Synaptic Sugar

Reuters reports news that Chuck Norris is suing publisher Penguin over their book “The Truth About Chuck Norris: 400 Facts About the World’s Greatest Human”, completely based on the famed Chuck Norris facts that have been circulated over the Internet in every conceivable form for at least two years now, as anyone who has any knowledge of the Internet will readily acknowledge. According to Reuters, the lawsuit alleges that “some of the ‘facts’ in the book are racist, lewd or portray Mr. Norris as engaged in illegal activities” and that “defendants have misappropriated and exploited Mr. Norris’s name and likeness without authorization for their own commercial profit”, seeking monetary damages for trademark infringement, unjust enrichment and privacy rights. I’ll sum up those two points here again for clarity: some ‘facts’ are inappropriate for publishing or damaging to Norris’s image; Norris’s name and likeness were used without authorization (and he probably gets no money from it).

Some online newspapers, like the Italian Corriere della Sera, were all too eager to poorly and hurriedly translate the Reuters report (compare them) and stick a big sensational title to their own article (”Chuck Norris: ‘only lies in that book’”), stating that Norris said things that aren’t found in the Reuters news, and that “the stupidity [of the published facts] made the actor furious”. Thus, as often happens, reporting the news in a partially wrong way, just wrong enough that the whole meaning of the facts (the real facts in this case, not those about Chuck) is turned upside-down. It’s more sensational, not to mention easier, to report that “the world’s greatest human” became furious about the ‘facts’ that were published in the book, all of them, rather than delve in legal “details”; who among the readers is going to notice the difference anyway? Perhaps somebody who can go straight to the source article used for the translation (although there’s no mention of the source on the Corriere page, as of right now) and knows the Internet a little bit better than some Web journalists at corriere.it.

For the record here’s a funny video of Chuck Norris himself, reading his top ten favorite Chuck Norris facts on television and laughing merrily about the whole thing, which aired more than one year ago.

It has finally been decided that the multi-million Web portal on Italian tourism, italia.it, about which I posted previously ("Brightest Italian ideas"), is going to be closed. Italian Minister Francesco Rutelli stated yesterday that the current government has not spent a dime on the portal and has tried instead to discover where the responsibilities for the incomplete and non-functional work lay. It is still unknown whether the Italian taxpayers will be able to be refunded some money out of the many millions that somebody spent on this horribly developed project; I’m ready to bet the answer is “no”. Another hope is the government will finally answer the many questions that have been asked all these years, about how exactly the money was spent; but once again, the negative answer is almost a certainty.

Here’s an excerpt of what the license agreement to accept before installing the demo of the long-awaited game “Hellgate: London“, developed by Flagship Studios and distributed by Electronic Arts, says:

“Consent to Use of Data. You agree that EA, its affiliates, and each Related Party may collect, use, store and transmit technical and related information that identifies your computer, including without limitation your Internet Protocol address, operating system application software and peripheral hardware, that may be gathered periodically to facilitate the provision of software updates, dynamically served content, product support and other services to you, including online play. EA and/or the Related Parties may also use this information in the aggregate and, in a form which does not personally identify you, to improve our products and services and we may share that aggregate data with our third party service providers”

“EA, its affiliates, and each Related Party”, “without limitation”, “periodically”, all for just a demo? Sorry but it’s a little too much to improve updates and product support. It sounds more to me like this is one of the first attempts to effectively implement that practice of serving dynamically targeted ads in videogames, tailored around the behavioral and commercial patterns of the players, that EA and other companies seem to appreciate. Either way, for now I’m not installing.

As promised, here’s the second bright idea. Perhaps it’s of more interest to my Italian readers, but it may serve as a warning to the others. But let me start from the Beginning.

Initially, I wasn’t sure about how to structure this blog and what topics to post about. Then I just decided to let it flow as it came because, after all, that’s one of the points of blogs; by the looks of it, even too many others have chosen the same approach (no need to give out links here, you all know examples). Like so many others, this blog is not affiliated with any company, doesn’t pretend to be a newspaper, doesn’t have any monetary gain from its own existence. It simply makes use of the freedom represented (so far) by the Internet.

