Bloggerheads: Fasthosts and UKreg: why you should look elsewhere

Dear oh dear.

I'm currently thinking of getting a domain name and some hosting sorted out so that's at least one potential customer they've definitely lost.

Justin has updated his now famous post to include an interim statement from Tim Ireland and Clive Summerfield:

We’d like to thank you all for your support and let you all know just what the hell has been going on, but we beg your patience as we continue with the practical measures required before we can fully and confidently speak our minds about this matter.

Our immediate priority is the restoration of the websites involved; this has been greatly complicated by the sudden closure of the entire account (as opposed to, say, the suspension or closure of the two websites directly involved in the Usmanov dispute). This total - and totally unexpected - withdrawal of service requires us to restore many websites with differing individual circumstances and formats. The removal of email used for the majority of these accounts has also further complicated matters, as the most immediate form of communication between many of the parties involved is no longer available.

Bob Piper is already back on deck, and we expect Boris Johnson’s weblog to be up and running shortly. Special arrangements are being made for Craig Murray as we speak.

A full statement is likely to follow the restoration of Bloggerheads and/or The UK Today, as it is at one of these websites that we would wish to host a full statement and manage the expected response.

The list of bloggers writing about the lovely Mr Usmanov has grown to well over 200 and Interweb searches for Alisher Usmanov are now far more interesting. This blog, along with everyone else's on the list I suspect, has been visited by a Schillings representative via Justin's post.

Wouldn't you have loved to have been a fly on the wall at the Schillings boardroom meeting this morning?

Agenda

1. Assessing negative impact outcomes and their effects on the business
2. Conference call with representatives of very rich Uzbek client
3. Team building exercise: group wailing and gnashing of teeth
4. Coffee and biscuits (for those not feeling too sick to eat)
   

Update

Heh! Top stuff.

"How do you feel sir?" "Better..." "Better?" Better get a bucket..."

UPDATED

Bloggerheads is down and here's the explanation. Also affected are Craig Murray and the blogs of Bob Piper, Boris Johnson and The UK Today.

To mark this moment, here's a little competition. Complete the following sentence in ten words or less.*

Alisher Usmanov is...

* Please note that the correct answer is "a very nice man". Any other answers will be immediately deleted.

Update

Justin's post has been added to substantially. Over 100 bloggers have already responded to Usmanov's actions and the list is growing. There's lots of good stuff there. Mr Eugenides repeatedly hits the nail on the head and RickB is well worth reading. I also particularly liked The Spine's blog protecting T-shirt.

Free Web Traffic Ahoy!

I've just been having a wee poke around with the Wikiscanner. For those who've not seen it, it allows you to track anonymous Wikipedia edits through IP addresses.

See if you can see what all of these edits from the last 28 days have in common. Deep breath...

1. Conrad Black
2. John N. Gray
3. Gustave Courbet
4. Ingmar Bergman
5. Cobalt Bomb
6. Travels in the Scriptorium
7. The Lay of the Land
8. Martin Amis
9. The Mission Song
10. John le Carre
11. J. G. Ballard

Have you guessed what it is yet? OK, I'll tell you. Every one of the above edits was to add a link to articles from either The Times or the TLS.

And can you guess who the IP 143.252.80.100 is registered too? Go on, have a guess...

The 51st State

This almost clever spam turned up in my inbox today.

Unity 08 - Your Voice in Politics

Unity08 has launched a unique online study that allows you to rank the presidential candidates and the issues facing the country.

To start the study, click here.

We've invited you to take and publish this study because we've seen that your site actively discusses politics and the state of the nation. It is crucial for us to include as many American citizens as we can so that we can truly start discussing the "crucial" issues facing the country and how to resolve them... before it is too late.

So near and yet so far.

Who Invented the Internet?

Apologies for the lack of activity here recently. There are a number of real world reasons for this which I won't bore you with. Normal service will resume shortly.

