The Irish Data Protection Commissioner published her annual report for 2015 [direct PDF link]. Highlights include a novel spin on the old 'a dog ate my homework and then the dog burst into flames and then it fell off a tall cliff' excuse once beloved of schoolchildren everywhere, and the potentially detrimental effect of search engine results forever connecting one's name to a story about potholes. The Irish Times has more.

Records of an internal complaint made by a member of the Defence Forces were destroyed in a flood and a burglary at a military investigating officer’s private house.

The Defence Forces told the commissioner it prohibited the removal of records and that such action may constitute an offence under the Defence Act. But as the military investigation officer was no longer a serving member, he was not subject to military law.

What an extraordinarily unfortunate sequence of events. Let us hope that such a thing can never, ever happen again.

From the report itself –

Of the complaints that were upheld, one related to an interview given by an individual to a local newspaper 7 years previously regarding potholes on the local roads, which on a search of the individual’s name was the first listed result. With the repairs to the potholes completed, the issue was resolved but the individual was unhappy that a search
against their name still produced this story in the results. Arguing with Google on the complainant’s behalf, we successfully made the case that the story was out of date and therefore no longer relevant.

I'm now desperately curious to find out what results do show up in a search for this individual's name, and why they urgently needed to excise their pothole past. Have they come under pressure from the pothole lobby for being a visible anti-pothole voice? Are they looking to find a job in the pothole industry and are afraid their anti-pothole past will catch up with them?

For a pretty accurate assessment of where Donald Trump's presidential campaign is right now, read this thread. Despite any appearances to the contrary, the United States is still the land of opportunity, where any huckster with ambition can turn a campaign to hold the highest office in the land into a Ponzi scheme.

Twitter, still struggling to understand what Twitter is, has launched a thing that helps celebrities push their banalities and sponsored posts to a wider audience of people who don't particularly care. Meanwhile Facebook is paying considerable amounts of money to entice folks to come and play in their live video garden.

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

'Unequal Scenes'

Totally Confused

Seinfeld in Doom, typography in Blade Runner, a world without Barnes & Noble, when Uber leaves and robot's rights.

Yours etc., @loughlin

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It's been a hellish week for news, and with the media still showing a reluctance to use the word homophobia in relation to the Orlando killings or to admit how complicit many outlets have been in fanning the flames of white nationalism in England which led to Jo Cox's murder, you're probably better off not watching any TV or reading any newspapers for a bit.

You could always give the latest episode of Note to Self a whirl instead. It's about one specific email newsletter and how we don't really consume the news any more, but perhaps an abstraction of the news. News is entirely a product now, we've all been segmented and soon we'll be aggressively targeted by the emoji we tweet. ::appropriate emoji::

Then you could marvel at the human ingenuity that's allowed us to sit at our keyboards like the I have no idea what I'm doing dog and watch video of a space capsule beginning its return to the Earth with the moon as a backdrop.

Back in Ireland, with the gurning approval of battery of government figures (Taoiseach, Tánaiste and Minister for Jobs), Google opened a warehouse in Dublin earlier this week. At the same time it announced it was throwing even more money at super exciting AI research and development. Except this high value engineering work will be done in Zurich. Although headquartered in Dublin for CERTAINLY NOT SOLELY TAX reasons, Zurich "is home to Google’s largest engineering office outside the U.S." Actually, another reason they're headquartered here might be easy access to sympathetic government ears.

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

'Nature has Eyes'

Totally Confused

'Likes' like sex, giant spider crabs, dog eats glue, honest restaurant slogans and The Secret World of Foley

Yours etc., @loughlin

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Looks like app downloads are slowing down in a very dramatic way. I can probably still count on one hand the number of apps I've used since 2009 that were a well designed pleasure to use, and not just an awkward resizing of a website / web app with a horrendous number of display ads obscuring, well, everything else. You know, the functional bits that I'd installed the app for in the first place.

“They apparently had zero appreciation of the irony,” an exasperated Olin told Intersect by DM. “Honestly I think it’s a wider anthropological sign of what the Internet is like now and I’m resigned to that — but the white men appropriating it last night of all nights was a bit too much for me.”

