Human Resources 101

Don't post your hangover sickie on Facebook. Duh!

Google as Big Brother

Say the government planned to drive through our neighbourhoods and take pictures of our houses and our stuff and integrate it with a GIS and real time capability to use it?

We would protest. Invasion of privacy, surveillance society, tut tut...

Say a large private company did the same thing without asking for permission and made it available to anybody with internet access.

We would say cool, neat, useful, interesting.....

Our house was done when we were preparing for our hard rubbish collection. It does not look its best.

Goodbye Good Riddance

After spending seven years not watching Big Brother, I can look forward to a lifetime of the same without trying.

Only seven years too late.

Facebook as Big Brother

I quite like Facebook for its shallowness and irreverent fun. I am certain that I am unimportant enough to worry about being bookmarked and socially indexed. Tom Hodgkinson in the Guardian thinks otherwise.

I despise Facebook. This enormously successful American business describes itself as "a social utility that connects you with the people around you". But hang on. Why on God's earth would I need a computer to connect with the people around me? Why should my relationships be mediated through the imagination of a bunch of supergeeks in California? What was wrong with the pub?

And does Facebook really connect people? Doesn't it rather disconnect us, since instead of doing something enjoyable such as talking and eating and dancing and drinking with my friends, I am merely sending them little ungrammatical notes and amusing photos in cyberspace, while chained to my desk? A friend of mine recently told me that he had spent a Saturday night at home alone on Facebook, drinking at his desk. What a gloomy image. Far from connecting us, Facebook actually isolates us at our workstations.

Fair enough, but some of the heavier stuff later on is a bit chilling. Apparently some of the venture capital money is funded by the CIA venture capital fund and one of the current boare members is associated with that group. Interesting.

Seems that we all just need to lay back and smell the roses as Big Brother rolls down the hill (gathering moss?)

Or is it a snowball?

Enjoy it while you can, before you are unwillingly dragged into a battle that you had no idea you were part of.

Thanks Peter Black from Freedom to Differ.

Google as Big Brother

Laurel Papworth exposes Google as Big Brother.

The central witness in a California lawsuit against AT&T says the government is vacuuming up billions of e-mails and phone calls as they pass through an AT&T switching station in San Francisco.
Mark Klein, a retired AT&T technician, helped connect a device in 2003 that he says diverted and copied onto a government supercomputer every call, e-mail, and Internet site access on AT&T lines.

So James was right all along. It is not at all surprising, more surprising that it is coming out at all. Life goes on la la la la.

If the Government gathered all this information by themselves, there would be a revolution few complaints. Why not delegate the task to one of the largest companies in the world? They can make a bundle of money and give it to the Government for free.

I'm off to hide in a remote pacific island and eat seaweed.

Some Thoughts on Big Brother

From Answers

When George Orwell's 1984 came out in 1949, his dystopic projection of a totalitarian state was far in the future. Orwell, born on this date in 1903, was dying when he wrote the book; he succumbed to tuberculosis just a few months after the book was published. Orwell coined the sentence "Big Brother is watching you," for 1984. He wrote of a society where people spoke Newspeak, a language of words with contradictory meanings designed to deceive and manipulate people, and where the individual — his thoughts, feelings and personality — would be completely dominated by the state.

It is really quite surprising how close the present is to his vision. He was only off by about 20 years in the UK. In an ironic way, the reality that many of us are watching Big Brother, does not diminish the erosion of liberty and the rise of the state that we see every day.

Thanks for the image Crushed By Ingsoc.

Every Parents Nightmare

Justin highlights every parents nightmare, where your kids dob in all your bad behaviour.

"Daddy was drunk three times last week. He didn't do the dishes on Wednesday and my dinner was cold last night. Mummy made me have a bath three times and I had to feed the dog and clean the rabbit hutch, in order to get pocket money"

You can just imagine the kinds of things a ten year old might say.

Anonymously, of course, according to those who should know. How much information does the government need to know. I can just imagine the development of Parent Behaviour Courts, where parents have to defend their parenting in front of a jury of children.

It is bad enough going to teacher parent interviews, like we did last week, to get into trouble for bringing your kids to school late and why did your son draw a pig with blood coming out of his mouth and make inappropriate jokes in class?

Big Brother really is starting to build up a big head of steam all over the UK. Generally these sorts of trends have some impact in Australia. No thank you Pomiticians! Stop spying into peoples lives. Leave us alone.

This message has been brought to you by the Parents Rights League. No children were harmed in the making of this blog post.

Jade Serves Her Last Supper in the Celebrity Big Brother House