The 2011 budget presented by South African finance minister Pravin Gordhan includes a R450 million item to implement a national broadband strategy. This money is misdirected. I explain why, and offer a compromise alternative, over at ITWeb: Throwing good money after bad.

Here are my thoughts on Murdoch’s broadside against Google and other online leeches, published today on South Africa’s top IT news site, ITWeb. I agree with him, feel for him, and wish him well, but I’m not convinced even he’s got the clout to recork the genie bottle.

Also, published on Tuesday on The Daily Maverick: Peace, love and schadenfreude. Why is being an advocate of free-market capitalism enough to get you damned? Poor people need the free market more than anybody else.

I’m very, very impressed, so far, with the new version of Ubuntu, the Linux distribution created by South Africa’s spacefarer and dot-com rich kid, Mark Shuttleworth. The Hardy Heron, the latest long-term support version of the relatively new OS, is better than ever. The install was the fastest and smoothest I have ever experienced with any operating system, contrary to some earlier versions of Ubuntu, which kept throwing up niggly hitches, some of which would be dealbreakers for newbies.

The usual trouble with an OS upgrade is to decide whether to do a clean install, or choose an upgrade so you can keep what you’ve got. Last time, from the Feisty Fawn to the Gutsy Gibbon, I chose the upgrade, so I thought I’d clear out the cobwebs this time. The serious downside of a clean installation is not so much restoring mail and other settings, which is relatively trivial, but the time-consuming mission of finding, selecting and installing all the applications you had installed before. Granted, since everything is easily accessible in online repositories, it’s not as much of a mission than it would be under another operating system, but still, there are a lot of applications, plugins, utilities, tools, and fonts that accumulate over time. I have occasional use for programs such as QCad, Blender and Wings 3D, for example, and no Ubuntu installation is complete without Nethack and Battle for Wesnoth.

To solve this problem, a trick that worked like a charm is this tip from ArsGeek.

First, get a list of all the packages installed on your system. Type dpkg --get-selections | grep -v deinstall > ubuntu-files to do so. (Now now, don’t fret. The command line isn’t that intimidating, and this could save you hours.)

Save the resulting file somewhere other than where you’re installing your new system. If you want, you can review it in a text editor and delete things you no longer want. It’s probably also a good idea to remove entries you suspect might break a fresh installation, such as kernel files (search for “linux-”), graphics drivers, or other things you know a new installation will provide anyway. While you’re doing this, you’ll note that the list of packages do not have version numbers, so you can be sure you’ll get the latest versions from the new version’s repositories when you reinstall them.

Install the new OS from CD. Unless you’re resizing partitions, this shouldn’t take long. Watch where it wants to install, though. My install script saw a wide expanse of unspoilt hard disk and promptly headed in that direction. I had to point out that I’d prefer my OS to sit on the primary drive, not my shiny new portable one. Boot. Set up your internet connection, if necessary (some types can’t be picked up automatically).

Then put the ubuntu-files you saved earlier back in your home directory, and type the following in a terminal:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo dpkg --set-selections < ubuntu-files

This just primes apt-get, and pumps your complete list of packages back into the package manager, ready for installation. Easiest way to install the selected files is using sudo dselect, which will offer you a menu of options. Just hit “I” to install the lot, go have a coffee (my list of packages to be download was big, and took two hours), and return to a sparkly new system. Unless you installed Sun Java or Microsoft fonts, in which case you get a few dialog boxes that stop everything and scream “PAPERS!”

Another useful thing to know is how to safely backup your home directory, without having to fiddle around with multiple drag-and-drop operations and the ever-present risk that hidden files might get lost. Hidden files in Linux start with a period, and while many are just simple user configuration settings for various applications, they include things like your browser bookmarks, cookies and, most importantly, your mail file. Ignoring hidden files is dangerous. And the solution is a Unix command that’s older than I am: cpio

Create a backup directory somewhere. No, not on the disk or partition to which you’re installing. From your home directory run find . -print | cpio -dumpv destination This will ensure that your hidden files are also backed up, so you can restore the whole lot by doing the same in reverse, or copy selected directories (such as mail) back to your clean installation. Warning: always, always, always double check that your actions had the desired results. It really spoils a shiny new operating system when the first thing you find is that some typo, a full disk, or sheer thoughtlessness, caused you to throw out three years worth of mail archives.