'A woman came up with this clever meme. Men quickly pretended the idea was theirs.'

(amongst other things, Laura Olin currently publishes The Awl's newsletter Everything Changes which is great and well worth subscribing to if you like rankings of Port–a-Potty names in your inbox)

Speaking of The Awl, what would you choose to leave behind if we could remake the Web from scratch?

I got a little taste of what the future of technology has in store recently when a pedantic bot got in touch with a bot of mine to take issue with its spelling.

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

'Cinemagraphs of Summery Landscapes in Croatia'

Totally Confused

Macro viruses reborn, modern music box, 2001: A Picasso Odyssey, Strange Trees, and life advice: ignore life advice .

Yours etc., @loughlin

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For my sins, I've spent a lot of my working life in and around the world of corporate communications. Crafting and disseminating messages. Writing and editing copy for websites, wrestling with obscure technology product descriptions (anyone for a next-generation SMSC? Anyone at all?), constructing the information architecture and style guides for large intranets and more besides. Politely disagreeing with colleagues over jargon, accuracy and basic grammar.

In this time I've seen an awful lot of very bad communications materials get signed off on and wend their merry way out into the world. This is a constant. I think most people are pretty well inured to corporate messaging at this stage and don't notice just how very, very bad much of it is. I know I try hard not to pay attention, but often just cannot help myself. The week just gone has dished up some howlers.

There was a widely covered massive data breach over at Myspace. The people there were minded to make a show of acting like good corporate citizens who are concerned about their users' data privacy, and set about informing the folks who might have been affected. An email showed up in my inbox from the impressive sounding sender 'Myspace Legal'. At a scan of the headings in the body of the email it looked like they'd got a lot of the basics of crisis communications right. It starts with a 'Notice of Data Breach', which is reasonable, as I'm eager to know what this correspondence is about. This is followed by 'What Happened?', 'What Information Was Involved?', 'What We Are Doing' and 'What You Can Do'. All reasonably good so far. I mean, it could be much worse. But,

This notification is nice. However, as it tacitly acknowledges, things have happened in the wrong order. As a user of Myspace I shouldn't have found out that my personal data was at risk through something that happened with their systems through the news media. I should have known before the story was widely reported. Now it looks to me as if this welcome communication from Myspace was something of an afterthought, and would likely not have happened if the breach hadn't been reported.

Memorial Day is a holiday in the US. It is not a holiday anywhere else. People from outside the US aren't at all likely to know that Memorial Day is celebrated on the last Monday of May each year. Nor should they have to. I'm assuming this email was reviewed multiple times by multiple Myspace employees, yet still nobody picked up on this. It's bad even for US residents, because Memorial Day is a movable public holiday and the date on which it falls is not constant. Put in the damn date, Myspace, and don't make your audience do this work.

The email closes with a copywriting flourish, a traditional call to action livened up with a dash of reassurance.

This seems positive, right? They've gone above and beyond just putting a team on the case. Except the multiple teams phrasing seems to be the go to weapon in the arsenal of reassurance in communications these days. Just last week LinkedIn told me the same.

Of course, the effort being made does largely depend on the amount of appropriate people allocated to the task. And a team is any number larger than one.

Enough of that and back to the big corporate comms story of the week, the month, possibly the year. This was tronc. If you haven't heard of tronc, just roll the word around your mouth a few times before we proceed. How does it feel? Satisfying? Slightly uneven? Pleasant with a hard to discern aftertaste?

tronc

I had planned to write a bit about tronc, because I have some moderate to strong feelings about tronc, but I don't feel there's anything I can say about tronc that Allison Hantschel hasn't said better in 'On #Tronc, Journalism and Its Value'.

It's reminded me that whilst expensive corporate communications exercises gone badly awry like this should always be laughed at, they should also be highlighted as a reason why journalists are losing their jobs and journalism is suffering as a result. That the piece is a nice understated hymn to city journalism is an added bonus.

