By John Klein (aka Saskboy)

How can I write this without sounding, well, paranoid? I believe the RCMP is watching too many people, and abusing its resources. There are plenty of signs this is taking place. And proliferating tech gadgets and social media are only making the matter worse.

It worries me.

The police should not be monitoring Canadians unless they have a reasonable suspicion that criminal acts are imminent or are taking place. We don’t pay them to watch all activists, especially ones who peacefully oppose prevailing political governance. Are we not a society free to disagree with our government?

Here’s an incomplete, but startling, list of reports that suggest the Mounties are getting their man by putting everyone, innocent people too, under a microscope:

RCMP spied on BC natives protesting pipeline. The Yinka Dene Alliance is not a terrorist organization.If the report had said RCMP were monitoring “Polish Canadians” (as a random example), do you think there would be more outrage?

RCMP interrogate former Conservative candidate for passing documents from anonymous source to Ethics Commissioner in Parliament (after Parliament mail room lost first submission).

A B.C. man got a visit from the RCMP after contacting the Prime Minister.

Until the 1980s, the RCMP kept a secret list of people they considered to be Communists, and were prepared to round those people up in the unlikely event of the Cold War heating up. PROFUNC was ended by accident.

The G8/G20 brought Canada’s so-called “largest ever” police spy operation down on activists whose worst members did damage comparable to unruly drunk hockey fans in Vancouver. Meanwhile, the police assigned to watch the protests ended up being charged with crimes. RCMP “abandoned policy”, and kettled protesters, which resulted in the arrests of hundreds, to possibly over a thousand, innocent people.

Since there are no laws clearly governing the use of your personal information collected by the ruling political party into their CIMS database, they could be sharing this intelligence with the Mounties. Would it change your answer to any survey or political phone call if you knew your response could end up as a detail in an RCMP surveillance watch list?

As a political blogger, I’m pretty much screwed if the government takes an active interest in me. Even though I’ve previously worked in a job for the government where people, with less oversight and more authority than the RCMP, confirmed I’m loyal to Canada (and the Queen even) and am the opposite of a threat to national security, I have little doubt that now I’m an unhappy smiley face in CIMS, and who knows what other police-state Stasi-style databases. There’s presently nothing preventing the government from using the Conservatives’ powerful partisan database.

With social networking, it’s easy to track most of my contacts. When Toews’ Bill C-30 passes, the police will be able to do legally what they’ve probably been doing since September 11th, 2001. I also carry a cell phone, so my movements could be mapped, or conversations bugged using the phone mic. Ubiquitous technology is stacked against a free, democratic Canada.

Will the RCMP maintain the peace in Canada, or bring an end to it? Will they resist the pull of pervasive electronic monitoring of every person? I know what I hope for, but the signs are pointing in the wrong direction.

By Saskboy

Children learn how to use computers and work around restrictions by experimentation and reading. So too must adults when they are confronted with restrictions. It’s a good idea to learn how to evade censorship before the flow of information is shut off — otherwise, working around the problem becomes much more difficult because you must work from your own ingenuity rather than from experts’ reports and examples found on the Internet.

Slashdot reports that citizens of the UK are being cut off from The Pirate Bay, an internationally famous Bit Torrent sharing website. Torrents, which point to files of all sorts, including free operating systems, leaked political documents, copyrighted TV, movies, books, programs, and music are available at The Pirate Bay. UK courts have ordered Internet Service Providers in the UK to block access to the Swedish/global site. The local UK Pirate Party has provided a proxy site to work around the censorship, but this too will probably be attacked by the ruling government and courts.

Sharing is a political, and even a religious act. So it’s very important that people know how to evade censorship — skills that are as crucial to defending liberty as the Americans’ Second Amendment. The government doesn’t only want to control your guns anymore. In the Information Age, people should have a right to a free Internet without barriers like the Great Firewall of China or the UK’s Pirate Bay browsing ban. And this isn’t just a theoretical battle. Without evasion techniques and anti-censorship software like Tor, the Egyptian people might not have been able to overthrow Mubarak, or interest/involve the world in their struggle last year.

Arm yourself with knowledge.

