Recently in Le enraged mutton Category

Have been catching up on US writers recently, and having just come into the office to discover our parent company is to be nationalised, I'm hoping those sleepless senators listened to voices like Joseph Stiglitz

If, as Paulson claims, banks get paid fairly for their lousy mortgages and the complex products in which they are embedded, the hole in their balance sheet will remain. What is needed is a transparent equity injection, not the non-transparent ruse that the administration is proposing. [...] The fourth problem is a lack of trust, a credibility gap. Regrettably, the way the entire financial crisis has been handled has only made that gap larger. [...] With lack of oversight and transparency the cause of the current problem, how could they make a proposal so short in both?

Aside from really pissing me off (odd getting pissed off at finance ministers but there's a first for everything) this comes just days after Tim started posting a set of thought pieces on transparency (he asked me to help with these which is how transparency has become an overnight obsession) which introduced me to Alan Knight and his organisation, Accountability.

Tim has posted a video of Alan talking about the need for credibility in the markets and the development of reporting and assurance in the markets. In particular, he describes using wikis as tools to empower the stakeholders of his new accountability standard.

Now there's a thought, didn't your mom tell you to never let yourself get pushed into things? Shame there wasn't time for congress to invite constituents to help write the recovery bill together via a US governement wiki!

Dirty Secret Of The Bailout: Thirty-Two Words That None Dare Utter

Why is this necessary?

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

Have just got off the phone with Ohna and it seems that Google/Youtube's behaviour is even more absurd than I thought...

Ohna's film Son wasn't just posted by her production company. Oh no:

• YouTube vetted a large number of independent film-makers for their "screening room" project and approached Ohna to ask her to participate.
• Not only was Son hand-picked by Google, it was reviewed by an approval board and checked for copyright.
• In an effort to promote the filmmakers, YouTube proposed that each film have a "buy now" button.

So let me get this straight. You go out and find the best films. You have lengthy conversations with the producers of each. You check each for quality and appropriateness of content and verify that each producer owns the right to broadcast the work.

Then, you nail them with a copyright-theft cease-and-desist and take down the film you've just spent months organising the screening of.

Never mind that this is just the worst possible PR job in the world. Isn't this frankly just downright stupid?

Well it used to be Big Oil or Big Business but we really are seeing the emergence of Big Copyright

Ohna's award-winning short film has been pulled by Google because of an automated copyright alert. This smells exactly the same as Google's ongoing mistreatment of the little guy. The same rules apply: justice cannot be applied by formula or filter. Unless each case is handled (note 'hand' as in 'human') individually by a trained adjudicator a never ending stream of injustice ensues.

I suggest Google work out how to pay for this adjudication service soon as sooner or later they're going to need a new business model...

Ohna reports:

Yesterday our short film SON was taken off YouTube's screening room because someone at Paramount Pictures copyright police company decided that maybe we had used some footage from Son Of Rambow. Whoever made this decision had obviously not watched the film as SON is obviously all original footage and in fact the only ressemblance to Paramount's film is the word SON in the title and the fact that there is a young boy in the cast. Despite the obvious blunder Paramount are making no effort to remedy the situation by removing their notice from YouTube and by doing so are damaging our reputation and possibly causing us loss of income.

The woman could use some words of support. Go comment on her post

And if you are aware of similar events, make you register each and every case with the EFF's chilling effects website.

So my accountant tells me I need to make sure and complete my VAT registration. Don't worry he says, you're an internet consultant so you'll have no trouble...

So here I go, whoops, something's awry with the vat section of the website, it appears to have lost its stylesheet (no doubt an indirect result of using the .Net framework).

So I call the helpline and am assured that even though the whole site (apart from the VAT bit) is working and it's just that I need to use internet explorer. But, I say, I haven't got IE, how can I pay my tax? At which point I was told to go away and stop being an annoying taxpayer...

I think it may be time to revert to paper processes on this one!

OK, I think O2 wins this donkey's current "Edge du Jour" tag.

Take a look at this wizard-style information display from the O2 self-care website. I landed here as I had just invested a chunk of my free time trying to review my invoice online having received my monthly your invoice is ready html email. Of course I failed, and I then failed to refresh my password, and sent a few paragraphs of vitriol to the support email only to be told that O2 can only be contacted using their customer contact wizard (perversly named "email us").

So before you even get started, what does this display suggest?

