Never one to drop a story before I’ve completely chewed the life out of it, I went to check on the Faceparty situation, and found a message from the administrator in my account. After some blather about a new webcam service, it says this:

“There have been rumours and press stories saying we are deleting everyone over 36. This is not true (as you should notice by browsing and seeing people over 36). Nobody has been deleted because of their age, but we have deleted 7 million accounts for hundreds of different reasons… most importantly to get all the spammers, fakers etc out. Our plan has been working really well, and we’ll soon be opening our doors again to those who got deleted by unavoidable accident.

If any of your friends were deleted by accident, you can apply to have them re-instated in the Gossip section, under the thread “Friend Deleted?”.

All for now,

*hugs*

Admin x”

While it’s true that there do still appear to be lots and lots of members over 36 on the site, that’s really not what Faceparty announced about its policies. Is this some rapid backtracking, then?

I’ve written in the past about the impossible demands people have been making of social networking sites, forcing them to somehow make sure that sex offenders and paedophiles can’t contact children on them, and I’ve always said I wasn’t sure how anyone could ever expect to enforce something like that.

Well, it looks like Faceparty has found a way:

In the last 2 months, Faceparty has been deleting a lot of profiles from the website. This has been due either to new legal requirements, violations of our terms of service, the non purchase of your account by the new company who is running Faceparty.com, or any of the following reasons. Information on refunds is also on this page. Please read this page in its entirety.

Over 36 years old?

New government legislation means we need to check older users on the sex offenders list. This legislation is based upon checking email addresses against a government provided list. Faceparty has never insisted on validated email addresses and can therefore not participate in this new scheme. Having discussed the use of our website with the home office and the police, and further some pretty serious crimes caused by older users, we were left with no option but to terminate a huge amount of accounts, and without notice, immediately. We understand that only a minority of older users are sex offenders, but you must understand that we cannot tell which - we can only delete all to make the site safe and we apologise for that. However, we are following the law and you cannot think we are wrong for doing that.

Um. Well, I think some people would think they’re wrong for doing that. This part of Faceparty’s announcement is interesting, too:

Unfortunately some of the creators of accounts who were deleted, of an older age group, have been creating new accounts with a younger age (which means that government legislation classifies them as a sex offender by lying about their age on the Internet, even though most who have done this may have done so with good intent and purely to be a part of a site they love and without any intent to manipulate younger users)

Really? Is that actually the law? Anyone know?

I’m baffled. Read their whole justification here.

Apparently, it’s National Work From Home Day today. I know this because a press release about it dropped into my inbox about a week ago. And although I wasn’t planning to work from home today, I’ve ended up doing so anyway. I did intend to work from home yesterday, and managed to finish the article I was working on as well as having a leisurely breakfast and even washing the dishes yesterday, so I’m completely happy that it’s possible to work from home and actually get things done, it’s just that… well, I’m not convinced the rest of the country was aware that it’s National Work From Home Day today, and thus many of the supposed benefits of the idea probably won’t pan out.

According to the press release, “with fewer commuters, the roads are clearer and public transport less crowded than usual. Stress levels have fallen, pollution levels are down and CO2 emissions reduced. People are happier, have a better work-life balance, and ultimately will be healthier.” Which almost makes me wish I was at work today, since it seems a shame to miss out on lovely spacious public transport and lower pollution levels, but since I’m at home, I’ll just have to take their word for it.

All of those things can only be true, though, if the day was well-publicised enough, and I’m not entirely sure it was. Obviously, there are only some professions that can allow people to work from home anyway, so it’s not like city centres will be deserted today; and the press release that came about National Work From Home Day was under embargo until today, which seems a bit counter-intuitive since by the time people are at work, it’s a bit late for them to arrange not to go to work. They needed to know about it last week, ideally.

Pfft.

Lack of awareness aside, I do think working from home can be beneficial. My brain tends to be most awake and capable between about 8am and 1pm, but factoring travelling to work into the equation means I can’t do much during my first phase of productivity. Working from home means I can leap out of bed onto my computer and be working away before I’m even technically supposed to be in the office…

Which explains why I’m writing this blog post at, well, it’s gone 9am now, but it hadn’t when I started. And I’ve already sorted out my work e-mail inbox…

Did anyone else know they were supposed to work from home today?

