Is porn art?

By Peter Nowak - Friday, February 10, 2012 at 10:52 AM - 0 Comments

ssoosay/Flickr

Can porn be copyrighted? It’s an unexpected question raised by a lawsuit filed in California by a woman accused of illegally downloading an adult film.

As TorrentFreak reports, Liuxia Wong has filed a harassment lawsuit against L.A.-based Hard Drive Productions, who she says wrongly accused her of sharing a film called Amateur Allure Jen on BitTorrent. The company sent her a letter saying she could be liable for up to $150,000, but that she could instead settle for $3,400.

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The next digital casualty: waiters?

By Peter Nowak - Thursday, February 9, 2012 at 9:55 AM - 0 Comments

The National Restaurant Association has released its 2012 industry forecast, which is jam-packed with tons of interesting facts for anyone interested in the business of food. While there’s a wealth of data on topics such as economic impact and employment, the tastiest morsels–in my books, anyway–have to do with technology.

You have to be an association member, or a journalist, to get the full report, but fortunately Business News Daily has some of the more pertinent info. The facts that caught my eye were:

Nearly 4 in 10 consumers say they’d be likely to use an electronic ordering system and menus on tablet computers at full-service restaurants. About half said they would use at-table electronic payment options and a restaurant’s smartphone app to view menus and make reservations. (My emphasis added)

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Samsung’s Galaxy Note: between smartphone and iPad?

By Peter Nowak - Friday, February 3, 2012 at 4:45 PM - 0 Comments

Remember when the iPad first came out and Apple touted it as the device that would fill the void between smartphone and laptop? The jokes came along pretty quickly about how long it would be till someone tried to squeeze something more into the space between smartphones and tablets.

Well, laugh no more because Samsung is going there.

The South Korean electronics giant is spending a pile of money on a 90-second commercial during Sunday’s Super Bowl to promote its new Galaxy Note, a weird device that launches in Canada on all three big wireless carriers on Feb. 14.

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The counterintuitive truth about piracy and profits

By Peter Nowak - Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 1:44 PM - 0 Comments

Jonathan_W/Flickr

One of my favourite writers is Terence Corcoran, who as editor of the Financial Post is an old colleague of mine. I enjoy reading his columns because whenever he ventures into technology and telecom issues, the result is usually a car wreck. And who doesn’t enjoy watching a car wreck?

Such is the case with a recent column on copyright, which he promoted on Twitter as being penned by the “anti-Geist.” One of Corcoran’s favourite whipping boys is, of course, Michael Geist, the University of Ottawa law professor and Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-Commerce Law who is one of the country’s most-cited experts on copyright law. If you follow both gentlemen, you probably know they, well, don’t like each other, to put it mildly.

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Apple’s China factory conditions need perspective

By Peter Nowak - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 at 1:38 PM - 0 Comments

Staff members work on the production line at the Foxconn complex in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen. (Kin Cheung/AP Photo)

The New York Times tried to stir things up over the weekend with a lengthy investigation into the working conditions at Apple’s manufacturing plants in China. The story detailed all the gruesome details at supplier companies such as Foxconn: unsafe working environments, unfair overtime, overcrowding in dormitories, violations of employments codes and so on.

It’s a damning story, intended to appeal to peoples’ consciences when it comes to the electronics they buy. It is, after all, hard to feel warm and fuzzy about your new iPad when you think of the human cost that went into making it.

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Insurance, the bump on our way to robot cars

By Peter Nowak - Friday, January 27, 2012 at 11:20 AM - 0 Comments

Having had the sublime pleasure of riding in a robot car a few years ago (and writing about it again recently), it was with great interest that I read the cover story in the latest issue of Wired. The article is all about robot cars – how not just Google, but all auto makers are close to making self-driving vehicles a reality.

The story, which doesn’t appear to be online yet, covered a good number of fascinating angles, from the technology being used to the potential changes we’ll face when robot cars fully arrive. One intriguing possibility is that the entire notion of car ownership may change. If we can simply order up a car on our smartphone that then drives itself to our front door, what need would we have to actually own one?

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RIM’s future isn’t with BlackBerry

By Peter Nowak - Monday, January 23, 2012 at 1:00 PM - 0 Comments

Research In Motion finally pulled the trigger Sunday night, with the BlackBerry maker announcing that co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie were stepping down. Chief operating officer Thorsten Heins is the new CEO while board member Barbara Stymiest takes over as chair.

As the saying goes, it’s too little too late. Continue…

The Liberals jump on the cellphone airwaves bandwagon

By Peter Nowak - Friday, January 20, 2012 at 2:21 PM - 0 Comments

Esther Gibbons/Flickr

Ah, political opportunism–so easy to see, so disappointing to witness.

