Technically Incorrect

If you haven't yet seen the video of a girl in a red hoodie throwing live puppies into a river, you haven't missed much. Just arrant cruelty delivered with a youthful smile and the question: "Can they swim?"

However, just as with the English lady who threw a cat into a bin for 15 hours, the Web has been like a detective show in constant motion, ruthlessly seeking out the perpetrator in preparation for a conviction.

On Tuesday, members of 4Chan and, it seemed, anyone else with a large conscience and a small amount to do with their day, offered clues as to the girl's identity.

On Wednesday, a video of apology appeared on YouTube, purporting to be from the girl in the video.

Using just one still frame from the video, the apology reads: "My name is Katja Puschnik and I would like to appologize [sic] for my behavior. The puppies belong to my grandma and she told me to get rid off them because they were only 3 days and they were ill. They had parasites from their mother. I didn't knew [sic] exactly what to do so I thrown [sic] them in the river because it was a short death. I did not want to make them suffer. I am really sorry for this:("

There is no way of knowing whether this video is genuine. Or whether someone is trying to set up Puschnik for Web ridicule or worse.

But, if anything, the outpouring of hate towards her hovers somewhere between the uncontrolled and the uncontrollable. At the time of writing, there is a still-active Facebook group called "Kill the Puppy-Throwing Girl."

Some on the Web are beginning to appreciate just how much power they possess in threatening the lives of those who might be guilty--or just might not be. The Web makes it so easy to accuse and so hard to retract. And the definition of a crime becomes "anything of which I don't approve."

This post on Reddit (NSFW), for example, asks people to think about that power. It offers that "Internet lynch mob s***" can harness an extreme negative force, one that might be entirely misplaced.

What's the chance now of Puschnik (who is reported to live in Germany) or--if it isn't, in fact, her--the real perpetrator, suffering physical harm because a resourceful group on the Web has tracked her down?

Once there are clinics for an addiction, it must be real.

And so it seems to be with video games. Once doctors declared that "World of Warcraft" was "the crack cocaine of gaming," everyone seemed to accept that gaming addiction was yet another human frailty.

Yet gaming companies chose to protect themselves with an end-user agreement that limited their own liability in creating something that might get others hooked.

However, Craig Smallwood, a Hawaii man who claims to be hooked on "Lineage II," has succeeded in the first round of what might be a long bout in challenging an end-user agreement.

According to the Register, Smallwood sued NC Interactive, makers of the game, claiming that its addictive qualities had made him dedicate more than 20,000 hours to it. He claims he was no given fair warning that he might suffer from its consequences--he is reportedly undergoing treatment for depression and other symptoms of distress.

Will the Sword of Justice come down upon gaming companies?

(Credit: CC Jordan Roher/FLickr)

NC Interactive allegedly locked him out of three accounts without warning and, naturally, the company declared its end-user agreement meant that only a small amount could be paid to potential claimants. The agreement also offered the convenience that any case could only be brought in the Texas State Court in Travis County, near where NC Interactive has a U.S. office.

I am sure this is a very fine and fair court. However, a federal court in Smallwood's Hawaii decided that perhaps it might offer a little jurisdiction.

While some of Smallwood's claims were thrown out, the judge ruled that Texas and Hawaii actually have something in common: they don't have affection for contract provisions that declare in advance that a gross-negligence claim cannot be brought.

The court papers also state that "during the years that plaintiff played Lineage II, the phenomena of psychological dependence and addiction to playing computer games was recognized by and known to defendants."

Smallwood's condition appears to be severe. And it will be interesting to see if his claim is ultimately successful. Perhaps, though, gaming companies will simply have to spend more money on clever lawyers to find new ways to phrase their legal disclaimers.

Facebook would like us to believe the world will be a better place if we just share a little more of ourselves.

The road to a better world, though, is paved with faux pas.

You see, a woman in suburban Detroit was very excited to share her views about a trial. The defendant, she believed, was guilty of resisting arrest. So she posted her view to her friends and, depending on her privacy settings, quite a few other people too.

The only slight snag with her enthusiasm was that 20-year-old Hadley Jons was actually sitting on the jury.

And, well, according to the Associated Press, the jury hadn't quite decided whether the defendant was guilty or not. This might have been because the prosecution hadn't, in fact, finished presenting its case.

(Credit: CC Smip.co.uk)

Her Facebook post was slightly troubling in that she reportedly wrote: "Gonna be fun to tell the defendant they're guilty."

Well now, let she who is completely innocent cast the first stone and hope she is more accurate than the San Francisco Giants bullpen. The judge removed her from the jury and now Jons herself might be found guilty of something called contempt of court.

