Originally published in The Tab, 10 March 2010

My God, the wine was awful. The wine in the interval, I mean. We’re not just talking David Hyde Pearce-style “Oh my God it’s just called ‘wine’,” or even out-of-a-box gyppo juice. (It wasn’t, anyway. I saw the bottles.) To give you some idea, I was accompanied to the theatre by a friend from Serbia, who said it was worse than Moldavian vinegar. I don’t know what he means. Maybe you do.

I’m sorry to go on, but I can’t help it. One over-enthusiastic gulp was all it took; now I may never sing again. I tried when I got home; bottom G stuck in my throat. I’ve been gargling with salt for two hours now, and if anything it’s getting worse. I left Wolfson a baritone and came back a counter-tenor. FitzTheatre wine. Just don’t.

So, anyway. I guess I should talk about the play. They made Julius Caesar into Margaret Thatcher and set the whole thing around the 1981 Tory conference. Ha fucking ha. Red braces, white collars and cream ties conflated Gordon Gekko with big-c Conservatism, and later in the show the mob were identified with punk. You can see where this is going. It didn’t work. The civil war, as Roman historians have it, makes no sense in relation to the disintegration of Thatcher’s leadership. You can’t map Caesar on to this period in British history; there aren’t enough points of confluence. It feels like a gimmick, because that’s what it is. So it got old. Quickly.

Where did they get this idea from? Was it the product of a drunken night in the JCR? Something that was left unchecked by good sense and allowed to blossom into an entire production? It doesn’t really matter. When Lucius cuts Brutus a line of coke in place of lighting him a taper, we know this is paradise. (I hope Guy Francis was using vitamin C powder on stage. Something tells me this simulation of class-A drug use is going to come back to bite FitzTheatre in the arse.)

The second half was better. Interesting, because it’s by far the weaker half of Shakespeare’s play. One explanation is Jenny Harris’s absence, but Richard Benwell’s suddenly magnificent delivery can’t be ignored. Actually, Jenny was rather good, though she gave Thatcher a haughty air that the role commands but Maggie never really had. Besides, 1981 was the year of the bomb attack on the Grand Hotel; Thatcher knew better than to be magisterial. Harris made a good job of the Northern star line, echoing Thatcher’s reassurances to Parliament that the poll tax would be popular. Similar end results in both cases. Nicely done.

I’d forgotten how unsophisticated Julius Caesar is. But any Shakespeare play is a hubristic project for a single College’s theatre company. They almost got away with it. Benwell delivered the “honourables” as well as anyone I’ve seen at the Globe. Steady, though, Richard: you need to man up a bit to give us a convincing Mark Anthony. After the assassination, you exploded onto the stage in what can only be described as… a tizz. Not very statesmanlike.

I was momentarily drawn to John Swarbrooke’s Metellus Simber, but this was Ben Woodford’s play really. His Cassius was part David Geffen, part William Hague. Appropriately oleaginous. A bit psychotic. More robust than the average Cassius – more of a Bosola, I think – but we forgave him that. And he was the only one who felt like a proper Tory: Portia scolded like Harriet Harman, while her voice was indistinguishable from Jacqui Smith’s; Brutus’s Blairite speech at Julius’s funeral had me heaving; Decius’s quick-wittedness was straight out of Alistair Campbell’s diaries. Octavius was just fucking weird.

Pity about the props. The daggers looked like plastic canteen cutlery, the chairs and tables looked like crap, and, let’s be honest, trying to pass off a red Rymans boxfile as the Chancellor’s briefcase was pretty dumb. But these are minor things.

The big gripe was the central conceit. Julius Caesar could never be a woman, and Tory-bashing isn’t big or clever. But even forgiving that, the directors didn’t need to mess with the script, changing all the hes and hims. It ruined, for example, Mark Anthony’s, “I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him” (which was rendered “not to praise her” instead; the trailing, open-ended vowel on “her” robbing the line of its intensity).

The wine was called La Maison de Charlotte. You can get it in Tesco for £3.33. But don’t.

First published in The Tab, 6 March 2010.

Watching a tap dancer try to be sexy is a deeply uncomfortable experience. Particularly when, as happened last night, they’re set against blisteringly hot contemporary booty-shakers. It’s Cliff Richard versus Britney; Celine Dion versus Mariah Carey; West Side Story versus Grease.

