page there's frequently no obvious way to get it back. If you don't log off, it often takes a considerable time to time out and log you off automatically during which you're still paying. It's often stupidly hard to find a support number, get through to support, find how to logoff and there's only very rarely anyone on site who can help.

And they expect to make a long term business from this?
[from: JB Ecademy]

I've just come across a niche business idea that needs to exist. Currently premium rate telephone numbers are arranged with each national PTT. This means that it's impossible to have a single number that can be called internationally and it's extremely expensive to set up numbers in each country that your users might want to call from. What is needed is for an organisation (Like Skype or Vonage, say or the cheap rate calling card companies) that already have infrastructure in each country to provide a system where they resell international premium rate numbers to service providers. Then an international company like Ecademy could go to a single place to arrange a premium rate number that worked everywhere.

The alternative is for the national PTTs and TelCos to work out cross charging but I don't hold out any hope of this happening, given how slow they've been with cross border SMS and MMS. [from: JB Ecademy]

I think I've finally got the comments threading working correctly in "Threaded-Max" view. It only took 2 years.

For those who don't know, above the comments on a blog is a comments display control box. The options work like this.

Display:
- List-Min: Just show titles in date order
- List-Max: Show full text (according to threshold values) in date order
- Thead-Min: Titles only in threaded order
- Thread-Max: Show full text (according to threshold values) in threaded order

Order:
For the List displays only
- Date-Old: oldest first
- Date-New: Newest first
- Rate-High: Highest rated comments first
- Rate-Low: Lowest rated comments first

Filter:
Each comment has a -1 to +5 rating in a drop down box. Comments start with 1 point. Set the drop down values and click on Moderate comments button at the bottom to show your approval or disgust at the individual comments. The end result is that the comments get a current score and an average value.

The Filter setting decides the value at which comments get collapsed into a title only and obviously only applies if you have a display setting of List-Max or Threaded-Max. So if you set it to +1 any comment with a current score of less than +1 will be collapsed.

The default view is now Threaded-Max, Date-Old, +1

I'd encourage you all to rate comments particularly on blogs that attract long threads. If we all do this, then the worst comments will tend to fade into the background. [from: JB Ecademy]

Project Censored 2005 - Top 25 Censored Stories

What's interesting about these stories is that they're generally not censored by governments but via self censorship by the media. Why?

Take a look at this quote.

Tentacles of Rage: The Republican propaganda mill, a brief history LEWIS H LAPHAM / Harpers Magazine v.309, n.1852, September 2004 1sep04 : * The rightward movement of the country's social and political center of gravity isn't a matter of opinion or conjecture. Whether compiled by Ralph Nader or by journalists of a conservative persuasion (most recently John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge in a book entitled The Right Nation) the numbers tell the same unambiguous story%u2014one in five Americans willing to accept identity as a liberal, one in three preferring the term "conservative"; the American public content with lower levels of government spending and higher levels of economic inequality than those pertaining in any of the Western European democracies; the United States unique among the world's developed nations in its unwillingness to provide its citizens with a decent education or fully funded health care; 40 million Americans paid less than $10 an hour, 66 percent of the population earning less than $45,000 a year; 2 million people in prison, the majority of them black and Latino; the country's largest and most profitable corporations relieved of the obligation to pay an income tax; no politician permitted to stand for public office without first professing an ardent faith in God.

Two nations divided by a common language? I don't think we even begin to understand the gulf between us. For all it's faults I sometimes think that Europe is actually on the cutting edge of political and social thought. We've successfully separated church and state to the point where church is something that people do privately at home if they choose. We've got a pretty good balance in our mixed economies between left wing social support and right wing capitalism. We've given up our empires and have effectively demilitarised. And we've got a legal system that works upwards from legal aid and citizens advice through national supreme courts to a supra-national court of human rights. These are all things that the USA would do well to study rather than dismissing them as the bleeding heart liberal foolishness of "Old Europe" (as in poor old Europe). It's also things we should defend vigorously from the arrogance of such politicians as Blair, Blunkett and Howard as they attempt to dismantle them in the name of "Law and Order", "Security" and the "War on common nouns".

