Someone in the Czech Republic is evidently well aware of the success of the website entitled Kim Chong-il Looking at Things. So they created its Czech analogy which follows the public appearances of the Governor of the South Moravian Region, Michal Hasek. Pure immitation, if not plagiarism. There is a Czech saying “A repeated joke is not funny“, sorry, guys (I think I know at least one author of this website).
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Video chat: when Czech pornographers lie
Since the global crisis started, students have had big problems finding temporary after-school jobs because companies have been laying off people and if they really do need part-timers, they will offer these jobs either to former employees or to their children. Among the companies which are hiring students on a continuous basis are videochat/livechat studios. Their banners and advertising boards can even be seen at the biggest public transportation intersection in Brno – at the main train station. According to a companies directory at the Seznam.cz portal there are about ten of them in Brno, and slightly more in Prague.
There are two interesting things about this type of business.
One, the form of advertising. The banners feature a smiling 20-something girl and a slogan along the lines of “Do you want to make your dreams come true and be independent?” I really do not think that any Czech woman dreams about dirty webcam talk with complete strangers in a foreign country. Evidently the whole concept of independence is based on possible earnings. Some employers claim to offer as much as CZK 50,000 per month (EUR 2,000).
Two, the employers try to convince job applicants that the servers are not accessible from the Czech Republic (e.g.: http://www.r-models.cz/index.php?page=koho_hledame&language=en), which means no friends, family members or neighbors will accidentally meet them during a videochat session. Of course, this can be true. However, videochat girls have their own discussion forum where they voice their concern about privacy, or lack thereof. Some employers often join the discussion and say that working for an American website means that foreign IP addresses are blocked. This issue is particularly important in the case of nude chats.
What the pornographers (not all of them are, let’s say many of them) do not say (and there have been several scandals in the Czech Republic when a certain starlet’s past got revealed this way) is that any session can be recorded and uploaded onto just any server where it can be found by a Czech porn lover. Just like when Czech porn stars work for a foreign producer who claims that the videos are only sold in the United States and not Europe. Of course, American customers like to grab videos from DVD’s or paysites and share them on the Internet with the rest of the world. Several Czech men who are somewhat famous (e.g. a BigBrother contestant or a son of the Mayor of a certain Czech town) found out the hard way because they had worked for a U.S. company and the videos eventually surfaced in the Czech Republic.
The Czech government has recently started amending Czech tax laws in an attempt to improve the state budget income from taxes and the legalization of prostitution was among the issues discussed. Some MP’s of the governing Civic Democrats support it, some don’t. They would like the taxes, but they do not want the state to be the pimp.
Insurance company: the late president was our client
Some people in charge of marketing and PR at Vojenska zdravotni pojistovna (V0ZP), one of health insurance companies in the Czech Republic, are idiots. An advertisement in a black frame was posted on the company’s website today included Vaclav Havel’s photo and the words “client of VoZP”, the iHNed.cz news server wrote and TV Nova reported today.
Low-cost airline has a tabloid-like website
Ryanair has recently innovated the homepage of its website. Most airlines’ websites look “serious”, because the industry as such must send certain signals to customers. The new website of Ryanair looks like a homepage of an amusement park. On the other hand, most people choose Ryanair because of its low fares: one-way ticket from Brno to London-Stansted is cheaper than a bus ticket.
[update]: Wikileaks.cz acquired by a private individual
Wikileaks (www.wikileaks.org) is probably the most discussed website (Internet address) of this year. It has been attacked, hacked, disconnected, re-connected… you name it. The authors know why they have several mirror sites and national versions. The Czech website, however, is a little odd… Just a few days ago, its “hello message” changed. And it seems like it will have nothing to do with the original…
If you typed www.wikileaks.cz on the day this post was first published, the following page appeared:
It means “Prepared for a customer of the Trustica company”. Trustica is an Internet security company that has had major business contacts with the Czech government, for example the Ministry of Industry and Trade or the Ministry of the Interior. The company has tested the ministry’s measures in place to prevent unauthorised access to the IT system.
Until last week, it was blocked by domain administrator Active24.cz for a private owner. DNSStuff.com had this to say:
domain: wikileaks.cz registrant: GIGASERVER-1272477422 admin-c: GIGASERVER-1272477422 nsset: NSS:GLOBE-SGLO000001:1 keyset: A24-KEYSET registrar: REG-ACTIVE24 status: paid and in zone registered: 09.12.2009 00:14:01 changed: 06.12.2010 21:34:42 expire: 09.12.2010 contact: GIGASERVER-1272477422 name: Luděk Kvapil address: Smetanova 1280 address: Lomnice nad Popelkou address: 51251 address: CZ e-mail: ***********@gmail.com registrar: REG-SEONET created: 28.04.2010 19:59:23 changed: 29.09.2010 10:37:52 nsset: NSS:GLOBE-SGLO000001:1 nserver: alfa.ns.active24.cz (81.95.96.2) nserver: beta.ns.active24.cz (81.0.238.27) tech-c: ACTIVE24 registrar: REG-ACTIVE24 created: 01.10.2007 02:00:00 changed: 05.10.2009 14:06:12 contact: ACTIVE24 org: ACTIVE 24, s.r.o. name: ACTIVE 24, s.r.o. address: Sokolovská 394/17 address: Praha 8 address: 186 00 address: CZ phone: +420.234262000 fax-no: +420.234262009 registrar: REG-ACTIVE24 created: 29.04.2008 12:35:02 changed: 15.01.2009 12:07:49UPDATE: Mr. Kvapil wrote recently and explained that it will be a website of an NGO and that it is his personal project. In other words, the content will not be operated by the aforementioned company.
