The resulting show, “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs”, deals with his Apple fandom (well, no-one’s perfect…) and its wider world implications. I’ve not seen the show sadly (he doesn’t appear this side of the pond too often), but I’ve been fascinated to listen to half of it, via a recent episode of the US radio show This American Life.

It’s well worth checking out, as Daisey is always a compelling presenter, and host Ira Glass mixes up bits of his monologue with interview snippets with Mike and others, including SACOM’s Debby Chan Sze Wan, to investigate Mike’s claims more fully.

This is a really personally brave venture from Daisey, and he tells a really compelling story. I met him briefly around the TUC event, and was struck by his openness and honesty in pretty much everything, and that’s a trait that comes through here in how he reacts to what Chinese electronics workers and trades unionists tell him on his trip, and how he reconciles this with his own technology(/Apple) obsession. Here’s hoping he brings it on tour to the UK, so we can catch the rest of it (I’m guessing most of the show’s laughs probably come in the part not included here!).

And in other news (from Good Electronics), there’s a glimmer of light that Mike’s work and the tireless activism of SACOM and many others could be starting to pay off. Apple have announced they’ve joined the Fair Labor Association (something sort of akin to a US ‘lite’ version of our own Ethical Trading Initiative),the first electronics firm to do so.

This could be fantastic news as it’s a concrete first step, enrolling Apple in a monitoring and certification programme that ties them to achieving standards in inspections within two years. However, campaigners will need to keep up the pressure for a second step, as there’s a perception that unless it’s done with real commitment, the FLA can often be used by bad firms as something of a shield against calls for real reform.

The scheme doesn’t engage meaningfully with independent trade unions for a more sustainable way of getting issues addressed in a work place. Unless this happens, as Mike Daisey found out in Shenzhen, it’s none too hard for companies with prior warning to pass a one-off inspection every few years and yet still have massive rights infringements despite any number of shiny awards.

If Apple are only after a badge that they can wave around noisily, to hope all those nasty campaigners, unions and investigative journalists go away and let business go on 95% as usual, then this is how they’d do it.

Of course if they’re after addressing the issues in a genuine way, and taking a leading role in the electronics industry (as I reckon would make real sense for them, given that they need to spend the inflated price premium that they use to keep up their brand image on something, and it would be a key selling point for them as a brand based as much around aspiration as around the tech itself), this would also be the first step in how they’d do it.

The jury’s out so far, but I’m excited to see at least a move has been made. D’oh! I’d hate to have to eat my iHat and stop hating on Apple, but this is probably the most interesting step made so far in the smartphone sector.

After doing a bunch of reading up on HTC, Samsung and Apple smartphones, and some of the dodgy suppliers who make their phone components for them, I settled on upgrading my mobile to a Samsung Galaxy Note. I’ve had it a week now and really love it. It’s an amazing device, able to do most of what I’d ever want from a phone and a laptop all in one tool, which (just about) fits into my jeans pocket.

My choice had come down to the Galaxy Note or the almost as mammoth-sized HTC Sensation XL. In the end, I’d plumped for Samsung mainly as I’d not found any evidence that HTC had done anything to improve the situation with sweatshop touchscreen supplier YFO, whereas Samsung customer services had responded that they’d brought screen manufacture in house (not actually responding to ethical concerns of course, but side-stepping the problem could debatably be seen as slightly better than just doing nothing).

However, today Hazards Editor Rory O’Neill has helpfully pointed me towards reports that despite the improvements, Samsung might still not be doing enough over their bad record on exposing workers to hazardous chemicals, and that they’ve also got a draconian no union policy that has seen attempts to start up real independent unions bullied into failure.

As this article from July (that I somehow managed to completely miss!) shows, a new Korean law permits multiple union recognitions in a workplace. Up until now, the company has been able to point to deals with bogus management-controlled unions as evidence to show they didn’t need another one, but now an independant union has a real chance – if you can call standing up to a company that’s been far from afraid to bully out activists in the past a real chance that is…

So having bought a phone that’s now taken a rather severe ethical tumble, the challenge is on for me to find a way to use my swanky new Note to help push Samsung into doing better by the latest attempt at an independent union amongst employees at Samsung Everland.

