Live from Austin!

Let’s have a quick fact check here:

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is rated M by the ESRB, meaning it is rated as unsuitable for anyone under the age of 17. The rating label notes “Strong Sexual Content”.

The game features a mission where you rescue a prostitute who is being raped and murdered by two johns. It allows you to have sex with bikini-wearing prostitutes in your car, accompanied by bouncing suspension, steamed-up windows and explicit sound effects. You can also kill the prostitutes with a chainsaw afterwards, if you so wish. Or, you can wander into a strip club, watch the dancers on stage, then go into the back room and pay money for a private lap dance, depicted in 3D polygons.

None of that was a problem for the ESRB when they issued an M rating. However, if you modify the game you can make it show a scene where two adult characters have fully clothed, completely consensual sex, with no money changing hands, no exploitation, and no violence.

That’s apparently a horrendously damaging image, which means the game should have been rated for people 1 year older—because the difference between an AO rating and an M rating is that AO is for 18 and older, whereas M is for 17 and older.

As a sidenote, 17 year olds in America can have actual sex with real human beings in 43 states in the nation; I’m assuming they can legally do it with the lights on, perhaps even after taking their clothes off.

One of the previous installments of GTA featured a length lesbian S&M scene. Meanwhile, the (reportedly awful) game BMX XXX features topless women riding BMX bikes while their breasts jiggle, and full nudity; it’s rated M. No problems there.

So those are the facts. Now the House of Representatives has voted, almost unanimously, for the FTC to investigate whether Rockstar Games deceitfully misled the ESRB in order to corrupt America’s 17 year olds, rather than only those 18 and up.

Well, that’s money well spent. Thank goodness we don’t have any more important problems that need attention.

So, it’s the end of 2004, and once again my life has changed in major ways. In less than a year I’ve:

• sold my flat in the UK,
• learned to drive,
• packed up my worldly possessions and put them in storage,
• bought a car,
• gone on a road trip half way across America,
• moved to Texas, and
• made an offer on a house.

The house thing is still stalled, however. Right now the critical path bottleneck is that the people buying the house next door feel that they need to get the property lines re-drawn. The way things were built, the property line ran across one corner of the shared garage, which meant that we would also have property rights over it. The neighbors aren’t happy with this; they want to have the entire garage on their property, and have us use it via an easement.

That’s fine by me; it’ll mean they have to deal with maintenance, and there’s parking out the front of the house if necessary. However, it should obviously impact the price of the property, so our bid is effectively stalled until we can at least see what we’re now buying.

On a more positive note, I sent off affidavits and documentation to two of the credit reference agencies, the collection agency, and the LA police department. Sure, you can try and talk to collection agencies and Trans Union by phone, fill out forms, and so on—but I wasn’t in the mood to screw around. Instead, I got a sample legal affidavit from the FTC web site, wrote everything up in exhaustive detail, attached insurance documents and other info proving I was nowhere near LA ever, signed it with a witness, and sent copies off in a big envelope. As a result, the collection agency has agreed that the guy in LA who used my name to run up a $5,000 phone bill wasn’t actually me. They say they’ve asked the credit agencies to remove all the bad stuff from my credit reports.

Hopefully that’ll make the bank happier. The latest from them is that they are suspicious that I’m buying the house as a vacation property or an investment, and don’t believe I’m really living in Texas. That’s a response I’ve had from a quite a few people now. I’ve sent a photocopy of my Texas driver’s license and the HMO card that proves that even IBM knows I’m living in Texas.

Minnesota was bitterly cold, very flat, and covered in snow—just the way my beloved spouse likes it. Today in Austin, on the other hand, it’s up around 25 celsius, warm and sunny T-shirt weather.

What with car repairs, a new Palm, air fares and Christmas shopping, December was a bit of a financial disaster. Since we’re planning on going to the UK for my cousin’s wedding in the spring, it’s time for some austerity. Fortunately, you can go out and get breakfast for two for $10 in Austin, so austerity doesn’t necessarily mean misery. Still, if anyone has a spare McArthur Genius Grant or something, I’d be very happy to transition to being an independently wealthy author of free GPL software and documentation. In the mean time, a visit to the Skunk Show gets put off for another year.