No 2 ID is a campaign against the introduction of ID cards in the UK.

Joi Ito's Web: David Weinberger, a small person :
Mitch: he literally just said "either you are with us or with the terrorists"
Mitch: and followed by comparing Bush to Churchill
Mitch: Rudy is sure he's Churchillian

Does comparing Bush to Churchill and calling him Churchillian count as a Godwin moment?

Shouldn't they be comparing Bush with Roosevelt, in the sense of Franklin D allowing Pearl Harbour to happen in order to get the USA into WWII? Or is that a conspiracy theory too far?

Skype Adds Mac OS X Support :: Voxilla :: A user's guide to the VoIP revolution

So now all the recent Mac users can play as well. Skype now have a client for Windows, PocketPC, Linux and now Mac.

The announcement was on 29th August but I can't see the download on their website yet. I guess it'll go up today or tomorrow. [from: JB Ecademy]

The Happy Poster Project Cheer up!

Now that the IPO has been a success and they have the money and income, what should Google do next? Here's a few ideas.

Release a Google branded and customised version of Mozilla Firefox. Contribute to Mozilla development.

Finish and release all those Beta programs. News, Groups II, and so on.

Add more APIs. It's 2-3 years now since the Google SOAP API was launched. Relax the 1000 calls r day restriction.

Add XML versions of the output from search, news search, image search and so on. Email alerts are just so 1995.

Do something useful with structured data. There's at least 15 million XML, RDF, RSS, Atom, FOAF files out there. Displaying and providing abstracts of the raw data is not enough.

Buy Technorati and Flikr. And then re-build them for scale from the ground up

Kill Orkut and do it again properly in a way that's not evil and allows members to export their data.

Route Blogger and Blogspot updates through the main search engine for instant indexing of blogs. Provide an API so that other blog systems can play too.

Expand the reach of Google News. 4000 news sources is not enough. Find ways of lessening the influence of AP and Reuters that means that a single badly written AP report turns into 100 newspaper reports and hence gains validity.

Find ways of eliminating the search spam so that searching for a product name doesn't mean wading through 3 pages of sales outlets.

Find ways of eliminating referrer spam and hence defusing the growth in comment and trackback spam on blogs.

Link all the signin and login systems for all Google products. I should be able to use one ID+Password for Groups, Gmail, Blogger, Adsense and anything else Google runs.

Turn the resulting Google login system into an MS Passport competitor with an open API.

Next? [from: JB Ecademy]

I can't believe this. We're getting a rash of 419 scammers on Ecademy. They sign up, navigate through all the email confirmation hurdles, set up a profile with a picture even. And then start spamming the members with 419 messages via the internal message system.

How the hell do I protect against this, apart from just banning them as they arrive and start abusing the system?

Marc's Voice: New Friendster features? : 2) Being able to route new contacts through Friendster. I love being able to say "Send me a Friendster message" to people I meet through the blogosphere or conferences, instead of having to give out my real email address or IM nick or phone number on the public Internet. And did you know you can now block Friendster messages from undesirable acquaintances?

I'm convinced there is a real need here. I've been calling it "Arms Length Communication" We need a way of contacting people we don't know very well or at all that is non-threatening, deniable and doesn't expose us to huge quantities of spam. There are those among us who don't care and post our contact details everywhere we can and just struggle through the mountains of cold calls and spam. But most people, while they are open to communication from strangers or new acquaintances, are scared of letting out their contact details. I've lost count of the number of business people who say "call me" but don't put any contact info in their email signatures.

