Stodge.org

This is round 2 of the exciting tit-for-tat between the secularists and the god-botherers:

I’m not sure what the strategy behind this advert is. It’s obviously a response to the “Atheist Bus” campaign which had an almost negligible visibility and yet nevertheless managed to provoke all kinds of ire from the nutty wing of various Churches.

Something I learned working for an advertising agency is that a sales process which begins with insulting the customer (in this case calling him a “fool”) is unlikely to be all that effective, even as in this case if the product is being offered free of charge.

I suspect that the reason for disbelief is not a consequence of lack of bibles: In my experience there are plenty of these in circulation. I suspect the problem has more to do with the content of the bibles, spesifically the fact that it is a book full of bronze-age superstision of questionable moral value with little or no relevance to the modern world. If only the Trinitarian Bible Society would tackle that core issue I think they’d have a great campaign.

When I was an Indymedia mirror operator I used to get weekly calls from concerned police officers worried about “dangerous content” on “my site”. It’s the nature of the project that it attracts all kinds of people who often post very foolish things in public view, however I’ve noticed that police find dealing with IM very confusing and this makes normally sensible investigators try some very foolish things:

Recently Kent Police confiscated one of IndyMedia’s servers because they believed it contained information pertaining to some threatening comments posted by an animal-rights activist. They had previously approached the server’s operator with a request for information – this request was denied not out of malice but simply because the information did not exist on that computer.

The police grabbed the sever based on the theory that all web-servers generate log-files and that all log-files contain a list of IP addresses of visitors to the site. This, they believed, might be used as evidence to discover the identity of the rogue activist. There are a number of flaws in this theory:

Firstly, the standard IndyMedia configuration requires that web-logging is switched off. There are no logs.

Of course this is done on purpose: IndyMedia want to preserve their reader’s anonymity. They also want to prevent the long-running mirror-servers from filling up with gigabytes of useless web-logs. Even if logging were enabled it is unlikely that there would be any useful information beyond what police have already seen on IndyMedia’s public web-pages.

Secondly, the machine used to generate the content which has so irked Kent’s finest is unlikely to have been the same machine from which the page was eventually accessed. The machine they confiscated is likely to be one of the hundred IndyMedia mirrors worldwide. The mirrors are an international network of computers donated by supporters which exist to distribute the IndyMedia content around the world. Any machine plucked at random would typically contain content which originated elsewhere. It would be impossible to determine who or where that content originally came from by looking at the content because that information is not stored.

Unfortunately the consequence of this confiscation will be the opposite of what the police intended: Since IndyMedia has no central editorial board, other IMC groups internationally are free to mirror what they like from the UK. Usually an attempt to censor any part of IndyMedia meets with a dramatic increase in the amount of international mirroring, effectively putting the content out of reach of both British police and UK based IndyMedia editors. Once this happens there will be nothing that anybody in the UK can do that will cause the content to be taken-down.

There is another, much easier way to deal with this problem. Indymedia does have an editorial policy and will usually remove obviously illegal content. You just have to ask them to remove content. The editorial moderation channels are public forums whose addresses are listed on the IndyMedia sites and contrary to popular belief the IMC edtors have better things to do than to pick fights with police. If properly notified offending content can be removed in less than 24 hours and everbody stays happy.

Economist-bloggers “The Baseline Scenario” propose an beautiful solution to our gloomy recession: Banks are desperate to offload their toxic assets, and bankers are desperate to get their bonuses:-

“Why not say that all bank compensation above a baseline amount – say, $150,000 in annual salary – has to be paid in toxic assets off the bank’s balance sheet? Instead of getting a check for $10,000, the employee would get $10,000 in toxic assets, at their current book value.”

The beauty of this idea is that it aligns the banker’s greed motive with the public good. Rather than simply maximize profits at the expense of the poorest a banker’s bonus would actually depend on financially enfranchising worst-off debtors.