No sooner did Open Media start a petition for better wireless competition than the Liberals jumped in. The activist group’s latest effort, called Stop the Cellphone Squeeze, is urging the federal government to set aside spectrum licenses in an upcoming auction for new wireless companies. In plain English, they want big players Bell, Rogers and Telus barred from bidding on a certain portion of the airwaves that are necessary for cellphones to work.

As of this past weekend, the petition had amassed more than 35,000 signatures. Invisible Industry Minister Christian Paradis has said the rules for the auction will be unveiled “soon.”

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How porn parodies avoid copyright restrictions

By Peter Nowak - Thursday, January 19, 2012 at 12:24 PM - 0 Comments

Wednesday, January 18, 2012 marked an intriguing confluence of events. No, it’s not some sort of Mayan end-of-the-world situation, but it is the day on which Wikipedia, Google and a number of other big websites posted the Stop Online Piracy Act. It was also the day on which the Adult Entertainment Expo kicked off in Las Vegas.

How on Earth are the two related? Bear with me.

I’ve written before about how SOPA has the potential to kick off the equivalent of an Internet Cold War. If enacted, the legislation would give U.S. authorities power to block certain websites. The target would be file-sharing enablers such as the Pirate Bay, but could also encompass other undesirable websites, which historically has meant porn. But that’s not the tree I’m barking up today.

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Why the CES still matters

By Peter Nowak - Friday, January 13, 2012 at 2:58 PM - 0 Comments

Power Panel discussion at the 2012 International CES in Las Vegas. (Jack Dempsey/AP Photo)

With the Consumer Electronics Show wrapping up for another year, it’s time to reflect back on the mega techno circus and try to decipher what all the hubbub was about. Before the show began, the Associated Press wrote that CES has a poor track record. In assessing how recent shows had done, the story concluded that the annual event was becoming a big dud factory. After all, netbooks, 3D television and a swarm of tablets introduced over the past few years mostly didn’t make it to market or made a resounding thud if they did.

From one perspective, this is true–CES does produce its share of technologies that fail to catch on. However, for the most part, the AP story missed the point. For one, it glossed over some obvious facts, such as that 3D has basically become a standard feature of flat-panel TVs. I remember doing radio interviews at the 2010 CES show, where such sets were first unveiled, and saying exactly that this would happen–3D would eventually become just another TV viewing option, like gaming or vivid mode.

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Robot cars: fond memories from CES ’08

By Peter Nowak - Wednesday, January 11, 2012 at 3:15 PM - 0 Comments

I’m knee deep in the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas so over the next few days I’ll be posting some retrospective–and futurespective (if that’s a word)–thoughts on the show’s past and future. With any luck, I’ll post some interesting stuff from this year’s show as well.

Today, I thought I’d start with my most memorable CES experience, which was riding in a robot car at the 2008 show. The car, a GM SUV designed by Carnegie Mellon engineers, was tricked out with GPS, ladar (also known as laser radar and LIDAR) and a host of other sensors, all of which allowed it to drive itself. The Boss, as the vehicle was known, won the 2007 DARPA urban challenge, an open race held by the Pentagon’s mad science division in an effort to spur development of robotic vehicles.

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A dystopian future for Canada’s Internet

By Peter Nowak - Thursday, January 5, 2012 at 4:20 PM - 0 Comments

jonny2love/Flickr

On Tuesday, independent Canadian ISP Teksavvy announced its new service plans, effectively dropping the other shoe in the long-running usage-based internet billing debate. While on the surface there are some things to like, at the core the new plans–and regulatory system they’re based on–paint a disturbing picture of the future of Canada’s Internet.

The CRTC set things in motion in November with its government-ordered revisit of the issue and came up with something called capacity-based billing, a sort of diet UBB. In essence, instead of large network owners charging indie ISPs for every byte their customers download, the new system requires the smaller companies to buy chunks of capacity based on how much they think they’re going to need on a monthly basis.

As Jesse Brown noted on this site earlier this week, while some commentators praised the decision, others–including Teksavvy–said the regulator screwed things up again. While the system itself was okay, the fees that a few big network owners are allowed to charge through it were way too high, the company said, which will inevitably result in price increases for customers.

All eyes have since been on Teksavvy, one of the largest and most vocal of the UBB opponents, to see what it would do. In the end, the company’s new plans and the accompanying explanation are something of a mixed bag. On the one hand, most existing plans are going up by $3 to $4, which fits the predictions by some observers that the CRTC’s ruling would push up rates by 10 to 15 per cent. The issue, as Teksavvy puts it, is that while its fixed costs actually went down somewhat thanks to the decision, the variable ones can potentially go up significantly. The company’s pricing notice reads:

If left to stand, these prices will ensure that residential Internet service prices will increase dramatically as consumer usage at peak times increases… in the face of the recent decision, we have to modestly adjust our rates.

