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nensic

Does Facebook have a problem with women? | Life and style | The Guardian - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...-images-rape-domestic-violence

women rape images violence

shared by nensic on 07 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Facebook insists there's no place on its site for hate speech or content that is threatening or incites violence. So why do images that seem to glorify rape and domestic violence keep appearing?
  • users taking to Twitter in recent weeks to express their anger at Facebook's refusal to remove images that tried to make a joke of rape.
  • One showed a woman bound and gagged on a sofa and a caption that read: "It's not rape. If she really didn't want to, she'd have said something." The second showed a condom, beneath the words "Plan A"; an emergency contraceptive pill, "Plan B"; and then "Plan C", a man pushing a woman with a bloodied face down the stairs.
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  • Over the past few years, women say they have been banned from the site and seen their pages removed for posting images of cupcakes iced like labia, pictures of breastfeeding mothers and photographs of women post-mastectomy.
  • Yet images currently appearing on the site include a joke about raping a disabled child, a joke about sex with an underage girl and image after image after image of women beaten, bloodied and black-eyed in graphic domestic violence "jokes".
  • There are countless groups with names such as "Sum sluts need their throats slit" and "Its Not 'rape' If They're Dead And If They're Alive Its Surprise Sex".
  • "Daddy f*cked me and I loved it"
  • A Facebook spokesperson insisted: "There is no place on Facebook for hate speech or content that is threatening or incites violence."
  • "We take reports of questionable and offensive content very seriously," said the Facebook spokesperson. "However, we also want Facebook to be a place where people can openly discuss issues and express their views, while respecting the rights and feelings of others. Groups or pages that express an opinion on a state, institution, or set of beliefs – even if that opinion is outrageous or offensive to some – do not by themselves violate our policies."
  • Each image normalises gender-based violence, sending the message to both victims and perpetrators that ours is a culture that doesn't take it seriously.
  • Facebook clearly accepts representations of some forms of violence, namely violence against women, as qualitatively different from others."
  • The Facebook spokesperson said: "It's not Facebook's job to define what is acceptable.
  • "You have a choice to have sex, I have the choice to rape you.""If you don't stop giving me shit I'll pay four of my friends to gang rape you.""Go ahead, call the cops – they can't un-rape you.""The only reason you have been put on this planet is so we can fuck you. Please die."
Gabrijela Vrbnjak

BBC News - Web code weakness allows data dump on PCs - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...technology-21628622

clevercode html5 browser bug

shared by Gabrijela Vrbnjak on 04 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • The loophole exploits a feature of HTML 5 which defines how websites are made and what they can do.
  • Developer Feross Aboukhadijeh found the bug and set up a demo page that fills visitors' hard drives with pictures of cartoon cats. In one demo, Mr Aboukhadijeh managed to dump one gigabyte of data every 16 seconds onto a vulnerable Macbook. Clever code Most major browsers, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari, were found to be vulnerable to the bug, said Mr Aboukhadijeh. While most websites are currently built using version 4 of the Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML), that code is gradually being superseded by the newer version 5. One big change brought in with HTML 5 lets websites store more data locally on visitors' PCs. Safeguards built into the "local storage" specification should limit how much data can be stored. Different browsers allow different limits but all allow at least 2.5 megabytes to be stored. However, Mr Aboukhadijeh found a way round this cap by creating lots of temporary websites linked to the one a person actually visited. He found that each one of these associated sites was allowed to store up to the limit of data because browser makers had not written code to stop this happening. By endlessly creating new, linked websites the bug can be used to siphon huge amounts of data onto target PCs. Only Mozilla's Firefox capped storage at 5MB and was not vulnerable, he found. "Cleverly coded websites have effectively unlimited storage space on visitor's computers," wrote Mr Aboukhadijeh in a blogpost about the bug. Code to exploit the bug has been released by Mr Aboukhadijeh and he set up a website, called Filldisk that, on vulnerable PCs, dumps lots of images of cats on to the hard drive. So far, no malicious use of the exploits has been observed. In a bid to solve the problem, bug reports about the exploit have been filed with major browser makers. More on This Story .related-links-list li { position: relative; } .related-links-list .gvl3-icon { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; } Related Stories Firefox smartphone partners revealed 24 FEBRUARY 2013, TECHNOLOGY Flash Player exits Android store 15 AUGUST 2012, TECHNOLOGY HTML 5 target for cybercriminals 02 DECEMBER 2011, TECHNOLOGY $render("page-see-also","ID"); $render("page-newstracker","ID"); Related Internet links Feross Aboukhadijeh The BBC is not responsible for the content of external Internet sites $render("page-related-items","ID"); Share this pageShare this page1.4KShareFacebookTwitter Email Print In association with $render("advert","advert-sponsor-module","page-bookmark-links"); $render("advert-post-script-load"); $render("advert-post-script-load"); More Technology stories RSS Computer glitch hits Mars rover Nasa's Curiosity Mars rover is put into "safe mode" after a computer glitch caused by corrupted files. US plans small-ship drone launches Hackers breach Evernote security $render("advert","advert-mpu-high"); $render("advert-post-script-load"); Top Stories http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/6618
  • found the bug and set up a demo page that fills visitors' hard drives with pictures of cartoon cats.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • because browser makers had not written code to stop this happening. By endlessly creating new, linked websites the bug can be used to siphon huge amounts of data onto target PCs.
  • found a way round this cap by creating lots of temporary websites linked to the one a person actually visited
  • Most major browsers, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari, were found to be vulnerable to the bug
  • was not vulnerable
  • Mozilla's Firefox
  • bug reports about the exploit have been filed with major browser makers.
Patricija Čelik

