Live from Austin!

We like to think that we are immune to propaganda. Yes, other feeble-minded individuals may allow their attitudes to be shaped by the media and their surroundings, but we’re sure that we are far too smart for that.

In 1975, John Cleese savagely satirized British attitudes to Germany, in the classic Fawlty Towers episode The Germans. After a blow to the head, hotel proprietor Basil Fawlty loses his ability to self-censor. While taking a dinner order from some German guests, he proceeds to blurt out the names of Nazis; eventually he descends into xenophobic ranting.

The sad thing is that after 30 more years, nothing much has changed.

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When Apple launched Mac OS X, they made a big thing about its typographical capabilities. To show off the new type rendering engine, they licensed and bundled…

More than $1,000 of the best fonts available today, including Baskerville, Herman Zapf’s Zapfino, Futura, and Optima; as well as the highest-quality Japanese fonts available, in the largest character set ever on a personal computer.

It’s interesting to contrast this with Microsoft’s approach. Back when they launched Windows, they needed some fonts too. Since every laser printer on the planet (and most non-laser printers) had Helvetica and Times in, it would have been really useful if Windows had had Helvetica too. Macintoshes at the time shipped with Times and Helvetica, and it enabled them to display on screen a reasonable facsimile of what you would get on printout.

Of course, doing what Apple had done and actually licensing the fonts wasn’t an option. Bill Gates didn’t get to be as rich as he is today by paying people for the use of their intellectual property. Instead, Microsoft got a couple of knock-off fonts made by Monotype that were close enough—Times New Roman and Arial. In the case of Arial, the emulation was painstaking, right down to using the exact same character and stroke widths for every symbol.

Much the same happened with Microsoft Office. Microsoft saw a font they rather liked—Hermann Zapf’s Palatino—so they called in Monotype to make a quick copy. The result was named Book Antiqua, and bundled with Office.

Unlike Helvetica, however, Palatino was a wholly original design by a living designer. Hermann Zapf got rather angry, and Microsoft agreed to license Palatino retrospectively.

With Microsoft, history has a way of repeating itself. The forthcoming (some day) Windows Vista has a font called Segoe, used for all user interface elements. Microsoft recently filed for a visual trademark on Segoe, to try and ensure that nobody else would be able to use the font in their logotypes or software. Because, you know, everyone wants the caché of looking like Windows.

Unfortunately, some spoilsports at Linotype noticed that Segoe (as shipped in the Vista betas) was almost identical to the font Frutiger Next, designed in 1997 by Adrian Frutiger for use on signage in Munich. Microsoft had tweaked the tail on the ‘Q’, added a baseline to the ‘1′, left everything else identical, and then filed for a trademark as if the font was their own original design.

The European Union denied the application. Microsoft attempted to appeal, arguing that Linotype hadn’t actually sold Frutiger Next. Unfortunately, Frutiger is a very popular font, and the evidence of its Next variant’s existence prior to 2005 was overwhelming. Denied! Microsoft must pay all the lawyers’ fees for Heidelburger Druckmaschinen AG, aka Linotype.

Frutiger is very similar to Adobe Myriad, designed by Robert Slimbach and Carol Twombly. Consensus seems to be that Myriad is original enough to not be considered a rip off, however. Myriad is used by Apple for their corporate publications (replacing Apple Garamond), and is also used by my team at IBM. It’s worth noting that Apple license the font from its owners, and I use a legal licensed copy too.

So…will Microsoft license Frutiger or Myriad? Or will they tweak Segoe some more?

Guardian:

Alexander Lukashenko, the authoritarian president of Belarus, is to be banned from travelling to the EU and US after riot police in Minsk arrested hundreds of opposition activists protesting against the results of last weekend’s elections.

Meanwhile on Newsday:

“We are concerned that false police statements may have tainted hundreds of cases of people arrested at the two largest mass arrests during the convention,” NYCLU attorney Christopher Dunn wrote to New York Police Department Commissioner Raymond Kelly and Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau.

City law officials have said the arrests were justified.

The accusations stem from the tense standoff in 2004 between the nation’s largest police department and the tens of thousands of demonstrators at the GOP convention at Madison Square Garden, where President Bush accepted his party’s nomination for a second term in office. While anti-war and other demonstrations were mostly peaceful, sporadic clashes between police and protesters resulted in more than 1,800 arrests, mostly on misdemeanor charges like obstructing governmental administration.

Can’t…maintain…doublethink…

If you watch New Hampshire Public Television (WENH) for a while, chances are you’ll see an advertisement stating that the programming is sponsored by BAE Systems of New Hampshire. The TV ad shows happy smiling families playing baseball to raise money for the American Cancer Research Fund, and ends with the slogan “BAE Systems: A Global Company With A Local Heart”.

