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.

By Alison@Creekside

So remember how the Cons withdrew their just-tabled internet surveillance bill, the Lawful Access Act, on Feb 14 and replaced it an hour and 15 minutes later with the identical but renamed Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act , a bill which mentions neither children nor predators?

Coincidentally, the US Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011 - sponsored by Texas teabaggin’ Rep Lamar Smith who also sponsored the Stop Online Piracy Act, another internet spying bill – has 39 co-sponsors and is heading off to the US House of Representatives for debate.

Good thing ours has that one-word difference in the title, the better to provide for Canadian independence and sovereignty.

Theirs :

House Panel Votes to Require ISPs to Keep Customer Records

“The Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act would require ISPs to retain all customer IP addresses [for 12 months, amended down from 18] so that law enforcement agents can use the information to investigate online child pornography. Law enforcement agents would gain access to the IP information with subpoenas they issue, not court-ordered warrants.”

Hey, ours does that too!

Michael Geist yesterday :

Toews has not talked about a provision in Bill C-30 that creates a voluntary warrantless system that would allow police to ask for the content of emails or web surfing habits and allow ISPs to comply with the request without fear of liability.

Hey, Section 6 of the theirs does that too! As does SOPA.

So who else is looking to spy on us online?

National Northern Border Counternarcotics Strategy, January 2012, pages 33-34:

“It is imperative that Canada and the United States work together to expedite the sharing of information from electronic communication service providers; and share information necessary to lay the foundation for intercepting internet and voice communications under their respective laws in a timely manner.”

Meanwhile, across the pond, the UK isn’t hiding their internet spying bill behind any malarkey about protecting children. Same basic mo though :

UK government to demand access to all phone and internet user data

“The British government is in the process of developing a scheme whereby all phone companies and broadband internet providers will be required to store customer transaction data for a year and hand it over to security services upon request.”

In opposing the US pornography bill, Rep. John Conyers said : 

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.

Canada’s startup landscape is healthier than ever, as evidenced by the recent International Startup Festival in Montreal.

Putting aside the ambitious name (I would have selected something like the Canadian Startup Festival), the fact that it was well-organized and well-attended suggests there might just be some real traction within the startup community.

For too long, the landscape has been dominated by a supply and demand problem – lots of enthusiastic entrepreneurs chasing too little capital. That meant there was a lot of talk but not a lot of walk, because without financing, it’s difficult to develop an idea and drive growth.

A few key things have changed in the past year or so.

First, I sense entrepreneurs are more sophisticated, experienced, and creative about how they start, operate, and finance a new business. We’re talking about people who have been in the startup trenches, and are now starting to see the benefits of their toil.

Second, there has been a surge in the amount of seed and startup capital available. It’s far from a financing tsunami, but it’s a solid start. It means (hopefully!) entrepreneurs can get the money they need to take a real shot at building something. It doesn’t have to be millions of dollars, although it would nice it if that kind of dough-ray-me were available. Many entrepreneurs can go a long way with $100,000 to $250,000, using a lean and mean approach.

Third, we’re starting to see exits; nothing spectacular, but acquisitions nonetheless. The recent hit list includes Pushlife (acquired by Google), Tungle (RIM), PostRank (Google) and Five Mobile (Zynga).

What’s more encouraging is that, if you scratch beneath the surface, there’s an awful lot going on. In my consulting business, I’m doing a lot of work with startups and, as important, coming across a lot of startups during my travels. These are companies with great ideas working away in relative anonymity, until the time comes for some of them break out.

All in all, call me optimistic that Canada’s startup community is starting to see some serious traction after too many years of struggling. A lot more can be done but at least we’re getting there.

First published on markevanstech.com.

Rebecca Black’s “Friday” has been making the internet rounds to guffaws and heaps of ridicule, and there’s no denying that it’s that bad.  But is it not ALSO a scathingly accurate anthem for our disaffected youth?  To wit:

The opening lines of the song have taken heat for being needlessly and idiotically itemizing.  Every event of Rebecca’s morning is listed, with separate lines being given to both the “bowl” and the “cereal,” to both getting to the bus stop and having to catch the bus.  Yet aren’t the teen years just one damn thing after another?  I mean, “7:00 am waking up in the morning/ gotta be fresh/ gotta go downstairs/ gotta have my bowl/ gotta have cereal” when all you want to do is sleep till noon?  Get off my back, mom.

Arriving (finally) at the bus stop, Rebecca “see[s her] friends kicking in the front seat/ sitting in the back seat” of Hot Johnny’s car.  Plaintively she cries, “Gotta make my mind up/ which seat can I take?”  Oh Rebecca, how deftly you capture the fears of adolescence.  What if she were to chose the front seat, and something awesome happened in the back seat, like, a really funny joke, or something?  Or if she chooses the back seat, and Hot Johnny puts his arm around Slutty Ashley instead of her?  The horror, you guys.

