media | Steve Woods

Council seizes fly-tipper’s van

27/09/2024 Steve WoodsBristol, Media, Politics

There was a rare item on the Bristol Live website today. Bristol City Council decided to publicise an element of its enforcement activities against fly-tippers and other environmental criminals.

Normally a shy and retiring organisation where its enforcement activities are concerned, the council is very publicity-shy about the number of people it deals with for environmental crimes, preferring quietly to issue fixed penalty notices (FPNs) of up to £1,000 a time. However, the council has this time taken firmer than normal action against an alleged fly-tipper by seizing the alleged offender’s vehicle in the city’s Hartcliffe are and towing it away, as well as the more unusual step of publicising its operation.

Image courtesy of Bristol City Council Neighbourhood Enforcement

The council was acting under section 34b of the 1990 Environmental Protection Act – the right to search or seize vehicles if a fly-tipping offence has been committed, the vehicle was used in the commission of the offence and proceedings for that offence have not yet been brought, or if the vehicle is about to be used or is being used in a fly-tipping offence.

Having repeatedly pleaded with the council to publicise its actions – if only for their deterrent effect – your ‘umble scribe is very pleased to see this welcome change and only has a further five words of advice to those in waste management and enforcement down the Counts Louse*: keep up the good work!

* = The traditional spelling for and pronunciation of the local authority’s headquarters within the city.
The ‘little list’ man returns

10/09/2024 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Politics

One of the more interesting aspects of the current Nasty Party (© Theresa May) leadership competition is the number of old Tory politicians sticking their heads back above the parapet to endorse various Conservative leadership contenders. In addition, it serves as a reminder to the rest of us just how awful those candidates are, as well as how dreadful the endorsers were when in office and still are today.

Yesterday’s Guardian reminds us that in an article in The Times (paywalled) that ‘Lord’ Peter Lilley, who was Secretary of State for Social Security under John Major, as well as occupying other ministerial and party positions under other party leaders, announced his endorsement of leadership contender Kemi Badenoch (a person so unpleasant Guardian political sketch writer John Crace has described her as being able to “start a fight with her own reflection. Ed.), drawing attention to her engineering background and aligning it with the scientific background of the sainted Thatcher, as follows:
Since Margaret Thatcher, a science graduate, nearly every prime minister and party leader of both the Tories and Labour has been a wordsmith. They mostly studied politics, philosophy and economics, or law. They were good at using words, all too often twisting words to explain away failure and rationalise broken promises, or finding out what people want then telling them what they want to hear. But they lacked the mindset to organise and plan the deployment of resources and people.

Lilley may have denounced the law and Oxbridge PPE graduates who tend to dominate modern politics and their twisted use of words, but he himself has not been immune in his time from twisting words for political effect, as was more than apparent in his 1992 speech to the Conservative Party conference, in which he referred to his notorious ‘Little List‘ which demonised those unfortunate enough to have to claim social security benefits under a Tory government – usually demonised as fraudsters and scroungers.

The transcript of Lilley’s parody from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado reads as follows:

I’ve got a little list / Of benefit offenders who I’ll soon be rooting out / And who never would be missed / They never would be missed. /
There’s those who make up bogus claims / In half a dozen names / And councillors who draw the dole / To run left-wing campaigns / They never would be missed / They never would be missed. /
There’s young ladies who get pregnant just to jump the housing queue / And dads who won’t support the kids / of ladies they have … kissed / And I haven’t even mentioned all those sponging socialists / I’ve got them on my list / And they’ll none of them be missed / They’ll none of them be missed.

Do you remember what is said about people who live in glass houses, Mr Lilley? 😀
CMA objects to Google’s anti-competitive ad tech practices

06/09/2024 Steve WoodsMedia, Politics, Tech

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has announced today its provisional finding provisionally that Google has abused its dominant positions through the operation of both its publisher ad server and buying tools to restrict competition in the UK.

