Russia to ban the Simpsons, Family Guy and South Park?

By Mark O’Neill
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

The Russian parliament, the Duma, is to begin hearings to decide whether to revoke the license of a cartoon TV network because they showed episodes of the Simpsons, Family Guy and South Park.

These three popular US cartoon programmes are being targeted by the Kremlin for termination, but it seems to be South Park which is the main target.  It has been described by Russian politicians as ”pornographic, extremist and immoral” and one episode in particular seems to have got their vodka bottles in a twist – “Mr Hankey’s Christmas Classics“.

In the episode, Mr Hankey leads a show of various Christmas songs with the lyrics all changed to poke fun at organized religion.  The Russian Government feels this “incites religious hatred” and “offends religious people”.

But wait!   They have more complimentary things to say about Eric Cartman and his chums!

There are full of scenes of mutilation and infliction of physical and moral suffering that evoke fear, panic and terror in children.

This media product is of low moral and ethical content and has an extremely negative effect on children, it perverts their moral orientation and increases the danger of panic and neurotic ailments.

So if Mr President-Prime Minister Putin gets his way and there’s no South Park, Simpsons or Family Guy in Russia anymore, what will there be on TV to laugh at instead?

The Russian parliament has decreed that if the cartoon licence is revoked the American cartoons will be replaced with programmes that will teach children patriotism, respect for family values, and the importance of sport.

To quote Cartman, “WHAT?! GODDAMMIT! YOU’RE GOTTA BE KIDDIN’ ME! YOU’RE BUSTING MA BALLS!”

And to show you what all the fuss is about, here’s a clip of “Mr Hankey’s Christmas Classics”.   Don’t send me all the flames.   I didn’t make this episode! I’m merely reporting it.

Russia to ban Simpsons and South Park – Daily Telegraph
Russia attempts to ban South Park – Guardian news blog

T-Mobile’s Change of Heart

GAS was just one of the many blogs on Tuesday to mention the bandwidth cap on the new Android G1 phone from Google/T-Mobile. Well, they changed that policy so fast that I think I have whiplash. Granted, it could have been due to new customers complaining, but I’m more inclined to thank the Power of Internet Bad Press for this one.

T-Mobile gave the following statement to the NY Times just last night:

Our goal, when the T-Mobile G1 becomes available in October, is to provide affordable, high-speed data service allowing customers to experience the full data capabilities of the device and our 3G network. At the same time, we have a responsibility to provide the best network experience for all of our customers so we reserve the right to temporarily reduce data throughput for a small fraction of our customers who have excessive or disproportionate usage that interferes with our network performance or our ability to provide quality service to all of our customers.

We removed the 1GB soft limit from our policy statement, and we are confident that T-Mobile G1 customers will enjoy the high speed of data access over our 3G network. The specific terms for our new data plans are still being reviewed and once they are final we will be certain to share this broadly with current customers and potential new customers. [Emphasis Added]

So now they have basically the same policy as other providers. For example, AT&T doesn’t charge overages, but reserves the right to deal with excessive bandwidth usage on an individual basis.


Jedi Beware: Darth Vader Wall Clock

Fans of the dark side, rejoice! The official Star Wars online shop has just started selling a Darth Vader wall clock that promises to freak out the Jedi-loving bunch out there. Manufactured by England’s Wesco Limited, this timepiece measures over 6 inches tall, features a reflective black finish, glowing red eyes and an evil Vader breathing sound effect that kicks in when the lights go out. Yours for only $35.

[Via GeekAlerts]

Jump from Firefox to any other browser in a flash

By Mark O’Neill
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

I’m sure that most of you, like me, live and breathe Mozilla Firefox.   However, there will be times when you may have to use another browser, such as when you’re coding a webpage and need to see how it looks in all available browsers.    Or you may come across a website that simply refuses to work in Firefox and demands that you use IE instead.    Yes, there ARE still sites out there that refuse to obey the Fox.

The IE Tab extension is already well known, but did you know about some of the other ones out there?   For example, here’s OperaView if you want to jump to Opera from Firefox.   There’s even one for Safari (Windows and Mac).