The chorus consists simply of “partyin’ partyin’” to which her friends respond insipidly “yeah.”  The clear subtext to the monotonous, auto-tuned “fun, fun, fun fun” highlights the unvarying nature of this entertainment, a fact only underscored by Rebecca’s dead eyes.  Woe to the teens, with nothing to do on weekends but get sneakily drunk and paw at each other.  Fun fun fun indeed.

The bridge brings ostensibly the most banal, but secretly the wisest, of Rebecca’s claims.  “Yesterday was Thursday . . . tomorrow is Saturday and Sunday comes afterwards.”  Is that so different from Shakespeare’s “To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow,/ Creeps in this petty pace from day to day”?  I think not, friends.  It speaks to the plodding inevitability of life!

Is the musicality abhorrent?  Sure.  Does Rebecca’s voice straddle the border between “nasal” and “unlistenable”?  You betcher.  But if we peer deep into the song’s gray matter we might find a more accurate reflection of our own teenage years than we are prepared to face.

Either that, or we’ve all been punk’d.

Lost in all of the hum online about Egypt and the CRTC was that 2011 is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Marshall McLuhan.

He was right.

When I tweeted that, my friend Rod Mickleburgh of The Globe and Mail shot back:

@davebrindleshow mcluhan was certainly right when he gave my mother an A on her eng lit masters essay for him, on ulysses…

@davebrindleshow she also had northrop frye as a prof that year…my mom was amazing….she went back for her MA at 46….

See that? That’s how participatory journalism works. A great story in six lines and a click. That’s the sort of thing McLuhan saw coming.

It’s ironic that we’re celebrating 100 years of McLuhan even as Canada has been engaged in an electronic revolt. Two, actually. One stirred up the net — on Facebook and Twitter — so much that Prime Minister Stephen Harper, sensing the will of a young demographic that might rally against him in an imminent election, acquiesced to opposition over the CRTC’s decision on user-based billing.

The second, less noisy, is in response to that same CRTC’s decision to loosen the reins on “false news.” A revision to current legislation would allow for pretty much anything to be broadcast that doesn’t “endanger the lives, health or safety of the public” — this supposedly in reaction to concerns that the current, more restrictive wording wouldn’t survive a challenge under the Charter of Rights.

But as The Globe‘s TV critic John Doyle writes:

“While there is an argument to be made that language of CRTC regulations on ‘news’ and ‘truth’ must conform to the law of the land, there is no authentic need to open up this can of worms.

” . . . What does it all mean? Say hello to the likely rantings and ravings of the upcoming SUN TV News channel . . . . What it means is not that the government has seen the future — the success of a right-wing TV news channel is an unknown — but it has posited the kind of future it would like to see in TV news and punditry.”

Which in turn means that the worms are already out of the can. If the government, through the CRTC, can legislate truth and news on TV, the precedent exists to impose the same on the internet.

That should concern us. The internet is messy. And god knows the perception exists that it needs tidying up. As Langara College journalism instructor Ross Howard is quoted saying in the brand-spanking new thedependent.ca:

“Online is just another form of presenting the same info quicker, more accessibly and with greater feedback and diversity of sources . . . . Unfortunately, the Web by itself provides no answer or relief from this ignorance driven by corporate imperatives and near-drowning in the info-tsunami we’re facing, because blogs and Facebook and Twitter etc. provide extraordinary diversity and interactivity but absolutely no reliability.”

I’d challenge that bit about reliability. Ask the people of Egypt which was more reliable: the regime or the internet? The network is reliable in that it never loses its voice, fluidity, fairness, free expression of ideas and opinions, and sense of justice — the very essence of democracy. And if an open democracy isn’t reliable, what on earth is?

It’s true, however, that the same engine that can organize through disorganization can also be retooled and used to quickly reorganize into factions and agendas. That’s what’s happened in the UBB debate, which has become too complicated and fractured to remain of interest to anyone other than special interest groups and the telecorps. The inherent strength of the internet’s global democracy is also its weakness. The network doesn’t have leadership nor does it follow a plan. That makes it more vibrant than the geezer media, but also a lot more anarchic.

McLuhan warned us this wasn’t going to be easy. As I said: He was right.

Adapted from an essay that originally appeared on davebrindle.blogspot.com

By Frank Moher

So, all you digerati who are celebrating this morning because the Conservatives have told the CRTC to rescind its decision on user based internet billing, or else: do you really want the federal government calling the shots on this? The Tories especially?

