However, it annoyed me a bit that it was so disposable – it goes out on Twitter and Facebook and that’s pretty much it. Hopefully the web services for Vine will come onstream at some point (and the Android app for the rest of us…), but in the meantime, here’s a slightly roundabout way to embed your Vine on your WordPress.org blog.

First off, you need to make sure you add it to Twitter. This is the last option Vine gives you when creating it, and if you skip it, you won’t get seen. The Vine itself isn’t actually shown in the timeline unless you click the “view media” link to expand it, but then you get to see it in all its 6 second glory.

Now, Twitter last year introduced the option to embed tweets into a web page. You’ll find it under the “more” link, bottom right of each tweet in the timeline. And this is how you’ll get to embed the Vine elsewhere on the web. Click it, and then “embed tweet” and you’ll get a snippet of code to copy. Make sure you check the “include media” box before copying.

Then off to WordPress, where you switch to Text view in a post, click “code”, paste the snippet and click “code” again to close it. Don’t switch back to Visual editing view (it might be a good idea to write the rest of the post before you do this), or it could screw up the code.

And here’s the result:

5 work rights you might well miss if David Cameron revokes the EU Working Time Directive http://www.stopemp... vine.co/v/bJjLPgUlv1d

— Stronger Unions (@strongerunions) January 29, 2013

True, you’re not directly embedding the Vine, and it’s including all the rest of the tweet stuff and formatting around it, but hey, that should be enough to prove you actually did make one, and can now go off an fiddle with something else…

So I thought the best contribution I could make for others like myself would be to present these complex and high level debates as a series of tired old memes. It’s my way of honouring Russia’s proposals to the ITU that countries should be able to restrict the Net to just “rational” uses.

ITU Sec Gen Hamadoun Toure has been rather at pains in the run up to Dubai to point out that all the nasty things being said about the ITU are terribly unfair, but especially that the ITU doesn’t have plans to regulate the Internet. The ITUC have documented their own ding dong with him, and he does indeed have half a point, but it’s also fair to say the proposals do amount to an attempt to secure at least a greater degree of ITU involvement in Internet regulation (which may be a good or bad thing), and various ITU members definitely are seeking more of same, even if Dr Toure might be too modest himself.

Internet supreme being Vint Cerf (co-inventor of TCP/IP and now Google’s official Internet Evangelist) has been rather exercised about all of this. Whilst an open internet brings with it other problems (monopoly search providers anyone?), it’s been the major driver in building the rapid innovation that’s given us so much in recent decades. Developing countries may well be a tad pissed off that they’re paying for the delivery of Google’s services to their citizens, and fancy a slice of Google’s earnings for their assistance, but I’d worry that they’ve more to lose by the greater digital divide of being cut off from global services running on micropayments that wouldn’t generate enough ARPU in many countries for it to be worth the sending.

US Ambassador Terry Kramer tried some bold ITUjitsu, to limit the scope of WCIT’s decisions just to the telecoms services type stuff the body was set up for, and to leave off regulating internet companies that don’t actually own any wires. This didn’t go down all that well, though he can’t hear the fat lady quite as well as the others yet.

The Russians have been keen to get standards for Deep Packet Inspection included in WCIT’s deliberations. Cynics might say this could be to legitimise some of their restrictive practices by letting them say they’re only keeping to UN standards, or maybe to try to get other governments doing it too, so they don’t look so bad. But of course, maybe they just want to know what a DPI is for certain so they can make certain they never do anything that naughty? (BoingBoing has the leaked text).

And of course if you find this all less LOLworthy than me, there’s still time to sign the TUC/ITUC petition to delegates. And Mozilla have some great resources and pointers for people wanting to get stuck in over WCIT.

Via a rather pissed off AFL-CIOnow today, I came across a Gawker article about Californian clothing company Unionmade Goods. They sell upmarket priced downmarket looking clothing to the good hipster folk of the Bay Area.

All quite pleasant looking, if rather on the pricey side, and topped off with a woolly commitment to ethical sourcing, which is some way better than nowt for the fashion industry. But what’s this? Apparently the fact they’re called “Unionmade” and have a rip off US union logo,  is not to be taken as any kind of inference that unions have been involved at any point in the process.

I saw something rather similar in the UK a few years back, when Firetrap tried a US blue-collar collection, replete with “union made” T-shirts. After badgering them for some time, they relented and told me that their line had nothing to do with unions at all.

It got me wondering, why is it that a fashion brand can think it can get away with abusing the union made mark? It’s not like they’d ever think twice about writing “Fair Trade”, “Organic Cotton”, or “Not tested on animals” on something that wasn’t.

I imagine in the rarified and union-free atmosphere of fashion design, they just see us as being a part of history to be plundered to get the right look. Even if they’re doing this out of a fond sort of nostalgia for better times, it’s a very harmful place for us to be if we let them get away with painting us into a historical corner.

For all the positive ethical choices that fashion companies can make in sourcing materials, none of them carries the guarantees that union made does – That the workers involved in the item’s production had an actual stake in the terms of their employment, not just relying on the extension of philanthropic whims.

You might like to big up that you make your clothes in a properly inspected factory. You might give your growers a fairer wage than the rest of the sector, or less harmful chemicals to work with. But if they don’t have a way to stand up for themselves, there isn’t the guarantee that things are going to stay good, especially when your buyer turns their back for a bit on the outsourced supplier you use.

So come on Unionmade Goods, wise up please. Exploiting your customers’ willingness to help low income workers in the garment sector is a pretty lousy way to make a big price premium on your clothes. Get it fixed and recruit some unionised suppliers (and hey, why not let your retail staff join too), and the next time in San Francisco, looking to spend $95 on a vintaged tweed tie, I’ll know where to get it.

