Medialens commenting on BBC director of news Richard Sambrook’s recent move to a public relations company:
It seems a natural career move. In 2002 and 2003 Sambrook’s BBC news team spun heaven and earth to lend an air of respectability to one of history’s most brazen campaigns of state-orchestrated lying. The performance was encapsulated perfectly by BBC “rotweiller” Jeremy Paxman when he said last year:
“… when Colin Powell sat down at the UN General Assembly and unveiled what he said was cast-iron evidence of things like mobile, biological weapon facilities and the like [in Iraq]… When I saw all of that, I thought, well, ‘We know that Colin Powell is an intelligent, thoughtful man, and a sceptical man. If he believes all this to be the case, then, you know, he’s seen the evidence; I haven’t.’”
Idiocy is one thing, but the BBC’s idiocy all went one way – no journalist swooned with comparable helplessness at the feet of experts excoriating US-UK propaganda.
WizardRSS violates the AGPL
A new site called wizardrss.com has emerged which is simply a copy of the full-text RSS service I developed for FiveFilters.org. Unfortunately the authors fail to mention this and even worse violate the AGPL license by not offering users the opportunity to download the source code. I would contact them about this but there’s no contact information.
Interestingly, it was today featured on KillerStartups.com where they ask “Will this service remain a free one?” The point of releasing the source under the AGPL is precisely for users not to worry about that question – if it ends up turning into something you don’t like, you take the code and host it yourself. In this case, they’ve taken the code, hosted it themselves but failed to tell their users that they can do exactly the same.
If you do use the service and you’d like the source code, head over to FiveFilters.org for download instructions.
If the authors of WizardRSS are reading this, please include a way for your users to download the source code.