You see, tap dance isn’t cool. That hot girl in the nail bar you’ve wanted to get on since sixth form? She does street dance. Your local librarian, the one with the squint and the perfectly centered ponytail? Yup, you guessed it. Tap.

And it isn’t just me: I could hear groans of agony rippling around the auditorium every time the lights went down and we heard the tell-tale tippity-tap of Mandy from the Reference section. I’m sure it’s fun to practise – not that you’d know it from the rigor mortis grins last night. Perhaps it’s even fun to perform. The problem is, tap is simply unbearable to watch.

It was judicious of the choreographer to employ safety by numbers to hide the shit dancers, and wise also to give two of the street dancers – both called Ruth, apparently – room to show off. I was mesmerized by their Fix Up, Look Sharp routine.

I enjoyed the girl band audition from a clutch of the sluttier dancers, who shimmied to Girls Aloud while the front row alternately vommed and came. Though that piece illustrated a general problem: when you have such talented leads, it really shows when the backing dancers are lacklustre, or a bit tired. “She’s only in CUTAZZ because her mother makes the costumes,” I almost heard from the row behind me. She needn’t have bothered: while the street dancers gyrated in little more than leggings and boob tubes, the librarians made us wince with awful skirts and bits of crap tied around their necks in a hellishly anodyne parody of studied Parisian nonchalance.

Two parallel shows wrestle for your attention within Shine. The first one is boring, and slightly sad. You watch it with pity and you applaud reluctantly. But there’s a second, stupendously good one, too: the street dancers, whose routines are a gay man’s wet dream. But unlike those overweight, sweaty poofs in provincial nightclubs, these girls can really dance. When they want you to get hot under the collar… you get hot.

When the street dancers turned lyrical, bathed in red light for a beautiful, slower set-piece, you could see they had soul as well as attitude. But it was mostly attitude: think body-popping, swooshes and sharp jumps. What Tyra Banks would call “fierce.”

I could have done without the interludes, to be honest. Yeah, I know the real dancers need time to get changed, but a bit of OK-ish prancing around to Shirley Bassey remixes didn’t really do it for me. (Get This Party Started? I wish they had.)

Shine is a celebration of pop culture; a warning against one too many choccie biccies at the issue desk; a chance for some of the University’s best dancers to show off and, overall, a bloody entertaining night out.

First published in The Tab, 4 March 2010.

What Ever Happened To Baby June? That was the thought going through my mind during the interval of Gypsy, as I meditated on the ponderousness of the first act’s latter half, which I felt suffered in the absence of Katie Taffler’s June. Little did I realise that Millie Benson’s magnificent Mama Rose would get even better, or that Tommy Crowley would blossom into such a brilliant stripper.

Yup, you heard that right. After a family-friendly first half, sustained by the combined talents of Taffler and Benson, Gypsy basically disintegrates into striptease meta-theatre. Boys need read no further: go book your tickets now. Girls, carry on if you want to know more about a play that chronicles the decline of a vaudeville troupe with more line-up changes than the Sugababes and as many hits as One True Voice.

Uncommonly, the supporting actors deserve high praise too. Laurie Marks was hilarious in each of the three parts he took (even his perpetual corpsing was adorable). Ed Wagstaff was particularly funny, while the faintly camp Jake Arnott provided eye candy while singing, somewhat unconvincingly, of his need for a girl. Top marks to the stage manager, too, for resisting the temptation to illuminate an LED bra more frequently than the music commanded.

Gypsy is not overwhelmed by an excess of plot, and it’s crammed full of songs that couldn’t sound more like porn movies if they tried (my personal favourite: “Dainty June and Her Farmboys”). But it isn’t just saucy fun: Benson’s final song, “Rose’s Turn,” raised her portrayal of a psychotic stage mum into something genuinely affecting. When it comes to university musicals, the safest strategy for the critic is generally to say, “Well, it’s not bad for a student performance.” But despite being rough around the edges, Gypsy is an awful lot better than “not bad.”

Naturally, there are a few improvements to be made in the coming days. It was a shame, for example, that the brass section seemed to have arbitrarily chosen a different key to play in from the rest of the band. And I was shocked at the horribly wooden acting and listless, often incomprehensible delivery from Henry Male. If this was deliberate “acting”, I humbly suggest that he drops it for the remainder of the run.

I’d also suggest advertising the show more widely across the university. It is a badly-kept secret that 40% of Magdalene’s female population hark from Essex, and I confess I did occasionally find it difficult to see the stage over the mounds of slap and fake Chanel bags. But the performers can hardly be blamed for that.

