Having mentioned Google Maps in previous posts, it’s worth pointing out that the service has now come to the UK.

Google Maps UK doesn’t yet have satellite overlays like its US counterpart, but that should be soon to come. The Google Local business-finding service has also been ported.

Applying Google’s happy helpful ethos to mapping seems to have paid off. You can enter any location and be given a map, or you can enter a basic route (such as “London to Brighton“) to be presented with instructions and maps on how to accomplish it.

The Local service allows you to enter a location or postcode and find businesses or services in the locale, such as taxis or pizza places. There are, apparently, 18 places selling our favourite Italian flatbread nourishment within 5 miles of my house :D.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s recently been bombarded with email “invitations” from a site called “SMS.ac“. The emails, which are mass-mails disguised as personal messages, invite the recipient to take advantage of an account that has been “reserved” for them by a friend.

Well, if you’ve ever been sent (or, more importantly, been responsible for the sending to me of) said emails, this is for you.

All it takes is one dribbling idiot with your email address in their Hotmail or Yahoo! address books, and you’re on the SMS.ac hit list. I have recieved around a dozen “invitations” in the last month or so, replete with such signup-encouraging gems as “Don’t worry it is quick. :-).”. Recognizing the potential scam for what it was, I ignored them. There was no way I was going to give my mobile number to a website offering “free SMS” just because some gomer with no conception of information sensitivity thought it would be a good idea to let SMS.ac run riot with their address books.

Finally getting fed up with them, I decided to see what I could dig up about the company. Well, I struck gold.

Ripoffreport.com just so happens to have a hundred-kilobyte page ripping apart SMS.ac, starting off with a testimony from a ripped-off customer, and spiralling into legal rebuttals, ex-employee whistle-blowing and, well, lots of angry customers.

Sign up for SMS.ac and you will receive spam text messages, especially if you opt into the SMS.ac “clubs” (general interest groups that correspond by text). There are employees at SMS.ac who are actually paid to send out bogus/spam SMS messages to members of these clubs. The Ripoffreport.com article contains testimonials from ex-employees who say that the company is run like a cult, that faithful employees rally round the CEO, pseudonymically named “Michael Pousti”, (whose surname, incidentally, translates from Greek as “faggot or gay (homosexual). But this is not the true essence of the word either, infact it means to be shafted from behind or to be taken from behind in an unsuspecting manner.”), who portrays himself as a genius, and anyone who doesn’t toe the line with him is branded “wierd” and “non-forward-thinking”. Multiple cases are described where employees have only worked for a day or two and have then quit, causing great anxiety at the company, and forthcoming urges to sign non-disclosure agreements.

Upon signing up for an account, the unsuspecting user is offered the opportunity to provide SMS.ac with their Hotmail/Yahoo! Mail username and password, so that their address books can be “synced”. What in fact happens when this “syncing” takes place is that every contact in your address book is sent an “invitation” email as described above, made to look like it is a personal and genuine message.

Rearrange “SMS.ac” and you get “scams”.

Figures bandied about include around 5 spam messages a day to a UK user, at a cost of 50p per message, and some unfortunates in South Africa being billed 150 rand per message (about $25, or £13, also equivalent to about 10% of the average SA citizen’s monthly wage), forcing an ISP to block access to the SMS.ac site.

So, ignore the “invitations”. If you’re already a member, try to get out. In case you missed the link to the meaty report, it’s here.

Other netizens have also given the SMS.ac scam a mention.

Following the launch of Google’s Maps service, allowing US residents to see maps and satellite imagery of just about everywhere in the country, Wired ran this article on finding hidden surprises in these satellite photos.

Apparently, “notable surprises include a just-erupted volcano, violent scenes from Iraq (a bomb going off in Baghdad and a firefight in Najaf) and even a 747 landing in Tokyo, something difficult to capture given that the satellite is moving at 17,000 mph.” The article also mentions some similar amusing occurences in the past.

Some samples include a packed baseball stadium, and an airliner landing somewhere in California.

Denzel Washington is surely a god.

If you come away from this film with one thought, that should be it. Having recently watched (and very much enjoyed) “Man on Fire,” I was only too pleased to serve myself up another helping of dark Washington acting, and while not quite at the level of “Man on Fire,” the quality of “The Manchurian Candidate” certainly approaches it.

The action takes place in present-day America, where Washington’s character, Major Ben Marco, is approached by a former member of his Desert Storm platoon, who tells him of the strange and haunting dreams he has been having of what happened to their platoon in Kuwait in 1991. The platoon was ambushed one night, and Marco knocked unconscious, but he and the rest of the platoon emerged believing that fellow private Raymond Shaw saved their lives, for which he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honour. He then goes on to run for Vice-President. Through the course of the film however, it emerges that what happened - or didn’t happen - is not so simple.

I can’t say much more without inviting whining accusations of giving away the plot, despite the whole thing being pretty much explained in the first 5 minutes of (and trailer for) the film. Not sticking too rigidly to the lines of the original 1962 film, the plot is not devoid of twists, all of which are expertly carried out. The whole mood of the film is of a dark, terror-wary America, looking to place its trust in a new leader who will fix everything and save the world. From the dimly lit, wet-walled corridors of a New York motel to the gleaming lights of political convention halls, the settings compliment the action brilliantly. Meryl Streep does a good job as the power-queen mother, and Liev Schreiber’s crisp-spoken, smiles-too-much Shaw maintains just the right level of creepy. Little touches, like the subtle way the lights brighten every time the men slip into their hypnotized state, really make this film into an immersive thriller.

If you haven’t seen “Man on Fire,” see it. Then see this, and see what you think. If you enjoyed the first, you’ll certainly enjoy this. It’s also likely to appeal to fans of the original, as it really breaks the remake mould in not being utter garbage.

Slashdot ran a great article yesterday about a recent paper from Canadian professor of law Michael Geist, which systematically examines the recent extravagant loss claims of the Canadian record industry, and emerges with the conclusion that P2P filesharing had little, if any, actual impact on the income of the artists themselves, and that many other factors were to blame.

Many of the principles discussed in the paper hold true for other parts of the world (especially the USA). Additionally, it’s full of great quotes:

“Although loath to discuss the matter publicly, according to an October 2004 Economist article, an internal music label study found that between 2/3 and 3/4 of recent sales declines had nothing to do with Internet music downloads.”

“Given the tens of millions of dollars that the Canadian government spends annually to support the creation of Canadian music, it is apparent that the relative impact of lost royalties due to file-sharing pales by comparison.”