Heartwarming stuff. Unless, of course, you know who BAE Systems actually are.

They used to be known as British Aerospace, until they merged with Marconi in the late 1990s. They’re the UK’s number one defense contractor, and one of the largest arms manufacturers worldwide. They make warplanes, ships, submarines, radar systems—everything from gyroscopic compasses to weapons of mass destruction.

One of their more well-known products is the Hawk fighter-bomber. During the 1980s and 90s, BAE Systems sold 40 Hawk aircraft to the Indonesian government, who used them to help with the attempted genocide in East Timor. The UK Labour government shipped them another 16 after the genocide started, saying that they were powerless to revoke an arms contract signed by the previous government. Of course, that doesn’t explain why they extended the contract to avoid it expiring during the EU arms embargo on Indonesia…

You might also know BAE Systems via their subsidiary Heckler & Koch. The H&K MP5 was standard issue for Indonesian troops in East Timor during the genocide. To get around inconvenient trade embargoes, BAE Systems licensed the design to MKEK, a Turkish company who were happy to sell the weapons to Indonesia. (You may also remember seeing one of them pointed at Elian Gonzales.)

BAES are on very good terms with the US government too, to the tune of $5 billion a year. (That’s a very nice tune, it goes cha-ching.) BAE gets special treatment from the Pentagon, being allowed to trade as if it was a domestic arms company. That means lots of juicy contracts fighting “The War Against Terrorism”.

They’re also close friends with the regime in Saudi Arabia, allegedly thanks to their purchasing houses, yachts and hookers for Saudi officials via a corporate slush fund. In 1995, investigative reporters caught BAE staff on film offering electroshock batons for sale as torture equipment, and admitting that they had sold 8,000 to the Saudis and thousands more to the Chinese, who are particularly fond of using them against Tibetans. The great thing about BAES electroshock batons is you can torture someone for hours and not leave a mark. For some reason, they fail to mention all this on their home page, merely stating that they are “innovating for a safer world”.

When the UK government tried to start an anti-corruption initiative, BAE Systems actually refused to take part. In fact, they are so sleazy that the Bush administration accused them of being corrupt. All of which makes the WENH ad rather surreal, but not as surreal as the fact that BAES have the titanium composite cojones necessary to publish a corporate social responsibility page.

So, next time you see the happy smiling faces of the BAE Systems children on WENH, perhaps like me you’ll wonder what happens when one of them asks “What do you do at work, Daddy?”

Yes, I know, all the bad things happen in other parts of BAE Systems. The New Hampshire people make teddy bears for orphans. No, actually they’re the Information and Electronic Warfare Systems unit, who make the guidance systems for the happy fighter jets that fly over Aceh.

Never let it be said that I’m not doing my bit to try and prevent a recession. This weekend it was time for a new mobile phone.

My old phone is a Bosch World 718. It’s a lovely phone; reliable, good sound, excellent build quality, adequate battery life, and works pretty much anywhere in Europe or the USA because it’s dual-band GSM. The only problem is, it’s 1996 technology, which means it’s the size and weight of a brick compared to today’s phones. Which in turn meant that I was less likely to carry it everywhere.

So, it was time for an update. I looked at the Ericsson T28w, another dual-band phone, but I must admit that I was put off by the fact that it has the highest radiation levels of any phone on the market.

As a skeptical scientific type, I know that there is zero evidence that cell phones cause cancer. In fact, there’s a scientist at MIT who regularly exposes herself to insane quantities of microwave radiation. During WW2, sailors would stand in front of the emitters on cold nights to keep warm. If EM radiation caused cancer, we’d have seen some pretty horrific cases by now.

Nevertheless…

I also wasn’t entirely convinced by the T28 flip mechanism. Especially when I saw that the one in the store had broken off. In the end I settled on a Nokia 8290—about the same size, but a quarter of the radiation, and it has a bunch of features which are nice to have, albeit not essential.

First off, the 8290 has no external antenna. This helps when keeping it in a pocket. It’s actually small enough to just stuff into the pocket of my jeans, which is amazing.

Secondly, the 8290 has IR support. You can beam phone numbers, SMS messages and other data between a PalmOS handheld and the phone. If I wanted to pay more, I could even get wireless web and e-mail access.

And finally, the 8290 has replaceable faceplates. That seems frivolous, but it means that when the front of the phone gets scratched up from being in your jeans pocket all the time, you can just get a new plastic faceplate.

I also like the fact that I can now set access control for incoming calls, and have predefined settings for different places. So I can put the phone in a pre-defined “meeting” mode, where only certain people are allowed to disturb me, and the phone vibrates without ringing. I also got a handsfree headset for free, but I haven’t tried it yet…

I’m still keeping the Bosch for when I travel to the EU. But for the 99% of the time that I’m in the USA, the Nokia’s a much better solution.