Online newspapers are a different matter, and that should be obvious to anyone. Maybe not so obvious to those (clearly smarter than us) people who work hard all day to come up with fair and intelligent laws in Italy. In the middle of August, when everyone else was on vacation, those people came up with a draft for a law that wants the editors of all publications (or “editorial products”) to be registered at a public registry, after paying a suitable tax, so that they could be more efficiently prosecuted in cases of defamation (to sum it all up). It wouldn’t be much different from the way it’s been so far, if not for the fact that the notion of “editorial product” is brilliantly extended to all those “products” that exist as non-profit, and to those edited on the Internet. Personal websites, blogs, et cetera. To have a blog, you’d have to pay registration fees, go through quite a lot of bureaucracy, and be more easily subject to defamation claims that could make you (literally) end up in jail (please note that, even under the previous regulations, non-profit blog authors have in some cases been tried for defamation — publishing on the Internet has hardly ever been a “Wild West” sort of thing like so many are eager to cry out in outrage).

To the rescue come the Undersecretary of State Ricardo Franco Levi (yesterday) who admits the text is different from what was intended but is sure it will be corrected; and the Minister for Communications Paolo Gentiloni (today), who admits the wording was a mistake and comments (ironically, on his own blog) that he “thought the law proposal merely confirmed the previous regulations” and that he “should have personally read the text, word by word” before approving it. Yes, it was a mistake, no, admitting it is not enough (although appreciated), if your job is to vote on laws that have anything (and in this case everything) to do with Communications. Or, in general, if you happen to be in the Council of Ministers (who has approved the proposal as is, allowing it to go next through the Parliament). Average people who have more typical jobs and make big mistakes aren’t always able to make it all better by just admitting the mistake — keep that in mind.

That’s the latest trend: to come up with a faulty, poorly written and deeply nonsensical law that takes into no account the reality of technology and is criticized by many, and justify it with a “Let’s just do it for now; we’ll amend it later on” (remember what happened with the Urbani law not more than a few years ago, which among so many other things tried to force webmasters to send the contents of their websites on a floppy disk to a National Library every time they were updated “to preserve Italian culture” — newsflash: they have Web crawlers and Google nowadays who can serve an equivalent function automatically — witchcraft!). What happens before it’s amended? Let’s not just do it: let’s instead focus on what we’re doing and pass a law that makes sense to start with, and if needs be amend it later.

Now that so many are protesting against this draft (but I wonder, if they hadn’t, how many others would have come to know about it before it fully became a law), I’m sure it will be corrected. If not, this blog will probably have to move elsewhere, and with it who knows how many others. But it’s all to preserve Italian culture and spur innovation, I’m sure.

Italian Council vice president Francesco Rutelli has recently changed his mind about the highly costly governmental project known as italia.it, that’s to say what was intended to be the ultimate Web portal for tourism in Italy, meant to incorporate enormous amounts of touristic information, a centralized reservation system for most Italian hotels and plenty of other resources potentially useful to aspiring tourists both in Italy and abroad. It would sound good, if not for the fact that the portal itself is unusable for most tour operators, shows plenty of error messages and most of it hasn’t even been completed years after its inception (under previous administrations, in Rutelli’s partial defense), which makes it severely undertrafficked and generally unused.What Rutelli seems to now demand is for whoever is behind the project (is there really anyone behind it?) to do something about it, or just shut it down. This is peculiar, because only a few months ago (in March and again in July) he himself pompously promised that the portal would soon finally be completed and have a purpose (see video above), to justify its gargantuan costs. What will really happen to it now is currently unknown; what this portal really is, is a very ambitious idea, maybe too big to be easily put into practice for even the most efficient of governments, and that was probably never meant to actually work. It should never have been born, and shutting it down is the only logical next step.Or it would be, if only the Italian government hadn’t spent 35.9 million Euro of taxpayers’ money (today, around 51,293,920 US dollars — spent how exactly?), out of the 58.1 millions initially accounted for by the previous minister for technological innovation Lucio Stanca (today around 83,013,280 US dollars — good job!). Dozens of millions, for a website that doesn’t work. Add to those figures the 13 millions (18,574,400 US dollars) used to fund a parallel Inter-regional tourism Web portal strongly wanted by the various Italian regional administrations (which were involved in the italia.it portal at the same time) and that was never developed. On top of that, requests for transparency and clarification sent by communities of concerned citizens have consistently been answered with a cheerful “You don’t need to know the details” by the government. So, nice going, for these last eight years or so. Another one of those bright Italian ideas that make one happy to be Italian (but wait, there’s more coming up next).