One of the more ridiculous logical fallacies that climate change denialists use is that carbon dioxide can’t be pollution because it can also be breathed by plant life. It’s really sweet they care so much about plants’ respiration, but I’m a little more concerned with the survivability of humanity. (Never mind that most of these same people would probably soak dandelions with chemicals that would make your newborn’s toes curl.)

Why do I bring this up? Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) is hitting some tough times. Sadly, this is the “clean energy” technology that the one-basket University of Regina has most of its “clean energy” research eggs in.

Here’s why the oil industry isn’t bothering with CCS:

“Our decision was essentially based on the fact that we could not see a way to make the economics of our CCS project work as we originally intended,” said Don Wharton, vice-president of policy and sustainability at TransAlta.

He said markets for pure carbon didn’t develop as expected, and federal and provincial governments took no steps to recognize the value of reduced emissions by implementing a price on carbon, for example, or a cap-and-trade system.

In short, despite nearly $800 million in government subsidies, the company had no incentive to invest in CCS.

Let’s keep in mind that the Harper Cons haven’t merely poured hundreds of millions of dollars into CCS: they’ve done so to the exclusion of any other climate-change funding (since their initial period of poorly-feigned interest in the environment when Stephane Dion was Lib leader).

Six years later, and there’s no Made in Canada solution to climate change, as I predicted very easily. There are plenty of Made in America excuses, however. And as our society focuses on technologies that are designed to benefit the oil and coal industries, we shortchange innovation in renewable energy technology. The U of R has more than 12,000 students, yet it has one VAT windmill in testing mode on its 18 buildings, and zero production solar panels that I’m aware of. Yet it’s a world leader in CCS research. Could it be the Conservatives and Sask Party are content pretending that they are investing millions into Big Oil and Coal’s “clean energy,” while their investment will be totally useless to private [and crown] industry producing electricity?

Opportunity Cost; Opportunity, Lost. At least too much CO(2) means some healthy plants . . . somewhere. I guess human vegetables like to look out for their own kind.

By Mark Evans

South of the border, the party is raging. You can almost hear Prince’s “1999″ playing in the background as startups find themselves being courted by investors and snapped up for eye-popping amounts.

The current case in point is Facebook’s $1-billion purchase of Instagram, which is staggering any way you want to slice it. To me, it feels frothy and eerily similar to the dot-com boom of 1999/2000. Meanwhile, Jason Freedman, founder of 42Floors, writes about how investors at a Y Combinator demo day were “frenzied almost, excited to invest in entrepreneurs.”

But while there seem to be signs the market is becoming increasingly over-heated, you also have wonder whether it matters. If the party is happening and everyone is having a great time, does it make sense to be a party-pooper? Maybe it is just better to jump into the fray and enjoy the ride.

It’s a strange world. While the startup scene in the U.S. is flourishing, the Canadian startup ecosystem is far from robust. There still isn’t enough capital, many institutional investors are still not participating, and many startups find getting financing difficult, if not impossible, to attract.

This despite the fact the startup ecosystem is as vibrant and strong as it’s ever been, and that dozens of startups were acquired last year. In other words, there’s a lot to be excited about, but while Canada is hosting a small tea party, a wild rave is underway in the U.S.

When you compare the two “parties,” the key question is: Are Canadian startups missing the boat? Is our conservatism and aversion to risk damaging the development of the startup sector and hurting Canada’s ability to drive innovation and economic growth? When the federal government has to commit $50o-million to support venture capital activities, it’s an admission that something is not right.

Some more key questions: Is Canada’s startup scene simply not robust enough, or are things getting out of control in the U.S.? Are we right, and they’re wrong? Or are we missing out on a good party?

What do you think?

More: Anyone interested in the Canadian startup landscape should read Jevon MacDonald’s post on StartupNorth.

First published on markevanstech.com

While Canada’s venture capital sector is showing signs of improvement, it is a long way from being robust, let alone healthy. So it was encouraging to see the Conservatives commit $500-million to support venture capital initiatives.

The support consists of $400-million into VC investment, although the details have not been disclosed yet, and $100-million via the Business Development Bank of Canada.

Not surprisingly, the VC industry welcomed the news.