Any suggestions short of tieing a note to it and lobbing its brick-sized form through Samsung HQ’s window (I do still love it…) would be gratefully received! At least it’s proving useful in finding more out – Today I’ve used it to sign this petition to Samsung, voted Samsung in this corporate misbehaviour award, and stuck some of Rory’s linked articles into Evernote, to read on its lovely 5.3″ Super AMOLED on my commute home.

And if you’re looking for a monstrous large Android smartphone from a slightly less unethical manufacturer, I guess (sigh…) the HTC Sensation XL vs Samsung Galaxy Note battle is back on – with the Taiwanese white monolith now looking much more the favourite – D’oh!

The Lumia 800 in particular looks like a pretty neato handset. So as I’m in the market for an upgrade at the moment, I thought I’d check it out a bit more. My upgrade choices (Samsung’s Google Nexus Prime, HTC’s Sensation XL and Apple’s iPhone 4s) all have some degree of question mark over their corporate ethics, so could do with some competition if I’m looking for a less unethical mobile (I realise I’ve no chance of an actively ethical one!).

What interested me was Nokia’s positive environmental record for handsets – coming out very high in a Greenpeace table some years back that Apple brought up the rear for. Unfortunately that may be where the ethical positives end.

It seems that the two new handsets have been allocated to two outsourced manufacturers, so Nokia’s pretty good labour standards policies don’t actually apply to the workers producing them, as they would in one of Nokia’s 9 directly owned factories. This is unsurprising really, as despite their in-house capacities, Nokia have been a big customer of evil outsourcing legends Foxconn for some time.

One report I’ve seen suggests the 710 and 800 have been allocated to Compal and Foxconn to produce, but it’s not entirely clear which manufacturer has which phone, with some sources listing Compal as having the 800 (codename Searay), but others suggesting mixed manufacture.

To be honest, I’ve also other concerns too away from the ethical. My current phone is Windows Mobile 6.1, and the upgrade path has been non-existant, as Microsoft moved within months onto 6.5 (not even a full version up) and dropped back compatibility, meaning no new apps or even a working app store for half their userbase. WinMo 7 looks nice, but with 8 on the horizon, I’d be extremely reluctant to trust a Windows Mobile phone again. At least with Android, you can risk flashing a phone to keep it a bit more current.

But my main concern is Foxconn. In other Foxconn news this week, Prince of darkness Terry Gou announced he’d be increasing Foxconn’s use of worker replacement robots from 10,000 units to a million over the next few years. The interweb has suggested cynically in many places this might be because the third law of robotics prevents them comitting suicide like Foxconn’s regular workers. Cynicism or no though, would you think the best place to make this announcement would be the annual workers’ dance party? It seems Terry “Mr Burns” Gou would.

Cue an email off to Nokia to see if they’ll say what Foxconn’s involvement with the 800 and 710 might be. Compal of course are not likely to appear on the Sunday Times great places to work list any time soon, but at least they’re not Foxconn. Otherwise the Nokia Lumia 800 is sadly most likely off my list as quickly as it came on.

I did inadvertently manage to get one useful bit of information out of them though. Samsung have for a long while been customers of sweatshop touchscreen outsourcer, Young Fast Optoelectronics (YFO), who provide them with LCD touchscreens. However, as I was asking specifically about the Galaxy S2 model, I found out that as Samsung have been the pioneers in AMOLED screen technology, they built the capacity to make the new type of screens in house, rather than use screen suppliers.

So this means if you’re looking at an AMOLED model (such as the current flagship Galaxy S2 or the forthcoming, and very tasty looking, Google Nexus Prime), the screen is a Samsung product. For their cheaper phones with LCD screens, I guess the screens are still coming from the unionbusting YFO.

Of course, I’m guessing the switch had more to do with making the most of Samsung’s own screen technologies, rather than any kind of reaction to their business ethics, so this is hardly a ringing endorsement, given that reading between the lines, they still use YFO for other models, and haven’t made any public comment I can find.

Second black mark against Samsung in recent times has been their lack of concern for the safety of their own workforce and the environment in parts of screen manufacture. Greenpeace have been on their case for some time, since most other electronics manufacturers started ditching the chemicals Brominated Flame Retardant (BFR) and Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC).

I asked Samsung specifically about this, but again no answer. However I recently stumbled on a new policy page on their site, which claims that they’re now BFR and PVC clear on all new model mobile phones since April 2010. So if your phone was launched after that date, it should hopefully be in the clear, meaning again that the Galaxy S2 and Nexus Prime are BFR and PVC free.

