September 1965 'On the Cover'

Fifty years ago, our two 'On the Cover' American chess magazines featured recurring, contrapuntal themes of the mid-1960s: Fischer on the one side and the World Championship on the other.

Left: 'Fischer Returns'
Right: 'World Championship Challengers Round - Quarter Finals Bracket B'

Chess Life

'Fischer Returns' by J.F.Reinhardt • At 8 PM on Wednesday, August 25, Robert J. Fischer's chess clock began ticking for the first time in more than a year and a half.

As we saw in July 1965 'On the Cover', 'Fischer Returns' was also the subtitle on the CR cover that month. The sole photo illustrating the Reinhardt article on the Capablanca Memorial was used in a post on this blog two years ago, Goichberg as Fischer's 'Gopher'.

Chess Review

Mikhail Tal of the Soviet Union outpointed Bent Larsen of Denmark by 5.5-4.5 and will therefore meet his compatriot Boris Spassky on the final match to determine who will play Tigran Petrosian next year for the world crown. Larsen was the last non-Russian to be eliminated [...]

No, he wasn't. Tal wasn't Russian, either; he was Latvian. At the height of the Cold War, Soviets = Russians = Communists.

Fighting Cookies with Cookies

It turns out that complying with EU cookie regulations -- see Google and the Brussels Bureaucrats and Google Is Watching You for background -- is easier than I had anticipated. After looking at a number of technical solutions, I chose Shareaholic - Content Amplification Software, as described in their blog post Remember to Ask Before You Take a Cookie.

I created an account, executed the required steps, and added the generated code to my Mark Weeks Homepage. I also decided to tweak my Site Map : World Chess Championship, to move the 'Privacy Statement' from the end of the page to the beginning. Although this might not be sufficient to satisfy the full intent of the EU policy, I think it's a good start. I can expand the statement if necessary and can replicate the consent banner to all other pages in a few minutes.

The Shareaholic software does much more than cookie warnings. I'll look at the other possibilities when I have a moment, but would first like to get some experience with it.

Surreal Chess

I was nearly certain that here on Top eBay Chess Items by Price I had already featured the painting shown below, but it seems I was mistaken. The auction was titled 'Vladimir Kush Artist Proof on canvas framed "Chess"', and the item sold for a bit less than $1800, 'Best offer accepted'.

The description added only,

The artist proof on canvas titled "Chess" by the artist Vladimir Kush. Framed by the gallery measures 21" x 23.5"; AP 5 of 30. Comes with the certificate of authenticity from the gallery.

'AP' means 'Artist Proof', which is undoubtedly the reason for the four figure price. If you do an image search on 'chess kush', you'll find dozens of examples of the same painting, most of them priced at three figures. If you do a search on 'Vladimir Kush', you'll find the artist's Wikipedia entry, Vladimir Kush. It starts,

Vladimir Kush (born 1965) is a Russian born surrealist painter and sculptor. He studied at the Surikov Moscow Art Institute, and after several years working as an artist in Moscow, his native city, he emigrated to the United States, eventually establishing his own gallery on the island of Maui in Hawaii.

That makes yet another reason to visit Maui.

Chess in Jakarta

The tags for the photo say, 'Kota Jakarta', which means 'Old Town Jakarta'.

5 menit saje © Flickr user Emile Krijgsman under Creative Commons.

Google Translate doesn't know what to do with '5 menit saje', but it translates '5 menit saja' to 'only five minutes'. That must be the time it takes to make a silhouette.

TCEC Season 8 - Preliminary Info

If you follow chess at all, you've probably heard about the tournament that just started a few days ago featuring the planet's strongest players. No, I'm not talking about the 2015 Sinquefield Cup. Those players, with the likes of GMs Carlsen and Anand, are strong -- at least for humans -- but the world's strongest players are battling it out in TCEC season 8, the Thoresen Chess Engines Competition.

For the original announcement, see Information and Participants List; for more details, see Complete Information, both pages courtesy Chessdom.com, the event's 'Partner'. Earlier this year I covered the previous season in TCEC Season 7. For season 8, I'll be looking for further clues about What Makes the Engines Tick.

Ethics in Chess Journalism

Here's the scenario: 'A' runs a popular web site devoted to an important aspect of chess history. 'B' copies large portions of the web site to create a book which is sold commercially. 'C' notices the excessive copying and publishes an article exposing the act. 'B' makes a formal complaint to the world chess federation, citing 'C's alleged unethical behavior; the complaint is rejected. 'D' notices the official record of the complaint and mentions it in passing, without understanding its history. Years later, 'C', who was never notified of the complaint against him, discovers 'D's writeup and sets the record straight.