Gregory Smith, president of the Canadian Venture Capital Association, said he was “pleased to see that the federal government has taken decisive action to address the acute shortage of venture capital by committing $500 million to the industry,” while Round13′s Scott Pelton told BNN it was “the beginning of a turnaround” for an industry that has struggled.

There is no doubt that $500-million of support for venture capital is a positive development. It will be interesting to see how the money is allocated and how it gets divvied up into the different sectors and investment stages.

At the same time, it’s also a sad state of affairs when the federal government has to get so involved at a time when it’s cutting corners to wrestle an enormous budget. Clearly, the need to support startups and innovation outweighed the financial and economic challenges.

The upside is the government is willing to walk the walk and talk the talk. It’s one thing to tout the benefits of innovation and the New Economy, it’s another to use taxpayer money to support it.

Maybe this will provide even more encouragement to institutional and corporate investors that have been sitting on the venture capital sidelines for whatever reason.

First published on markevanstech.com

First of all, I’m not going to predict the end of the world. I know, 2012 is the year that the Mayan long count calendar ends, on December 21st, to be exact, but somehow I doubt it will be terminal.

Really, our best shot at near term extinction comes from science. But so far the scientists have failed utterly to destroy the world, despite spending billions of dollars on a massive super collider which was predicted to create a black hole which would swallow the earth. Do not let the light hearted musical approach in the following educational video fool you; this thing was supposed to be a planet killer (Fox News wouldn’t lie).

Instead, they may have discovered evidence of the Higgs boson, or “God particle.” Some days it seems like they’re just a bunch of geeks who have no appreciation of how seriously we take them and the threat they represent.

Scientists will next attempt to destroy the world using a super-laser which will rip the fabric of time and space, but that doesn’t come online until 2017 at the earliest. So it looks like we’ve got another five years or more before Armageddon.

My prediction last year that Adobe Flash would be killed by HTML 5 has not come fully to pass, but as I wrote when Adobe themselves released their own HTML 5 authoring kit, the writing is on the wall, and remains so. Much depends on having a solid authoring tool — Adobe is still in preview with theirs (preview three), but even so, I will renew that prediction for 2012.

I also mentioned both Nokia, and Microsoft’s phone OS, but did not anticipate a partnership between them. That will be interesting to watch in the coming year. Nokia makes good phones, and is a world leader outside of the North American market. I’m not sure it really needs Microsoft’s OS, as it could have continued with its own, or adopted Android. The real question is: Will the association with Microsoft open up the North American market to Nokia in a way they just haven’t been able to manage on their own?

I have to say I really don’t know. It’s a powerful combination in more ways than one, but Apple still holds an albeit fading first-to-market caché and has a large and largely uncritical fan-base.

But not everyone was influenced by Jobs’ reality distortion field, and now that he’s gone, Apple may be in more trouble than people realize. Android looms large on the mobile phone front. Is there room for a third party come late to the game?

I won’t go out on a limb with this one, except to say it will be somewhat bad for both Nokia and Microsoft if they haven’t made at least something of a splash by summer. It won’t be the end of the world (that’s coming in 2017 at the earliest, remember) — Nokia has its success in the global market, Microsoft its still near monopoly on desktop operating systems.

I would like to predict an iPad killer, but I don’t know if anyone can do what apparently needs to be done. So far the competition doesn’t get it. It’s not enough to create a tablet as good as or better than the iPad. In fact, quality doesn’t seem to matter so much as price.

If a company out there can come out with a tablet with reasonable features (doesn’t even have to be brilliant) for half the price, it will take a big bite out of iPad’s market. HP’s Touchpad was a disaster at its initial price point, but they cleared them out in no time at a hundred dollars. The Amazon Kindle Tablet shouldn’t be any kind of threat to the iPad based on features, but at the price of $199, they sold a million a week this month. The formula is clear – price matters much more than features in the tablet market.

Here’s hoping Santa brought you what you wanted this year, and that 2012 will be good to you as well.

By Mark Evans

As an enthusiastic supporter of Canada’s high-tech community, I’m hoping RIM can somehow find a way to revive its flagging fortunes.