Of course, if you really are terrified by the command line, you have two simpler options:

1. just do a version upgrade rather than a clean install, which is quicker and safer, but could leave old settings and data lying around, or
2. backup your home directory using a graphical backup tool of your choice, do a clean install, a backup restore, and then just go to add/remove programs (or the synaptic package manager) and select the software you want manually.

The Hardy Heron comes with new versions of most software, but I’m most pleased with the fact that Firefox 3.0 beta 5 has been included in the software repositories, in addition to Firefox 2. Even though version 3 isn’t yet final, it reportedly solves a ton of long-standing memory and performance issues. Beagle, the desktop search tool and system hog now also behaves rather more politely.

In all, the entire installation took me maybe 90 minutes, not counting download time. This included restoring all my backed-up data and settings, and installing a boatload (three gig’s worth) of applications. The only company that conspired to irritate me during this process was iBurst, the state-protected cartelco (to coin a term), which charges a right fortune (as I wrote on ITWeb) for supposedly always-on wireless broadband. Ubuntu may be free, but it delivers. And this time it did so without any hitch whatsoever. Well done to the Hardy team. Consider me impressed.

Finally, lest anyone think my preference for open source software suggests I’ve taken leave of my free-market capitalist senses, consider this: would I be a good capitalist if paid through the nose for a vastly inferior and far more limited product, when I can exploit socialists who offer me a world of shiny free stuff instead?

Yet another big banner headline. Yet another braindead “news” room exposed. “Lost girls in MXit drama”, the bold black letters scream, above photographs of two teenagers. The sub-headline repeats the headline, as if readers are too dumb to get it the first time: “Chat service linked to disappearance”.

The basis for this sensationalist drivel in the Saturday Star is that, amazingly, both girls are among the 5.2 million people in South Africa who (the article claims) use MXit. Unnamed experts warn of the “massive risks” on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace (which have squat to do with MXit). Desmond Olivier, a “private investigator” associated with Missing Children SA, says MXit is “evil”.

If the girls had disappeared from the mall, would the headline have screamed “Lost girls in mall drama”? If they had met some guys at a disco, or communicated by telephone rather than by text, would the story have railed against the dangers of nightclubs? Would it have called the telephone evil?

Besides, what massive risks? Two missing girls among 5.2 million users is 0.0000385% of the user base. Stop the presses! Hold the front page! Oh wait, that’s exactly what the idiots did. Yet by my reckoning, such odds make MXit the safest possible thing for kids to be doing while awake.

It would have been real news is if they managed to disappear without being able to communicate with anyone. That takes some doing.

It gets better, though. One of the kids, 15-year-old Chantelynn Janse van Resnburg, lives with her father in Orania. She travelled alone, by bus, to visit her mother in Naboomspruit (which someone should inform the sub-editors is officially known as Mookgophong) and upon her return, instead of meeting her father in Hopetown, got off the bus in Johannesburg. Now I haven’t been to Orania, a kind of ultra-conservative white Afrikaner enclave, but I have been to Hopetown. There, I met the local satanist, a 17-year-old boy, so known by the townsfolk because he preferred black t-shirts and wore an earring. That his sights were set on escaping to the “big city” was not the most surprising news I’d heard that day. If I were that teenage girl, I’d also get off the bus in Johannesburg, rather than return to Hopetown or Orania.

The other girl, 17-year-old Hannelie Grabie, packed a suitcase, and took her make-up, hairdryer and back medication with her. Either that, or robbers who specialise in teenage accessories stole them. “We don’t know if she’s run away or disappeared,” says our private investigator. Boy, I hope he has a day job. What do you think, genius? That you need a hairdryer to access MXit? And this is the Clousseau who proposes to find South Africa’s missing children? I sure hope he’s not representative.

Both sets of parents are surprised at their daughters’ disappearance. Aren’t most parents of runaways surprised? If they had a clue, the girls probably wouldn’t have felt the need to run away.