As anyone who has wandered through Magdalene in the last few weeks will have noticed, the promotional material for Gypsy falls gloriously short of its aspirations. Fortunately, however, the production does not. Highly recommended.

Before I sign off, a final word to the staff at Magdalene’s Cripps Auditorium: the surest way to kill the mood of an audience immediately prior to performance is to issue interminable, stern admonitions about eating, drinking and mobile phones. WE GET IT. Having never been to the Auditorium before, I don’t know if this is standard practice, but if they intend to continue this policy, I pray they elect someone a little less bossy and patronising. It just spoils the mood, alright?

First published in The Tab, 3 March 2010.

When I tell you I was grateful to be out of Pembroke’s New Cellars by 9pm, do not misunderstand me. Yes, Quality Street is infuriatingly vapid. The plot is pointless and predictable, the characters two-dimensional and the language whimsical even by J. M. Barrie’s standards. But the Pembroke Players, led by a marvellously neurotic Caitlin Doherty, did the best they could with a second-rate script and put on a very entertaining show. And let’s be honest: we might level the same dramaturgical criticisms at Oscar Wilde. His popularity is no worse off for them being valid.

That said, it would be madness to compare Barrie to the author of Lady Windemere’s Fan, and no amount of clever innuendo makes up for his lack of dramatic subtlety. “One thing we discovered during rehearsals,” confided a member of the cast to me, somewhat churlishly, before his stage debut this evening, “was that J. M. Barrie couldn’t write plays.”

To be fair, if I’d only had tonight’s performance to go on, I might not have reached the same conclusion about Barrie – which is a testament to the cast’s ability to pull off a very good performance of a very weak play. It’s true that the second half, as written, can be dreadfully languorous, and that the first suffers from some unfortunate and unnecessary compressions. But it is witty and quite clever, and so were most of the actors, who overcame the limitations of the script with intelligence, enthusiasm and what Simon Cowell might refer to as “the likeability factor.” Best of all, they actually made me laugh.

The litmus test of comedy is whether it moves you to genuine, unpretentious laughter. Sounds obvious, I know, but having sat through innumerable “avante garde” (that is, too clever for their own good) comedy performances by delusional student troupes, I was grateful to sit back and enjoy some earthy titillation and silliness for once.

So what of the performance? Well, at times, Miss Phoebe (played by Doherty) lost her wide-eyed, nervous energy. The whole play suffered when she did. But, for the most part, she was a superbly hysterical, gurning, glassy-eyed trainwreck who single-handedly drove the action forward with a mixture of bipolar mood swings and slutty coquettishness. She was complemented effortlessly by Anna Goodhart’s Miss Susan.

I must applaud Rosie Corner, who modestly reveals her responsibility for this production’s magnificent costumes in the programme notes. She also gave a very serviceable performance as a copybook lusty wench (though the real point of discussion for me was whether her fiery locks are her own or a horror-store wig).

The male roles were subject to more curious casting decisions, with a wiry lead who affected an accent twenty years too old for his character. I’d like to have seen more from Christopher O’Donnell’s Lt. Spicer, who came alive in the second half. George Johnston as Ensign Blades was unarguably good-looking, but perhaps a little bland until he briefly stole the show by leading a hilarious and unexpected swordfight down the aisle.

First published in The Tab, 26 February 2010.

It must be dreadful to be a ballet mum. Imagine it: watching from behind a rictus grin as your portly offspring flounders about on stage like an autistic hippo, sighing, “You looked so beautiful, darling,” through painfully gritted teeth while praying that little Lizzie will lose interest before the next big show.

Because, let’s be frank, amateur ballet is horrendous. It’s not like playing the piano, which can be executed perfectly well, albeit at a more modest level, by novices. No: if you’re a ballerina, you’re a ballerina, and you’re judged accordingly. And ballet critics, even more than classical music critics, can be savage.

Which is why it was so awful to see the valiant efforts of the Cambridge University Ballet Club sabotaged by appallingly shoddy production values, the like of which I haven’t seen since Sunset Beach. The most important component of any ballet performance, beside the dancers, is the music. Tchaikovsky was so hilariously and haphazardly vomited from the speakers that it twice prompted loud chortles from the row behind me. There were abrupt endings, weird volume changes and I swear we heard the CD skip during the penultimate piece of the first half.