But the terrible debut of the PlayBook, the modest reception to the BlackBerry 9900, and October’s global network outage has not only put RIM on its heels but caused some industry watchers such as GigaOM to envision an even darker future.

As much as it would be hard to believe RIM and the BlackBerry could crumble before our eyes, it wasn’t that long ago that Nortel was king of the telecom world before it went stumbling and fumbling into bankruptcy protection and an embarrassing asset sale.

So what if RIM disappeared? Would there be anything good to come out of it? Here are some outcomes that accentuate the positive.

1. It would free up a lot of people within RIM, who have gained valuable experience and, in many cases, a lot of financial security over the past 10 years. These people could work for other companies that need talented people, as well as finance startups that would benefit from having smart and strategic money.

2. It would reduce the Kitchener-Waterloo technology hub’s dependence on one giant company. Now, I know my friends in K-W will contend there is already a large and thriving community but my take is that it could be even more diversified. It’s like when a giant tree falls in the forest. All of a sudden, the sunlight is allowed to pour in, which lets existing companies thrive and new companies to sprout up.

3. Given RIM went from start-up to world-class company, it would hopefully be a huge reminder that supporting Canada’s start-up community is essential to the health of Canada’s high-tech community and our overall economic prosperity. For all the talk about creating jobs and nurturing the New Economy, Canada needs more walk in terms of financial support.

4. Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis would be free to pursue other entrepreneurial and philanthropic pursuits. Over the past 15 years, they have done an amazing job building a world-class company. Along the way, they have also done some impressive non-RIM projects such as creating and funding the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (Lazaridis) and the  Centre for International Governance Innovation (Balsillie).

If they were liberated from RIM, they could focus their time and efforts on such things as supporting start-ups, providing mentorship, and influencing policy and economic changes. Heck, Balsillie might even finally get himself a NHL franchise.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge RIM supporter, but you have to be realistic and pragmatic. Having covered the rise and fall of Nortel, nothing in the technology world surprises me. It’s a fickle, volatile, and ever-changing landscape in which anything could happen, and often does. While RIM’s demise may seem far-fetched, it is possible, so it’s a good exercise to consider the silver lining.

First published on markevanstech.com

Dear Mr. Jobs:

I write to you on the occasion of your death to congratulate you on making a difference. As more of a technology visionary and businessman than a true geek (that was your erstwhile partner Steve Wozniak, or “Woz”), you may not recall that this was the concern of a dying James Tiberius Kirk at the end of the movie Star Trek: Generations. Granted, you never saved the planet by travelling in time to rescue whales or anything like that (at least, you left no public record of such feats), but, way back when, you knew a good thing when Woz showed it to you.

Some might say that you were the mercenary and Woz was the real techno-saint, but left to his own devices would Woz have formed a company to sell the Apple I back in 1976 or sought venture capital to expand and sell the Apple II in 1977? Or would he have been content to hand out his genius for free at the local computer club? If the latter, I might never have had an Apple IIe. That was a sweet little machine back in the day — thanks to the both of you Steves for that.

You also knew better than Xerox what they had when you visited their research facility in 1979 and saw what they were doing with graphical environments, and that curious pointing device, the mouse. You took these ideas, ran with them, and had Bill Gates playing catch up until 1995 (and yes, your devoted fans might say that Windows never caught up to the Mac).

When you were edged out of your own company in 1985, you simply went on to found another computer company, NeXT Inc. There you made the uber-elite NeXT computer — no compromises, including on price. Your target market was institutions that could afford it, including CERN in Switzerland where Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first web server and browser on one. Eventually an ailing Apple would buy your company and get an OS that would allow them to catch up to, and arguably pass, Windows, and also get you back as the CEO.

Once back, you didn’t stay in the PC comfort zone. No, you could see the future, and the future was in people’s pockets. Along came the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad. You left Apple in such good shape that the day after the announcement of your death, Apple’s share price didn’t change much at all. Such was the confidence of the market.

Personally, I’m not so sure. Your personal stamp is all over Apple. It is so much the product of your vision. I don’t see how Apple can be Apple without you. And Apple has been without you. What happened is a matter of historical record.