I feel for the parents, and I hope the girls are found, and that they’re okay. But there’s nothing more to this story than a pair of runaways. Plain and simple. Unhappy at home, bright lights in their eyes, fell in with dodgy company, who knows? Slapping this on the front page, and blaming it on MXit, or Facebook, or MySpace, or the internet, or cellphones, or postcards, or bus services, is absurd. It’s braindead sensationalism which does the girls’ case more harm than good and slanders both the creators of MXit and its 5 199 998 other users.

The front page of the Saturday Star is worse even than its back page. At least the back page features serious news, such as: “‘My Nazi orgy with twisted F1 boss’”. Now that’s real journalism.

Some things are not politically correct to say, so lots of stats are presented in support of rash generalisations that deny those things. Often, they’re contrived to support a pre-conceived argument, rather than constructed to shed light on the matter.

That the environment is not the biggest crisis of our time is one case in point, which I’ve discussed before. You’ll see plenty charts that show, for example, what a 20-foot rise in sea levels would look like on a map. Or how hurricanes have increased in frequency or intensity. A close look at the data, however, and you’ll see signs of contrivances, such as selecting end-points for data series to support the pre-conceived argument, or presenting speculative conclusions as factual data. And how the environment manages to recover from catastrophes — such as volcanoes, meteor strikes, earthquakes, nuclear testing — when it really is a fragile system, perched precariously atop an unstable equilibrium, and sensitive to every little belch and burp of human life, is left as an exercise for the reader. How humanity came to be so prosperous and well-fed if our production methods are so stupidly unsustainable, ditto.

But let’s look at a very different example. Let’s consider Microsoft’s success. It isn’t politically correct to suggest that the monster from Redmond occasionally makes smart business decisions. How it came to be a large, successful company that made more millionaires than most is left as an exercise for the reader. How a a billion PCs came to be installed around the world in 20 years, a majority of them running Microsoft’s terrible products, ditto.

Now granted, I’m not convinced that its bid for Yahoo! was a smart business decision. It smacks of desperation. It has spent ten years trying to find a revenue stream to which the Windows-and-Office cash baton can be passed, but no convincing candidate has yet appeared. In its search, it has a habit of buying up second-best players in a market segment, and then swamping them with Microsoft branding until they’re never heard from again. My own prediction on Microsoft is that ten years hence it will be known as a very good gaming company.

But take a look at this analysis, by Max Freiert, highlighted recently by the folks over at Junk Charts, who spend their lives debunking — often in the most entertaining fashion — statistics abuse by companies, governments and the media.

It shows this chart:

Then Freiert assigns value only to new customers, which makes the $45 billion deal appear like a valuation per customer of $1 200. This is patently ridiculous. But I suspect it is designed to look ridiculous from the outset. That’s why it does not take into account that Microsoft might derive additional value from customers in the overlap area, or might offer additional value to its own customers, and that these might all lead to higher revenue for Microsoft.

If we redo the calculation, but with the (equally arbitrary, but more realistic) assumption that Yahoo! customers who also use Microsoft properties are worth half as much as new customers who didn’t use Microsoft properties before, and customers who don’t use Yahoo! at all have no additional value at all, we get a per-customer valuation of less than $200. And if you postulate that the deal might result in the ability to offer new revenue-generating value to customers that didn’t use Yahoo! properties before, at the arbitrarily-selected rate of one-third of the value of new customers from Yahoo!, you get $150 per customer, overall. Does that sound more reasonable?

But what about the new customer numbers? Does the chart above really reflect visually how many new customers Microsoft gets? How small is that top slice really? The guys at Junk Charts, instead of mentally calculating the area as a reader is meant to do, simply recast the data as a bar chart, as a statistician might do. It’s not pretty, but it does make the point: actually the growth in customer numbers is pretty darn decent.

Here’s their reworked chart:

Check out the last line of the table in Freiert’s analysis, and you’ll see that his result is the same: new customer growth will be a substantial 31%. And if you look in the next column, you’ll see a 89% projected rise in page impressions. In fact, Freiert makes a big deal of this growth in Microsoft-owned traffic later in the analysis. But if only the new customers had any value, why the massive discrepancy? This merely confirms that assigning value only to those new customers is a ludicrous assumption, apparently designed to support a pre-conceived conclusion.