But we can’t place all the blame with the production team for the audible sigh of relief after the final curtain. The director too seems to have sleepwalked through rehearsals: neither the more accomplished ballerinas nor the novices came off well after ill-judged and brutal juxtapositions of fluent performances with mass waddling and teetering from the less confident dancers. Which brings me to my other complaint: why were so many of these women so large?

At one point, I don’t think there was a ballerina on stage below size 18. Now don’t get me wrong, I know we’re growing as a nation, and sure, big can be beautiful, but honestly, I never expected to see a ballerina with bingo wings. (I should point out that it’s not just the ladies of the Ballet Club who ought to lay off the pies: one of the male ballerinas looked like he’d been preparing for months for The Sleeping Beauty… by eating deep-fried Mars bars.)

In the interests of fairness, I must tell you the improbably tall lilac fairy went down a storm with the audience, and there was a delightful little set-piece in the first half that involved pink umbrellas and a cute girl I recognise from the English faculty. The staging was pretty good, too: simple, but effective, even if transitions were generally over-long.

In fact I wish that we’d seen a bit more from the umbrella girl, and perhaps that camp couple dressed in black, who were very good. And, as I’ve said already, I wish the Ballet Club would put a bit more thought into how their less talented, but no less enthusiastic, dancers are presented.

More than anything, though, I do so wish Sleeping Beauty had shaved her armpits.

Published 15 January 2010 in The Catholic Herald.

In December the Venerable English College in Rome revealed that it had uncovered a mysterious parchment. According to the College, it suggests that Shakespeare spent “missing years” in Rome and that the Bard was a recusant Catholic for most of his adult life.

The evidence amounts to three signatures: those of “Arthurus Stratfordus Wigomniensis”, dated 1585, “Shfordus Cestriensis”, dated 1587, and “Gulielmus Clerkue Stratfordiensis”, dated 1589. Fr Andrew Headon, vice-rector of the College, thinks they should be decoded as: “[King] Arthur’s [compatriot] from Stratford [in the diocese] of Worcester”, “Sh[akespeare from Strat]ford [in the diocese] of Chester” and “William the Clerk from Stratford”.

These three signatures are not the first artefacts produced in support of the idea that Shakespeare was a Catholic. Irish Shakespeare scholar and editor Edmond Malone famously saw and described a “tract”, discovered in the 18th century in a house that once belonged to John Shakespeare, which purported to show John’s secret Catholicism. Various pieces of circumstantial evidence have also been offered by Catholic scholars over the years. They include the alleged Catholicism of several of Shakespeare’s schoolteachers and of John Frith, the man who conducted Shakespeare’s wedding ceremony; the fact that Shakespeare was never registered as attending a Protestant service while in London (though it was the government’s practice to keep records of attendees); and the testimony of Archdeacon Richard Davies, a 17th-century Anglican minister who wrote that Shakespeare “died a Papyste”. And it is often pointed out that Shakespeare purchased the eastern gatehouse at Blackfriars, a secret meeting place for fugitive Catholics, in 1613.

In 2005 amateur scholar Clare Asquith published Shadowplay, in which she too claimed the Bard for Catholicism. But Asquith went even further than that, presenting Shakespeare’s body of work as a complex web of signifiers pointing to a strong set of Catholic beliefs and a profound unease about the prevailing Protestant orthodoxy. Her supporters included Fr Peter Milward SJ, who confidently asserts Shakespeare’s Catholicism in his own book Shakespeare the Papist. Fr Milward says Asquith was the first person to spot and decode the hidden messages in Shakespeare’s plays.

But none of these claims bears scrutiny. The textual evidence presented by Asquith and Milward is not persuasive, and has not convinced mainstream academics: David Womersley, Professor of English Literature at Oxford University, seemed to dismiss Asquith’s book out of hand when asked to review it. Edmond Malone changed his mind about John Shakespeare’s tract, declaring it to be a forgery. Davies’s testimony has been discredited. Examination of Shakespeare’s purchase of the Blackfriars gatehouse by Samuel Schoenbaum confirms that it was a sound fiscal investment (Schoenbaum sees no reason to ascribe any other motive).

When arguments for Shakespeare’s Catholicism surface – and they do regularly – they feel suspiciously like “special interest scholarship”, the result of a preordained conclusion in seek of verisimilitude. The Ricardians, who seek to exonerate Richard III from wrongdoing and to “rehabilitate his reputation”, are perhaps the best example of such writing.