I’m off to Vegas again in January, another IBM conference. I’m working a pedestal and helping at the info booths, which means long hours and not much opportunity for expensive vices. Plus, my only real vice is Krispy Kreme. There’s one of those located in the Venetian, allegedly the hotel I’m staying at.

Work is…well, the project I’ve been working on is now being transitioned to an officially supported server run by IBM Global Services. If you’ve worked with IGS as a customer, you can probably imagine what it’s like to work with them when you have no choice and they can set whatever price and define whatever working practices they like.

If you watch Comedy Central, chances are you’ve seen a strange and irritating message scrolling across the screen recently. It says something about Dish Network subscribers losing access to the channels they have paid for. It’s actually a complete lie; here’s the real story:

Viacom own CBS, MTV, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, and a bunch of other channels. Their contract with Dish Network was coming to an end. Their terms for the new contract were: (1) You pay us an extra 7%, and (2) You carry all of our channels as part of your basic lineup whether the customer wants them or not.

Dish Network balked at this. They know that customers are sick of having one humongous expensive package that contains dozens of channels they never watch. So, Dish said that they would drop the Viacom channels from their basic package—but that anybody who wanted them could pay the extra cost and get them.

Viacom threw a hissy fit, and said that if Dish didn’t force all their customers to pay for every Viacom channel whether they wanted them all or not, they wouldn’t be allowed to carry any Viacom channels—not even CBS, available over the airwaves for free to anyone with a wire loop antenna.

Dish still refused to back down, so Viacom started putting the scrolling messages on all their channels. In spite of the fact that it’s Viacom threatening to take the channels away from Dish Network subscribers, Viacom are lying that it’s Dish Network’s fault, and telling people to call Dish Network and complain. Dish’s response has been to file a lawsuit to try and prevent Viacom from using its media power to force people to buy its channels. Dish has also been covering up the lies with black rectangles.

Obviously I’m siding with Dish Network on this one. To get the handful of channels we watch, we have to pay for over 50 channels we never watch. I’d like to ditch those channels and use the money to pay for HBO instead, but it’s not going to happen unless someone stands up to companies like Viacom and Disney and forces them to let it happen. Disney pulls the same tricks—it forces the cable companies to make expensive Disney channels like ESPN part of the basic lineup, or else they’re not allowed to carry ABC.

Ironically, the Viacom channels are amongst those I’d pay to receive if I had the choice.

So, please spread the word, contact the FTC, whatever.

[2004-03-02] Well, pobox.com’s new spam filtering system picked up 2,982 spams in the last week, and 1 false positive. And that wasn’t really a false positive—it bounced a newsletter from sudhian.com because they’re apparently too incompetent to set up their MTA to provide a proper HELO hostname, so their SMTP request was invalid (as per the RFCs). I sent them e-mail to warn them, and it bounced because their newsletter reply address was invalid too. I’ve forwarded the bounce back to postmaster, what’s the betting they’re violating that RFC as well?

I have no problem with bouncing mail from anyone that incompetent, and 99.99% accuracy is plenty good enough, so I’ve switched the filters over to full automatic, and now they’ll reject the spam e-mail during the SMTP attempt. It won’t even reach my second-line adaptive bayesian filters.

[2006-03-09] About two years on, and the spam rate remains more or less constant: 2,840 spams in the last 7 days.

Contrast this with the claim from the FTC that the CAN-SPAM Act has been effective, and that consumers are receiving less spam than they used to.

It’s quite possible that consumers are receiving less spam, but from my numbers it seems clear that the amount of spam being sent hasn’t gone down. Instead, filtering for the average person is getting more effective.

The FBI is investigating the terrorists’ use of stolen credit cards and other ID to hide their trail, thanks to inadequate privacy protection.

The FTC has abandoned plans to improve privacy protection, citing the 9/11 attacks as the reason.