The First Post is reporting that Stephen Fry has been having a bit of a rant about the BBC’s iPlayer. According to him, it’s too easy for people to download and keep programmes broadcast online, watching them on devices not supported by the BBC and for longer than the BBC intended them to be available. Here’s part of the quote:

“There is this marvellous idea the iPlayer is secure. It’s anything but secure. The BBC is throwing out really valuable content for free. It shows an incredible naivety about how the internet and digital devices work. … The BBC is making a lot of enemies giving away free programmes to an internet that everyone else is trying to monetise; at the moment, it’s relying on the fact you have to be slightly dorky to record from the iPlayer; but, believe me, that will change. It will soon be the work of a moment for my mother to get an iPlayer programme off her computer and on to her iPod, iPhone, or whatever device she chooses.”

Which is all probably true, except, here’s the thing: we’ve been able to record and keep programmes broadcast on the BBC to watch in our own sweet time for donkey’s. It’s called “owning a VHS player”. Digital video recorders (DVRs, or hard disc recorders) allow you to do the same thing; it’s hardly a problem specific to the iPlayer.

You could mentally insert a rant about TV licence fees here, too, if you were so inclined.

It’s with no small amount of embarrassment that I admit I sort of fell for LG’s fake adverts for Scarlet. I caught the end of one - part of a scene in which Natassia Malthe (aka Bloodrayne) walks out of an explosion, and then her eyes glow red, and the credits roll - and I believed it was, as it appeared, an advert for a new TV series.

And yesterday it turned out it was - just not in the way you’d expect. Instead of being a new drama about a secret agent or superhero or whatever, Scarlet turned out to be - drumroll! - a new range of LCD TVs. “TV series”, get it?

It’s like one of those jokes out of a Christmas cracker, where instead of laughing, you just groan. Admittedly, LG’s little prank is nowhere near as crushingly embarrassing as Sony’s All I Want For Christmas Is A PSP blog, and at least, unlike LonelyGirl15, LG actually has a product to sell us, but it still feels a bit, well, rubbish. Especially since lots of bloggers and forumgoers had already busted it, having checked out the IMDB and TV listings and having clocked the fact that there wasn’t any time or network information included in the ads. Moreover, having not been at the Hollywood launch, I’m now in the position of having seen the ads, but not what they’re actually selling - and while this advertising technique is admittedly clever, doesn’t it sort of imply there’s nothing particularly marketable about the TVs themselves?

Meh, maybe I’m just bitter about having been caught out. After all, Sony’s Bravia ads don’t exactly explain the exact specs of the TVs they’re trying to sell, and everyone loves those. Having rewatched the Scarlet ads again, there definitely is something off about them, something that implies they’re a spoof or a trick of some kind, so maybe if I’d been paying a bit more attention, I could have joined in the online speculation and enjoyed the playfulness of the campaign a bit more. The lesson here, then, is that I should watch more TV, in order to keep on top of this sort of thing…

The world seems to believe I’m made entirely out of magnets. This week, everything I touch seems to be going screwy; my mobile phone keeps claiming it doesn’t have a SIM card, my PC decides it doesn’t feel like starting up, my washing machine floods everything… and I can’t be the only one having non-stop problems with Firefox, can I?

Bah. I’m torn between trying to fix everything, and just going back under my duvet til things decide to work again. (Or until Mozilla sorts out Firefox, at any rate.)

We’re constantly being told that we need to be vigilant online, protecting our bank details, only using our credit cards on reputable sites, watching out for phishing scams, using electronic card readers and PINs and passwords and security questions and all the rest of it. And, y’know, yeah, fair enough, we should be careful with our information online. But what about offline?

My mother always, without fail, shreds documents containing confidential information, so that no-one could steal post from her bins to rip her off. I use a slightly less high-tech method known as “ripping stuff up” whenever I throw anything away, and when I moved house, my bank was one of the first to know about it. (Though, granted, they still reckoned it’d take weeks and weeks before my change of address actually kicked in.) Yet I’m still getting bucketloads of post to my new flat addressed to the previous tenants.

Very often, this post is just spam - letters from Weight Watchers begging the previous tenant to come back to them, for instance, or appeals from charities. But in the last week or so, I’ve started getting slightly more important mail. Like a credit card (which handily signalled its presence via a clear window in the envelope). And bank statements.