Internet pornography: safety plans do not go far enough - charities - Telegraph - 0 views

www.telegraph.co.uk/...t-go-far-enough-charities.html

internet safety

shared by Patricija Čelik on 03 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • The Government yesterday launched a consultation on a possible change in the law to give parents more control over the material their children are viewing online.
  • Internet service providers have been in talks with the Government about ways of enabling parents to block sites containing sexually or gambling as well as forums glorify suicide and self-harm.
  • a report by MPs who called for a full “opt-in” which would automatically block adult material unless the user chose to deactivate it. Google has argued that an automatic block as a “mistake”, while Virgin Media, BT, TalkTalk and Sky have developed versions of the “active choice” system which makes users chose whether they want parental controls when they sign up, rather than imposing them automatically.
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  • Claire Walker, head of policy, at the charity Family Lives, which this week published a hard hitting report on online dangers, said parents would be more secure with an automatic block.
Jan Keček

Smartphone operating systems: Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...s-bright-eyed-and-bushy-tailed

smartphone ipraktikum internet networking

shared by Jan Keček on 04 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • IF YOU have a new smartphone, it is almost certainly either an Apple iPhone or one of the many devices that runs on Google’s Android operating system. According to IDC, a research firm, more than 90% of the 228m smartphones shipped in the last quarter of 2012 belonged to one of the two dominant species. Android is the bigger bea
  • st. Its share has grown as the smartphone market has boomed, to about 70%.
  • Most Windows smartphones are made by Finland’s Nokia, which dropped its own plans for a new system when it threw in its lot with the American software giant. BlackBerry, a Canadian company formerly called Research In Motion, hopes to recover lost glories with BlackBerry 10, which appeared in January after much delay.
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  • Mozilla, a non-profit organisation best known for Firefox, a web browser, unveiled plans to bring a smartphone operating system to market. Called Firefox OS, it has the backing of 18 mobile operators based in countries from Asia to Latin America.
  • One reason for the challengers’ optimism is that a lot of ground is unoccupied.
  • BlackBerry and Microsoft have the advantage of familiarity; 80m people use BlackBerrys. Companies’ information-technology departments trust them as secure. Microsoft hopes that Windows’ dominance of personal computers can be transferred to mobiles. With that in mind, all new Windows devices, on desks, on laps or in hands, have the same look, with “tiles” for touching, not clicking.
  • Whereas most applications on Apple and Android devices have been written for those systems, Firefox OS uses open standards. In principle, apps based on it can run on any device connected to the web.
Jernej Prodnik

Facebook Now Allows Friends To Promote Posts, But Privacy Concerns Arise - Internationa... - 0 views

au.ibtimes.com/...osts-privacy-concerns-2013.htm

facebook international business times privacy political economy of communication political economy of the internet surveillance society surveillance