It is perfectly understandable that Catholic scholars should seek to appropriate the Bard: after all, there is something larger at stake here than the religious affiliation of a single playwright. An understanding of Shakespeare’s work is not just the key to English literature; Shakespeare is one of the essential components of English identity. Claim him for your own and you are appropriating a part of Englishness for your cause.

Shakespeare was the product of a confusing time in which many people thought of themselves as Catholic but nonetheless obeyed the state: it’s hardly surprising that Catholic imagery, and some degree of nostalgia for lost Catholic treasures, would inform his work. Presumably he did harbour some sympathies, or he would not have written of the “bare ruined choirs” in Sonnet LXXIII. But while this is almost certainly a reference to the ruins left by Henry VIII, it is hardly a reason to suppose Shakespeare himself was “a Catholic”.

The problem of classifying Shakespeare’s religion, then, is complex, and probably irresolvable, which may be why some academics question whether he was a Christian at all. The English Reformation provides the perfect conditions for special interest scholarship to flourish. There isn’t enough to go on from the 15th century, and there’s too much proper work from professional historians on the 17th. But in the 16th, plausible positions can be strung together on the basis of “probability” and “circumstance”, hinging on the seductive “what if?” – a question that that lies at the heart of a million junk history books. It goes without saying that, had Shakespeare been identified as a Catholic in his lifetime, he would not have been permitted to continue staging his plays. But our recent fascination with detective stories and “code-breaking” – the trend from which The Da Vinci Code sprang – should not be allowed to cook up a conspiracy either.

Those “lost years” in Rome – don’t they sound like a classic piece of wishful thinking? Much Shakespeare-as-Catholic writing suffers from the hallmarks of special interest scholarship (one gets the sense that conclusions were reached before a single library book was opened).

As James Fenton wrote in the Guardian: “For some reason, Shakespeare as Shakespeare is not interesting enough for the sort of taste that dabbles in this area. It has to be Shakespeare and the great pyramid of Ghizeh, Shakespeare and the knights templar, Shakespeare and the missing Lancashire years…”

Fenton is right to be exasperated: it is only a matter of time before one of these risible interpretations hits the big time and captures the public imagination. But while Leonardo da Vinci may have been hijacked by fantasists and partisan amateurs, perhaps Shakespeare can be spared the same ignominy.

We may wish to claim Shakespeare for Rome, but we do so in the absence of fact and predicated on a daisy-chain of “what-ifs”. Which is why we should approach the latest glut of books on this subject with a healthy scepticism.

Milo Yiannopoulos is a freelance technology writer currently reading English at Cambridge University

I would not be so vain as to imagine that my contributions to the “gaming Twitter followers” debate, nor the post they prompted by Will Heaven at the Telegraph, had anything to do with Econsultancy’s announcement yesterday that it was unfollowing the impressive 19,000 people its @econsultancy account had followed.

But I am going to chip in. Because, Chris Lake, merely unfollowing the 19,000 people your script followed for you isn’t good enough. And nor are the seeming half-truths and curious definitions in your blog post.

Let’s start with the claim that you were “experimenting” with Twitter when you employed an autofollow script. Were you young and naive in the ways of Twitter? Did you just want to see what would happen? Hmm. Smacks of the same kind of bullshit that @Mazi told the Telegraph:

Nadjm has made clear that his Twitter following has grown organically and properly. “I use Twitter as a networking experiment,” he tells me. “I manually follow hundreds of people using Twitter directories and by searching for hashtags such as #Iranelection which particularly interest me. But I have used Huitter.com to unfollow people who don’t follow me back, which can be painstaking otherwise, given the presence of hundreds of bots and spammers on Twitter. I have never knowingly violated Twitter’s terms of service.”

It didn’t wash when he said it, because he was deliberately misleading about his following methods. (Though he doesn’t explicitly state that he only follows manually, that’s what he means to imply.) And it doesn’t wash in your post, either.

It looks spammy to have 19,000 followers and to follow 19,000 people, but we don’t used Hummingbird or any pyramid software tools to grow our follower count. Our Twitter presence has grown organically.

“Looks” spammy? Sure does. You clearly used an autofollow script (which you admit earlier in the post), which suggests that you intended to artificially inflate your follower count. Even if you didn’t intend that, autofollow scripts do have that effect. Why hide behind this disingenuous and cutesy “we’re curious peeps here at Econsultancy” defence?