The provisional findings relate to how Google gives precedence to its own ad exchange – harming competition and, as a result, advertisers and publishers.

This action in the UK parallels the actions of US and EU agencies which are also investigating similar concerns in respect of the search behemoth.

As set out in a statement of objections issued to Google on Friday 6th September, the CMA has provisionally found that when placing digital ads on websites, the vast majority of publishers and advertisers use Google’s ad tech services in order to bid for and sell advertising space.

The CMA is concerned that Google is actively using its dominance in this sector to give precedence its own services. In so doing, Google disadvantages competitors and prevents them competing on a level playing field to provide publishers and advertisers with a better, more competitive service that supports growth in their business.

In its 2019 market study of digital advertising, the CMA found that advertisers were spending around £1.8 billion annually on open display ads, marketing goods and services via apps and websites to UK consumers.

The CMA has found provisionally that, since at least 2015, Google has abused its dominant positions through the operation of both its buying tools and publisher ad server in order to strengthen AdX’s market position and to protect its AdX advertising exchange from competition from other exchanges. Moreover, due to the highly integrated nature of Google’s ad tech business, the CMA has provisionally found that Google’s conduct has also prevented rival publisher ad servers from being able to compete effectively with DFP, harming competition in this market.

Overview of the ad tech stack, key intermediaries and Google’s ad tech products

This practice is still continuing, according to the CMA. The Authority is therefore considering what may be required to ensure that Google ceases these anti-competitive practices and do not do the same or similar in the future.

The CMA may impose a financial penalty on any business found to have infringed the Chapter II prohibition of up to 10% of its annual worldwide group turnover.
Days out ideas. Time machine required

25/08/2024 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Oddities, Social Media

When parliament rises for the summer recess, the period until it reconvenes in the autumn is traditionally known as the silly season. This time of year was traditionally when the press would scramble around desperately for something newsworthy and printable.

This has changed somewhat in recent decades due to the emergence of the 24 hours news cycle driven by technological change, including the rise of social media.

However, the need to find worthwhile to publish is exacerbated when the silly season also includes a public holiday, a time when the great unwashed needs to be kept amused and entertained, which brings us to a piece in today’s edition of the Bristol Post/Live.

Yes, you did read the headline correctly. It does say 2024. Sadly, in this particular item, Bristol’s Reach plc local news title has not followed standard Reach procedure and included affiliate links to time machine providers in the copy, so those intent on visiting Bristol’s hinterland last year will have to go and look for their own, at least until the proofreader returns from holiday. 🙂
Ambushed by donkeys and a lettuce

14/08/2024 Steve WoodsMedia, Politics, Social Media

Today’s Guardian reports that Britain’s shortest-serving former prime minister, one Mary Elizabeth Truss, stormed off the stage at a book promotion event after being upstaged by a lettuce banner which dropped from the flies.

The banner bore the phrase “I crashed the economy” below a picture of a lettuce.

Truss was at Beccles Hall in Suffolk promoting her memoir, Ten Years to Save The West, once described as “the work of a failed politician whose historical legacy will be the unprecedented shortness of her premiership“, when the incident happened.

Campaign group Led By Donkeys had arranged the stunt and publicised it via its account on the Muskrat’s X-rated social media platform.

And here’s the video footage in all its (ahem) glory.

For once, Truss had no difficulty finding how to get off the stage; this has not always been the case.

In response to the stunt, Truss reportedly remarked:

What happened last night was not funny. Far-left activists disrupted the event, which then had to be stopped for security reasons. This is done to intimidate people and suppress free speech.

I won’t stand for it.

According to The Independent, Conservative political commentator Tim Montgomerie advised: “Liz Truss would be well advised to learn to laugh at herself”.
The continuing menace of driverless vehicles

01/08/2024 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media

All over the country, every day driverless vehicles are colliding with other vehicles and/or structures according to the local press.

Here’s a typical example from today’s Bristol Live/Post to accompany the screenshot below.