Here's the cast of characters: 'A' is Wojciech Bartelski of Olimpbase.org. 'B' represents the Turkish Chess Federation. 'C' is Dr. Daaim Shabazz of TheChessDrum.net, writing Olympiad book copied from Olimpbase.org?. 'D' is me (D is I?), writing Ethics and Cheating, about FIDE's Ethics Commission.

Dr. Shabazz has documented the entire affair in a recent post, Turkish Chess Federation vs. Dr. Daaim Shabazz (2012). See in particular the link to the 'Official Complaint of Turkish Chess Federation' (PDF), which is almost surreal. The Ethics Commission should perhaps have contacted Shabazz about the complaint, but this was, at worst, a procedural lapse.

By coincidence, I was in touch with Wojciech Bartelski this past weekend and asked him what he thought. He replied,

My database grows courtesy of hundreds of volunteers who devote their time and offer money to build up the database. This is why everybody has and will always have free access to it and permission to use the data. Of course this has nothing to do with simple copy and paste of my own texts.

Of course English is not my native language and texts are not verified by professionals so there must be errors and awkward phrases in there. They charged €28 per book and did not even hire a professional [editor] to correct buggy text!

To this he added, 'Litigation and other legal actions are open questions.' I'm familiar with several cases of copyright violation in chess literature and understand that any civil awards are not likely to produce a windfall, perhaps not even covering the cost of legal action. Perpetrators of copyright violation also know this and it is their first line of defense.

The Ethics Commission is a wonderful resource for righting the wrongs of international chess. In covering their activities I am glad to have rendered a small service to chess journalism and will continue to do so.

Google Is Watching You

In Google and the Brussels Bureaucrats, I wrote,

I have to return to the same sort of web site maintenance that I did for the 'Going Mobile' series, once again dictated by Google policies: 'We want to let you know about a new policy about obtaining EU end-users' consent that reflects regulatory and best practice guidance.'

To be specific, we're talking about my web site mark-weeks.com, its use of Google's Adsense, and the cookies that Adsense drops on visitors to the site. I have three options on Google's policy:-

• Ignore it
• Do enough to satisfy the minimum requirements
• Remove any code that uses cookies

Ignoring the policy probably won't work in the long term and removing the code means knowing which third-party services are doing what (my pages also have links to Amazon.com, another black box service). Only Google knows how Adsense operates internally and only Google can satisfy the EU's requirements to the letter. Google is essentially doing the minimum by pushing the EU requirements on to the owners of the web sites that use the Adsense service. I'll follow Google's example by also doing the minimum.

Blogspot.com (together with the related Blogger.com) is another Google service that encourages the use of Adsense. On that service Google has grabbed the bull by the horns and introduced a message that is repeated over-and-over across all Blogspot.com subdomains. For example, when I clicked to the Adsense blog's post Introducing a new user consent policy (adsense.blogspot.com), I was greeted with the message,

Deze site gebruikt cookies van Google om services te leveren, advertenties te personaliseren en verkeer te analyseren. Informatie over je gebruik van deze site wordt gedeeld met Google. Als je deze site gebruikt, ga je akkoord met het gebruik van cookies. • Meer informatie • Ik snap het

Yes, it's in Flemish/Dutch and, yes, I've seen the same message dozens (hundreds?) of times on the various computers that I use. It doesn't matter that I've told Google many times that I prefer English and it doesn't matter that I've already accepted the message ('Ik snap het') on other blogs. Google intends to annoy me along with millions of other blog visitors and to blame it on the EU: 'Take that, Eurocrats!'

Clicking on 'Meer informatie' ('More information') leads to a page written in English, How Google uses cookies.

We use cookies for many purposes. We use them, for example, to remember your safe search preferences, to make the ads you see more relevant to you, to count how many visitors we receive to a page, to help you sign up for our services and to protect your data.

Why can't they use cookies to note my language preference or to remember that I've already accepted their cookie policy? And why do they need cookies 'to count how many visitors we receive to a page'? In reality, it's all about targeted ads.

Another link on that 'How' page goes to Managing cookies in your browser. Here the only instructions are for the Google Chrome browser. Users of other browsers have to figure it out for themselves. Google, Google, Google; get it?

Back to satisfying the minimum requirements on my own site, what does that entail? I'll look at that in my next post in this series.