shared by Jernej Prodnik on 24 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Facebook Now Allows Friends To Promote Posts, But Privacy Concerns Arise
  • By Ian Kar | February 16, 2013 8:27 AM EST On average, Facebook posts are seen by approximately 16 percent of your friends; with Facebook’s newest feature, however, more of your friends may start seeing your best moments on the social network more often, because users can now pay to promote their friend’s posts.
  • Facebook hopes that with this new service, quality content supported by you and your friends will  be featured at the top of your News Feed. Some users have already received the new feature, but the gradual rollout will continue with Facebook users with fewer than 5,000 total friends and subscribers. 
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  • Facebook has dealt with many privacy issues in its nine years on the Web, but unlike most of the past issues that deal with broader concerns like “data mining,” the new promoted posts service could have a greater impact on individuals, like its increased potential for cyberbullying.One problem is your friend doesn’t need your explicit permission to promote your posts. So, for instance, if one of my friends from college decides to promote an old embarrassing photo of me, I won’t be able to prevent the picture from getting to the top of the News Feed for a large percentage of my friends.
  • We’ve reached out to Facebook to talk about any safeguards that will be put in place to prevent cyber bullying, but they didn’t get back to us by the time this article went up.In addition, there’s no way to determine who promoted the post, so, as TechCrunch notes, a friend promoting an article written by me could be perceived as a shameless plug by me in an effort get more of my friends to check out my article (which is totally true by the way).However, Facebook notes there are a lot of benefits to the service. A Facebook spokesperson released a statement to AllFacebook on Friday, describing the feature:
  • “If your friend is running a marathon for charity and has posted that information publicly, you can help that friend by promoting their post to all of your friends,” the post said. “Or if your friend is renting their apartment out and she tells her friends on Facebook, you can share the post with the people you and your friend have in common so that it shows up higher in news feed and more people notice it.”As you can see, Facebook’s new feature has a number of potentially beneficial uses like fundraising for a friends’ charity or publicizing events to increase attendance, and can even make somewhat tedious tasks like finding an apartment be a little less difficult.
  • Facebook will want to monitor this new feature to see how it’s used. It has the potential to be really lucrative and turn Facebook into a network more like Reddit, where popular posts dominate the front page on a merit basis, but it could be used maliciously to embarrass or play pranks on friends – only time will tell. Facebook is planning on emphasizing its mobile platform in 2013, and it will be interesting to see if the Promoted Posts feature will be included in its mobile plans. In the company’s most recent earnings report, Facebook said mobile ad revenue accounts for 23 percent of its total ad revenue. To contact the editor, e-mail: editor@ibtimes.com
sergeja perklič

The European Union Closes in on Data Privacy Legislation - SPIEGEL ONLINE - 0 views

www.spiegel.de/...vacy-legislation-a-877973.html

data privacy EU

shared by sergeja perklič on 04 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • The European Union is seeking to increase the private sphere of its citizens by strengthening data protection laws for the web. Large Internet firms and lobbyists are fighting the plans.
  • Gmail and Facebook may be forced to abandon their ad-supported models and start charging their customers in Europe or stop providing them with these popular services altogether.
  • Take Facebook, for example, which has its European headquarters in Ireland. The Irish government's data protection commissioner would then be responsible for the concerns of all EU citizens relating to the company's privacy policies.
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  • Under exi
  • sting privacy regulations, data protection supervision in EU countries must be conducted entirely independently of public authorities, and data protection controllers are not under the supervision of the European Commission. But the EU wants to weaken this policy and install itself as the data protection agencies' supervisory authority.
manca_

Apollo Plus: Microsoft's next Windows Phone update to include Wi-Fi, audio, and other f... - 0 views

www.theverge.com/...ollo-plus-windows-phone-update

microsoft Apollo Plus: Microsoft's next Windows Phone update to include Wi-Fi audio and other fixes

shared by manca_ on 05 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • bring new features to Windows
  • // 33inShare Microsoft is currently preparing an update for Windows Phone 8, codenamed Apollo Plus.
  • A Wi-Fi connection fix is also planned to let connections always remain on, alongside some audio improvements. Apollo Plus will also test Microsoft's ability to deliver Windows Phone 8 updates over-the-air, a change from the previous OS that required users to plug devices into PCs to get similar updates.
Jan Majdič

