News Sniffer: Revisionista
The latest News Sniffer project went live today: Revisionista. It tracks changes in corporate news articles and marks the differences. So you can choose a BBC news article and see how it’s changed since it was first created. Most changes are on breaking new articles which get updated as more information becomes available, but some changes are rather telling of policy.
Currently only the BBC is monitored, but it’s pretty easy for me to add support for any site with an RSS feed.
Some examples:
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BBC Have Your Say
A while back I wrote a system to detect when the BBC censor comments on their Have Your Say website. It’s been running for a few months now and recently I wrote a fancy front end for it to allow easy browsing of the database.
It’s called ‘Watch Your Mouth’ and it’s part of my News Sniffer project, which will include other corporate media monitoring tools (coming soon).
It was broken for the duration of last week so no censored comments got detected, but it’s been working since and there is a large archive of censored comments too from the last few months.
I spotted some BBC ip addresses browsing the site already too.
Bruce Schneier whistles white noise
The new ELER strip is about Bruce Schneier and links to a Chuck Norris style Bruce Schneier Facts Database system I wrote. It got linked from Boingboing, Metafilter, Reddit and even Bruce Schneier’s own blog!
As you might imagine, it’s getting trabigillions of hits right now. Lucky I wrote it in Ruby on Rails with its built in page caching which (after first render) serves as fast as the webserver can serve. And since I’m using Lighttpd too, that is very fast.
Referrer Securer
Did you know that Firefox (and Epiphany) don’t send referrers when following a link from an SSL encrypted site? The target site cannot tell whether you clicked a link or typed the url in directly.
I don’t know about other browsers, but this seems like a sane behaviour.
Can I Compost This?
Louisa and I am announcing our latest project: Compost This. It’s a directory of items with information about it’s compostability.
For example Tea and Flour can be put on the compost heap, but Bindweed and Walnuts cannot. And it’s not always a good idea to put Orange peel on there either.
For geeks: I wrote Compost This using Ruby on Rails, which is one of the best web frameworks I’ve used, and I’m really starting to love the Ruby language too. I’ll release the code soon as an example.
Continuum
My continuity meter is broken. I can’t fix it because I need a continuity meter to find what’s wrong.
It reminds me of the time I banged my head in that I didn’t realise I was suffering from concussion because the detection equipment was suffering from concussion.
Rehumanize
At the end of these…
…are scenes like this
Why won’t the British and American governments support the end of this violence? Why is America rushing to continue it’s arms supply to Israel? Why is the British government allowing the transport of these weapons through our country? In the face of mounting evidence, why don’t the corporate media challenge the claims that our governments support peace? Why do we let all of this happen? Do we not care? What is wrong with us?
Self-defence. Israelly?
“Israel has been pursuing a campaign in Gaza for almost three weeks, since Cpl Gilad Shalit was captured by militants on 25 June.”
“Gaza, itself, the latest phase, began on June 24. It was when Israel abducted two Gaza civilians, a doctor and his brother. We don’t know their names. You don’t know the names of victims.”
–Noam Chomsky interviewed on Democracy Now
“Nor have the press suggested that the one-sided nature of the killing in the weeks leading up to the capture of the Israeli soldier might have “sparked” Palestinian actions.
On June 8, the Israeli army assassinated the recently appointed Palestinian head of the security forces of the Interior Ministry, Jamal Abu Samhadana, and three others. On June 9, Israeli shells killed seven members of the same family picnicking on Beit Lahiya beach. Some 32 others were wounded, including 13 children.
On June 13, an Israeli plane fired a missile into a busy Gaza City street, killing 11 people, including two children and two medics. On June 20, the Israeli army killed three Palestinian children and injured 15 others in Gaza with a missile attack. On June 21, the Israelis killed a 35-year old pregnant woman, her brother, and injured 11 others, including 6 children. Then came the Israeli capture of two Palestinians, followed by the Palestinian capture of the Israeli soldier and the killing of the two other soldiers.”
–David Edwards in a Medialens alert
Research project of the day: Try and find mention of any of this relevant information in the mainstream media. Unlikely that you will. Try and find mention of it in relation to the current attacks by Israel.
I’ll get us started: BBC news do mention the capture (it’s only kidnapping when official enemies do it) of the two Gaza civilians in this article, which I had to dig around to find. I’ve not seen it mentioned being possibly related to the capture of the Israeli solders the next day.
Guardian Warming
This article on the Guardian website is amusing. They tell the tale of Al Gore’s new Documentary about global warming, named An Inconvenient Truth.
The Guardian, as most mainstream media, make the vast majority of their income from advertising. And the majority of advertising revenue comes from the automotive industry. So, obviously, the Guardian cannot afford to discourage automotive advertising in its newspaper and on its website by taking global warming seriously.
The article reduces the film to “wooden vice-president and failed presidential candidate, wheeling his suitcases from town to town and presenting a slideshow about climate change”. It goes on to suggest that it’s only popular because it was produced by the same guy as Pulp Fiction (huh?).
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