I’m a little late on reporting this, buy I just found out that Sony recently ran a promotional stunt/event in celebration of the recent release of ‘God Of War II’ for PS2. I think it’s great that moer money is being ploughed into the games industry, sure, but when companies use decapited animals and their guts for shameless marketing purposes? Unacceptable. Sony originally printed the photos of the event in their latest ‘PlayStation Official Magazine’, but after being contacted by the Daily-Mail, quickly stopped printing of the issue and pulled the coverage.

The way I see it, this isn’t a mistake that can be made by such a large company. What where they thinking? Party guests were reported to have ‘been invited’ to pull out the goats guts, for goodness sake! What kind of ethics do Sony employ now-a-days? Isn’t there some kind of basic training? The whole promotional team needs a fish-slap and a shakeup, if you ask me. Clearly the very same marketing team thinks racism is also acceptable. I’ve done alot of ranting lately. ‘Sony. The law. Sony. Censorship. Sony.’ - But this time, I feel they’ve gone too far.

The double-page magazine spread was titled “Sony’s Greek Orgy”. I’ve managed to include a ‘pixellated shot’ of the article along with this post, in order to avoid the ’sight of the goat’s decapitated head hanging by a thread of tissue from its corpse, with blood dripping to the floor’. Sounds nice…

In the magazine however, readers were shown the horror uncensored, blood, guts, ‘n’ all. The article which was intended to be a follow up to a previously published Sony Press release, shows different shots of the event (all as horrific as the next), accompanied by headlines such as ‘Topless Girls!, ‘Flesh Eating?’ and further, disturbing details embedded within the text. The magazine asked readers how far they’d go to get their hands on a PlayStation 3.

“How about eating still warm intestines uncoiled from the carcass of a freshly slaughtered goat? At the party to celebrate God Of War II’s European release, members of the Press were invited to do just that . . .”

I’ve been left shocked. Is it Sony who’ve gone too far? They have the cheek to ask their readers how far they’ll go for the console, so we’ll fire the question right back at ‘em. How far will Sony go, to sell their products?

We love seeing what the ‘hackers’ can do with mobile devices, or at least, I do. Just the other week, we were hearing about a device that let you change your mate’s ringtone to a sound of your choosing, but now, your GPS can be controlled via means of FM frequenices. Usually used to send traffic and weather information to drivers, the RDS messages can now be tweaked by unwanted hackers, triggering various alerts on your GPS screen. Whether it be a terrorist incident or a full-out traffic jam, don’t trust yoru GPS next time it tells you to watch out for the rampaging elephant on Route 66.

Sourced from ComputerWorld.

The Electric Bath Duck. Dark and evil? Hardly - though this 220-volt bath duck promises to pack quite the kicking, if you plan on going off with a ‘bang’. As opposed to finding this ‘amusing’, I actually find this rather disturbing, even if it is just a University Project… Tethered on one end to an electric cable (UK/North-America/European Plug-Sockets Only!) - packaged in some rather self-explanitory packaging “Electric Bath Duck, Suicidal Tendency, One Use Only” and only for those over the age of 18, “Please Make Sure You’ve Made The Right Decision” before using. I dub thee, Emo 2.0!

via OhGizmo!

Speaking to Ray van den Bel about social networking tool, LinkedIn, resulted in a rather interesting discovery on his behlaf, on how the ‘LinkedIn Jobs’ network operates. The results were rather shocking, too… Here’s the full story, from Ray’s perspective…

I noticed that recruiters have to pay a massive fee for advertising their vacancies. Most of the time they spend around 150$- 300$ for a single advertisement.

Somehow I found this to be adisproportionate amount and because I am also the owner of The Open Networkers Movement as well I decided to do something about it.

What most people and recruiters don’t realize is that popular Job-board use content from external resources to fill their Job-board in order to sell their own vacancies. The marketing message is something like this:

‘ …don’t you see other people are doing it as well, so use us too…!’

One such example of the use of external vacancies is the use of the 5 million vacancies which are published on the Simply Hired network. It turned out that these are getting republished on LinkedIn, Myspace and dozens of other job-board without the usual costs!

Next thing, the Open Networkers made themselfves a Job-board, added it to the Simply Hired Network and guess what…. it works! The vacancies are visible all over the internet on many job-boards! And all that for a symbolic fee of 9$. So if you also feel a bit annoyed by those high advertising costs as well, just strike back by adding your vacancy here:

http://jobhunters.jobamatic.com/

The revenues will be used to create additional services for Open Networkers Movement. Our idealism is to freely share in quality online networking.