Free speech on the internet | Technology | guardian.co.uk - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...freespeech.internet

free speech internet

shared by Jan Majdič on 06 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Freedom of expression has long been regarded as one of the fundamental principles of modern democracies, in which civil liberties are honoured and regarded as a prerequisite for individual development and fulfilment.
  • It is this classic liberal argument that is still used by civil liberties' campaigners on the internet, like Hatewatch, which argues that those "hate speak" groups, such as neo-Nazis, must still speak freely, if only to expose and discredit themselves
  • It is not simply a case of "same old issue, new technology" with free speech and the internet. With its low start-up costs and global reach, the internet enables almost anyone in the West, in theory, to speak and be heard around the world, as well as hear others' speech.
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  • particularly when they originate from, and are hosted in, foreign countries.
  • China have successfully prevented their citizens from receiving a huge quantity of (pro-democratic) material on the internet.
  • seeking to regulate and control its immense, potential, power.
  • The anti-censorship pressure group, Campaign Against Censorship of the Internet in Britain, was created in response Scotland Yard's request to ISPs to censor their news feeds
  • Governments in the USA, Germany and France, have all taken significant steps to curtail free speech on the internet
  • US is several years ahead of Britain
  • industry self-regulation
  • Technology is used to censor and evade censorship, although it seems likely that censorship tools will grow in sophistication and use as legislators struggle to censor the internet.
  • In December 1997, a 200-strong internet industry group agreed to accept a common standard of labelling called PICS - the Platform for Internet Content Selection
  • Millions of internet users in big offices, cybercafés, education institutions and libraries will use machines or ISPs which have filters installed in them.
  • In 1999, the EU launched an action plan, "Promoting Safer Use of the Internet", which provides for a hotline, where people can report sites which have caused offence
Blaž Gobec

Why Facebook's new Open Graph makes us all part of the web underclass | Technology | gu... - 1 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...book-open-graph-web-underclass

facebook plans graph opengraph underclass

shared by Blaž Gobec on 01 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • ou're not paying for your presence on the web, then you're
  • just a product being used by an organisation bigger than you
  • When you use a free web service you're the underclass. At best you're a guest. At worst you're a beggar, couchsurfing the web and scavenging for crumbs. It's a cliché but worth repeating: if you're not paying for it, you're aren't the customer, you're the product.
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  • Your individual account is probably worth very little to the service provider, so they'll have no qualms whatsoever with tinkering with the service or even making radical changes in their interests rather than yours. If you don't like it you're welcome to leave. You may well not be able to take your content and data with you, and even if you can, all your URLs will be broken.
  • if you really care about your site you need to run it on your own domain. You need to own your URLs. You'll have total control and no-one can take it away from you. You don't need anyone else. If you put the effort in up front it'll pay off in the long run.But it's no longer that simple.
  • Anyone who's ever run a website knows that building the site is one thing, but getting people to use it is quite another. The smaller your real-world presence the harder it is. If you're a national newspaper or a Hollywood star you probably won't have much trouble getting people to visit your website. If you're a self-employed plumber or an unknown blogger writing in your spare time, it's considerably harder.
  • Social networks have changed all that. Facebook and Twitter now wield enormous power over the web by giving their members ways to find and share information using tools that work in a social context.
  • Either way, your social network presence is more important than your own website.
  • But increasingly that freedom is just the freedom to be ignored, the freedom to starve.
  • es, that's nearly 34,000 new Facebook apps created in one day by customers of just one hosting company.
  • What Facebook is doing is very different. When it records our activity away from the Facebook site it's a third party to the deal. It doesn't need this data to run its own services.
  • orst o
  • all, the way Facebook collects and uses our data is both unpredictable and opaque. Its technology and policies move so quickly you'd need to be a technical and legal specialist and spend an inordinate amount of time researching Facebook's activities on an ongoing basis to have any hope of understanding what they're doing with your data.
Maj Krek

The Enduring Myth of the 'Free' Internet - Peter Osnos - The Atlantic - 3 views

www.theatlantic.com/...273515

internet myth free accessofinformation

shared by Maj Krek on 04 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • The Enduring Myth of the 'Free' Internet
  • The mantra of a "free" Internet has shaped the prevailing view of how we access information and entertainment in the digital age.
  • the role of the broadband Internet is reaching a stage where anything less than total availability at minimal prices is a matter that deserves far more attention than it is currently getting.
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  • But access to this "free" information on the Internet, as everyone acknowledges as soon as it is pointed out, is not gratis.
  • The leading beneficiaries of all these charges are the big multi-platform companies, the pipes for content and digital services
  • the devices that connect us to search engines, countless websites, social media, and e-mail bring us vast amounts of content for which we do not pay separately.
  • 100 million Americans do not have high speed Internet at home, largely because of high costs and the lack of available infrastructure.
  • the Internet is the key to economic growth in the 21st century
  • One promising initiative, at least as it applies to speed and access, comes from Google Fiber. This is a project the company is developing in Kansas City as a trial of what would be a far faster broadband network using fiber-optic communication.
  • No other company can match Google's projected speed, but the price it is planning to charge for that service so far is higher than slower providers
  • For all the progress in delivering information and entertainment in the Internet era, Americans deserve and should demand something closer to the ideal of what is possible with our technology.
Kaja Horvat

