Adding insult to the injury of rape


The Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority has acknowledged its rules were applied ‘wrongly’ when 15 rape victims who had been drinking on the day of their attacks were told they deserved only three-quarters of the compensation the law provides for them. The full figure is a paltry £11,000. That’s how much the UK legal system holds our bodies to be worth should we be intimately violated. Yet, while the news channels are rightly making a huge stink over the insult the CICA added to extreme injury for these people, there’s another, just as outrageous, factor to consider: how many rape victims, male and female, ever get told they can make a claim for compensation? And that they can apply even when their attacker is never caught?

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Tuesday, August 12th, 2008

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Apple does the right thing after MobileMe disaster


I received an email today from Apple, with the welcome news that the company is to automatically extend all current subscriptions to the MobileMe (formerly .Mac) service by 30 days, as a way of recompensing everyone affected by last week’s disastrous transition to the new service which, unlike the old, is—or rather, should be by now—available to Windows users as well as Mac fans.

The company has also taken the unprecedented step of describing its use of the word ‘push’ to describe the synchronisation of email, contacts, calendar events and web applications as having been a ’snag’ it ran into. You can really feel the squirming of giants going on behind the email. Snag, indeed.

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Wednesday, July 16th, 2008

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