Two years ago, while watching the film Rendition I was quite taken with Moroccan actress Zineb Oukach which I mistook for Israeli actress Hadar Ratzon. This led to my making a point about the Israeli Internet being stuck in the 1990’s, a point I seem to keep on making.
Later on I used the Israeli Screen Actors Guild as an example for Israel’s laxed approach to privacy and how, for instance, Ratzon’s cellphone number, SSN and date of birth can be revealed using a simple Google search.
Now, since most people cannot distinguish between a ‘white hat’ and a ‘black hat’, it is quite likely all this made me look like a kind of stalker. Creating a portrait of Ratzon out of her cellphone digits probably didn’t help.
I get that vibe now and again from people who don’t get technology. I guess it’s true what they say: ignorance is bliss. Apparently once one’s naivete has been interrupted, one sometimes gets upset.
Okay, so in two years’ time has anything changed? Not much:
1. Israel’s leading acting agency Perry Kafri still won’t spend a couple of bucks building a website for each of its actors.
2. Two years ago, Hadar Ratzon’s page consisted of three photos, one coding error and no background information. Today it boasts eight photos, zero coding errors, some background information -- but also quite a few errors including some kind of “Mongols contest” which presumably stands for “monologue contest”; Plus a characterization of Ratzon’s acting part in “Rendition” as “leading role” -- a gross exaggeration.
3. Two years later, the Israeli Screen Actors Guild did nothing to curtail its privacy leakage.
4. Hadar Ratzon now has an official website! Yes, I was quite happy to be notified of this glorious fact by a friend of Ratzon who built it for her (oh, but of course). Two years ago I suggested HadarRatzon.com -- but apparently she went with HadarRatzon.co.il.
And so we get enough progress to celebrate with a showreal [sic]. Here’s to hoping Hadar Ratzon is taking all this in stride:
CompuServe died this week. The service that started in 1969 and by the 1980s offered electronic mail, real-time chat and online shopping, was shut down by AOL, its current owner. Yes, of course I know most people have never heard of CompuServe. The Internet, just like electricity, has always been there – or so it seems.
I am pretty sure I really hope there are many people out there who would be interested in learning how all this came about and there’s no place better to start than by watching BBS: The Documentary. Spanning 8 episodes of 40 minutes each, it’s almost as long as a Claude Lanzmann’s documentary, but it’s full of geeks reminiscing about old times. Here’s the first episode:
Vacationing in Göynük, Turkey,
Thinking to myself:
This is how all Muslim countries should be,
Secular, advanced and free.
Logging to YouTube and reading this:
Access to this web site is banned by “TELEKOMÜNİKASYON İLETİŞİM BAŞKANLIĞI” according to the order of: Ankara Çubuk Sulh Ceza Mahkemesi, 30/10/2008 of 2008/558
I have already posted an elaborate list of the top annoyances plaguing the Israeli Internet*, but wherever my mouse takes me I encounter more and more prototypical examples:
Let’s say you want to check out the official website of the Israeli Ministry of Transportation. You skip Google, as you can distinctly recall the easy to remember URL from a radio spot, and so you type in: mot.gov.il – only to receive this disappointing page:
No, 404 is not the serial number of a new form you need to fill out, but the error message you get as someone was not clever enough to define the DNS settings properly.
Now, I should point out that the world can be divided into two groups:
One group is made up of those who believe that, similar to Dorothy clicking her heels three times, their typing the letter W three times magically charges the Internet, thus allowing it to flow smoothly and deliver data to their computer. Individuals within that group tend to utter phrases like ‘I clicked on the Internet’ or ‘the Internet is broken’.
The second group is made up of those who actually know what FTP, gopher or telnet mean, thus knowing WWW was an arbitrarily chosen name for the server that delivers HTML pages. Individuals in this group tend to skip the unnecessary typing of www in domain names, but will always say ‘double-you double-you double-you’ when dictating web addresses to acquaintances they do not consider particularly sharp.
Okay, back to the Ministry of Transportation:
Upon receiving the 404 error, you enter the same address with the WWW prefix, and lo and behold, you get the government website:
Now take a close look at the web address in the right-hand corner:
That’s right! No www!
Now, as I pointed out in a previous post, aside from the obvious disaster of not showing your reader the requested website, there are two additional mistakes the MOT webmasters made:
They failed to define a human-readable 404 error page, with some helpful links
They failed to define a reporting mechanism that would raise a flag at the webmasters side
Related browser trick:
Clicking Ctrl-Enter instead of Enter in your address bar, results in the auto completion of the URL with a ‘www’ prefix and a ‘.com’ suffix.
* For a lack of a better term, ‘Israeli Internet’ is what I call the ad-hoc collection of websites run by Israelis. ** As with my previous posts, all the information was checked, double checked, and was correct at the time of its publishing.