BBC News - Internet shopping: What makes the online consumer tick? - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...business-17619022

internet shopping consumer

shared by Kaja Horvat on 07 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Data can be used at every stage of a marketing campaign from planning how it will run, to effective implementation, to measuring how successful the campaign was
  • data also shows us what really influences people online.
  • What does this mean? It means that today's savvy shoppers are taking their time when it comes to making a purchasing decision - often checking out online forums, blogs and social networks such as Facebook before they invest.
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  • In March 2012, UK retail websites received an additional 8.5 million visits through social networks and forums compared to March 2011, representing a 2.3% increase year-on-year.
  • two in every five visits to online retailers now come from a search engine.
  • Recently, we conducted some anonymous research into the way that people engage with brands and social networks - specifically Facebook. We looked at the top 100 online retailers, and benchmarked that against the number of fans those retailers had on their Facebook page. The correlation showed that the more fans a retailer had on Facebook, the more visits the website received, to the extent that for every additional fan acquired a retailer could expect to see an additional 20 visits to their company website from Facebook over a 12-month period.
  • As Facebook has evolved, it has become more than a source of traffic for retail websites; in some cases it has also become the digital shop front.
  • 4% of the UK's Facebook population have purchased a product from a brand's Facebook page
  • social media in particular offers companies a huge opportunity to expand their brand equity and profile, engage with consumers and influence their customers.
  • A recent poll conducted by Experian showed that 5% of consumers have actively sought feedback on a purchase made in store on Facebook or Twitter, while 24% of people would be positively influenced to buy a product after seeing an advert on Facebook.
donnamariee

Internet Activism? Let's Look at the Specifics | Rebecca MacKinnon | Cato Unbound - 0 views

www.cato-unbound.org/...ism-lets-look-at-the-specifics

shared by donnamariee on 20 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Internet Activism? Let’s Look at the Specifics
  • Internet brings new dimensions and power to activism, we must not be naïve about the power of networked technologies. It is important to unpack the factors behind successful—and unsuccessful—online activism.
  • widespread social media adoption do not on their own guarantee activism’s success. The Internet is not some sort of automatic "freedom juice."
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  • Success or failure of digital activism in authoritarian states also depends on the regime’s technological capacity, skill, foresight, and planning
  • Internet itself—its technical architecture as well as the regulatory constraints shaping what people in different places can and cannot do with it—is a variable. We cannot treat the Internet as constant—either across geographical space or across time—in our calculations about the success of online activism.
  • often empowers activism, it is also used in many parts of the world as an insidious extension of state power—sometimes with the direct collaboration of companies seeking market access; sometimes much more indirectly due to the fact that Internet and mobile companies are conduits and repositories of vast amounts of citizens’ personal data, and also make commercial decisions that have a profound impact on people’s digital lives and identities
  • Whether the Internet remains conducive to political activism, or with liberal democracy for that matter, is by no means guaranteed. We face a virtuous or vicious cycle depending on whether you are an optimist or a pessimist: Activism is urgently required—nationally and globally—to ensure that the Internet remains compatible with activism.
  • donnamariee on 20 Mar 13
     
    "INTERNET ACTIVISM? LET'S LOOK AT THE SPECIFICS" - essay theme
Jernej Prodnik

The New Westphalian Web - By Katherine Maher | Foreign Policy - 0 views

www.foreignpolicy.com/...the_new_westphalian_web

web foreign policy internet peace of wetphalia westphalian web

shared by Jernej Prodnik on 25 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • The New Westphalian Web The future of the Internet may lie in the past. And that's not a good thing. BY KATHERINE MAHER | FEBRUARY 25, 2013
  • But 30 years ago, humanity gave birth to one of the most disruptive forces of our time. On Jan. 1, 1983, the implementation of TCP/IP -- a standard protocol to allow computers to exchange data over a network -- turned discrete clusters of research computers into a distributed global phenomenon. It was essentially the work of three men: two engineers to write the protocol, and one to carry out the plan. It was a birth so quiet no one even has a photo of the day; a recent post by one of TCP/IP's authors, Vint Cerf, was able to turn up only a commemorative pin.
    • Jernej Prodnik
      Jernej Prodnik on 25 Feb 13
       