In the meantime, here's a little something for you. I started writing this last weekend before the offline world so rudely interrupted. This is a reworked version.

The question which has been on my mind recently is, can there ever be objective reality in political debate? (For a deeper discussion as to whether there even is such a thing as objective reality, you'll need to go to a philosopher. For the purposes of this, it is enough to accept that a tree in the woods has either fallen down or it hasn't. It's status can be checked and an objective reality can be agreed.)

Politics is all about differences of opinion of course but it seems to me that more and more time is spent arguing over the facts rather than the policies which address the facts. This is, I believe, one of the reasons why so many people are disillusioned with politics. The economy is booming/on the verge of collapse, crime is rising/falling, we're winning/losing the war and so on. It's not an edifying sight so see politicians squabbling over the facts in this way. Who wants to live in a world where nothing is real and everything is a matter of opinion?

Here's an example. Rather than tackling a big issue, I thought I'd start with an inconsequential one. The opportunity arose when Dizzy wrote a response to Tim's post on Dizzy. I felt no need to leap to Tim's defence, he's a big boy and can certainly look after himself, but I did decide to try to make a wider point.

Dizzy had written this:

Where [sic] Gore invented teh Interweb (All Praise the Gore!), he invented the blogosphere.

The "Gore claimed he invented the internet" meme is pretty widespread, it has to be said, but is it actually true?

On the face of it, it appears unlikely. Why on earth would a politician make such an extraordinary claim, one which was certain to be subject to endless ridicule?

Objectively, we can say that Gore never said the words "I invented the internet", What he actually said is recorded here.

During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.

And, as Snopes points out, what Gore meant was that "he was responsible, in an economic and legislative sense, for fostering the development the technology that we now know as the Internet". In context, this is obvious; he just said it very clumsily. Indeed.

As to whether that claim was valid, here's what two of the "founding fathers" of the internet had to say about Gore and the claim:

Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development.

No one person or even small group of persons exclusively "invented" the Internet. It is the result of many years of ongoing collaboration among people in government and the university community. But as the two people who designed the basic architecture and the core protocols that make the Internet work, we would like to acknowledge VP Gore's contributions as a Congressman, Senator and as Vice President. No other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time.

And he won an award for it too.

So, although it may be a matter of opinion as to the extent of Gore's contribution, his claim certainly wasn't entirely baseless. Essentially what we have here is a politician bigging himself up clumsily but with some amount of justification for the part he played in promoting the internet.

Objectively, we can say that Al Gore never claimed to have invented the internet in the way that was claimed by Republicans.

I decided to see whether Dizzy would agree so I submitted this comment:

"Where Gore invented teh Interweb..."

Urban myths are neither clever nor funny.

There is, I think, a difference between being politically partisan and being a truth distorting propagandist.

That was a bit rough but it's my understanding that Dizzy's a big boy too. Dizzy's response:

Curious Hamster, urban myth are funny if their intended target audience is Adam from Cross Pond who is, of course, simple great.

I have to admit to not understanding fully what he's saying here (and I've not had the time to find out about Adam and what he has to do with this) butDizzy does at least seem to accept that the Gore claim is an urban myth. Fair enough.

Not everyone was convinced though. Since PragueTory also appeared in the comments to that post, I also had a go at asking him the question that he's gone through hoops to avoid answering recently. Slightly cheeky perhaps but I couldn't resist:

Apologies for going off-topic but since PT is here, I would like to ask he ever got round to looking at the evidence of Guido's "beyond the pale" activities? (I won't "spam" the relevant link. PT knows what I mean.)

I only ask because people may be starting to think he's a coward who runs away when he's not got any answers and I'm sure none of us wants that.

Anyway. Must dash, Got stuff to do this afternoon. I'll check back to see if any answer is forthcoming later.

And, when I came back later, PT had responded. Of sort:

Stop giggling at the back. He only said he created the internet. Oh forget it. Let's all laugh and point.

Oh, how I laughed.