I moved into this flat at the end of February: seven weeks ago. Even taking into account delays in getting things changed at credit card companies and banks, I shouldn’t still be getting this stuff. I’ve been diligently writing “no longer resident at this address, please return to sender” on all the envelopes and entrusting them back into the care of Royal Mail from the beginning - now I’ve started writing “no longer resident at this address, please return to sender SO THAT THEY MIGHT UPDATE THEIR RECORDS” on things. I actually got a letter back from one company addressed to “the occupier” telling me that their records showed Miss A. Previous-Tenant lived at my address, and if that was no longer the case and I had information about her present whereabouts, I should contact them and let them know. But of course I haven’t got any such information — I never met the previous tenant. She’d moved out before I moved in, and so all I know about her is that she used to be a Sky customer, used to be a member of Weight Watchers, and, oh yes, which bank she’s a customer of.

If I were inclined towards identity fraud, though, it really wouldn’t be difficult to take her for a ride. She’s dropped all her information into my hands. I have all her bank details, and I know her name and address. I had, before I sent it back, an actual credit card, and probably the PIN for it in another letter, too. No matter how obsessively she might check her credit card statement, she wouldn’t know if I’d run up a debt of several thousand pounds, because the statement? Would be delivered to my address.

This is starting to drive me batty, quite frankly. I’m fed up of my mailbox being full of someone else’s mail, and it makes me cringe when I realise how careless she’s being with so much information. What’s the point of being careful with your credit card online when you’ve delivered all your personal information to someone else - someone you’ve never met, wouldn’t recognise on the street, someone you know literally nothing about? Please, if you’re out there, and you know you recently moved and didn’t update any of your records: LET YOUR BANK KNOW YOU’VE MOVED. I’m not going to rip you off, I’m going to keep returning your mail to sender and hoping they somehow manage to get in touch with you, but really, this is beyond a joke.

So, Facebook has added a chat function to its social networking site. It’s currently being rolled out across the site’s thousands of users, but will eventually be available to everyone, displaying in a bar at the bottom of the page and allowing users to talk to their friends in real time, rather than via messages or wall posts.

MySpace has had a similar service for donkey’s, and Gmail’s chat function will let your AOL or Gmail contacts talk to you in real time, too. (And anyone you e-mail at a Gmail address automatically gets added to your contact list, aggravatingly, so if you don’t want someone to know you’re online and be able to contact you, you’ll have to take ‘em back off.)

While I’m not being forced to use Facebook Chat, obviously, and I can choose to be signed out/invisible on all of these services, I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed. It’s possible that I’m mildly OCD - I really hate having multiple programs hanging around that essentially serve the same purpose, and I already use MSN Messenger. I guess I just don’t see the point, and am frustrated with having to always turn things off, instead of on. Facebook is enough of a pestering-machine as it is, what with the constant stream of application invitations and the “poke” function; adding a chat function is overkill.

What’s the point of using a social networking site to IM, anyway? The two are different and, in my opinion anyway, should be kept separate.

I’ve been doing a lot of writing lately using OpenOffice Writer. I want to like it. And, y’know, it has a lot of positive attributes (most notably, that it doesn’t cost anything). But it is utterly infuriating to use over a long period of time, or for writing anything that’s likely to be drafted more than a couple of times. At the end of the day, I find myself longing for Microsoft Word, in spite of the fact that I know full well Word is far from perfect itself.

My main gripe, I guess, is that OpenOffice’s word count is inaccurate, sometimes wildly so. It’ll give different answers depending on what day of the week it is, even if the document remains unchanged. (Okay, so it’s not THAT bad, but if you run a word count, then close the document, then open it and do another word count, you’re likely to get a radically different number. Not ideal, when you’re working with strictly word-counted articles.)

And the next issue? There’s no thesaurus. I never realised how often I use the thesaurus in Word, usually when I want to check that a word I’m using really means what I think it means. When my Internet connection is actually in existence, I can always check online, but it’s nowhere near as convenient. Come to think of it, I can use web-based word counters when the Internet’s working, too, but that again is just not as efficient as using a word processor that gets it right in the first place.

So, humbug. Anyone got any suggestions for other word processors that won’t drive me up the wall? Or should I just accept that the devil I know is, at least, the devil I know, and go back to Word?

My blogging muscles are twitchy today because, well, mostly because I’m the contrary type, and today a group of LiveJournal users are having a blogging strike. Or, more accurately, a LiveJournal-using strike. It seems a large number of LiveJournal’s userbase is angry over a couple of recent decisions made by LiveJournal’s new management, the Russian online media company SUP.

