The European football championship is one of the great sporting spectacles, with this year’s Euro 2008 living up to the high standards of past tournaments. Thirty-two teams kicked off in a competition where virtually every team was a potential winner.

Like many other football fans in the IT industry, getting up early every morning and watching world-class players show extraordinary skills while representing their country was a fine way to start our day.

And the supporters! What a riot of colour, movement and all-round joie de vivre. It has not been all beer and skittles, as with so many people congregating there will be a few knuckleheads.

Great football, great players, great fans and superb, yes superb, advertising at the grounds! In a startling display of good taste those nasty, blinking electronic billboards, which seemed to have become ubiquitous around sporting grounds, have been surprisingly absent.

These ‘electronic eyewash' advertising billboards have been blinking away at UK Premier division soccer matches of late and they popped up at Wellington’s Cake Tin this winter for the AB’s Irish test and then again in Auckland and Christchurch at the English demolition derby (tests). (If only England had scored as well on the field, as some of the players did off it.)

Yet, it would seem in Austria and Switzerland there is still a belief that sporting fixtures should be first and foremost for the players and the fans. Good taste, in central Europe at least, does not seem to have been thrown out with the bathwater to keep advertisers happy.

And, really, you go into a sports ground branded XYZ Stadium, the players run on to the pitch with XYZ Corp on their shirts, but just in case the spectators (in the ground and watching on the telly) have not got the message it will get blinked at you…XYZ Corp - blink, blink blink…got the message. No, oh ok XYZ Corp - blink, blink, blink, got the message? No, oh ok, XYZ Corp - blink, blink, blink ad nauseam.

As stated, there was once a time when sporting fixtures were for the players and the fans with some acceptable and not-overbearing static displays.

You don’t watch sport for the thrill of being bombarded with advertising. Yet, with those flashing electronic signs removing any kind of subtlety, the advertising message is quite simply jammed down spectators throats to the detriment of those watching and playing the game.

Posted by Rodney Fletcher June 24, 2008 4:44 PM | Comments (0)

A couple of years ago I was shopping at my local mall when I stole some tracksuit trousers - for about eight seconds.

I had been shopping with my toddler and already had two bags of clothes from a retail chain when I cruised into another clothes store. I had just picked up the tracksuit trousers off a rack when my daughter announced that she really had to go to the toilet. I grabbed the bags of clothes from the floor and headed for the door mentally mapping out where the nearest toilets were.

That’s when I ‘stole' the trousers. They were still in my hand, though covered by the other shopping bags as I left the store. When I realised, I spun on my heels ignored the startled cry of my daughter as I abandoned her and raced the few steps back to the store and thrust the trousers into the hands of a shop assistant.

It was a close, close, close call. I was a distracted father saved from being charged as a shoplifter by inattentive staff. And charged I most certainly would have been.

The clothes already purchased where from a head-to-head competitor of the store I had just ‘stolen' the trousers from. I think the management of the store would have taken a dim view of a ‘shoplifter' who buys from the competition and then ‘steals' from them. Charged and quite likely convicted as a thief because of a moment’s inattention; scary stuff.

This came to mind with recent case of Michael Fiola, a Massachusetts US state employee whom recently had child pornography charges dropped after it was determined his government-supplied laptop was poorly configured and riddled with malicious software.

Defence computer forensic analyst Tami Loehrs said that malware surreptitiously served up pre-teen pornographic images onto the machine without the awareness of its user. Loehrs described the case as "one of the most horrific" she'd ever dealt with. In her report to the court, she said "the laptop was compromised by numerous viruses and trojans, and may have been hacked by outside sources".

There is no evidence to support the claim that Michael Fiola was responsible for any of the pornographic activity, Loehrs stated. All the offending images were loaded into locations reserved for cached web pages. Crucially there was no sign that any user had viewed or attempted to access this content. Two computer forensic experts hired by the prosecution came back with the same conclusion.

It’s been crucifying for Fiola; having been charged with possessing child pornography his friends and family deserted him.

Fiola, along with the even more ludicrous prosecutions of high school teacher Julie Ameo and that of Matt Bandy, have been hurled into the public spotlight because of Information Technology Ignorance (ITI). An infected laptop or PC loaded with pornography leads to an automatic assumption of guilt directed towards the user/owner of the machine. ‘Innocent, how can that be, it was his/her computer,' an ill-informed general public all too readily assume.

That the public routinely suffer from ITI is understandable. What’s stunning is that Fiola’s employer, the Massachusetts Department of Industrial Accidents (DIA), could be so manifestly struck down by ITI during the initial investigation of the situation. The so-called ‘experts' who incorrectly verified Michael Fiola’s guilt as the downloader of the child porn, and then so casually hung him out to dry, were clearly out of their depth.

Too bad for Michael Fiola the DIA was not prepared to acknowledge the lack of expertise in computer forensics in its IT department and call in a specialist, as opposed to letting incompetence and ITI send an innocent man to purgatory.

Posted by Rodney Fletcher June 17, 2008 4:32 PM | Comments (0)

Shopping online was an initial alluring promise that came with the heady dotcom rush into our lives 10 years ago. No more trips to the shopping mall, dealing with salespeople and the inevitable crowds. Oh no sir; you, a modem connection and your PC were all you were ever going to need.

As the new millennium rolled over ‘visionary' IT pundits saw shops as heading to the same knackers yard as gas lighting, vinyl albums and 286/386/486 PCs.

Now that kind of tantalising vision must have had retailers jumping for joy in 2000. No retail premises, no retail staff - just a big warehouse, an efficient pick and pack system and a fleet of courier vans - or a contract with a courier company.

For retailers this equation seemed near perfection, with fewer staff and vastly reduced rentals being the key attractions. Running a perky website with just one warehouse for your products is a lot cheaper than renting a number of stores scattered through expensive-to-rent shopping malls.

However, like some great IT visions as to how our lives would be changed by computers, there was a problem; those darn customers.

Despite the easy allure of never leaving home to shop, it seems people like shopping at stores. Take a trip to the mall, tyre-kick in a few clothes shops, check-out the latest DVD releases, bag a coffee and then wrap it up with a trip to the supermarket. And let’s not forget the option of dropping the kids off to watch a movie at the mall to give you quality shopping time.

The ‘retail shopping is a sunset industry' pundits should have considered the cinema, whose demise was hotly predicted after TV burst into living rooms in the early ‘60s. Surely people wouldn’t bother to leave home to watch a movie, when such entertainment was beamed straight to their living room?

Cinema survived and continues to thrive, even with the current arrival of high-definition 52inch TVs and wall-mounted projectors. The reason it’s still going strong is that going to the movies is a thought-provoking (depending on the movie), relatively inexpensive and enjoyable night out.

Where the web has changed our retail habits in the past 10 years is that people can shop smarter. Looking for a new washing machine? You don’t have to go from store to store to compare prices you just do that online, find the best price and then go to the store and buy it.

When buying a big-ticket item it can be advantageous dealing with a salesperson in a shop. You could get the price even lower with some judicious bargaining. Also, if there are technical problems after the purchase, it’s a lot easier to get them sorted if you are back in the store eyeballing a staff member when raising your complaint. That’s as opposed to attempting to secure redress over the phone (where you have to wonder just what city or country the call centre is located in) or by email.

At present online sales in the US chime in at three percent of total retail sales. For the reasons listed above, along with the kicker of courier charges adding to the retail cost of items ordered online, bricks and mortar still rule and always will.

Posted by Rodney Fletcher June 5, 2008 11:49 AM | Comments (0)