1. O2 only gives customer service to customers who know their details. This could be a problem for new customers who may not yet have received all the cryptic bits of misorganised pseudo-information that O2 sends out in a bid to help new customers settle in. This might also be a problem for existing customers who are on holiday or away from their base (imagine being in an internet café in Belize City trying to get help with your phone).
2. Assuming a customer has their details to hand, O2 will only engage in dialogue with users who can pass security. Now, this is a support email for crissake, what the hell kind of security do you mean? I just want to email you to complain or ask for help and you will only hear me out if I can give you secret password (which I've either forgotten or never had to begin with). This is just ridiculous
3. O2 will only listen to queries for internet users who get through steps one and two above

This is bad on a number of levels but the most obvious one is that the experience design takes no account of context-of-use.

If you are designing a support interface you can be pretty sure that most of the users who engage with it will have negative context-of-use issues. A big part of the interface's success will be taking into account why the user might feel upset or confused. Think of issues like:

• my phone is broken
• there's a problem with my bill
• I don't understand something and need help
• I'm in unfamiliar surroundings
• I don't have access to my own computer (with its cookies and bookmarks)

I think it's obvious from the entire interface that the O2 team took no account of these issues.

This is bad on further level. Dialog and transparency are now key elements of most sensible corporations' comms strategies. There is no point having your CSR team and your marketing folk writing about how open you are to dialog when your website clearly isn't.

Finally, the contact form has an input box which I think demonstrates the marketing team's deep understanding of the customer:

Now I'm pretty sure most iPhone customers can't tell the difference between an N95, an iPhone and a K800i. I know i certainly struggle with that one every day;-)

I think the nice man who went in search of my Identity theft woes last week would have liked me to update my previous post.

So here goes: according to his findings there is nothing wrong with either his payment-processing software or hardware and a review of staff at the branch revealed nothing untoward.

So just to confirm: all is well at Eat. You can pick up your soup and sandwiches safe in the knowledge that these guys pay attention to detail, act fast when required and are just generally a bunch of excellent people!

eat.co.uk

Please immediately tell this person (details updated, thank you Peter)

Judge Louis L. Stanton
Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse
500 Pearl St., Room 2250
New York, NY10007

Phones
+1 212 805-0252

Faxes
+1 212 805-0389

that obtaining your personal history will in no way assist Viacom in identifying which of their intellectual properties has been illegally distributed. Please add that the phenomenal (how many millions of users?) negative impact on personal privacy utterly outweighs any spurious copyright swinery...

Read it: Judge orders YouTube to give all user histories to Viacom (Wired) and eff response and Viacom CSR

Man this is infuriating, and while I'm on the topic can I add that the making available argument is tantamount to arresting car owners because their ownership makes available the possibility of running over a pedestrian or saying that owning a gun is legally equivalent to shooting someone:-(

Time to increase my donations to the EFF, and you should too OK?

Wow, when was the last time you thought you'd get a response as a result of filling in a form on the web (never mind a rapid response)?

Well, I had a little grief from the fraud protection mob at Firstdirect this afternoon and as a result posted this note in the feedback form on the Eat website (and I won't go into the domain name resolution issue on the site which means if you load the flash movie by entering the domain without the 'www' the links to the feedback form are broken--I wonder how much more feedback they'd get if that was fixed...)

At 14:31:55 on 27 June 2008 (roughly an hour ago) I purchased a soup and sandwich from your 15 Basinghall Street shop.

When I returned to my desk to eat my lunch I received a call from my bank (first direct) informing me that there had been fraudulent behaviour on my switch card.

According to their records, the transaction I had just made in the City of London was routed through a supplier in Equador.

The security guys at the bank where I work reckon this is a man-in-the-middle attack and that someone has tampered with the keypad in the store (similar to attaching card readers to ATM tellers, to harvest card details).

Please review this situation asap.

All the best,
Dug Falby

To be honest, I really didn't think I'd get an answer (strangely, the Flash front-end is what gave me this impression: If it's not a real html form, how can it yield real results?) but I did.

A nice man called Martin (I think he said he was head of business communications?) rung up to explain what was going on as a result of my note. From his description, I pictured a black helicopter appearing over Basinghall street and special forces whisking the card-reader off to a controlled explosion. It was very impressive, he said he'd frozen all card transactions at the store, notified the card processing supplier who are going to come in and refit the store tonight and would double-check records for staff access to card processing stuff.

He also made a point of checking that I had notified my bank and assured me he would get back to with with any progress relevant to my situation. Prompt, courteous and thorough, just the way it oughta be.

Which of course means I'll be all the more likely to go buy delicious soups and salads from Eat:-)