One of these decisions was to discontinue creation of “Basic” accounts. To backtrack a bit - LiveJournal, as the name implies, is a blogging site. Users can create blogs, and also join blogging networks by adding other bloggers as “friends”. When the service was created, its founder promised that there would never be advertising on LiveJournal, but since then the company has changed hands twice, and advertising has, inevitably, turned up. When the ads were introduced, there were three levels of account types: Basic, which was free, had no adverts, and had only the most basic of features available; Plus, which was free, had adverts, and had more features available, and Paid, which, er, users had to pay for, had no ads, and had advanced features. The idea was that the new Plus level would be attractive to users because of the additional features, for which they would accept advertising being placed on their blogs. At the time, there was controversy over this decision - but nowhere near as much controversy as the news that the Basic account, as of March 12th, was being discontinued, and all new accounts would have to be either Plus or Paid.

The reasoning behind this move seems fairly obvious - all accounts will now generate revenue for LiveJournal, one way or another. Since existing Basic accounts aren’t being forced to upgrade, you might expect little resistance, except in doing so you’d be overlooking something fairly important: LiveJournal users create new accounts all the time. LiveJournal communities can be created by any user at any time, and these too will presumably now no longer be ad-free (unless someone wants to pay for them), but even setting communities aside, people create new blogs for new interests, or just because they want a fresh start, all the time. It’s not a case of not being able to miss what you’ve never had, because it won’t just be new users who are affected by the loss of a Basic account - existing users will either have to stick with the account they’ve got, accept that they’re going to see advertising, or pony up the cash to get rid of them.

Even so, I know what you’re thinking - so what? Aren’t we all used to advertising nowadays? Well… yeah. But that doesn’t mean anyone actually likes it. Plus, the fact that LiveJournal didn’t actually announce this change via its usual News channel but instead left it to one staff member to leave a comment on an already much-commented-upon News update didn’t go down well with users - if you’re subscribing to a News feed for a service you use, wouldn’t you expect a major change to the terms and conditions of the service to be reported there?

There’s another reason many LiveJournal users are on strike today, too: it recently emerged that SUP was removing certain interests from its reports of its users most popular interests. Mostly, these interests related to either fanfiction or homosexuality - it’s not clear why, exactly, SUP chose to purge those interests from its reports, but it’s being presumed that it’s to appeal to advertisers. Again, that might not seem like a particularly big deal, but you’d be underestimating the fervency with which people actually use LiveJournal - SUP probably never expected anyone other than potential advertisers to even notice that the reports had been doctored, yet outraged posts are popping up all over the blogosphere on the topic. And considering that, last May, several LiveJournal users found their accounts suspended without warning because they had listed interests in these same categories, it’s not surprising that there’s a small scale riot going on.

Actually, that might be overstating the case a bit. What’s actually happening is that many LiveJournal users have decided to boycott the site for the day. They won’t read posts, they won’t post content, and they won’t post comments, in the hope that the drop in traffic will signal to LiveJournal’s owners that their recent conduct has been deemed unacceptable by its users. The argument goes that if people can’t sign up free, ad-free, then they’ll go somewhere else; that SUP has fundamentally failed to understand LiveJournal’s business model, which relies upon a great amount of content being posted, much of it by free users, in order to attract traffic … and without traffic, you can’t serve many adverts.

I’m kind of torn about where I stand on the whole thing. I’ve had a Basic LiveJournal account for years and years, although I occasionally pay for a period of paid time, and I’m quite happy with the basic feature set so long as I don’t have to see adverts. I do see adverts on my Gmail account every day, and on almost every single website I visit, so I’m sure I could cope with seeing them on LiveJournal, but, y’know, I’d rather not. And I certainly don’t agree with the censoring of interests, even if it’s just in annual reports designed to attract advertisers. But I can’t help feeling that a one-day strike - on Good Friday, too, which is bound to be a slow day anyway since most people are off work and probably out and about, away from their computers - probably won’t do much good.

It’s like online petitions, in a way - how much good do those ever do? There must be a more effective way of registering displeasure - but other ways, like sending letters or e-mails, take more time and effort. So I guess I’ll be on strike today. Not that anyone will notice, given that I generally post about five times a month on LiveJournal anyway…