You might be wondering how her post came to the court's attention. No, the judge hadn't friended all of the jurors. Instead, the defense lawyer's son happened upon Jons' post, as he had decided to get to know the jury members a little better.

His mom, defense lawyer Saleema Sheikh, offered the AP these comforting words for Jons: "I would like to see her get some jail time, nothing major, a few hours or overnight."

Jons must now return to court Thursday so that the judge might weigh whether to find her Facebook actions contemptible.

Perhaps Jons will enter an apology (or even a plea) as a status update.

I hear wailing, screeching, and the sound of a Zimmer frame scratching on an old wooden floor.

I hear the downhearted and downtrodden banging hard on the door of the inner temple, begging to be invited inside. I hear the dark accusations of sexism, ageism and even, it seems, dumb-and-dumberism echoing around the halls of the Web.

Yes, it is time to examine tech's navel and wonder why it is that navel is smooth, male, and full of Special K and croissant crumbs.

You see, this week, important sectors of society have been expressing their pain at being shut out from the start-uppy, uppity world of tech.

First, there was Vivek Wadhwa, a University of California at Berkeley academic, who was so pained and appalled that he produced both words and charts to offer the view that older, more experienced engineers are being tossed onto Silicon Valley's large (but, no doubt, green) scrapheap in favor of the young, the cheap and the unwashed.

It seems that older engineers have families, carpal tunnel, and varicose veins, all attributes that seem a little too cumbersome for our thrusting, dynamic tech companies that value dynamism and lissomness above all else.

Before one could even organize a chauffeur to take us to the wake of tech's over-40s, along came members of the female population, young and old.

The Wall Street Journal offered something of a lament that start-ups in tech seemed to suffer from a dearth of female tech entrepreneurs. A barb contained within it then inspired TechCrunch to suggest that this wasn't the fault of men.

(Credit: CC Indy Slug/Flickr)

Indeed, TechCrunch suggested, not enough women were interested in becoming entrepreneurs. The post then quoted Cyan Bannister, founder of Zivity, who reportedly suggested that women are rather more into nurturing and are rather less into silly things like risk.

Naturally, being male, when I see eggshells, I very much want to run through them as if they were a field of buttercups.

It is surely difficult to argue that tech companies are actually as open as the world they claim to adore and espouse. Somehow, the young, dominant male ethos, the one that worships at the altar of "Star Wars", World of Warcraft, Charles Darwin, and Bart Simpson often seems to shine through like an active cell phone on a cold, dark night.

So many tech businesses seem to be based on the idea of the left-brain as the source of all progress and the right brain as the repository of everything that is pink, fluffy, and yesterday.

When you hear that some folks at Google look forward to the day when the search function will be an implant in our brains and when young people will be free to change their identities in order to avoid their pasts, you wonder whether they've been reading too many books of the same genre.

Indeed, it often seems as if technology exists not to improve human life but to change it for the sake of a young boy's vast experiment. What happens when I remove the legs from this spider? Will it grow new ones? Or will it just crawl around till it dies of starvation?

Perhaps one of the more cogent criticisms of why many of Google's products disappear into oblivion is that the company is only capable of making products that satisfy its own, mainly male, left-brained employees. Where their predilections happen to coincide with the outside world's (search), there are hosannas. Where their creations are merely bran for a large, left, male brain (Buzz, for example), they capture the imagination of very few.

There are those who might choose to wonder whether tech is really as interesting as it thinks it is. Just as there is a limit to the fascination level of your average nerd (three hours, I would suggest), so a business that bases itself in expanding the limits of rationality might just seem to some to be deeply dull.

It might also well be that the biggest problem with the over-40s and women succeeding in the world of tech is not that they don't have talent, nor that their left-brains are wildly under-developed. It just might be that there is one, large thing in common between men who have seen a little bit more of the world and women, whose emotional sophistication can be under-appreciated and under-utilized: they are both a little more, well, human.

And perhaps, just perhaps, it's that very humanity that gets in the way at many tech enterprises.

As the history of the world over the last year or two has shown, it is not easy to work in a bank. It places special, even unique, pressures on individuals, so that some make the occasional "split second of misjudgment."

Such a split second occurred for the clearly stressed British bank worker Mary Bale, who tried to bring a little levity to her day by putting a cat in a trash bin, where it remained unrescued for 15 hours.

There will be some who will say: "Well, at least it wasn't a baby." Yet the full weight of technological jurisprudence (and imprudence) has now descended upon Bale.

It all began last week when the video of a woman putting little Lola the cat into a bin was put on YouTube by her concerned owners. They had captured the dreadful moment on their closed-circuit TV security system.