Presumably they didn’t want to crow about this though given their extreme tardiness in following the rest of the industry, and the between-the-lines admission that they may still be using the chemicals in 18 month old models that are still being manufactured (the original Galaxy S is still on sale – not sure if it qualifies).

So at the moment, Samsung seems to be sitting top of my ethical smartphone pile, ahead of heavy YFO customer HTC and Foxconn’s favourites Apple, but it’s a hollow recommendation, not really through any kind of positive action, and only true for the phones I’ve been looking at (Galaxy SII and Nexus Prime) rather than the manufacturer more widely.

Tim Cook’s biggest problem now is what to do with an $81bn and growing surplus that Apple are just sitting on. Frankly, they’re raking it in far faster than they can do anything with it. They were never big on dividends to shareholders, and even their much vaunted R&D operation is only $450m a year – hardly a pinprick on their cash mountain. And the problem shows no sign of going away – as they charge into the Chinese gadget market, they’re predicting a bailout-tastic £37bn for the next quarter.

So given they have more money than they know what to do with, why are they still so keen on screwing every penny out of their suppliers, and by extension their outsourced workforce? Looking at the iPhone, Apple have by far the largest margin on their handsets in the industry – up to 65%. And earlier this year, they started to demand their many downstream suppliers shave a further 10% off their costs, to compensate for the huge increases in iPad business Apple were putting their way.

Prominent amongst these suppliers is Foxconn, the Chinese electronics behemoth that assembles the iPhones and iPads from parts provided by dozens of separate suppliers. They do this sort of work for many companies, including Nokia. They do it cheap, and they do it on a huge scale.

Chances are though that if you’ve heard of them, it’s because of the shocking allegations flying around about their abuses of the hundreds of thousands of people working for them. Last year, after a string of worker suicides in their gigantic factory dormitories, Apple were shamed into acting, and Foxconn promised increased wages to compensate (which of course strangely seemed not to actually appear as promised, and where they did were accompanied by greater performance stress).

A very hefty chunk of Apple’s spare $81billion has been extracted from the sweat of Foxconn workers (and that’s just taking the first – if most infamous – name of their many suppliers).

Is it too much to ask for Tim Cook and Apple to ease up on the cash grab from now on? Use the strong-armed 10% savings, and more besides to make real change ongoing for the people without whom, Apple products couldn’t exist in such abundance.

It’s not just pay. Get Foxconn and others to reduce the punishing workloads, high stress levels and even workplace violence, to allow people some respite and dignity away from the company, and to improve basic safety provisions, so that workers don’t need to grind iPad cases without protective equipment against breathing in aluminium dust, or clean iPhone screens with dangerous solvents because non-toxic ones cost a fraction more.

Even a tiny fraction of $81bn would go an awful long way to repairing some of the damage Apple are doing to the workers it likes to pretend it doesn’t have.

HTC have come the closest in terms of answering my questions so far though, and were good enough to give me the requested copy of their Code of Ethics for suppliers (PDF). It’s not a bad policy *, mentioning the right to union membership, and many of the key terms you’d expect.

After a stunt last year by workers who make HTC phone touchscreens, HTC Chairperson Cher Wang engaged sympathetically but told her disrupted press conference that the issue wasn’t one she knew about, other than that it related not to HTC staff, but to a supplier (Young Fast Optoelectronics), and that therefore HTC unfortunately couldn’t do anything about it.

However, a lot of the issues in the HTC supplier code neatly map against a Taiwanese government inspector’s report from 2010. Chairperson Wang is a busy woman, so I’ve made her a handy cut out and keep guide:

* Unfortunately the HTC Code is rather let down by the fact it would seem to have no teeth whatsoever to ensure it’s effectiveness. Or rather, it has one little, and rather wobbly tooth:

(F) Upon HTC’s request, Suppliers agree to provide HTC with documents or proof with respect to Supplier’s implementation and compliance with this ethics code.

So if there are serious doubts as to YFO’s compliance with HTC’s supplier code (and I’d view a government report citing infractions of 5 of the code’s 8 sections to count as a serious doubt), are HTC able to show us a copy of the documents YFO provided on implementation and compliance?