I presume by “Our Twitter presence has grown organically”, you mean that it has steadily increased at about the same rate. Well, duh: that’s what happens when you use an autofollow script. That’s not what I, and I’m guessing most other people, mean by “organic”.

“We simply want to start from scratch,” writes Chris. But this isn’t starting from scratch at all, Chris: what you’ve done is dump the a suspicious follower/following ratio, leaving a Twitter account that looks like it has been naturally followed by nearly 17,000 people. Forgive me for thinking that’s not plausible: at a bare minimum, the autofollow script is likely to have inflated that 17,000 by a few thousand. If you don’t understand that, you need to get out of social media.

What’s worrying about Econsultancy’s behaviour here is that not only did they start out with bad practices (I don’t buy their claims about “experimentation”), they’re now prevaricating and have embarked on a course of action that appears to make the offence even graver. Effectively, they’re burying bad behaviour, conveniently assuming (because they have no way of knowing) that their Twitter account has 17,000 natural followers. There’s just no way to tell.

So I’m challenging Chris to really start again by using the following method to clear out @Econsultancy’s follower count too. Why not start from zero on both sides?

I wonder if he’s got the balls to do it.

How to really “start from scratch” without losing your Twitter handle

Let’s assume your current account is called @JohnSmith.

• You’ll need to register a fresh, second account (call it @JohnSmith1) with an alternative email address.
• What you want to do is transfer the name @JohnSmith from the old account to the new one. First, log in to @JohnSmith via the website and change the username to @JohnSmith2.
• Immediately log out and log in to the new account (currently @JohnSmith1) and change the name of that account to @JohnSmith.
• Finally, you’ll want to archive your old account (the one with the gamed follower count), so rename that to something like @OldJohnSmith. That way you can still access your old tweets.

Update: In light of a comment below, I have modified my wording slightly to make it clear that even if it’s true Econsultancy only followed “real” followers back, rather than aggressively pursuing new ones, as I charge @Mazi with doing, my challenge stands. What Chris proposes isn’t “starting from scratch” as I understand the term.

What are the tools available to combat online piracy? I wrote about a few of them for DGA Quarterly, the Directors’ Guild of America’s craft magazine.

As technology evolves, new and better tools are becoming available to combat Internet theft and protect intellectual property. Online theft is not going to go away, but now content creators can protect their work and help ensure a fair deal for themselves and paying consumers.

If something is visible or audible on a computer, it can be copied. It only takes one computer-literate pirate to make a single unprotected copy of a film or TV program for it to become available to everyone on the Internet, free of charge. The only barrier to entry for prospective file-sharers is mastery of a simple set of computer programs designed specifically to find and share music and video. It really is as simple as “point” and “click.”

It’s true that the Internet has enabled copyright infringement on an unprecedented scale: millions of illegally pirated files are now available for download to anyone with a broadband connection. But this doesn’t mean that the battle against Internet theft can’t and shouldn’t be fought and—to some extent—won. Here is a brief survey of the tools that are out there and how they can be used to protect your work.

Digital Rights Management (DRM)

Historically, this has been the most common form of digital copy protection, but to date it has not been particularly effective. DRM describes a set of rules or controls embedded within the content itself that are designed to prevent unauthorized viewing or listening—for example, by preventing playback on devices that are not owned by the purchaser (this is how Apple’s FairPlay system, used in its iTunes Store, operates). In reality, digital media files employing DRM can have that protection stripped away by experienced thieves in a matter of minutes. The content can then be duplicated an unlimited number of times, with no reduction in quality, as if there had been no protection applied at all.

Every widely used DRM system has been rapidly defeated by pirates. The Content Scrambling System (CSS), introduced in 1996 by the DVD Forum, has been practically useless since 1999. The Advanced Access Content System (AACS) for HD-DVD and Blu-ray discs was “cracked” in December 2006: the first unprotected HD movie appeared on peer-to-peer file-sharing sites, complete with audio options and special features, less than two weeks later. DVD region codes, another attempt to limit international piracy, can be circumvented very easily on a modern computer—not to mention using one of a widely available range of multi-region DVD players.

DRM is sometimes perceived as reducing the value of a paid product, for example when a piece of software needs to “phone home” via the Internet in order to be installed or operated. This occasionally results in inconveniences to legitimate customers if, for instance, authentication servers are offline or the user is not connected to the Web.