But don’t let that worry you. Assuming that there is an afterlife, move on to your next project. Or better still, take a break for a lifetime or two. You packed enough into this one that you deserve it.

-Eric

Steve Jobs Timeline

Remember all those episodes of the various Star Treks where characters were genetically altered, either willingly or unwillingly, by some means or other? It would happen within the course of a single episode and be neatly fixed at the end, with a hypo from the lovely Dr. Crusher.

In reality, of course, altering the DNA in every cell of a person’s body is a very tall order — let alone reverting them back to exactly what they were before, so that they might carry on as usual in next week’s episode.

Unless you happen to be a nemotode worm.

Researchers at Cambridge University have succeeded in genetically altering nemotode worms so that they glow in ultraviolet light. They have been given one additional amino acid in addition to the 20 provided by nature.

How did these boffins of biology do it? The article is weak on detail, but if this process could scale to humans (nemotode worms are only 1 mm long and have only about a thousand cells), it might put a twist on the ethical debate concerning genetic enhancement. No longer would the question be whether to enhance foetuses, but whether we should wait until an individuals are old enough to decide for themselves whether or not they want to be enhanced and how.

Expect also to see a new twist on spam: “In life’s genetic lottery, were you short changed in the john thomas department? Now you can say, ‘Screw you, Mother Nature’ and be sufficiently endowed to ensure she enjoys it.” Not that I have any insecurities in that regard, but if they were to come up with a genetic tweak for male pattern baldness . . .

Still, be careful of what you wish for. Don’t forget what happened to Tom Paris, when traveling at warp 10 somehow screwed with his genetics. He turned into a giant salamander. And so did Captain Janeway. Then they had giant salamander babies. Perhaps we shouldn’t play God.

Back in March, I criticized Apple for not including support for Adobe Flash in their iPad tablet. Their reasoning seemed to be, at least in part, that Flash was going away, to be replaced by HTML 5 with support from javascript and CSS, to which I responded that may very well be, but Flash wasn’t dead yet.

The writing is still on the wall today, but now in a large, animated font. This looming threat to Flash comes from Adobe themselves, with the preview release of their HTML 5/Javascript/CSS authoring tool, Edge.

What difference will this make to the average web surfer? Probably not much. Sites with annoying special effects and sound and other hoopla offered up by Flash will no doubt offer the same via HTML 5. But your back button will likely work, and you will be able to send links to interior pages, because the whole thing will be written with open standards designed for web browsers — it will be the same old web you’ve always known, just on steroids.

Indeed, Adobe isn’t doing much here that hasn’t been possible for years, at least with regard to the final product. But what a chore it was! Extremely time consuming, and even if you went to all the trouble to test your technical magnum opus in the top ten web browsers at the time to ensure it worked in all of them, one browser would go up a version, change its behaviour, and break your work. Just not worth it.

So even though Adobe doesn’t own the underlying technology as it does with Flash, if it can make the difficult easy, their new product will fill a huge niche. But couldn’t the competition do the same thing? Yes, but could they do it as well? Give the devil his due, Adobe is very good at what they do. Plus they will have a first-to-market advantage. They will establish Edge as the Photoshop (also an Adobe product) of HTML 5. And don’t look to the open source world for a free app that does all this and does it well — their track record when it comes to multimedia authoring is mostly dismal.

Who this will be a real boon for is the non-technical designer types who are drawn to Flash like moths to a flame. Easy to use Flash authoring tools mean that they don’t have to have a lot of technical knowledge in order to realize their glorious visions. Sadly for them, Flash has lots of problems, many to do with the fact that it’s mostly graphic, not text based. Search engines can’t read it, spider it, summarize it, and Flash sites usually don’t do well in rankings. And that’s only the half of it.

HTML 5 and associated technologies, on the other hand, are totally kosher open standards that use the web browser and all it has to offer, rather than simply using it as a frame. If Adobe can satisfy the Flash-addicted elves of the web design world (and they won’t be easy to satisfy, so good thing Adobe is planning more preview releases as features evolve), then there will be richly designed multimedia sites which sacrifice nothing of the power of textual information and the properties that made the World Wide Web the ubiquitous force it is today.

AND you’ll be able to view them on your iPad.