I feel another email to customer services coming on…

"The Physical Impossibility Of v3.2 In The Mind Of Someone Running v2.8"

WordPress is as any fule kno, about three or four of the seven wonders of the Internet. It’s a remarkably elegant and flexible website platform that puts enormous publishing power into the hands of people without any particular coding skills to speak of. As a definite member of this low-talent group, I find it hard to speak too highly of it.

However, like all good things, it’s very easy to binge on it and regret it later. You can throw up impressive, interactive blogs and sites for anything, extremely quickly – any short term project, event or campaign – and soon find you’ve got a dozen defunct CMS-driven websites on your hands.

Often you want to keep the content of these sites, as it’s useful to have as an archive, you’ve got a sentimental attachment to them, or at least they’re not harmful and give a bunch of people a teaspoon of Googlejuice. The problem is that CMSs move on all the time. WordPress drops another incremental version every now and then, adding lovely new features and fixing bugs, but also addressing security vulnerabilities.

Get too far behind, and you may find yourself with a site that’s swiss cheese for hackers, using your hard written content to push Viagra or phish for others’ personal data. You web host is unlikely to take kindly to this abuse of their servers too, and it’s an all round hassle you’d be far better off without.

The problem is that keeping  your dozen defunct sites up to date in perpetuity, when you’ve no longer any intention of updating the content ever again, is also a hassle you could do without.

I’ve had this problem recently, and have set out on a program of killing off a number of old blogs or sites for defunct but still interesting projects. I basically wanted a way to render a site unhackable, which would mean deactivating the site admin tools and database, and converting the whole thing into hard-to-mess-with flat file HTML.

I’d hoped there might be a plugin for this (there’s one for pretty much everything else), but didn’t manage to find it, so with a colleague, we came up with our own 7 step plan. I admit this is of pretty specialist interest, but I guess if you’ve read this far, you’ve probably got the same problem, and may find this useful too:

1. Get hold of an offline browser program. I like Maximumsoft WebCopier. This can be set to crawl a whole website, saving a local copy of each page with the same relative file structure as the site, and copies of all static resources such as images or stylesheets.
2. Tweak your WordPress theme’s header.php, so you can add a banner at the top of every page, explaining the site is no longer actively maintained, and is being kept as an archive, so you shouldn’t be surprised if content’s out of date, or links no longer work. If you want to be very clever, you could even do this via an iframe, so editing it in one place in future will change the banner on all pages.
3. Take out locally hosted search functions, or other pieces of interactivity that wouldn’t work if saved as static files. Remove contact forms and switch off new comment permissions across the site, so you don’t disappoint people who wanted to respond but now can’t.
4. Run WebCopier on the site, saving every page the spider can find onto your hard drive.
5. Make a subdomain or subfolder for your site, and upload the offline site copy there. Have a quick poke around to check it’s all still linked okay.
6. When it’s okay, switch the main domain to point at the subdomain folder or the subfolder holding the static site.
7. Delete the WordPress files and remove the MySQL database.

And presto, you have one mothballed website, still all there, still with incoming links intact, but now proof against hacking or other unpleasantries.

A rather drastic solution sure (you can obviously not go back to running it by CMS again), but one that might save you a lot of grief repairing hacker damage on an old site you didn’t plan to do much with anyway.

(Of course, for completeness sake, there’s a less drastic alternative you could be factoring in from the start, by using the MultiUser functionality of WordPress to run loads of sites off one installation, meaning you need only ever keep the one central system updated. It’s not always an option though, as it restricts your freedoms around user accounts and plugins used on different sites. Plus it requires a degree of planning, which is not always my strong suit.)

The case hinges on comments he made on behalf of a group of Burmese migrant workers in the country, who alleged they had been promised much better pay and conditions by the company than they eventually received. When they complained, they were threatened with termination and deportation.

Worryingly, the trial looks to be stacked against Hector, with the court issuing a statement in advance that the blog posting under discussion was factually incorrect, and refusing to allow the migrant workers affected to join the suit.

Hector is being threatened in what seems to be an attempt to chill discussion of Asahi Kosei’s business and human rights issues in Malaysia. The company works as an outsourced supplier of many major electronics and motor brands, such as Hitachi, Sony, Seagate, Toshiba and JVC – none of whom would be too happy to be dragged into an Apple/Foxconn style labour abuses story.

Calling for such punitive damages is a clear deterrant to other human rights group and individuals from investigating how the company treat their migrant workforce, or representing people in cases where they’ve been abused by employers.