      To je blizu tehnološkemu determinizmu, za razvoj interneta je šlo ogromno raziskovalnega denarja (iz in za "vojaško-industrijski kompleks").
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • This Internet was wild and wooly, unknown and unregulated
    • Jernej Prodnik
      Jernej Prodnik on 25 Feb 13
       
      Huh.
  • Like all new frontiers, cyberspace's early settlers declared themselves independent -- most famously in 1996, in cyberlibertarian John Perry Barlow's "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace." Barlow asserted a realm beyond borders or government, rejecting the systems we use to run the physical universe. "Governments of the Industrial World," he reproached, "You have no sovereignty where we gather.… Cyberspace does not lie within your borders."
  • With the flip of a switch, three engineers had undone the work of more than 100 princes and diplomats.
    • Jernej Prodnik
      Jernej Prodnik on 25 Feb 13
       
      !!!
Jernej Prodnik

Amazon unpacked - FT.com - 0 views

www.ft.com/...bd-11e2-85d0-00144feab49a.html

amazon political economy of the internet political economy of communication labour conditions

shared by Jernej Prodnik on 24 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • February 8, 2013 12:30 pm Amazon unpacked By Sarah O’Connor The online giant is creating thousands of UK jobs, so why are some employees less than happy?
  • Between a sooty power station and a brown canal on the edge of a small English town, there is a building that seems as if it should be somewhere else. An enormous long blue box, it looks like a smear of summer sky on the damp industrial landscape. Inside, hundreds of people in orange vests are pushing trolleys around a space the size of nine football pitches, glancing down at the screens of their handheld satnav computers for directions on where to walk next and what to pick up when they get there. They do not dawdle – the devices in their hands are also measuring their productivity in real time. They might each walk between seven and 15 miles today. It is almost Christmas and the people working in this building, together with those in seven others like it across the country, are dispatching a truck filled with parcels every three minutes or so. Before they can go home at the end of their eight-hour shift, or go to the canteen for their 30-minute break, they must walk through a set of airport-style security scanners to prove they are not stealing anything. They also walk past a life-sized cardboard image of a cheery blonde woman in an orange vest. “This is the best job I have ever had!” says a speech bubble near her head.
  • If you could slice the world in half right here, you could read the history of this town called Rugeley in the layers. Below the ground are the shafts and tunnels of the coal mine that fed the power station and was once the local economy’s beating heart. Above the ground are the trolleys and computers of Amazon, the global online retailer that has taken its place. As online shopping explodes in Britain, helping to push traditional retailers such as HMV out of business, more and more jobs are moving from high-street shops into warehouses like this one. Under pressure from politicians and the public over its tax arrangements, Amazon has tried to stress how many jobs it is creating across the country at a time of economic malaise. The undisputed behemoth of the online retail world has invested more than £1bn in its UK operations and announced last year that it would open another three warehouses over the next two years and create 2,000 more permanent jobs. Amazon even had a quote from David Cameron, the prime minister, in its September press release. “This is great news, not only for those individuals who will find work, but for the UK economy,” he said.
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  • Workers in Amazon’s warehouses – or “associates in Amazon’s fulfilment centres” as the company would put it – are divided into four main groups. There are the people on the “receive lines” and the “pack lines”: they either unpack, check and scan every product arriving from around the world, or they pack up customers’ orders at the other end of the process. Another group stows away suppliers’ products somewhere in the warehouse. They put things wherever there’s a free space – in Rugeley, there are inflatable palm trees next to milk frothers and protein powder next to kettles. Only Amazon’s vast computer brain knows where everything is, because the workers use their handheld computers to scan both the item they are stowing away and a barcode on the spot on the shelf where they put it. The last group, the “pickers”, push trolleys around and pick out customers’ orders from the aisles. Amazon’s software calculates the most efficient walking route to collect all the items to fill a trolley, and then simply directs the worker from one shelf space to the next via instructions on the screen of the handheld satnav device. Even with these efficient routes, there’s a lot of walking. One of the new Rugeley “pickers” lost almost half a stone in his first three shifts. “You’re sort of like a robot, but in human form,” said the Amazon manager. “It’s human automation, if you like.” Amazon recently bought a robot company, but says it still expects to keep plenty of humans around because they are so much better at coping with the vast array of differently shaped products the company sells.