The effortless way he avoided the question is evidence of a real master at work. I did reply but, alas, although my comment was submitted well before Dizzy shut the thread down (due to a discussion between him and Tim, it seems), it never appeared. It has, I'm afraid, disappeared into the interweb ether.

In any event, attempts to get PragueTory to answer a straightforward question are probably doomed to failure from the very start. Perhaps that's why my comment didn't get through; maybe Dizzy realised that I was wasting my time with him. And what chance do you think I'd have had of getting PT to accept that Gore never actually claimed to have created the internet if the thread had remained open?

No, me neither. For PT, reality can go whistle. It's certainly not nearly as important as the opportunity to take cheap shots against political opponents. And there are more and more bloggers who do this. The accepted granddaddy of this sort of thing, "Guido Fawkes", likes to claim that Tim Ireland's exposés of his behaviour are somehow part of a Brownite plot orchestrated by Tom Watson. Anyone who's read Bloggerheads for any length of time will know that that's utter bilge of course but repeated often enough, some will start to believe it. And with that, objective reality in politics becomes just that little bit further away.

George Orwell famously wrote that "politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia". Sadly, the political blo****ere now looks to be going the same way.

It could be argued that this invasion of partisan spin and bull onto the interwebs is an unstoppable and inevitable result of modern politics and human behaviour. Perhaps it is but we'll never know for sure if we don't at least make the effort to stop it. And that's one of the reasons why I'm on the blogroll here (not the bogroll) and why I think you should be too.

(By the way, in the interests of transparency I should also say that I think Al Gore is a bit of a git. But not because he claimed he invented the internet. He didn't.)

Freedom of Information

If you're a fan of free speech, defending the forums in which is practised should be an ongoing activity. It is my opinion that total anarchy does not actually enable free speech; total anarchy allows unscrupulous bullies to dominate the forum and silence, ridicule or otherwise marginalise those they do not wish to be heard. This is detrimental to the right to free speech.

Anyway, Tim at Bloggerheads has a succinct summary of the state of play in the "blog war". The linked posts are all worth clicking through also.

On "Guido", Paul Staines is a man who publishes his own "tittle-tattle, gossip and rumours" through a company based in Nevis so as to limit his exposure to British libel laws. He is a man who then taunts those he has written about with that fact.

Guido has a mini-corporation behind him, Global & General Nominees LLC of Nevis. If you want to sue the publishers go ahead, the office for service is properly registered in accordance with the law. The laws of the island require that the plaintiff first deposits US$25,000 with the court before commencing action. Guido will defend himself vigorously.
- Paul Staines

He is a man who allows people to be smeared in the most extraordinary way in the comments to his blog.

And he is a man who threatened to take to court those blogger who republished an article about him which was printed by the Guardian and never retracted. It is an article which is still in the public domain and which is available to anyone with a subscription to the Lexis-Nexis database. Note that it was the little guys who Paul threatened with legal action.

He is, in short, a hypocrite and a bully.

On Iain Dale, I've decided to take down the button. This is not because he's offered a genuine apology; he hasn't; I'm taking it down because he went on record at his blog with an explanation of sorts. It spoke volumes that he he didn't provide a link to the relevant post so that his readers could judge for themselves whether his explanation was plausible. For a man who claims to like blogging because it enables conversation, it's a strange way to behave. It's impossible to resist suggesting that he might be well served by looking up the word "conversation" in his dictionary too.

As for Iain's call for a ceasefire, everything you need to know about Iain's "olive branch" is encapsulated in the following:

In the spirit of reaching out to those who seem to have developed an unhealthy obsession with me...

What class.

Throughout all of this, by deploying a variety of techniques, Mr Dale has consistently managed to avoid meaningfully addressing questions about Nick Boles and Policy Exchange. Emails to Mr Boles at Policy Exchange asking for clarification of certain issues (as recommended by Policy Exchange trustee Iain) have so far been ignored.