What has happened to newspaper companies in the past two decades is not about “industry shifts” and it’s not about “digital paradigms” and it sure as hell isn’t about Kids Today not reading. Nobody checking Facebook on an iPhone made the Tribune a national joke today, and if there was no internet at all in the world, newspaper companies would still be imploding because stupidity is a constant, whereas technology changes with the times.

In other newsy news, Simon McGarr has a brand spanking new newsletter which keeps you right up to date with the news you'd be better off not hearing about in the first place. Highly recommended.

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

'The Taking Of Thailand's Temple Tigers'

Totally Confused

He's number one, stolen licence plates, horse yoga, cats versus bathtubs and Woodstock couple still in love.

Yours etc., @loughlin

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‘We ask the reality TV star who may become leader of the free world how tough he would be on large zoo animals.’

Publishers hand ‘their futures over to Silicon Valley billionaires’

We ‘have come to depend on GPS, a technology that, in theory, makes it impossible to get lost.’

We have data doppelgängers who like ‘water, ice, oranges, day spas, Chinese New Year, cervical verte­brae, and human skin color.’

We have ‘“fans” on Instagram who were surprised to learn we were more than just a bot that posted pictures of Winona Ryder in Beetlejuice every four hours.’

This is what we do now.

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

Natural Palettes

Totally Confused

Player Two, unstoppable content flow, Mosh Pit Simulator trailer, who marries whom and Put Your Head Into Gallery.

Yours etc., @loughlin

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Hello.

Yellow

Bananas

It might be said that the only bananas the EU has had a significant impact upon are the politicians who repeat this myth, in the face of evidence to the contrary in any branch of Tesco. Boris is the yellowest of all.

Book covers

This year, disparate works like Sunil Yapa’s literary novel “Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist,” Tim Dorsey’s serial-killer comedy “Coconut Cowboy” and Lauren Weedman’s memoir “Miss Fortune,” all have come jacketed in straight 100% yellow, the most basic yellow in printing ink.

Canaries

In the last month the number of searches for warrant canaries grew by an order of magnitude. This is likely thanks in large part to the disappearance of reddit's warrant canary from their 2016 transparency report. The last year has, without a doubt, been a banner year for awareness of warrant canaries.

Yarn

"Days later this conversation echoes around my mind while I’m listening to the song as I walk past a typical Scottish woollen knitwear shop. My eyes flit over a ball of wool in the window while the vid2word “unwinding” is sung and pretty quickly I’m leaving a garbled over-excited message on Tim’s phone about the music video I have in my head”

Undercover police cars

Herman Yung is an enthusiastic photographer/taxi-spotter and over the years, he's managed to spot seven NYPD police cars disguised as yellow cabs.

Worth Pondering

♫ Corner

This Nicolas Jaar Essential Mix, which starts with a clip of Angelo Badalamenti talking about composing for Twin Peaks, with David Lynch sitting next to him dictating atmospheres is very much my current jam.

Eye Candy

'A Kinetic Sculpture of 15 Moving LEDs Mimics a Walking Person'

Totally Confused

Didgeridoo yerself to sleep, Museum of Obsolete Media, violent margin rabbits, sad lonely smut storms and slugs work out.

Yours etc., @loughlin

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Google has, or at least had, a design ethicist. Who is, or at least was, also a magician.

It's all about hijacking. And distracting. The attention economy

Pecking at screens looking for insight under glass in apps may not be the future for us though. If it isn't then Marco Arment thinks Apple may be in trouble.

ProPublica is running a series on the way technology is shaping our lives, often in completely unseen ways. This instalment about racist bias in police risk assessment systems makes for pretty grim reading. Someone made the algorithm. It is not neutral. That's not an excuse to hide behind.

• Chicago Police Try to Predict Who May Shoot or Be Shot
• Harassed By Algorithms

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

'Behind the Scenes of Alien'

Totally Confused

Camera traps, hallucinogens for your ears, an accidental meme, the Internet's favourite book and 'Kill the Wabbit'.

Finally, Ruth and Martin's Album Club is a must-read for me every week and last Friday's edition in which some bloke called Iain Lee listens to Yo La Tengo's I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One is particularly good. It's worth reading if you love, hate or have never heard of Yo La Tengo.