So in effect - you no longer have to pay $300 to post a job on LinkedIn! Ray has discovered how you can post jobs for a measely $9! But it makes you think - how many other big Web 2.0 sites are ripping off their users?

I’m officially an ‘Uber-Geek’. I dress myself up like syndication. Thanks to Feedburner for the t-shirt!

Posting should return to its usual schedule soon. Been rather busy lately - with exams nearing soon!

The Choc-U-Lator is a cleverly packaged, fully-functional, basic calculator that covers all your ‘basic’ needs. Sure - no ‘hyp, cos, sin & tan’ for the oh-so-painful Pythagoras, but you never needed that stuff anyway, did you? You can grab one now from Yakuten for about 500 Yen, which works out to about $4 - plus international shipping & handling charges. My advice? Buy in bulk (to save money on shipping) then flog them for $10 each to eager friends.

Personally - I think that the packaging is far more convincing that the calculator itself, but from what I’ve heard from Paul, the gadget itself is just as good. Smish. Side-note: This isn’t edible. Really… Unless you eat plastic like Seshi.

The Linux Penguin Logo “Tux” has been stuck to the nose of the Panoz/Honda in anticipation of meeting a donation goal. The Tux 500 is an effort to raise $350,000USD in exchange for a Primary Sponsorship + Team Linux name for the upcoming May 27th, 2007 Indy 500 race. As long as their efforts secure $25,000USD, the logos will stay on the car.

If less than 1% of the Linux community donates $1, this will happen!!

So ‘buck’ up and lets get that Penguin roaring!!

What your donations will buy:
$25K-$50K USD: Minor Associate Sponsor: logo appears on the car
$50K-$100K USD: Associate Sponsor: larger logo appears on the car
$125K-$300K USD: Major Associate Sponsor: large logo on car’s engine cover
$350K-$600K USD: Primary Sponsor: logo on sidepod, team name contains “Team Linux”

Prizes for Top Contributors:
The top contributor will be a member of the Pit Crew on Race Day
Two random contributors will get a ride in a two-seater Indy Car
The second highest contributor will get a Linux server or notebook
The third highest contributor will get a video iPod

[Source: Wired.com, Tux500.com, PetersMotorsports.com] - Written by Anthony Carbone from the Zi Media Network.

Former Apple Chief Financial Officer, Fred Anderson hit the news recently, having been acused of robbing Apple of a whopping $3,500,000 through backdating stock options. With some charges dating back to 2001, when Anderson still worked at Apple, he was granted multiple stock options that were backdated in the middle of a meeting with the board that supposedly ‘never took place’. Anyhow, to cut a long story short, the fraudster was offered a dirty deal by the SEC - he should pay back the original 3.5mil, plus an extra $150,000 coming out of his own pocket. Even though he denies any wrongdoing, Anderson accepted the deal, declining to comment to any media in the doing so. Weird, eh? If the guys innocent, he should just fight it out. Afterall, $3,650,000 is quite a bit of cash.

Next on the SEC’s roadmap? Nancy Heinen. Former legal aid to Apple. Heinen reportedly took part in a $7.5 million grant of options during the same falsified board meeting, but unlike Anderson, Heinen plans to contest the charges put to her. I’m taking bets right now, that she’ll get locked up for a pretty long time and slapped with an even more hideous fine… Any bidders? via AppleInsider.

Oh - and sorry for only having the quickie post today, and not even having one yesterday! We’ve had some funny issues, of late. Yesterday (and for most of today) I’ve been unable to access the site, whilst at the same time, people in India, Australia and America have been able to. DNS? Hosting? Something got Dugg on the server? Routine maintenance? Who knows - but thanks to Nate we’ll be running smooth sometime soon again. You rock man!

Hate mail sucks at the best of times - we’ve probably all received some from an anonymous looney at some point and we know how much it gets to you. You’ll go off and think about it for hours-on-end wondering about what the person says, and coming up with counter-arguments against every scrap of detail they put into the message (even though they probably only spent two or three minutes firing off the piece of junk). I think that hate-mail is just as big a crime as any other thing and we need to start punishing those who commit the more serious offences. Of course again, we have to draw a line between playground arguments and full-blown organized attacks on people, but something has to be done. Something has to change… Internet Community Service?