  • The unassuming efficiency of these warehouses is what enables Amazon to put parcels on customers’ doorsteps so quickly, even when it is receiving 35 orders a second. Every warehouse has its own “continuous improvement manager” who uses “kaizen” techniques pioneered by Japanese car company Toyota to improve prod­uctivity. Marc Onetto, the senior vice-president of worldwide operations, told a business school class at the University of Virginia a few years ago: “We use a bunch of Japanese guys, they are not consultants, they are insultants, they are really not nice … They’re samurais, the real last samurais, the guys from the Toyota plants.” In Rugeley, the person with the kaizen job is a friendly, bald man called Matt Pedersen, who has a “black belt” in “Six Sigma”, the Motorola-developed method of operational improvement, most famously embraced by Jack Welch at General Electric. Every day, the managers in Rugeley take a “genba walk”, which roughly means “go to the place” in Japanese, Pedersen says as he accompanies the FT on a tour of the warehouse. “We go to the associates and find out what’s stopping them from performing today, how we can make their day better.” Some people also patrol the warehouse pushing tall little desks on wheels with laptops on them – they are “mobile problem solvers” looking for any hitches that could be slowing down the operation.
  • . . . What did the people of Rugeley make of all this? For many, it has been a culture shock. “The feedback we’re getting is it’s like being in a slave camp,” said Brian Garner, the dapper chairman of the Lea Hall Miners Welfare Centre and Social Club, still a popular drinking spot. One of the first complaints to spread through the town was that employees were getting blisters from the safety boots some were given to wear, which workers said were either too cheap or the wrong sizes. One former shop-floor manager, who did not want to be named, said he always told new workers to smear their bare feet with Vaseline. “Then put your socks on and your boots on, because I know for a fact these boots are going to rub and cause blisters and sores.” ©Ben RobertsAmazon workers in Rugeley process ordersOthers found the pressure intense. Several former workers said the handheld computers, which look like clunky scientific calculators with handles and big screens, gave them a real-time indication of whether they were running behind or ahead of their target and by how much. Managers could also send text messages to these devices to tell workers to speed up, they said. “People were constantly warned about talking to one another by the management, who were keen to eliminate any form of time-wasting,” one former worker added.
  • Watson said Amazon was supposed to send the council employment data every six months, but it had not done so. “We had no idea Amazon were going to be as indifferent to these issues as they have been, it’s come as a shock to us how intransigent they are,” he said. Inside the warehouse, Amazon employees wear blue badges and the workers supplied by the agencies wear green badges. In the most basic roles they perform the same tasks as each other for the same pay of £6.20 an hour or so (the minimum adult wage is £6.19), but the Amazon workers also receive a pension and shares. A former agency worker said the prospect of winning a blue badge, “like a carrot, was dangled constantly in front of us by management in return for meeting shift targets”. Amazon’s Darwinian culture comes from the top. Jeff Bezos, its chief executive, told Forbes magazine last year (when it named him “number one CEO in America”): “Our culture is friendly and intense, but if push comes to shove, we’ll settle for intense.”
  • Ransdtad said it supplied a number of clients with “onsite-flexible workforce solutions”. It added: “The number of workers required by these clients fluctuates in response to supply and demand. When demand for clients’ products or services is high (for example during the Christmas period) the Randstad partnership allows local people to benefit from short-term work on a temporary contract, to help supplement our clients’ permanent workforce and deliver against order requirements.” Certainly, not everyone in Rugeley is upset about Amazon. A group of workers having a pint on a picnic table outside The Colliers pub near the warehouse gates said they liked their jobs, albeit as their managers hovered nervously in the background. One young agency worker said he was earning about £220 a week, compared with the £54 he had been receiving in jobless benefits. He had bought a car and moved out of his mum’s house and into a rented flat with his girlfriend, who he had met at work. “I’m doing pretty well for myself,” he said with a shy grin. “There’s always opportunities to improve yourself there.” Across the table, an older man, wagging two fingers with a cigarette pinched between them, said slowly: “It gives you your pride back, that’s what it gives you. Your pride back.” Many in the town, however, have mixed feelings. They are grateful for the jobs Amazon has created but they are also sad and angry about the quality of them. Timothy Jones, a barrister and parish councillor, summed up the mood. “I very much want them to stay, but equally I would like some of the worst employment practices to end.”