The many migrant workers in Malaysia are in a precarious position, facing deportation and whipping if they lose their jobs, so it takes a lot of courage to become a whistleblower as this group have done. Lets’ hope the court case gets thrown out, so in future it won’t require just as much courage for others to show solidarity with them.

There are a number of things you can do right now:

• Sign Good Electronics’ campaign action to Asahi Kosei’s key customers Hitachi.
• Sign Change.org’s petition on Asahi Kosei’s customers.
• Take Frontline’s online action calling for a fair trial.
• Sign the Asian Human Rights Commission’s petition for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of the action.

When they tried to post the link (and later also short link site redirects to the site, and even posts discussing the site), they got a popup message saying the site had been reported and they weren’t able to share it. This persisted for some time before Facebook relented and let the site be shared by users.

This isn’t a new development – vexatious complaints to Facebook (or indeed pretty much any other commercial social network) can be ludicrously powerful. Facebook’s revenue per user is pretty minuscule, so their legions of users can only be serviced on the cheap. A few years back they only had around 100 customer service operatives to moderate tens of millions of active users’ content, and I imagine if the situation’s changed, it’s for the worse.

These beleaguered souls are kept busy removing the alleged paedophiles and terrorists that could seriously cause problems for the company, and so decisions over the rest of us are taken in the first instance by machines. This is how a machine mistook Derek for a spammer, and vexatious reports got Ms Wagstaff evicted over her ID. A few trolls or political opponents decide to badmouth a piece of content they don’t like, and it’s gone, regardless of how many good users it pisses off, as quite frankly it’s cheaper to lose a hundred users than spend 15 minutes on having a human resolve a dispute.

MIT’s Chris Peterson has a very interesting post on what he thinks are the mechanics behind this one, and it seems very plausible indeed. It looks like the Facebook auto-banning process has become a lot more efficient – Once it’s made a decision (right or wrong), it now works to tie off the possibility of that problem arising again. It makes sense – if something genuinely offended people, it’ll likely offend some other people the next time it gets posted. They might as well save their users the upset by pre-banning the content for subsequent shares.

I recently (rather slackly) moderated a large union event community on Facebook, and it’s the first time I’ve really had to deal with a severe case of troll-rot. People who seemingly have nothing to do all day but revisit a page to give the same right wing perspective on it over and over, even going to the huge effort of creating new identically presented accounts nearly as fast as you ban them. Clicking ‘report’ for the sake of it isn’t exactly hard to do, so once you add to this gibbering mass, the unscrupulous political (or employer) opponents of your campaign, activist content on Facebook is in a very vulnerable place.

I can’t really see a practical way out of this in the commerical framework. A community run network like Wikipedia can rely on a kind of user court to help weed out the vexatious complaints, but I doubt a commercial network like Facebook could get the goodwill from power users (though they did manage to get their translations done for them, so I concede I might be very wrong!) to undertake this kind of work unpaid. But the commercial relationship you enter into with Facebook is getting clearer and clearer all the time, as they strip out user-generated apps in favour of more passive, predictable and easily monetised content, and as their efforts to monetise your data by (generally rather clumsy) stealth never cease to surprise.

We pay Facebook by commoditising our identities and relationships for them. We can’t really complain (even if I’m in the first rank doing so…) when we come up against economic realities of their service – Their need to turn a profit and buy larger yachts simply trumps concerns about free speech for the millions who’ve over-invested their communications in the network.

So I can’t really see a way out of this (short of getting our own First Amendment this side of the pond). Facebook is shaky turf for activists, and getting shakier – as a mixture of the vulnerabilities of algorithms and the profit drive push us towards consuming cat photos and fan pages, and away from hard news and activism. It’s one more worrying facet of the Filter Bubble argument (I’m still shuddering from Eli Pariser’s compelling London lecture on his scary new book earlier this week). As Peterson puts it: “Think about the incredible, suffocating centralized power the Facebook filter represents to controversial opinions“.

And I guess in any case, the Wikipedia model works as the number of updates (and hence complaints) is much much smaller (still obviously colossal, but not on Facebook’s almost unimaginable scales). Will a Diaspora node manager (or UnionBook‘s dedicated volunteer crew) ultimately fare that much better on their smaller turf (and smaller resources) than Facebook’s thin blue line of customer service moderators?