On this front, if Teksavvy is to be believed and the rate increases are essentially going to further compensate network providers, the impact of capacity-based is the same as the intended effect of usage-based billing: Prices for consumers are going up.

On the plus side, Teksavvy is now officially offering higher speeds–up to 24 megabits per second–with usage limits that are generally much more generous than those of the incumbents at significantly lower prices. As many people pointed out on Twitter, even with the price increases, the company’s plans are still way better than what can be found elsewhere.

But there are plenty of downsides as well. For one, Teksavvy has introduced the concept of non-peak usage–meaning that customers can download all they want in the wee hours of the night without it counting against their caps. Some observers call this “innovative,” but it may well be the first step down a slippery slope. It heralds a future where internet usage is further compartmentalized–if it starts with file-sharing overnight, how long till someone makes it more expensive to watch online video in the evening, or call on Skype during the afternoon? Not only can this approach become confusing, it can also become expensive and limiting.

The only countries I know of that have adopted such non-peak usage concepts are Australia and New Zealand, both of which are in the process of building multi-billion-dollar next-generation fibre networks because their telco monopolies have failed to provide decent infrastructure on their own. The two countries, along with Iceland and Canada, are also the only ones where unlimited usage plans are uncommon if not completely absent. As I’ve pointed out before, one those countries (cough, Canada, cough) is unlike all the others. As far as anyone can tell, in fact, Canada is not an isolated island that must buy capacity on cables that run under the ocean.

Is the idea of compartmentalized internet service–where Canadians can only watch Netflix or other online video in the early hours of the morning for fear of exceeding their caps– an absurdist notion? It is indeed. It portends a dystopian scenario, which may or may not come true, but would be just as absurd as imposing a capacity-based billing scheme in response to congestion problems that large network owners have yet to prove exist.

It’s also thoroughly absurd to suggest that limiting how Canadians use the Internet–rather than expanding their use of it–is in any way “innovative.”

2012: What’s bubbling up

By Peter Nowak - Monday, January 2, 2012 at 12:02 PM - 0 Comments

I kind of like year-end lists. I dig retrospectives because they remind me of things I might have forgotten–a year is a long time, after all. I also like lists that look ahead because they help me to start thinking about what’s to come. And again, they remind me of things that may not be top of mind right away heading into the new year.

That said, here’s my very own list of things–in order of significance–that are looking likely for 2012 as they pertain to technology in North America, with special relevance for those of us here in Canada. This isn’t so much a list of predictions as much as a roundup of items that seem inevitable because of the momentum building around them.

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SOPA, theft and the new Cold War

By Peter Nowak - Thursday, December 22, 2011 at 7:25 AM - 0 Comments

Will Lion/Flickr

Much has been written about the highly controversial Stop Online Piracy Act currently being considered by U.S. Congress. The legislation would allow for the taking down or blocking of websites that aid in legally-grey file-sharing, such as The Pirate Bay. From the heads of major tech companies writing about how the Act would effectively break the Internet to commentators chiding politicians for their potentially harmful ignorance on technological issues, just about anyone who is concerned with the Internet’s future is frothing mad.

Most of the arguments against SOPA have been bang on, but not many have taken the historical or psychological context of piracy into account. When such aspects are considered, it becomes even clearer just how futile and bone-headed the legislation—if enacted—would be.

It’s handy if we start with defining “piracy.” Under Webster’s traditional meaning, piracy is an act of robbery on the high seas. The only difference between a pirate and a thief, therefore, is water.

Digital piracy obviously doesn’t take place at sea, yet “pirate” somehow emerged as the term of choice for someone who engages in file sharing, rather than “thief.” Why? It’s probably because the people who object to file-sharing—the entertainment industry—think it’s safer and less provocative to call customers “pirates” rather than “thieves.” It’s a small but important idiomatic distinction, so the industry has probably been correct in its approach. Continue…

Why not searching on Google is stupid

By Peter Nowak - Wednesday, December 7, 2011 at 4:37 PM - 0 Comments

Alain Bachellier/Flickr

Last week, I had the honour of speaking at the Online Educa conference in Berlin, an annual meeting of education professionals that this year attracted 2,000 visitors from more than 100 countries. Conference organizers have put up a video of my speech, which was about how food technology is driving economic growth in the developing world and, as a consequence, the collective demand for education there.

