The Weekly Round-Up: 20.02.04

Pass the Alka-Seltzer... The Round-Up is feeling a little worse for wear this morning having spent last night rubbing shoulders with the great and the good at the Internet Service Providers Association Awards in London.

The ISPAs, which may or may not (hint - it's the latter) be bigger than the Brits, are an annual opportunity for some well-deserved industry back-slapping. The usual suspects were all present and up for nominations in categories as glamorous as Best International Female Recording Artist, Best Rock Group, Best Album and Lifetime Achievement... no, hang on, that is the Brits isn't it.

Instead the Round-Up watched as winners in categories such as Best Hosting Provider, Best Business Broadband ISP and Best Third Party Application marched across the stage to collect their awards.

However, as with any awards ceremony they save the best until last and each year at the ISPAs the most eagerly awaited gongs are for Internet Hero and Internet Villain of the year.

The Villain Award was a three-horse race between VeriSign "for their presumption that they own the internet", the RIAA for its mismanaged file-sharing crackdown and Derek Wyatt MP "for lowering the level of informed debate on the internet generally and spam in particular".

However, it would seem the judges believed Wyatt's clueless bumbling to at least be well-intended and awarded VeriSign the dubious honour.

The people's vote however appeared to be for the RIAA whose nomination was met with boos that a pantomime baddy would have been proud of.

But for every Darth Vader there must be a Luke Skywalker and the Hero Award - perhaps the most predictable of the evening - deservedly went to anti-spam campaigner Steve Linford - which is handy, because silicon.com last October identified him as an Agenda Setter for the coming year (see here for more).

Linford was praised for "educating people about spam, endeavouring to thwart spammers and urging the US to reject the opt-out approach to spam legislation".

For more on the awards and a full list of winners, see here.

ISPA wasn't the only one accusing the RIAA of villainy this week. A woman in New Jersey (pronounced Noo Joy-zee) has likened the organisation to legendary Chicago mobster Al Capone, accusing it of extortion and racketeering... and running moonshine across the Canadian border to sell in Prohibition-time America. (OK, so the Round-Up trumped up that last accusation.)

Michele Scimeca claims the 'pay our over-inflated fines or face ruin in court' tactic is tantamount to racketeering and is countersuing the RIAA on those grounds.

Scimeca's attorney said: "These types of scare tactics are not permissible and amount to extortion."

Speaking of extortion - a pint down the Round-Up's local has now hit the £3 mark - now that really is villainous.

However, such inflationary lunacy has not deterred one enterprising website designer from launching a site dedicated to encouraging the Great British public to spend more down the boozer.

The site, www.drinkingbuddys.co.uk, is a contact site for people who are lacking some decent company at the bar... a sort of Friendless Reunited if you will.

Trawling through the ads - for research purposes - there is a noticeable trend. By and large a lot of the people advertising on there are new to an area or stuck in that 'all my friends have grown up and started families and I still want to be 21 forever' time warp.

However, the Round-Up's three favourite ads, in no particular order are:

1) "I love to go out on 72-hour benders with my cronies and wake up unconscious in a strange place. I also love to go out clubbing and show off my retro dance moves to all the girls."

First, it isn't possible to "wake up unconscious" - it simply cannot be done. In the same way you can't get dry by swimming - the two are in perfect opposition. Second, implied in this ad is the fact that 72 hours after meeting this man you will find him 'waking up unconscious' on your sofa, so like it or not you've acquired yourself a new live-in loser. Can the Round-Up implore all readers to steer clear of this man? You have been warned.

2) "Hello looking for drinking buddies around my area, work nights so daytime or weekends would be good."

OK. "Work nights so daytime would be good." Not for your boss it wouldn't my friend. What you're basically saying is: "I work nights so I'm looking for somebody who can help me turn up pissed after a day's drinking." The Round-Up hopes you aren't a taxi driver.

3) "Hi. My name is Rob. I am 44 years old. I am really looking for company for when I go out drinking. I hate standing at the bar on my own. You can tell people call you 'Billy no mates'." Doesn't lonely Rob sound like he'd be a great person to have a beer with? (If you wanted to go home and cry yourself to sleep about the tragedy in some people's lives.) Still you have to admire his honesty, because "people" almost certainly do call you that Rob.

Many people using the site talk of how many kids they have and how long they've been married. Whether this is to elicit sympathy or simply to illustrate why they are climbing the walls at home and desperate to get out for a beer is unclear.

But make no mistakes, marriage can be tough, driving even the most sane to drink (says the Round-Up from a position of no experience... of marriage that is - lots of experience of drinking).

Take this example of a couple from Kuala Lumpur who recently fell out over a text message one of them received. According to a Reuters report, the pair were out for "a romantic drive" (which the Round-Up reads as 'had just had sex in their car') when the man's phone beeped to alert him to a text message. As he was driving he asked his wife to read the message for him (big mistake).

Imagine her horror when she read: "Darling, I really miss you, always thinking of you even when you are not here tonight beside me in the bed. I am waiting, lots of kisses and hugs - Jane."

Oh dear.

Clearly distressed by what she'd read the woman demanded he stop the car (the Round-Up assumes she didn't ask politely) before getting out and taking a taxi to her parents' house where the Round-Up assumes phrases such as "you warned me about him" and "I always said he was no good" were bandied about liberally.

Meanwhile her poor jilted husband was left sat in his car thinking to himself "but... I don't even know a Jane".

And he'd be right, because Jane was merely a careless texter who had entered the number of the intended recipient wrongly and sent it to our tragic hero by mistake. Fortunately the couple patched up their differences and the husband now has a solid gold excuse for the similar unearthing of any future - and genuine - infidelity.

More marital woes at the hands of technology came in Greece this week where a man surfing porn experienced a heart-stopping 'That's my wife!' moment on one website he was visiting.

The man was looking at a voyeur site which featured couples filmed without their knowledge by hidden cameras, when he spotted his wife with another man.

While his double standards clearly stretched far enough to consider other couples fair game the man was understandably outraged by what he saw and informed the authorities and anybody else who would listen. The Round-Up's not sure it's the sort of thing you should exactly shout from the rooftops - though it probably made the desk sergeant's day down the local cop shop.

"Sorry sir, you were doing WHAT, when you saw WHAT? I can't quite hear you, can you say it a little louder... you're 'sure your wife had poor sight'? ...Oh! You saw you wife on a porn site."

And finally, more family in-fighting as a result of technology comes to us via the US where a young man got a nasty surprise while 'ego-surfing'.

For the uninitiated the practice of 'ego-surfing' involves typing your own name into a search engine such as Google and then glorying in any relevant results which are returned.

However, one 17-year-old in Los Angeles was shocked - and understandably upset - when his ego-surfing revealed the fact that he had been kidnapped 14 years ago from Canada and had spent his formative years growing up in the care of his kidnapper.

The boy found himself on a Canadian missing persons website and sounded the alarm. It subsequently transpired that he had been abducted by his mother who had kidnapped him from the legal care of his father, when he was just three years old. She escaped over the border into the US and set up home in LA - never telling her child of his past.

The mother has now been arrested and faces extradition to Canada and up to 10 years in prison. The boy has been taken into care pending a reunion with his father.

And on that bombshell - the Round-Up is off to nurse an ISPA Awards-sized hangover.

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