And if you’re a fan of the new Google Chrome browser, you can even have a right-click option to be able to jump to Chrome.

Via Firefox Facts

Study shows most cyberattacks are US-based

By Mark O’Neill
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

Whenever people hear of cyberattacks and hackers, they automatically assume that these attacks come from China, Russia or another country in that area of the world.   But a study by security firm SecureWorks has shown that the vast majority of cyberattacks come from the United States with China coming a distant second.  They have also determined that most of the attacks against Georgia came from the U.S.

According to SecureWorks, there were 20.6 million attempted attacks against their clients from US-based computers in 2008.   This puts them in first place with China coming in second with 7.7 million attempts.   Russia, the place where everyone seems to think hackers, rippers, downloaders and other unsavoury types live in is way down in seventh place with a paltry 130,572 attempts!    So it looks as if Russian people are more law-abiding than previously thought, eh?

What do you think?   Do you agree that the US is probably more into the cyberattack game than other nations or would you say these results are a bit suspect?

T-Mobile: Buy a shiny new Android G1… just don’t use it much.

Here’s a great example of why you should always be sure to read the fine print. On the product page for the highly-anticipated new T-Mobile/Google phone, you will see (if you squint) this note at the bottom: “If your total data usage in any billing cycle is more than 1GB, your data throughput for the remainder of that cycle may be reduced to 50 kbps or less.”

So much for the “unlimited” access plan. Sure, you can still surf the web, download music, or watch YouTube videos as much as you want… but if you do it too much, they’ll cripple your phone so that for the rest of the month you have to do it really slowly.

I remember there was a lot of talk this year about AT&T limiting their “unlimited” data plan to 5GB per month. T-Mobile’s way of dealing with “excessive use” (and their definition of “excessive” is apparently five times smaller than AT&T’s definition) is to put on the brakes. I wonder if users prefer this, or if they’d rather just pay overage fees?

Of course, I guess the “excessive” users could just stick with the iPhone. No wonder T-Mobile put that bit in fine print.

WordPress maker buys IntenseDebate commenting system

Matt Mullenweg announced today that Automattic (the maker of WordPress) is acquiring IntenseDebate, a blog commenting system with lots of features that WordPress doesn’t have available yet except through third-party plugins.

IntenseDebate currently works with a number of different blogging platforms, including WordPress, TypePad, Moveable Type, Blogger, and Tumblr.  They say they plan to keep it that way, and to extend support to even more platforms.  For now at least, IntenseDebate will also retain its separate brand.  We can expect that WordPress will gradually incorporate some of IntenseDebate’s features into their core as time goes on.

Features of IntenseDebate include:

  1. Threaded comments.  Lots of people currently use the Brian’s Threaded Comments plugin for WordPress, not without problems.  Matt says that threaded comments will become part of WordPress 2.7.  How much of that comes directly from IntenseDebate?
  2. Reply-By-Email.    Just send an email to respond to a comment.  Hope they have a good spam plan.  This seems to imply built-in email notification as well.
  3. Importing/Exporting from/to other commenting systems.  They would be smart to provide an importer that understands Brian’s Threaded Comments’ comment relationships.
  4. Commenter Profiles.    Sort of like the optional user registration on WordPress?
  5. Reputation Points & Comment Voting.  Make your blog a mini-reddit.
  6. Moderation/Blacklisting.  Sounds a lot like the moderation that’s already built into WordPress.
  7. Widgets.  More ways to waste space on your sidebar.
  8. RSS Readers and Tracking.  This one sounds really interesting.  They’ve integrated with Google Reader and Bloglines so you can read and respond to comments right within the feed reader.  Sweet.   More feed readers to come, they say.
  9. Twitter.  Make any comment you post an automatic Tweet.  Noise * 2.
  10. FriendFeed.  People make comments about your blog on FriendFeed.  You can automatically pull those comments over to the blog itself.
  11. OpenID support.  One less extra login.
  12. HTML formatting.  That’s sort of expected, I should think.

I haven’t had a chance to try out the service, and they have gone back into closed beta since the acquisition, so my statements above are based on information from their web site only.  I sent an email through their contact form to ask a few questions not covered there, but haven’t received a response yet.