I also had the pleasure of participating in a debate on technological developments and their effects on privacy and learning. My teammate Peter Bowers, a teacher in the U.K., and I had the task of arguing against the following statement:

This house expresses its concern about the effect developments in technology are increasingly having on personal liberty and believes this will have serious consequences for learning in the future.

On Thursday, before the debate, I wrote about how I thought the statement was indefensible; that technology enabled liberty and therefore learning like no other force on the planet. While true, the debate was ultimately quite lively and resulted in an almost even split among the audience. Alas, our side lost by a narrow margin.

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CanCon, CommCon: what’s the diff?

By Peter Nowak - Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 8:08 AM - 0 Comments

I had a few days to be a tourist on my trip to Berlin last week and one of the more fun things I did was visit the DDR Museum, which provides visitors with an excellent documentation of what life was like in communist East Germany before the Wall fell in 1989.

The museum has exhibits detailing the obvious stuff, like shortages of everything from toilet paper to gasoline, as well as the spying efforts of the Stasi secret police. It also sheds light on some of the really dumb ideas, such as requiring school children to take communal potty breaks. The kids would all go take a dump together and could not pull up their pants until everyone had finished. Continue…

Dispelling fears of foreign telecom ownership in Canada

By Peter Nowak - Friday, December 2, 2011 at 5:56 PM - 0 Comments

Time to welcome the barbarians at the gate. (PhotographLayne/Flickr)

There was quite a bit of speculation leading up to Tuesday’s speech by Industry Minister Christian Paradis at a telecom conference on whether he would address the festering issue of foreign ownership. The speech came and went, and Paradis–although he visibly gave the speech–continues to be, policy-wise, the Invisible Man.

Despite the fact that two successive government-appointed panels–one Liberal, the other Conservative–urged lawmakers to lift restrictions that limit foreign entities from having any meaningful ownership of Canadian telecom companies with an actual physical infrastructure, Paradis et al. continue to show a lack of backbone to do what’s necessary. As both panels have pointed out, removing those restrictions would not only bring Canada in line with every other developed nation, it would also improve competition and lead to better services and prices.

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Sharp’s 80 inches of television glory

By Peter Nowak - Tuesday, November 29, 2011 at 11:39 AM - 0 Comments

It’s true what they say: once you’ve tried 80 inches, you never want to go back.

I’m talking, of course, about televisions (get your mind out of the gutter). I recently spent a few days with Sharp’s new 80-inch Aquos TV and, having fallen in love, I’m sad to say I have screen envy now that I’m back to my measly 50-inch plasma. Continue…

On UBB, the fat lady has not yet sung

By Peter Nowak - Wednesday, November 23, 2011 at 2:17 PM - 0 Comments

It’s been a week since the CRTC released its big decision on usage-based Internet billing. With the dust settled, everything is a lot clearer, right? Not really. Because of the ruling’s complex nature, it looks like it may be some time before its effects are felt and understood. One thing is clear: this long-running drama that everyone hoped would be resolved, with Internet users and small service providers on one side and the big telecom companies on the other, is far from over.

A number of consumer advocates have come out in favour of the CRTC’s decision. University of Ottawa professor Michael Geist wrote this week that it is a very good thing for small Internet service providers. By allowing them to purchase capacity rather than per-byte usage from large ISPs, they now have the flexibility to offer plans that are different from what the big guys sell: Continue…

Sony’s visor and in-your-face 3D

By Peter Nowak - Friday, November 18, 2011 at 11:55 AM - 0 Comments

When Sony showed off its futuristic-looking 3D visor at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, few people thought the company would actually follow through with it. Many wrote it off as one of those concept devices that technology companies bring to CES just to get media attention.

Well, nope. Sony has indeed put the visor into production and is currently taking pre-orders. The device officially hits stores in Canada on Nov. 25, although at $800, it’s not much cheaper than a full 3D television.

This is one of those oddities I simply had to try for myself and the folks at Sony were nice enough to lend me one for a week. First off, it’s obviously not for everyone. With its price tag, it’s clearly aimed at gadget lovers who get all the latest and greatest stuff, regardless of cost. Sony says the visor is in high demand through pre-orders so far—I’m willing to bet the vast majority of buyers (or the ultimate recipients of said purchase) are probably males between 25 and 40. Continue…

The CRTC decision on UBB: everybody hurts

By Peter Nowak - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 at 2:56 PM - 0 Comments

Codice Internet/Flickr

The CRTC’s usage-based billing decision is in and boy is it a lot to digest, which is perhaps why there were so many conflicting reports in the media as to who the winners and losers are or will be. After reading and digesting the long document and speaking to a number of the small Internet providers that will be affected by it at the ISP Summit dinner on Tuesday night, it’s hard to see how anybody really wins with this decision. Burdened with the impossible task of trying to make everybody happy, perhaps this was the CRTC’s desired outcome.