It would be naive to assume that an IT security company that has had business contacts with the government and that includes government server security testing among its achievements would want to be associated with the genuine website with its contents that mostly come from unauthorised and leaked sources. [UPDATE: well, what do you know, it might not be the case here]
UPDATE: As at December 17, 2010 the homepage included the introduction that says that the purpose of the website is to introduce materials that have been published on the main WikiLeaks server and are in some way related to, or associated with, the Czech Republic.
Racism on Czech Facebook: do not support black Haitians, they are over-populated and the Earth is not inflatable
Over 100,000 Czech Facebook users were tricked into joining a "let's help Haiti" group...
Originally, it was a For every member who joins, CZK 10 will go to a Haiti relief fund group…
Over 140,000 Czechs joined (by January 18, 4:20 CET). Some of them maybe didn’t even believe that the mysterious user named “Adela Sobotkova” would actually donate the money.
But shortly afterwards, the main description of the group changed, from a charitable appeal to a racist statement. And since Facebook is a U.S. server, it is most definitely subject to the First Amendment (although I might be wrong here…).
Here is what is says now: There is no reason to support them, the Earth is not inflatable. This will result in them having more and more children, or at least to extend their hands and wait for self-destructive white people to give them something…
The authors claim it was a sociological experiment!! Yeah, right…
They continue: Instead of supporting complete strangers, help your loved ones. Visit your grandparents, buy a present for your partner or go on a trip with your kids. Do not live virtual reality with blacks from Haiti.
This is racism. This is not an experiment the purpose of which would be to prove that “Facebook users join stupid groups without thinking”. It is true that the relationship between an actual donation and a number of people in a Facebook group makes no real sense. If you have money, donate them… But the users who were tricked into joining maybe did both: they joined AND sent a special-rate SMS…
And fellow Facebook users stood up… Right now there are ten groups warning about the racist group or supporting its shutdown.
Personal request: Farmville neighbors wanted…
Dear frequent readers, if you are Facebook’s Farmville farmers 🙂 I’d be happy for some 6-10 new neighbors, so look me up and add me (I’ll do the same). 🙂
Back to regular posting…
Google Street Car spotted in Brno. Had the mess been cleaned beforehand?
(c) iDNES.cz
The Google Street Car that is known for taking detailed pictures of the streets of world metropolises for the Street View application has recently been spotted in downtown Brno, the iDNES.cz news server wrote. Once completed, the authors will have to work with the material, which includes blurring the faces of pedestrians.
I don’t get it.
Any TV news crew can get a footage of “people in the streets” and broadcast it numerous times as “file footage for illustrative purposes”. And it may catch a cheating young man walking hand in hand down the street with his “safety-net girlfriend”. TV news reports do not have these images blurred, so why should Google specialists do the same with still images?
I honestly hope that Google warned the municipality authorities beforehand. The main pedestrian zone and the main square where iDNES.cz reporters met the vehicle are known for overflowing garbage cans and piles of garbage around them. So I want to believe that it had been cleaned before the Google Street Car passed by with its numerous rooftop cameras.
Foreign spammers flood Czech matchmaking servers
I thought spammers had ideas and were always one step ahead…
Having said that, I really don’t understand what the idea is behind the efforts of some third-world spammers who send crappy replies to Czech matchmaking servers, like Seznamka.cz… This is what a friend of mine received as a reply to a boy-seeks-girl ad:
how are you! hope you are fine and in perfect condition of health.i went through your profile and i read it and took intersest in it,please if you don t mind i will like you to write me on this id(hellen4xx2@yahoo.co.in ) hope to hear you soon,and i will be waiting for your mail because i have something very important to tell you. lots of love hellen4xx2/@/ya/hoo./co./in
No doubt there is a human being behind this idea, I don’t think there is a computer or a robot named Helen who wants to meed a Czech 17 year-old student. And this shit-for-brain person really thinks that anyone will fall for this?
UPDATE: Hmm, this person has obviously been trying it all over Europe…
When a naked Trojan horse eats your notebook…
No more Internet porn. A typical resolution for a man whose firewall and anti-virus programs are beaten and eaten by a Trojan horse dressed as an EXE file with no clothes on and doing things we all do…
Yes, my systems crashed yesterday and the computer started to do strange things, like rebooting when I clicked on an innocent Mozilla icon.
And it wasn’t because I like to watch videos of landing aircraft on YouTube. A technician who cleaned the hard drive had a lot of work and he said there had been multiple Trojan horses, some of them from hacked e-shops that their owners fixed only after I had downloaded the bug…
Czechs are generally very open-minded when it comes to pornography, as long as it is legal. A while ago we (we = when I was the senior editor at the Brnensky denik daily – not a tabloid!) did a story on the Mayor’s adult son who turned out to be a gay porn star. Most people I talked to reacted by “so what” and “it does not mean that the Mayor is a bad Mayor”.
I did see a sample clip of the Mayor’s son because we had his ordinary-life photo and we had to be absolutely sure before calling him and asking for a statement, so more people’s “it-IS-him” opinion was necessary.
And I hope it was not the Mayor’s son’s clip that ruined my notebook hard drive. That would, well, suck…
The Czech Daily Word 