  • For Watson, the big question is whether these new jobs can support sustainable economic growth. In Rugeley, it is hard not to look back to the coal mine for an example of how one big employer could transform a place. . . . The Lea Hall Colliery opened officially on a soggy Tuesday in July 1960. Miners and their families huddled under marquees to eat their packed lunches and when the first coal was wound to the surface, three bands played an overture specially written for the occasion. It was the first mine planned and sunk by the Coal Board, the body set up after the second world war to run Britain’s newly nationalised coal industry, and the Central Electricity Generating Board was building a coal-fired power station right next door. It was a defiant demonstration of confidence in coal at a time of increasing competition from oil. “King Coal is not yet dead, as many would have it, but is going to be with us for many years to come,” the regional secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers told the crowd.
  • Soon, miners from all over the country were swarming to the modern new mine. The Coal Board and the local council built housing estates and schools to cope with the exploding population. “Peartree estate was built for the Geordies, the Springfield estate was built for the Scots and the Welsh,” remembered Brian Garner, who helped to build the mine when he was 16. “It was unbelievable, it was buzzing in the town, there was that much money about then. I could leave my job at 10 o’clock in the morning and start at five past 10 on another.” On Friday and Saturday nights, the queue outside the Lea Hall Miners’ Welfare Centre and Social Club would wrap right around the building. Rugeley’s mine was soon the most productive in the country. It was a “young man’s pit” with all the latest machines and techniques, says Ken Edwards, who started there at 25 as an electrician. The work was still dirty and dangerous, though. In 1972, a local reporter took a tour. “All is silent except for the movement of conveyor belts which carry the coal and the murmur of the air pumps. The blackness is relieved only by narrow shafts of light coming from each person’s headlamp,” she wrote. It took her two days to remove the black dust from her nails, ears, nose and hair.
  • The good times didn’t last. By the time the pit closed, four days before Christmas in 1990, a spokesman for British Coal told Reuters it was losing £300,000 a week. More than 800 people lost jobs that paid the equivalent of between £380 and £900 a week in today’s money. The town council’s chairman tried desperately to say something reassuring. “It has come as such a shock,” he told the local paper. “[But] we have got to do what many have done and look for new areas, particularly information technology and high technology. We have a lot of expertise and a wonderful geographical spot. There’s no reason why it should be the end for Rugeley.” From behind her desk in Vision estate agents, all purple paint and fairy lights, Dawn Goodwin sucks the air in through her teeth at the mention of Amazon. “We all thought it was going to be the making of the town,” she says. She expected an influx of people, including well-to-do managers, looking to buy or rent houses. But she hasn’t had any extra business at all. People are cautious because they don’t know how long their agency jobs with Amazon will last, she says. One of her tenants, a single young woman, got a job there but lost it again after she became ill halfway through a shift. She struggled to pay her rent for three months while she waited for her jobseeker’s benefits to be reinstated. “It’s leaving a bad taste in everyone’s mouths,” Goodwin says with a frown. Even the little “Unit 9” café next to the Amazon warehouse hasn’t had a boost in trade. The women who run it reckon the employees don’t have enough time in their 30-minute break to get through security, come and eat something, and then go back in again.
  • In a cramped upstairs office at the Citizens Advice Bureau, Gillian Astbury and Angela Jones have turned to statistics to try to identify Amazon’s effect on the area. They haven’t had an increase in the number of people asking about employment problems or unfair dismissal, but nor has there been any improvement in the community’s problems with debt and homelessness. Their best guess is that people haven’t had enough sustained work to make much of a difference. Astbury says employment agencies are a “necessary evil”, but stresses it is hardly ideal for people to be bouncing in and out of temporary work, particularly when a job ends abruptly and they are left with no income at all until their benefits are reinstated. Workers leaving Amazon have had a particular problem with this, prompting the parish council to submit a Freedom of Information request to the Department for Work and Pensions to find out exactly how long local people are being made to wait for their social security payments to come through.
  • Far from the CAB’s little office in Rugeley, Britain’s economists are also puzzling over why the economy remains moribund even though more and more people are in work. There are still about half a million fewer people working as full-time employees than there were before the 2008 crash, but the number of people in some sort of employment has surpassed the previous peak. Economists think the rise in insecure temporary, self-employed and part-time work, while a testament to the British labour market’s flexibility, helps to explain why economic growth remains elusive. Angi Cooney, who runs C Residential, the biggest estate agent in Rugeley, thinks the nature of employment is changing permanently and people should stop pining for the past. It’s “bloody great” that a company like Amazon chose to come to “this little old place”, she says fiercely, looking as if she’d like to take the town by the shoulders and give it a shake. “People expect a job for life, but the world isn’t like that any more, is it?” Sarah O’Connor is the FT’s economics correspondent
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