For me (the only person I ever speak for), those questions were never about Brownite revenge or attempts to protect the man. The fact that Policy Exchange trustee Iain had made a film criticising the Smith Institute was interesting because it seemed that there was a possibility of Pots and Kettles. It was doubly irresistible because Iain himself likes to hand out Pots and Kettles awards (for the record, I agree with the actual contents of that post).

But answers on the activities of Policy Exchange were not forthcoming. Attempts to have those questions answered will be ongoing.

As I said in the comments to a previous post, there's nothing like a bit of openness and transparency...

"Blog Wars"

"Guido" has agreed to give an interview to Sunny at Pickled Politics. He wants a "fair hearing" apparently. Now there's an irony of genuinely monumental proportions. Fair play to Sunny for offering Paul something which Paul himself never considers offering to others. Likewise Tim and Justin and others.

Given his own attitude towards such things, it will be interesting to hear Paul explain why he threw a hissy fit and threatened to take everyone to court yesterday. Whatever happened to "If you don't like it, don't read it"?

Meanwhile, Iain has decided that playing the victim card is the way to go after all. How very noble...

I didn't highlight this before, but here's a further titbit about Iain which might explain a little more about the reason why he's become involved in the "blog war". After my post on his refusal to answer my questions on Nicholas Boles, Policy Exchange and a certain party political issue - a genuine attempt to ask questions on matters of fact - Iain turned up in the comments to my post to say this:

nice to see you have deleted my comment I left last night.

I've checked and the comment was definitely left by someone signed in using Iain's blogger account. I think it's reasonably safe to assume that it was Iain. As I said at the time, I did no such thing. Iain did not respond again however; he was happy to just leave his allegation hanging there.

Now, it seems to me that there are two possibilities here. The first is that Iain made a spurious accusation against me in an attempt to deflect attention and/or make me look bad.

The second is that Blogger somehow lost Iain's comment. Since I switched from Haloscan to Blogger comments, no-one has ever made a complaint about a missing comment before and I'm not aware of this being a problem for Blogger users. Nevertheless, the possibility cannot be ruled out completely.

Iain, however, certainly did rule out that possibility. He made a specific and unqualified allegation against me which was entirely false. When challenged, he didn't withdraw it or offer an apology; he let it stand. That's not the sort of thing you'd expect from someone who says they like blogging because it enables conversation. At best, Iain has made an ill-advised claim in the heat of the moment which he now ought to withdraw. At worst, he has deliberately attempted to smear me.

I'm not really a fan of the victim card myself but I'd ask you to consider what chance I'd have of getting Iain to retract his spurious accusation.

Again, I must stress that for me, this whole issue is only coincidentally related to left and right. What I'm currently attempting to do is point out the ways in which two of the U.K.'s most prominent bloggers behave.

It'd be nice to think that these two people, underneath it all, are human beings who might now be reflecting on the way they treat other people on the interwebs. At this stage, however, and particularly in light of Iain's post today, I have to say that that doesn't look likely.

Update

More reactions to Iain's latest post.

Bloggerheads: Iain Dale plays the victim... again

Ministry of Truth: Open Letter to Iain Dale

Obsolete: Ceasefire?

Tygerland: Iain's Wet Rebuttal

Busy again this morning but here's something I've noticed.

That post by "Guido" attempting to mock Tom Watson for having to disappear a story has, er, disappeared. It's not been corrected or updated, it's just vanished into the ether. You'd never even know it had been there if you hadn't seen "Guido's" site yesterday.

Interesting.

As you may have gathered, I've started fiddling with Blogger's new template system. It's still a work in progress.

For a start, I pretty sure I remember reading that comments would have their own separate feeds but I can't seem to find them. I'll hopefully be sorting that and making a few more tweaks this afternoon.

Right, I'm on the new Blogger at last. Hurray! There's no three column template option but I was thinking of tidying things up anyway so I'll be having a little fiddle with the new layout system over the next few days. Any feedback would be much appreciated.