It’s a timely reminder of why Russia are so keen on some of the proposals they’re bringing to the International Telecommunication Union’s WCIT conference in Dubai over the next fortnight. If they pass, this sort of thing will get vastly easier for autocratic states to curb freedom of speech at home and abroad.

Russia will be seeking to use a new treaty at WCIT to place an obligation on telcos to engage in deep packet inspection (monitoring the detail of what everybody is looking at online), so they can comply with requests from national governments to block services they don’t like, or in Russia’s words don’t consider “rational” uses of the Net.

So rather than having to enforce a ban on a particular YouTube embed on Russian hosted sites, Putin would be able to turn off access to it for Russians, regardless of where in the world it was hosted.

Of course, yesterday’s ruling proves that Russia already has some ability to censor the Net domestically, with this loose interpretation of anti-terror laws, and with other laws aimed at blocking whole services which the authorities claim could be hosting material harmful to children. But when they do this, it’s both tricky to execute and politically embarrassing for them to be shown up as autocrats.

If this becomes the default position on the Net, enshrined by UN treaty, Russia and other states can act with impunity, banning and blocking more easily as they want, whilst at the same time claiming to their people that it’s merely standard practice for all countries, not something that only bad regimes engage in, as they’re only following UN guidelines.

If the ITU conference in Dubai comes to a vote, it could be finely balanced, and without national vetos, if states like Russia get their way, it could cause real problems for the operation of the Net and freedoms we need to preserve online.

So please help by signing the ITUC/TUC petition to ITU delegates in Dubai.

And make sure to watch punk prayer in solidarity!

Given the pretty reliable maxim that if you turn over most stones you’ll find something creepy underneath, I thought I’d have a look at the bits that make up my gadget and see if I can find out a little more about they impact they’ve had around the world.

So here are my first two snippets of stone lifting so far…

Assembly, screen, memory etc - Samsung

Flash microcontrroller – Atmel

Atmel are a microcontroller manufacturer who produce the MXT540E touch screen controller used in the Galaxy Note. They have a FAB (semiconductor fabrication facility) in Colorado Springs, USA, but have in recent years closed three other FABs.

This includes the Dec ’11 closedown of their FAB in Rousset, France, which was controversial and involved a protracted strike by the workforce. It’s alleged that the final terms didn’t match up to an agreement signed at the beginning of the process with the workforce and their union the CFDT.

From what Google can translate for me, the guarantees on redundancy and short time working pay were ultimately not upheld, and the company fell back onto legal minimums instead.

I can’t tell which FAB the Galaxy Note controllers were produced in, and I guess not France as they mightn’t make a new product in a factory they knew they were most likely closing since 2009.

Of course companies are always changing, so closing a particular factory is something that sometimes just has to happen if it can’t be made to work out for the business, but it seems this one is a little fishy.

Atmel posted record Microcontroller revenue of $1,114 Million in 2011, Up 25% on the previous year, and the firm appears on lots of stocks-to-watch lists, so it looks like they could have afforded to do much better by its workforce when the firm decided to close.

As you now can’t listen to it, the show centred on Mike’s trip to China, to investigate working conditions at Foxconn, the electronics megacorp that makes iPhones, Nokias, Dells, you name it… Mike had worked up his experiences in China into one of his monologue performances, a short one-man theatre/comedy routine, exploring the connections between how we feel about our shiny tech gewgaws, and the company ethos and practical manufacture details behind them.

It turns out Mike embellished a number of the details of his trip. He didn’t actually meet a number of the people he wrote about (some were based on case studies of people in a totally different city), and invented more dramatic dialogue from poetic licence. Prior to his This American Life airing, most people probably wouldn’t have been surprised by this, unless they were the type who was rather late finding out about Santa.

He’s a dramatist, producing a story to make a compelling theatrical experience. Reading Mike’s fantastic 21 Dog Years, a geek humour chronicle of his time as a customer services early hire at Amazon.com, I didn’t really expect a lot of that stuff to have happened exactly as it did, or that Mike hadn’t woven in anecdotes from others, or general Amazon folklore.

Journalism can’t be “truthy” (and it’s right for TAL to clarify), but drama certainly can, and needs to if it’s to work. You can argue that polemical drama like Mike’s latest sits uncomfortably somewhere in between the two. But even so, I don’t think Mike now deserves to be presented as a cross between Jayson Blair and Kony2012, and used by Foxconn and Apple to try to duck responsibility on a technicality.

As he explains on his site, his mistake was in mixing up his dramatic work with This American Life’s high integrity journalism, and not thinking about where this was taking him, ultimately compromising both sides.

So Mike made a mistake on this occasion, but I for one am willing to cut him some slack. What he reports didn’t all happen to him, but look at the genuine academic research and journalism coming out of the issue, and you’ll find this stuff is happening, and happening in spades, just that it’s generally being talked about by people with less of a gift and opportunity for presentation than Mike.

I think as campaigners, we have a lot to thank Mike Daisey for, and unceremoniously dumping on him as a problem best publicly jettisoned, without giving his side of the story a link, doesn’t really do him his deserts. He’s been the previously missing link that over the last year has moved the academic research on to connect more widely, and enable some great investigative journalism. And of course, he’s done this by using his considerable talents as a comedian and playwright, rather than by retraining as a journalist.

I like the fact he’s now weaving the latest twists in the story into his show. It might be strange to say that it’s my impression he’s a very honest guy, given the current furore, but on the one occasion I’ve met him, whilst helping with publicity for a 21 Dog Years gig he was doing in London, that’s exactly how he came across to me.

Sure, we can be annoyed at his mistake in muddying the water, but as Mike says himself, this really isn’t the story – There’s a story there that Mike’s helped bring out to the world, and that’s more than big enough already.

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!