Nonetheless, DRM is still widely used as an extra layer of deterrence. It forms part of an integrated toolkit of anti-piracy technologies, but should never be considered a complete means of protection in itself.

Read the remainder of this article at DGA Quarterly’s website.

A few of you may remember a little shindig we had at Liverpool Street Station earlier in the year to celebrate Michael Jackson’s death. About 2,000 people came together for a “mass moonwalk”. You can see CNN’s coverage of the event here.

Don Riddell asked me to appear on CNN again to talk about the moonwalk as part of their end-of-year round-up. We revisited Liverpool Street (I hadn’t been back since) a few weeks ago and talked about Michael Jackson’s legacy. The interview is here.

And here’s the original coverage from the moonwalk:

I did say I was going to depersonalise this debate. And I meant it: look out for my post on the subject in January, which will be concerned with the issue of gaming followers and its effect on online reputation.

But in the meantime, it seems that Telegraph.co.uk has picked up the story. For those interested, here’s how they’re reporting it (click through to the original for pictures and links):

Have you ever wondered how some Twitter users manage to gain a huge following, despite having fairly limited online profiles otherwise? Welcome to “gaming”, a practice causing huge controversy in the Twitterverse. Put simply, gaming involves a small number of Twitterers who follow hundreds of people at a time (manually or using software), then “unfollow” those who don’t return the favour. This causes an overall long-term rise in their total follower counts, which artificially boosts their reputations online. Big tech industry names, all of whom have gained their followings “organically”, tell me they are keen to stamp out this practice.

One of the figures connected to this controversy is Maz Nadjm who, in his own words, is the man “responsible for social media at Sky TV”. PR Week once named him “the most influential communications professional on Twitter in the UK”, and he has been a speaker at the 140 Characters Conference, as well as a host of other high-profile social media events. But one well-known tech blogger is accusing Nadjm of “gaming” his Twitter account to boost his online profile.

@Mazi – Nadjm’s Twitter username – is followed by an impressive 33,201 people as of today. But just take a look at this graph from the excellent Twittercounter.com, which shows the number of people he has followed on Twitter over the last three months:

Sharp peaks and troughs in a graph can indicate that a Twitter user has added hundreds of people at a time and simply removed those who won’t follow back, a practice which guarantees an overall rise in the number of followers. According to his updated Twitter account, Nadj has 33,201 followers and is following 33,927. As one well-known London online reputation manager puts it: “The closer the two numbers are together, the more likely it is that [perfectly legal] modifications have been made. Is an individual likely to manually follow tens of thousands of people. Would you?”

On top of this, last week’s graph seems to show that Nadjm added a staggering 1,464 followers in one day. In the same week, the graph suggests that he also removed 1,262 people from his “following” list.

According to a well-informed source, very high numbers sometimes indicate that a “script” may have been used – a simple piece of code which directs a Twitter account to follow people and unfollow those who don’t follow back (there are dozens of these available online – and their use is banned by Twitter.com). In contrast to the graph above, here’s what another “following” increase looks like over the same three-month period:

Nadjm has made clear that his Twitter following has grown organically and properly. “I use Twitter as a networking experiment,” he tells me. “I manually follow hundreds of people using Twitter directories and by searching for hashtags – such as #Iranelection – which particularly interest me. But I have used Huitter.com to unfollow people who don’t follow me back, which can be painstaking otherwise, given the presence of hundreds of bots and spammers on Twitter. I have never knowingly violated Twitter’s terms of service.”

So “Mazigate“, as it has been termed online, may be evidence of nothing more than someone with stunning new popularity. But the practice of “gaming” is apparently endemic among social media experts and agencies and, although it’s not illegal, certain techniques have been explicity banned by Twitter. Yet dozens of third-party Twitter applications promise thousands of additional followers in an instant – often for large sums of money.

For people who use Twitter professionally, a follower count is often considered to be an accurate indicator of your online profile: it reflects your influence and connections in social media. So those who “game” are seen by many to be cheating to get ahead, in the same way that someone might adjust the achievements on their CV in order to get a job. Some gamers are also hoodwinking their technologically illiterate bosses into thinking they are highly successful. It’s a masterclass in how to capitalise in a new technological field – and all the more infuriating for honest techies because it so consistently works.

Good to see the mainstream media acknowledging the importance of keeping it real. Onwards and upwards.