Blogorrah has had excellent coverage of this for the past while and you can go to the Warlords of Pez (best band in Ireland, please play at the Blog Awards!) website to listen to the actual voicemail.
There’s talk of t-shirts going on sale:
The dance version.
Hello Tribune readers. Hello Sun readers. Hello Mirror readers.
First Tuesday Ireland are now blogging. They had a blog just for their wireless conference but now there’s an all encompassing blog too. Welcome to the Irish Blogs FTIs!
The Indo has a piece today on junk mail. Only a few thousand have opted out to receive snail mail spam. Yeah, you have to opt out in this country by sending in a form to the Irish Direct Marketing Association. That’s right Skippy, the industry is the one in charge of the opt-out database. Just like the Advertising Standards “Authority” of Ireland which is funded by the advertising industry. Self-regulation. But then we have a telecoms poodle that is funded by the telecoms industry.
Back to the point I’m going to make. So you fill out a form, sign it, send it into the industry representative group, they can take up to two months to process it and then you are off snail mail advertisments sent to you. BUT this does not include any of the crap the likes of Dell sends out as you were a customer previously. If you were a customer of a company that are sending you mailshots then you have to contact them directly and ask to be removed. Lovely. So off I trot to the IDMA site today only to find you can’t download the form that is to be filled out as the link is bust. If I was a cynic I’d say “that’s handy”. That’s handy. If you ring they’ll post a form out and you can fill it in. The catch you see is you must sign the form. I guess that’s why you can’t ring them up and have yourself removed. Yet you can sign up for any junk mail without signatures. You can find the form here though.
Imagine if there was an online service where you fill in all your details, postal address, phones, emails and all the various databases are told to have your details removed. One can only dream I guess.
This is a test
I installed the Notable WordPress plugin yesterday and can’t seem to get it to work at all. Below is the configuration screen which from what I’m reading has some menu missing. Anyone have an idea as to what’s wrong?
Joe Lennon isn’t the only government spin doctor deserting the ship less than nine months before the general election. Grace Cappock, Noel Dempsey’s press officer, is off to work for BT, while Robert Marshall from the Fianna Fail press office has gone to Murray Consultants. Dan Pender has already left the transport department, and Tony Cotter is gone from arts and sports. Do spin doctors see the writing on the wall?
Civil servant harassed for taking medicine to MCD rock gig.
The couple say that at the entrance to an REM concert in Balbriggan in June 2005, MCD security staff emptied McCarrick’s bag of drinks and medication on the ground and said the couple would be arrested for drug dealing.
“They said I was a dealer because my bag was full of prescription drugs,â€? said McCarrick. “They accused my fiancée of planning to inject drugs with her insulin needle. I’ve never before been harassed and embarrassed in front of other people like this.â€?
McCarrick said the security staff ignored the couple’s civil service identification cards and doctors’ letters that explained their need for medication.
From IT Conversations is the Podcasting Legal Guide
Blurb:
Podcasters may unexpectedly find themselves on the wrong side of the law. Copyrights, attribution, fair use, inducement, defamation and privacy are just a few of the issues which must be finessed to avoid ending up in hot water. Luckily, Colette Vogele and her colleagues have published an excellent, free guide for podcasters on their legal rights and responsibilities. Denise Howell sits down with Vogele to discuss this ‘participatory law’ project which helps demystify the legal dangers raised by the blossoming of audio and video podcasting.
This would apply to the US mainly but I’m sure Bernie Goldbach of Digital Rights Ireland would have a lot in his podcasts that cover this particular issue too.
Below are the minutes for the joint Oireachtas Committee on Communications meeting on their broadband report. They dragged in E-net, Smart Telecom, BT, eircom, ComReg and Noel Dempsey and subjected some of them to a very tough line of questioning. Word doc version of this.
The most interesting section for me is when Isolde Goggin, John Doherty and Mike Byrne are questioned. We have our regulator telling an Oireachtas Committee that our line failure rate is in line with the rest of Europe and that us and Northern Ireland are pretty much the same for line failure. That’s an outright lie. Why is our regulator lieing to the Oireachtas?
They go on to protect eircom by saying they are fulfilling their licence obligations for the only national wireless broadband licence despite the fact 200 people or less use the service and the service is not advertised. If you ring eircom they won’t sell you the service either. They say it isn’t available to you in your area. ComReg won’t publish a map of where this service is available despite it being a requirement of the licence agreement. Compare that to Chorus who had their licences for wireless broadband removed and more recently ComReg taking the 3G licence back off Smart Telecom.