The growth in customer numbers is larger than Freiert’s pie chart suggests, and the actual price paid for potential new revenue is much, much lower than the $1 200 he puts in the headline. None of this shows that the Yahoo! acquisition really was a smart acquisition, but it does show that at least part of Freiert’s neatly contrived argument for why it may have been a daft acquisition holds no water.

It was a daft acquisition for other reasons. I could create a chart to prove it, but I fear you wouldn’t believe me.

A great decision by a California appeals court holds that Constitutional freedom of speech applies to anonymous forum trolls who say mean and nasty things. Writes Jaqui Cheng, at ArsTechnica:

Anonymous trolls on the Internet are allowed to remain anonymous, a judge in a California appeals court ruled yesterday. Not only that, but they’re allowed to exercise their First Amendment rights and speak their minds, no matter how scathing their comments may be. The court opinion reversed a previous decision that would have allowed Lisa Krinsky, COO of a Florida-based drug service company, to subpoena 10 anonymous Yahoo message board posters’ real names.

According to a post on Slashdot, the court held that the statements, “fall into the category of crude, satirical hyperbole which, while reflecting the immaturity of the speaker, constitute protected opinion under the First Amendment.”

What would the internet be without the freedom to call idiots, well, idiots?

And what insecure idiot sues forum trolls anyway?

Update: Yesterday’s UserFriendly cartoon is apposite:

Finally, a Facebook group that achieved something! Hundreds of thousands of irate Facebook users made the company back down on telling everyone else what you bought on partner websites — an idea it sprung on users without warning, and without even the ability to opt out of the scheme. The article quotes Chamath Palihapitiya, a vice president at the company:

“Whenever we innovate and create great new experiences and new features, if they are not well understood at the outset, one thing we need to do is give people an opportunity to interact with them,” Palihapitiya was quoted as saying.

“After a while, they fall in love with them.”

Apparently they didn’t. But I can see how they would. Once enough of my friends know I shop for eczema cream, collect bondage accoutrement and just bought a book on living with a heroin addict, I’m sure I’ll come to love the idea.

Prats.

I’m increasingly pleased about having left Facebook. A couple of weeks ago I posted about advertising that appears in your news stream, cannily disguised to look like a photo update from a friend. Now, things are getting even murkier.

A guy named Joe discovered that not only were his purchases on Facebook partner sites like Overstock and Yelp being tracked, but they were being posted to his news stream. He didn’t opt in, and claims (justifiably, it would seem) not to have been given a clear and unambiguous way to opt out.

An AP story shows the implicit dangers of embarrassment and worse of this feature, which Facebook dubs “Beacon”. One guy discovered what his girlfriend had bought him as a present. Another found his movie ticket purchases displayed to his friends. The article not only shows how tricksey the feature is, but also notes that users cannot withdraw completely from the programme, but merely decrease the frequency of the relevant items in their news feeds. (Just like my account at Facebook is merely inactive, and cannot be deleted.)

This feature is remarkably offensive. “Hey, everyone, Jimmy bought some lube! Do you want some?” Or more realistically, as one source in the AP story says, “What if you bought a book on Amazon called ‘Coping with AIDS’ and that got published to every single one of your friends?”

Joe asks, plaintively: “Facebook, it is not OK to collect information about me from other sites. Please stop.”

Sorry, Joe. You agreed:

Facebook may also collect information about you from other sources, such as newspapers, blogs, instant messaging services, and other users of the Facebook service … in order to provide you with more useful information and a more personalized experience. … We may use information about you that we collect from other sources, including but not limited to newspapers and Internet sources such as blogs, instant messaging services, Facebook Platform developers and other users of Facebook, to supplement your profile.

However, not being able to opt out of this offensive feature is contrary to Facebook’s own privacy policy, which states: “And you control the users with whom you share that information through the privacy settings on the My Privacy page.”

Turns out the privacy policy and terms of use are there to bind users, not Facebook. It also turns out, as I discovered when I wanted my account deleted, that once you agree, you can never revoke any permissions you gave Facebook. Not even when circumstances — such as Facebook’s shareholding — change. They own you and the lemons you buy. Forever.