My reason for writing though, was in response to some anonymous hatemail from Chris Pirillo to… Chris Pirillo. The scary thing about hatemail is this - usually the writer is far too thick to string a sentence or two together. This guy actually seemed to have a pretty good vocabulary. *shudder* TROLLS 2.0! *shudder* So what’s the best route of tackling trolls at present? There isn’t really one… But we can start by all sending consoling messages to the person effected. The worst thing someone can do is bottle up the problem and not tell anyone. Look at all the comments in response to the article! These people think Chris is fantastic (as do I for that matter)! Here’s the email that Chris got hit with anyhow:

Chris,

What have you been up to lately? Coddling a bunch of losers while you drink wine out of single serving 187 ml bottles? You claim you are an “Entrepenuer”, a “Tech Addict”, as well as an “Idea Evangelist”, amongst other things. The truth is, you are a joke. You are marketing yourself as some form of celebrity, when in fact you are an ugly, self serving dullard who is attempting to gleam fame from a bunch of internet using toddlers. Furthermore, your comments are usually similar to the ramblings of a lobotimized turd deep in psychosis.

I really have to hand it to you. You really are making something of yourself. Of course, I mean if “making something of yourself” is making a eating utensil out of a piece of fecal matter.
You are a loser, a joke, your website is slow and unresponsive due to your ignorance, and your capacity to drink alcohol is akin to the ability of a dead rodent.

BYE!

-Chris Pirillo

P.S. I will retain this email address for my own amusement, no matter if you choose to ignore my input or even prove that you are a pussy and block this email address from futher correspondence.

P.P.S. **** YOU!

So I sent an email in reply spinning off to Chris’ inbox, using the troll/loser’s e-mail as a template…

Chris,

What have you been up to lately? You claim you are an “Entrepenuer”,
a “Tech Addict”, as well as an “Idea Evangelist”, amongst other
things. The truth is, you are all of these and MUCH MORE! You
market yourself honestly, and because of your honesty and
unconditional help your giving out, you’ve become an Internet
celebrity. Furthermore, I find your comments to be most helpful and
regularly amusing. Sometimes you even post about lobotimized trolls
deep in psychosis who go along and send you nasty messages…

I really have to hand it to you. You really are making something of
yourself! You are an idol to many on the net, a right joker at times
(see bLaugh.com), your website has a great design and always loads
quickly, due to your down right spiffy coding, and your capacity to
drink so much caffeine to keep going on, answering questions should
be applauded…

BYE!

- David Wilkinson
http://www.techzi.net/

P.S. I will retain this email address for my own amusement, in
response to this message here:
http://chris.pirillo.com/2007/04/20/mean-people-suck/

P.P.S. YOU ROCK! MEAN PEOPLE SUCK!

I’ll be frank, and to the point. Trolling/flaming has passed the stage on the Internet of simply being a nuisance. It can now go as far as being disturbing (and in some cases reported recently) suicidal. We need some kind of Internet ASBO of they’re not going to implement Net Community Service. Some enforcement needs to begin of what’s done on the net. I’m not a fan of censorship, but restricting known offenders from use of certain parts of the net seems like a viable idea. In the meantime, have a laugh at one of Chris’ latest cartoons.

I was just reading an article about how the Canadians are wanting to ban child pornogrpahy, racial hatred and promotion of violence against women, which left me wondering… Is banning someone from Internet access for 7-years that much of a fitting punishment? I mean, sheesh! You couldn’t get a job for 7 years - even BestBuy store clerks need to use the Internet for company e-mail, price checks, etc.

Racial hatred strikes me as a rather difficult thing to police, as it is… Where should the line be drawn between humour and hurt? What if it’s just an accidental slip of the tongue? Things happen, and I know in the past that I’ve said something which someone has found racist unintenitonally. Sometimes I think it’s a bit silly how the person interpereted (as it was not intended to be insulting in the slightest) but people view things in different ways. As ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ can now be classed as racism here in the UK as it is, what happens if we’re racist wihtout realising it?

So how’s Internet Community Service sounding? We make the poor sods who find insulting people based on their colour amusing, clean up comment spam on our blogs, edit Wikipedia articles, etc… To me, it seems like a win-win situation. Enforcing it may be slightly harder, but heck. That comes later.

How should we police the net? Should we even police the net? I’m against general censorship (like in China), but I agree that porn, etc should be dealt with or at least made sure that people know what they’re viewing before doing so.