When it comes to online detection, there is an organization that would put the more conventional security services to shame. That organization is 4chan. It reportedly took 4chan's resourceful members a mere few hours to identify Bale.

Having found her, they reportedly began to reveal details of her employment, her phone number, and--that most basic foundation of human existence--her Facebook page.

At first, she wondered publicly what all the fuss was about. "It's just a cat," she told a newspaper. This was, perhaps, a slightly injudicious response, one that marshaled the energies of the online collective.

As her infamy spread, increasing ingenuity was dedicated to her excoriation. A YouTube video (embedded below) dreamed of a cat putting her in a trash bin. It has already enjoyed more than 800,000 views at the time of this writing.

Then one deeply feeling human created Twitter.com/catbinlady. It began on Wednesday with this tweet: "Just passed a shoe shop. Threw one of the sample shoes outside on top of a bus. Why do I do these things?"

It then offered observations such as, "Just kicked the head off next door's gnome. For a joke. Who's laughing now though? Not me. Not me."

Facebook, too, features expressions of disgust. What is remarkable, given Facebook's avowed stance against hate speech, is that the "Mary Bale Hate Group" is alive and very much kicking at the time I write this.

All this Web and flow of invective made Bale go into hiding. This had not deterred those who viewed her behavior as ill-befitting the human race. The Sun newspaper has created the online game Whack-Cat-Woman. This affords you the pleasure of bashing Bale's head as it emerges from various green bins strewn about the street.

In the closed-circuit TV footage, Bale was remarkably blase in just grabbing Lola with one hand and disposing of her. Unfortunately, the Web now has both its hands shaking every last bit of dignity from the so-called Cat Bin Lady. And that's not counting the fact that she reportedly may face charges of animal cruelty.

Perhaps, though, she will come out and make online videos against animal cruelty. The Web might be judge and jury, but it also has the power to rehabilitate.

When businesses become big, some decide to act big too. They walk into the legal saloon, swagger up to the bar and expect plaudits and favors to come streaming their way.

Sometimes it is for good reason, for they fear that others might trade off the back of their bigness. Sometimes, though, it is just an attempt to live large.

What, then, might one think of the news that Facebook is reportedly not merely attempting to trademark the word "book," but also the word "face"?

The trademark application, seems to seek a rather broad coverage.

TechCrunch reports that Aaron Greenspan, a classmate of Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard and someone who may or may not have been a participant in the company's founding, has already laid an objection to the trademark application.

Greenspan has a company called ThinkComputer and a mobile payment app called FaceCash. He has therefore reportedly asked the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for an extension to fully form his discomfort.

"Get outta my face"?

(Credit: CC Deney Terrio/Flickr)

I will admit not to have been entirely au fait with FaceCash's possibilities.

However, who could not have enjoyed some kind of relationship with a thing called FaceTime, Apple's very nice video chatting telecommunication feature of the iPhone 4? Apple already owns the trademark to FaceTime, yet it is very fond of creating subbrands that have a very close verbal identification with each other.

What if Apple wants to create new versions of FaceTime, called, say, FaceIT, through which you could be grilled face-to-face by your most trusted IT professional anywhere in the world? Would that be suddenly verboten?

Yes, I know that not everyone wants to talk to an IT professional face-to-face. Of course I don't expect such a feature to suddenly appear on iPhone 5. (It's just a little too niche.)

But surely the question is whether Facebook can prevent any new product, especially one that might already carry some fame with it (like FaceTime), appearing in the vaguely technologically communicative sphere with the word "face" at the beginning of its name.

I have contacted Apple for comment and will update with the company's reply.

Will there be a face-off? Might a lawyer perform a face-plant? The possibilities are, let's face it, fascinating.

Oh, you just know it was meant to be funny. Eight-year-olds using naughty words has always been funny. Especially at bar mitzvahs, birthday parties and, of course, on YouTube.

There will be some who will, therefore, feel a tinge of sympathy for Josh Eastman.

The Connecticut Post tells me that Eastman, of Bridgeport, Conn., is alleged to have taken it upon himself to give YouTube viewers exactly what they want: a little reality TV amusement.

So he reportedly encountered his neighbor's 8-year-old son in the garden, encouraged him to use rude words and inappropriate racial epithets, and filmed the experience. Eastman was allegedly none too shy about his role in the movie, as he was reportedly heard on the film encouraging the child to use these bad words.

(Credit: CC Vibracobra/Flickr)

Unlike, no doubt, quite a few of the cultured viewers on YouTube, the boy's mother didn't find it all that funny. She contacted the police, who arrested Eastman on charges of impairing the morals of a child.