Nowhere in the entire report is there any mention of a driver, i.e. someone who might have been able to avoid the vehicle in question deciding to crash into the railway bridge of its own volition.

Furthermore, the byline shows that someone is unfamiliar with basic English language. It reads:

Services are at a stand.

The byline is in fact quoted from Inrix, a US-based traffic data company which now operates in the Untied Kingdom, but seems to be unfamiliar with the word standstill. If any illiterate Inrix employees happen to be passing, it is defined as a condition in which all movement or activity has stopped.
The phrase at a stand does exist, but its meaning – in a state of confusion or uncertainty; undecided what to do next – is subtly different from standstill.
Auntie aids fascist rioters

31/07/2024 Steve WoodsMedia, Politics, Social Media

On Monday an horrific attack took place in Southport at a children’s dance class in which three young girls were deprived of life.

The victims had been attending a Taylor Swift-themed dance and yoga class for children aged up to 11. Taylor Swift herself responded as follows to the news.

A seventeen year-old youth was arrested on suspicion of murder and attempted murder, although his motives remain unclear.

The BBC went to the trouble of reporting the suspect’s ethnicity.

The BBC can report that the teenage suspect, whose parents are from Rwanda, was born in Cardiff and moved to the Southport area in 2013.

It is at this point that questions arise as to why did the BBC point out that although the suspect is a British citizen, he is of African heritage, a fact that was sure to inflame the extreme right.

A vigil was planned near the scene of the attack on Tuesday evening. At about 19.45 hrs, it was followed by violent disorder in which those involved set alight cars, threw bricks at a local mosque, damaged a local convenience store and set wheelie bins on fire. The rioters are believed to have been members of the English Defence League (EDL).

After the riot, questions were asked including the one below by tax campaigner and top-flight accountant Richard Murphy.

Meanwhile in Scotland, The National reports that SNP leader Hamza Yousef has written to the Home Secretary demanding that the EDL be proscribed as a terrorist organisation, as well as posting the following on X/Twitter this morning.

Violence targeting police officers, the public, and mosques, all to drive forward the far-right’s hateful ideology.

Rhetoric is not enough.

We need to take action against the far-right. I have asked the Home Secretary to use her powers to proscribe the English Defence League.
Newspaper gives fascist geography lesson

22/07/2024 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Politics, Social Media
An interesting mini-drama has played out on social media this morning in the wake of incumbent US president Joe Biden’s decision to step down from the impending campaign in that country’s presidential election.

The dramatis personae are as follows:
- Johannes Huber, a member of the far-right AfD party who serves as a member of the Federal Parliament (MdB); and
- The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), one of Germany’s major newspapers.
In common with the characteristics of the species homo politicus, i.e. approaching each and every subject with an open mouth, Huber took one look at the news of Joe Biden’s decision to step down from the forthcoming US presidential election (called a general election in the USA. Ed.), got straight on to X/Twitter to post the words ‘Biden is not my President!’.

Note the exclamation mark. 😀

This enabled the FAZ to reply sarcastically to the MdB in question ‘Dear Johannes Huber MP, correct, your president is Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Best wishes‘, giving him both a timely geography lesson reminding him not so subtly that he is in fact a German citizen.

Meanwhile in the actual presidential campaign itself, Biden has formally endorsed his vice-president Kamala Harris to be the Democrats’ candidate; and Harris looks like she’s relishing the prospect of putting victim-playing egomaniac and disgraced former president Donald John Trump in his place.

Ouch!

The next few months promise to be interesting times indeed.
Auntie prefers football to politics

17/07/2024 Steve WoodsMedia, Oddities, Politics, Social Media

Yesterday’s The Jouker column in The National highlights a prime example of a colonial attitude in the media of the Untied Kingdom.

There were two two significant resignations on Tuesday, but as The Jouker points out, football – and English football at that – was prioritised on the BBC News website ahead of a major political development in Caerdydd, capital of England’s oldest colony.