Black and White Photography: London Tube Map. Wonderful overlays of actual London Tube maps onto satellite photos. [from: JB Ecademy]

It looks like the challenge to blog the UK political conferences is looking up. VoxPolitics is acting as the hub. At least for Brighton (Labour Brighton Centre, Brighton from 26-30 September 2004), there's free Wifi on the beach.

Now what about the Conservatives (Bournemouth Monday 4th to Thursday 7th October 2004) and the Lib-Dems (Bournemouth (19-23 September) ?

Are there any Ecademists from the South of England that fancy getting in there and telling us and the world what's really going on?

See also my aggregator of UK political blogging. [from: JB Ecademy]

AKMA's Random Thoughts: So Weirdly Wrong This is a story from the good Rev AKMA about using a laptop while sitting on a park bench outside a library. Now AKMA is not exactly a threatening looking person. And sitting on a park bench using a laptop never used to be a crime in the USA. But he describes being hassled by a policeman because he was "stealing" Wifi from the library. When he dutifully shut down WiFi and then showed the policeman that his Apple had no antenna symbol he still got moved along. “It’s a federal law, sir; a Secret Service agent came and explained it to us.” Now the library offers free WiFi but apparently being outside the libraries doors doesn't make it ok to use it.

I don't know where to begin with this story. I could start ranting about police states but that doesn't help anyone. I could ask where the Library's T&Cs were but there probably aren't any. I don't know if they used a captive portal with a click through to a T&C page, but I'm willing to bet that probably all they've got is a photocopied sheet on a pinboard. I could rant about the morality and legality of using open WiFi internet access that you happen to find but then we'd get into another clone of the usual pointless arguments with bad metaphors about whether it is actually illegal or moral. In any case, here AKMA was using a deliberately open, deliberately free access point.

As one wag put it, maybe the policeman was sponsored by Starbucks and got his donuts via T-Mobile. But that's a cheap shot.

I do kind of wonder if laptops with WiFi are now instruments of terrorism along with toenail clippers. Can we expect the police to start rounding up people in Bryant Park with laptops open? Especially with the RNC coming up? Oh dear. And I said I wouldn't rant about police states as well.

Really, the whole episode is just bizarre...
[from: JB Ecademy]

Linksys, Vonage connect on VoIP | CNET News.com

Linksys and Netgear have announced Wireless access points and routers that have two analogue phone ports that work with the Vonage VoIP system. Linksys also have a plug in module that converts an existing ethernet port to an analogue phone point.

While I welcome it, the big question for me is how closed this is. Can you use other services apart from Vonage? [from: JB Ecademy]

Get Paid to Wardrive

Quaterscope is building a database of access point locations to build a cheap and dirty location system. They're paying $0.01 to $0.05 per access point-GPS

Anyone for Cellphone Cell-ID-Lat/Long collection?

BTW. I'm still on the lookout for a really cheap NMEA compatible GPS add on for a laptop. New, 2nd hand I don't care, just as long as it's NMEA compatible and will work with a laptop. Anyone? Anyone want to sell me one? [from: JB Ecademy]

Following yesterday's news about record oil prices. OPEC is pumping to capacity. Iraq is effectively off-stream. China is now the second largest oil importer after the USA and ahead of Japan. China's oil imports are growing at 20% a year.

Something's got to give. This wasn't supposed to happen for another 10-20 years. Looks like the curse of "Interesting times" is upon us. So how do we get out of this one?

Detailed analysis here. [from: JB Ecademy]

Blunkett's latest initiative (don't get me started) to get tough on crime (and the causes of crime) is an initiative to banish the scourge of graffiti from our inner cities.

I dont have a problem with graffiti. I have a problem with how bad it all is. If all graffiti artists were as good as Banksy, I wouldn't mind a bit. But the vast majority consists of little more than a hasty and unreadable tag layered on top of hundreds of other hasty tags.

Rather than an on the spot fine or temporary incarceration in a police cell, maybe what we should actually be doing is sending them to art school. [from: JB Ecademy]