One can’t help but admire the campaign run by openmedia.ca that has gathered some 358,000 signatures (and counting) on a petition against running the meter on broadband usage, and turned the issue into a political lodestone  I haven’t managed to become as exercised about it as many of you because, as a Shaw Cable customer, I’ve been living with a broadband cap for, well, ever. Not that they’ve ever enforced it, and not that I usually get very close to exceeding it. But then, it’s a fairly cushy 100 gb/month plan, and I get a deal on it because it’s bundled with my cable TV.  I realize that if you’re getting gouged on a 50 gb/month plan, and now facing the prospect of getting further gouged, you have every reason to be pissed-off.

But do you really want Industry Minister Tony Clement as your knight-in-shining-armour? It was Clement’s tweeted confirmation on Wednesday night that the government would force the CRTC to reconsider its ruling, or see it reversed in cabinet, that set off general jubilation across the Canadian Internetz. But that’s a very slippery slope he’s leading you down on his white charger. Give the Tories the idea that it’s okay to meddle in the decisions of its putatively independent regulator, that that whole “arms-length” approach to broadcasting is so 20th-century, and things could get really ugly really fast. Especially with a government that’s once again nosing around the idea of selling-off the CBC.

Clement’s meddling comes on the heels of Heritage Minister James Moore’s decision to override Library and Archives Canada and force them to show the documentary Iranium. As sage arts journalist Jamie Portman wrote in the Ottawa Citizen, that set a bad, bad precedent.

“For all his grandstanding about safeguarding democracy and the Canadian government from the bullying tactics of the Iranian Embassy in Ottawa, the bottom line is that a minister of the Crown has violated the arm’s-length relationship that exists between independent federal cultural agencies and the politicians.

In brief, Moore should not be telling his agencies what or what not to do.”

Who knew Clement and — why look! Who’s that over his shoulder? Looks like PM Steve! — would follow up on Moore’s precedent so quickly? But that’s what’s happening here. You may like what they’re doing in this instance. But when the time comes that they stick their fingers in someplace else they don’t belong, and you don’t like what they’re up to, those of you huzzahing today about the Cons’ intervention are going to be in a very poor position to complain.

Okay, I’m starting to want a tablet. No, not the iPad for which I expressed my underwhelmedness back in February of 2010, but the Motorola Xoom to be released this quarter, perhaps even as soon as next month.

What’s so great about the Xoom? Well, if you’re one of those who have been waiting for Apple to add all the features they omitted, like camera, usb support, multitasking, SD card support, and so on, your wait may soon be over, at least if you’re prepared to venture outside the Apple fold. The Motorola Xoom will be everything the iPad ought to have been at its inception.

Check out this vid, and note when the Motorola spokesperson refers to it as a tablet PC.

 
If one had to summarize the difference between the iPad and this, one could simply say that the iPad is an internet appliance whereas the Xoom is a tablet PC. This may change as Apple is forced to compete on features. A mockup of the iPad 2 was displayed by a CES exhibitor for a time until it garnered too much attention and Apple quashed it. While a mockup can’t be regarded as final or definitive, it suggests that it will sport a camera as well.

What its final configuration will be is uncertain, but it does seem likely that Apple will have to add features, a camera being only one of them, if it wants to remain competitive in this space.

The Motorola Xoom runs the Android Honeycomb operating system, which is the latest version of Google’s Android OS originally designed for phones, but retooled by Google specifically for tablets. Boasting an Nvidia Tegra 2 1GHz dual-core processor with a gigabyte of RAM and 32 GB of storage (expandable with SD), it packs enough punch in a well-designed package running a skookum OS that it won CNET’s best of the CES show this year. They note “We believe the Xoom is the most potentially disruptive technology among the nominees; it’s a true competitor for the iPad and will be one of the first 4G-compatible tablets to hit the market.”

I don’t need a tablet. I’m typing this on my faithful Acer Aspire One netbook. It’s fine, really it is, all I need in a light, portable computer. I don’t need a tablet. I don’t need a tablet. I have a feeling I will be repeating this a lot. Just because the Xoom looks cool, sleek, sexy, and doesn’t allow its form to interfere much with its function as a PC (I could always get a Motorola bluetooth keyboard), that doesn’t mean that I need it.

I don’t need a tablet. I don’t need a tablet. I don’t need a tablet.

The internet is not all boobs and trolls. I mean, it’s mostly boobs and trolls. If you were to answer either “boobs” or “trolls” for every question in an Identify This Internet Thing Pop Quiz, you’d get a passing grade, which is better than usual for you.

But the occasional trickle of goodwill does force its way in. First there was Antoine Dodson, the unabashed camera ham who frightened an intruder out of his sister’s bedroom and became an instant meme. Due to the internet’s OCD need to auto-tune everything, an interview with the charismatic rapist-thwarter was turned into a Billboard Top 100 song. The proceeds from sales of that song on iTunes as well as of merchandise urging you to “hide yo kids” allowed Dodson to move himself and his family out of the Lincoln Park projects, and to set up a foundation for juvenile diabetes. Point: internet.