That resignation was of the disgraced First Minister of Cymru, Vaughan Gething, who amongst other things, had refused to step down after, inter alia, losing a vote of confidence and accepting a £200,000 “donation” from a “businessman” convicted of environmental crimes. Gething’s hand was forced by a mass outbreak of ministerial resignations similar to that which ended the premiership of disgraced former alleged party-time prime minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.

Although he’d only been First Minister since March, when the BBC did finally send its political editor down the M4/Great Western railway line to Caerdydd, Chris Mason did helpfully point pout that Gething’s term of office was 2.4 times longer than that of another British premier, one Mary Elizabeth Truss, the ultimate free marketeer whose polices were roundly rejected by the, er, market.

The resignation story which took precedence yesterday was that of England football manager Gareth Southgate who managed to get his team to two consecutive European Football Championship finals, yet still disappointed the jingoistic English media by failing (yet again) to win a chunk of international silverware like his predecessor in 1966, Alf Ramsey.

Why should football take priority over politics? Critics on social media were not slow to notice the choice of priorities made in London, i.e. that only England matters and Wales is a lesser concern, as has been the case ever since Henry VIII’s 16th century Acts of Union.

There is however precedence for this attitude and it comes from another footballer; and one that is one of Scotland’s greatest football exports, Bill Shankly, who was manager of Liverpool FC from 1959 to 1974, a length of tenure of office which modern football managers can only dream of.

Shankly is famously on record as rating the importance of football as follows:

Some people believe football is a matter of life and death. I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.

The above quote from Shankly can be found here with plenty of others from the sage of Anfield.
Commission sends preliminary findings to X for DSA breach

12/07/2024 Steve WoodsPolitics, Tech
Today the EU Commission has informed X – the declining social media platform formerly known as Twitter – of its preliminary view that the company is in breach of the Digital Services Act (DSA) in areas linked to dark patterns, advertising transparency and data access for researchers.

Based on an in-depth investigation that included, inter alia, the analysis of internal company documents, interviews with experts, as well as cooperation with national Digital Services Coordinators, the Commission has issued preliminary findings of non-compliance with the DSA on three grievances:
- First, X designs and operates its interface for the “verified accounts” with the “Blue checkmark” in a way that does not correspond to industry practice and deceives users. Since anyone can subscribe to obtain such a “verified” status, it negatively affects users’ ability to make free and informed decisions about the authenticity of the accounts and the content they interact with. There is evidence of motivated malicious actors abusing the “verified account” to deceive users.
- Second, X does not comply with the required transparency on advertising, as it does not provide a searchable and reliable advertisement repository, but instead put in place design features and access barriers that make the repository unfit for its transparency purpose towards users. In particular, the design does not allow for the required supervision and research into emerging risks brought about by the distribution of advertising online.
- Third, X fails to provide access to its public data to researchers in line with the conditions set out in the DSA. In particular, X prohibits eligible researchers from independently accessing its public data, such as by scraping, as stated in its terms of service. In addition, X’s process to grant eligible researchers access to its application programming interface (API) appears to dissuade researchers from carrying out their research projects or leave them with no other choice than to pay disproportionally high fees.
If the Commission’s preliminary views were to be confirmed, the Commission would adopt a non-compliance decision finding that X is in breach of Articles 25, 39 and 40(12) of the DS, which could entail fines of up to 6% of X’s total worldwide annual turnover and order the provider to take measures to address the breach. A non-compliance decision may also trigger an enhanced supervision period to ensure compliance with the measures the provider intends to take to remedy the breach. The Commission can also impose periodic penalty payments to compel a platform to comply.

Thierry Breton, Commissioner for the Internal Market said:

Back in the day, BlueChecks used to mean trustworthy sources of information. Now with X, our preliminary view is that they deceive users and infringe the DSA. We also consider that X’s ads repository and conditions for data access by researchers are not in line with the DSA transparency requirements. X has now the right of defence — but if our view is confirmed we will impose fines and require significant changes.

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