It seems, though, that Eastman was shocked at his arrest. He told the AP: "If they didn't like the video they could have just asked me nicely to take it off, and I would have taken it off."

I am slightly perplexed by the "just asked me nicely" part of his quote. Why did Eastman feel he should have been asked nicely, when he seems rather more enamored of the slightly less nice forms of expression?

He claimed to the AP that he had not encouraged the boy and that the boy was well-known in the neighborhood for using less than neighborly language. He also denied the mother's claim that he had paid the boy $1 for his trouble.

Still, one can, perhaps, understand why he thought YouTube might have been the place for this work of art. The site has a rather hearty collection of "swearing kid" videos.

Now, however, Eastman will have to answer for his directorial debut in court on September 8. I wonder if cameras will be allowed inside.

Who was the last person you ever saw write anything? You know, with a pen. For me, it was Terrell Owens, when he removed his Sharpie during an NFL game, signed a ball, and thrust himself into greater posterity.

People type these days. They don't write. The issue, however, has been further exacerbated in China and Japan, where languages based on characters, rather than the alphabet, are apparently simply being forgotten by those who have dedicated their lives to keypads and screens.

An interesting Agence France-Presse expose offered a look at just how serious the problem has become. Here's how serious it is: it has a name--"character amnesia."

The China Youth Daily wanted to find out how bad this amnesia really was and discovered that 83 percent of the 2,072 who replied said they experience difficulty writing Chinese characters.

My 20-year-old Chinese friend tells me this says: GOOGLE IS CHINA'S BEST FRIEND IN THE WORLD. But he could be wrong.

(Credit: CC Myuibe/Flickr)

The majority of Chinese people are reportedly familiar with pinyin, a system that turns Chinese characters into the Roman alphabet. So while you have to know which character to select from the menu, you don't actually have to know how to take your pen and re-create that character.

Japan has a slightly different issue. It has three writing systems. But the most complicated, the Kanji, is not used on gadget keyboards. The AFP quoted 23-year-old Ayumi Kawamoto as saying: "I've mostly forgotten characters I learned in middle and high school and I tend to forget the characters I only occasionally use."

Some are very concerned about this change, even resorting to keeping handwritten diaries to maintain a level of written competence. Some smartphones, including the iPhone, do offer the ability to draw a character on the touch screen.

But there are those who believe this is just evolution. In the 1930s, even Chinese leader Mao Tse-Tung was conscious of the complicated nature of the Chinese language and ordered some of the written characters to be simplified.

This amnesia might seem like a problem only for character-based languages, but I wonder whether they're the only victims. Surely you, too, have seen, say, the English language increasingly tortured by the uncertain hands of those who spend far too long touching keys rather than pens, books, or other humans.

Perhaps privacy doesn't exist any more. Or, perhaps, as the highly incisive Danah Boyd of Microsoft Research New England suggests, we will have to find more sophisticated ways (and more sophisticated software) in order for everyone to understand what information should be made available and to whom.

Yet when the issue reaches the level of comedy, then you know it is truly serious. So this week, when Stephen Colbert decided on his "Colbert Report" to make Google and its CEO Eric Schmidt the rather public source of entertainment, what was most surprising was not the humorous way in which he wielded his scalpel. It was the quite numbing bite with which he ended the operation.

Colbert offered that social media's ubiquitous land and mind grab has meant that young people should simply stop being, well, young and people.

"The point is," he said, "the Internet is one giant resume. And under 'special skills' yours might list: getting high, keg stands, flashing your boobs, and multitasking."

Then he suggested that this was the reason Schmidt recently declared, quite tantalizingly, that young people should have the option to change their names.

But changing your name, Colbert said, wouldn't really solve the problem when Google is developing facial-recognition software.

So your solution, kids, is to have plastic surgery, dump all your friends, family, associates, hangers-on and admirers. Oh, and "dump everything you've ever searched for on the Internet."

"Once all that's done, and you're a disfigured, nameless loner, you'll be the ideal job candidate," he said.

Strangely, it seems to me that quite a few people who have succeeded in business are, indeed, disfigured, nameless loners. And I am absolutely not referring to anyone in the tech world specifically when I say that.

So there is already something of a template for those young people with ambitions, goals, and an ability to make absolutely no mistakes whatsoever.

Colbert's last line, however, was touchingly grave: "Of course, there is one other answer. Google and Facebook could stop invasively data-mining and selling our private data to the highest bidder. But that would be asking them to change who they are. And that's not fair."

Once you've watched the clip, please lie down and tell you me how you feel. You don't need to tell me who you are, of course, but you can if you want to.