Then there was Jenny the Bloggess and her taxidermied boar’s head, James Garfield. The Bloggess designed Christmas cards featuring the JOLLIEST STUFFED BOAR’S HEAD EVER and because the internet has a penchant for wtfery, it purchased said cards to the tune of $600. Jenny graciously offered that money in $30 gift cards to the first 20 people to comment that they couldn’t afford Christmas for their kids. Before long, a commenter offered to help the 21^st person, and another the 22^nd. After a few heady days of online bonhomie, over $42,000 worth of Christmas-making goods had been sent to random people who needed it by other random people who perhaps did not need it as much. Point: internet.

Most recently, Ted Williams, a homeless man with the most illegible sign and silkiest vocal chords in all of Homelesslandia, received his internet boon. A web producer filmed Williams saying radio-y things and then threw it online on a slow news day. Within hours, the world’s ear drums had found a new lover. Since then, Williams has done voice-overs for everything from MSNBC to Kraft Dinner, appeared on The Early Show and Jimmy Fallon, and been offered a job and a house by the Cleveland Cavaliers. The internet literally scored this man a house.

So kudos, internet. You may be overloaded with cuss words and outdated Sad Keanu memes, and recent studies may suggest that you have a deleterious effect on our creative thinking skills and ability to follow an ar – hey look!

see more Gifs

Ha ha ha, bears. They don’t know what’s up. Ok what? Oh yes. But as long as you keep throwing us the occasional philanthropic bone, internet, I think we’ll hang on to you.

While you were enjoying the festive season, a minor contretemps blew up and just as quickly away at The Globe and Mail. Both parties to the matter have been studiously decorous about it, but it deserves further scrutiny before disappearing entirely down the memory hole.

On Dec. 24th, the Globe pulled from its website a blog post by Norman Spector, former Mulroney Chief of Staff and ambassador to Israel, now living in Victoria and making his way as a pundit. Spector had remarked on the unusual fact that, for the first time, Laureen Harper would join husband Stephen when he sat down for his annual Christmas chat with CTV. In fact, it would be “her first television interview with the Prime Minister since he took office in 2006.”

Why her sudden visibilty? Spector speculated that it might have something to do with rumours circulating in Ottawa that the couple’s marriage is in trouble, and, more particularly, that those rumours had recently emerged in the Ottawa Citizen, albeit in veiled form. Wrote Andrew Cohen in the December 3rd Citizen: “In Ottawa, tongues have been wagging for two years about trouble in one political marriage. One of the partners is now said to have left the nest. It hasn’t made the newspapers, at least not yet.”

Specifically, the rumours have Mrs. Harper living in the Chateau Laurier while the Prime Minister remains at 24 Sussex. Showing more journalistic initiative than the rest of our press, Spector did some digging. “I checked out the rumour with two journalists in Ottawa. From both, I got the sense that it was likely true. And that it was not being reported because it was deemed to be a personal matter.”

Oh really?

In his forbidden post, which Spector immediately republished to his own website, he makes a reasonable case for why the matter, if true, would be more than personal. “If the PM’s marriage was in trouble, that was something that could affect his performance and lead to bizarre decisions. (Have you heard about the census being abolished?) And given the power of the office, the troubled marriage could impact all Canadians.” I’ll add another: if Harper and his wife were living apart, but he continued to issue Christmas cards like the recent one above, we would have to conclude that the Prime Minister is a big fat dissimulator.

Spector also politely allows as how zapping his post “is the paper’s right.” (I’ve had my own experience of being disappeared, in my case by the National Post; I wasn’t quite so polite.) But while the Globe may be within its rights — that is, they haven’t broken any laws — their boilerplate claim that they did it for reasons of “fairness, balance, and accuracy” is ludicrous. Does the Globe think publishing the rumour is unfair, imbalanced, and possibly inaccurate? Then let it do its job, particularly in matters of public interest: phone up the principals and ask them about it. Then do what Spector did, and phone up some informed sources and ask them about it. Then publish what you’re told. It’s called reporting.

What did the Globe do instead? Zap.

This sort of misplaced politesse is the reason that mainstream papers are increasingly obsolescent in an age of internet journalism and wikileaking, no matter how many iPad applications they produce. Readers are increasingly aware of how much the old-school media choose not to tell us, whether for political or financial reasons, or from some misguided notion that it’s for our own good. And increasingly we reply: We’ll be the judge of that. Tell us what you know, or even just what you’ve heard (where’s Frank magazine when you need it?), and we’ll decide whether it’s File 13 material or not. And if you won’t tell us, there are plenty of sources out there that will.

We don’t need mommies and daddies in our newsrooms. What we need are actual journalists — even if they must be drawn from the ranks of retired civil servants.