England’s smoking ban on July 1st has caused a sea change in British social interaction, but not in an obvious way. A percentage of the ten-plus million smokers in Britain [statistic from Action on Smoking], have been using their outside smoking time to catch up on their correspondence. According to Orange UK [via T3] people were multitasking by sending text messages while smoking. Naturally, sending messages to bitch about how they were cast from of their now smoke free hangouts to commune with the elements and other frustrated smokers.

Without divulging the actual percentage, the network saw a 7.5 million increase in texts within the two weeks of the ban. Given, this is the summer time, I wonder if this will make the cost of messages to go up or down, or if this will just be a seasonal phenomenon. Perhaps Orange, O2, 3, and T-Mobile will be smart and make TXTs cheaper in the winter months. Regardless of what happens, my hopes lay in the notion that England will start up the use of the cigarette holder to make smexting easier.

Video of the undercover reporter being escorted from DEF CON was posted and it revealed a couple of things.

1) associate producer doing the walk of shame
2) nerds aren’t above a bit of schadenfreude
3) nerd’s can take the high road, they’ll turn into huge dorks and heckle like common paparazzi

I have respect for the guy just taking photos, he was capturing the moment. Unfortunately, the other nerds just made her feel bad by calling her names. Sure some person shouted out “This is for all those helpless predators” but that didn’t help summarize why whole venture was unjust.

Michelle Madigan wisely kept quiet and let the dorks shout rhetoric. Had they asked serious questions about her intentions and those of NBC, her silence would have rang as an admission of guilt. Instead, the hoard shouted quips making for a better YouTube clip but clearly showed that they were more interested in revenge rather than justice.

The undercover associate producer Michelle Madigan was outed at this year’s DEF CON. Sent by Dateline NBC, she was to uncover the supposedly seedy underworld of the hacker community. Clearly violating the gestalt of the convention and turning down a proper press credential, her intent was to tattle on hackers by acting like one of them. Do the masses think that identity theft, viruses, and unsolicited email swirl stem from the congregation of these hackers? If NBC did indeed catch someone admitting to a hacker crime, is there evidence to back up the claim?

In my mind, if NBC had their way the piece would start off with a sepia toned shot of a kid in a t-shirt and denim (maybe shorts, it is Las Vegas in the Summer). A slow pan starting at the casual shoes up to his face which has a familiar black bar over his eyes, while a voice-over perhaps Michelle Madigan herself, asking if you knew where your personal information is going as it travels over the Internet. What would come next is a distorted voice, owning up to a breach in security, then a freeze frame. A serious voice would tease the story by giving out statistics of identity theft or PC infections, and this would carry the telecast into 22 minutes of hysteria.

Had this story been aired, what would the public have done with this information? Would the people of Kansas (Michelle’s touchstone to middle America) come down to Las Vegas to protest the convention? Personally, I think people would just throw up their hands and say, “I don’t know anything about computers” and move on. As for the kid that was filmed for the piece, he would be ridiculed to no end. Probably shunned, hacked, and farked into Internet super-humiliation.

Jump to ZDNet article

Undercover NBC Dateline reporter bolts from DEFCON 2007 by ZDNet‘s George Ou — Undercover reporter Michelle Madigan (Associate Producer of NBC Dateline) got a little more than she bargained for when she tried to sneak in to DEFCON 2007 with hidden cameras to get someone to confess to a felony. When DEFCON staff announced the “spot the undercover reporter” game and told the audience that an undercover reporter […]