Yours etc., @loughlin

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~ Interrupting the scheduled programming with a quick toast to The Toast ~

The Toast is stopping on July 1st, which is a significant date in online calamities as July 1st 2013 is when Google Reader was put down. Why, Internet, WHY?

This shutdown raises questions as to whether any sort of independent site that features quality writing can carve out a successful existence online. The Toast was undoubtedly popular, the liveliness of their very well moderated comments section attests to that. They paid writers and went out of their way to give new voices a place to be heard. They generated revenue both through display ads and a tipjar. Although cash isn’t the main reason cited by Mallory and Nicole it certainly played a part. I’ve no doubt if things weren’t so tight they would have been able to bring more contributors on and decrease their own workload.

Oh well, we can’t have nice things for too long I suppose. Perhaps better that it goes out like this – stopping with a reasoned and classy announcement – than being bought up and having the weird brilliance squeezed out of it, bit by bit.

Here are my favourite humour pieces from its three year reign as the place with the funniest, smartest and frequently most thoughtful writing on the Web.

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“They took off their clothes, leaving their soft and hairless skin exposed to dust, wind, cold, and various other deadly elements.”

Erotica Written By An Alien Pretending Not To Be Horrified By The Human Body

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IF I CAN’T HAVE A WAR
YOU CAN BE DAMNED SURE THE RUSSIANS AND THE JAPANESE AREN’T GOING TO HAVE ONE
wait a minute and I’ll send someone from the State Department with you
TOO LATE, TAFT
I’M ALREADY ON MY WAY
GOING TO DO LUNGES ACROSS THE ATLANTIC
SHOULD BE IN MOSCOW BY NOON
I’LL WIRE WHEN I GET THERE

Dirtbag Teddy Roosevelt

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I hate the way they wobble-squample across the street at night when you see a shadowy mass under a streetlight and then it turns out to be like seven fur-children

A raccoon is the child of a cat and a wizard and it walks in too many worlds for it to be allowed to stay in this one

Everything That’s Wrong Of Raccoons

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I will have to take the day off today because:

☐ A dog looked at me

☐ I got a text from someone for whom I feel a mix of concern and frustration and recognition and longing that is both more and less than romance

☐ Someone made a joke about dead pets meeting you in heaven

Why I Am Not Coming In To Work Today

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“Sure, why not?” Ted shrugged coolly, cool not in a rude way but in the laid-back, relaxed way of a man who’s very at ease with women. “I’m a pretty liberated guy, probably not like the ones you’ve known before. I’m okay with a woman buying me things.”

Liberal Dude Erotica

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“Due to dietary restrictions, I am only able to eat Yatzhee dice. I made the necessary substitutions, and it turned out great.”

All The Comments on Every Recipe Blog

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get up
it’s weird to lie down when nobody else is lying down
sit up
i’ll sit up when I see something worth sitting up for

Women Having A Terrible Time At Parties In Western Art History

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But how is a normal internet citizen supposed to know, when they hear someone say “I just can’t stop looking at gifs of Bombadil Rivendell” that this person isn’t talking about some other actor with a name and a voice and cheekbones? Or in other words, what makes for a reasonable variation of the name Bendandsnap Calldispatch?

A Linguist Explains the Rules of Summoning Benedict Cumberbatch

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MOVIE STAR: BRING OUT MY DECEIT TWIN WHO LIES TO THE MIRROR FOR ME
BRING FORTH MY SKIN MINION, I REQUIRE HIS BODY’S LIES

“Bring Me My Pain Twin”: A Movie Star Names Things

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21. Things Get Worse and Then You Have an Illegitimate Child With a Man From Outremont Who Doesn’t Really Love You

Every Canadian Novel Ever

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MONK #1: are people the same height as castles
MONK #2: pretty much yeah

Two Medieval Monks Invent Art

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MONK #1: what part of the knight do fish go on
MONK #2: the head

Two Medieval Monks Invent Bestiaries

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MONK #1: what surrounds the earth
MONK #2: mm
trees
lobsters
some guys trying to blow on us
horrible red chaos

Two Medieval Monks Invent Maps

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Yours etc., @loughlin

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