Update: Duncan McLeod has published a Financial Times article on the subject on his website.

The rot has begun. Scarcely has Microsoft bought its slice of Facebook (over which I left), than advertising is starting to appear. Right there in the news stream; a large, glaring advertisement. This is what it looks like:

A few things are notable. Unlike the Facebook Flyers, which appear on the left-hand-side, very visible but without wasting space needed for the news stream, and unlike Google-style text ads, which are non-intrusive and take up little space, this advertisement appears slap bang in the news stream, where interesting updates from friends vie for screen real-estate even on a very large screen. I’d guess on a typical notebook screen or a mobile device it would take up a good proportion of the visible screen space.

It is disguised as a real update, as if a friend just posted some new photos. That’s devious and offensive. Magazines (credible magazines, at least), decline advertisements that attempt to appear like regular editorial, since this hurts the integrity of the publication. I were in charge of Facebook advertising, an advert that looks like a legitimate update would be declined.

It appears to be completely untargeted. Credit reports comprise one of the biggest categories of online spam. What next? Pump-and-dump share schemes? Invitations from hot babes looking for money, honey?

It is true that some other social networks — including Orkut in particular — suffer from spam problems, especially in group discussion forums. This is something they will have to combat if they intend capitalising on the discontent created by Microsoft/Facebook deal. But at least they don’t (as far as I’m aware) condone the spam. At least they don’t place the spam themselves, where it clogs up an already-cluttered news stream.

In all ways, this particular Facebook advertisement is offensive and sends a clear message of where Facebook is going: more clutter, more noise, less signal, less usefulness. It lacks even the minimal redeeming quality — unintentional humour about Yahoo! spam filtering — of this inviting offer I recently received:

After years of delays, restrictions, monopoly domination and a government that enforces a “managed liberalisation” policy that is neither managed nor liberal, there have been growing signs — despite government — of a sort of springtime in the South African telecommunications industry.

Russell Southwood, who runs the London-based Balancing Act Africa, covering telecoms and internet issues in Africa, agrees:

Almost unnoticed the rules of the game are changing and the South African market shows key developments that will transform how markets operate. DSL subscribers there look set to break through the “critical mass” barrier and there are irresistible pressures building up for low prices and no caps.

He says numbers of internet users (and in particular broadband users) are reaching levels that will begin to make an impact on traditional media, too. Competition is coming from newly licenced entrants, mobile operators, and ISPs that are able to compete under the new legal environment for telecoms.

So everybody is now rushing into infrastructure and the vertical integrators … will offer triple and quad play. Telkom will probably now face nine competitors. The traditional contenders will be: MTN, Vodacom, Neotel, and Sentech (that has already decided to get out of the retail space). Possible insurgents contenders will include: MWeb, IS, Verizon and Datapro. Rumour has it that after the recent issue of Wi-MAX spectrum that there is enough remaining spectrum for 4 players Neotel’s retail launch will take place in March/April of next year and it is working on a triple/quad play product.

… The market is unlikely to sustain nine infrastructure players but this flurry of competition will open up the VoIP market, lower national prices and grow the user base for a wider range of services. And what’s not to like about that?

Lots of interesting detail in his article.

Should have guessed, really. It’s not like Google does anything on our side of the network. The long-awaited Gphone is not a device, but another open application platform. Hot on the heels of the OpenSocial announcement, it has launched Android, backed by the Open Handset Alliance. This group includes big Windows Mobile customers, such as HTC, whereas Google’s strategy is to provide access to information independent of device or platform.

Here’s an explanation:

Sheesh, I’ve seen the dot com bubble come and go, but I’m starting to buy the company’s valuation. After all, it’s P:EG ratio is only 1.33, and that makes the share a buy…

Update: The original video, which had been linked to from Google’s official blog, was removed by the user and replaced with the one you see now.

Marc Andreessen hasn’t sat on his laurels after Mosaic/Netscape and now runs Ning, a place where anyone can create their own social network. He explains, without resorting to (much) technical jargon, the concept behind Google’s OpenSocial API. It’s well worth a read, even if you’re wedded to closed, proprietary platforms (read: Facebook), but especially if, like me, you aren’t.