To understand the ruling, we need to delve past the headlines and the press release. I swore I’d never use the phrase “the devil is in the details,” but the demon certainly is in the fine print. In the case of this decision, it’s in the appendix, way at the end, which is a bunch of prices. I’m not a network guy so I’m sure I’ll get some of this wrong—even the experts will need a few days to digest and crunch the numbers—so feel free to jump in and make corrections in the comments. Continue…

Canadian broadband: the time for complaining is over

By Peter Nowak - Friday, November 11, 2011 at 5:36 PM - 0 Comments

Tiago Gualberto Morais/Flickr

I had to take a deep breath before writing this post, mostly to get all the four-letter words and other obscenities out of my system. There are few things that make me as angry as Canada’s abject failure on broadband issues, a situation that was highlighted again on Wednesday by our neighbours to the south and their creation of a plan to get high-speed Internet to the poorest Americans.

If you missed the news, the Federal Communications Commission introduced a plan that will give households in the National Student Lunch Program access to broadband for $9.99 a month. Moreover, the FCC’s Connect 2 Compete program will also get these families access to inexpensive computers ranging from $150 to $250, plus training on how to use them and the Internet. This is far from just a government initiative, though—the broadband part is coming through a partnership with cable companies such as Comcast, with the likes of Microsoft and Best Buy providing the other stuff.

It’s probably hard for anyone reading this (on the web) to imagine what life would be like without the Internet, but for those millions of Americans, it’s reality. That’s why, for the most part, the FCC’s plan is being lauded. Lefty types like it for obvious reasons while the righties like it too because it targets those 5.5 million homes that don’t—and most likely can’t—subscribe to broadband anyway. The plan doesn’t take money out of Internet providers’ pockets and it stands to add millions of people to what was once considered the economy of the future, but what is in reality the economy of the now. Continue…

Population bomb bogus

By Peter Nowak - Wednesday, November 2, 2011 at 5:09 PM - 0 Comments

Liz | populational/Flickr

No sooner had I finished writing about how technology fears are stoked by supposedly learned people and the media that another example rears its ugly head. This time, with the world’s population exceeding seven billion people, it’s new worries of a population bomb.

For those unfamiliar with it, the concept is at least as old as Robert Thomas Malthus, an English reverend and scholar of the late 18th and early 19th century. Malthus believed that if the world’s population kept growing at its then-pace, humanity would run out of food and other resources, and experience a catastrophe that would thin out the herd to a more manageable and sustainable size.

Of course, it didn’t happen and it probably never will, despite vocal kvetching by modern-day Malthusians. Population growth simply does not occur in a vacuum. Everything else–like technology and the economy–grows alongside it. So far, this has served us well.

The reality is that technology, the economy and population growth are interlinked. The more a country has of the first two, the less it has of the third. A quick glance at birth rates confirms this–the rich, technologically advanced countries in North America and Europe typically have the lowest, while those in Africa have the highest. Going by those figures, it’s obvious that the more prosperous a country is, the fewer children its people have, for reasons that are equally clear.

Historically, people had many children so that there would be more hands to work the land, but in a non-agrarian society that doesn’t make much sense. Moreover, with both parents typically working, it’s too expensive and time-consuming to have many kids.

The good news–not that the media ever really reports on this–is that the global economy is doing a fine job of alleviating poverty, despite what the lingering economic crisis and Occupy Wall Streeters would have everyone believe. Over the past five years, about half a billion people (most of them in China) were elevated out of abject poverty, something an op-ed in the Jakarta Globe recently called the “fastest period of poverty reduction the world has ever seen.” As the article put it, “advances in human progress on such a scale are unprecedented, yet they remain almost universally unacknowledged.”

Fortunately, some people are taking these developments into account. The demographers at the United Nations know this, which is why they’re projecting the world’s population to peak at about 9 billion about 40 years from now. Their reasoning is simple: as people become wealthier, they have fewer children. On that end of things–the input, if you will–population growth is slowly but surely sorting itself out naturally.

All of this growth–whether its demographic, economic or technological–that we’ve experienced over the past few centuries is hardly a bad thing. People everywhere–in countries rich and poor–are living longer and considerably better than they did a century ago, largely thanks to technological improvements in food production and medicine. Those inputs will continue to improve, so the dire predictions of how food production will need to increase by 70 per cent to accommodate an even larger population may not actually be all that hard to meet. People who worry that the world is running out of food and water are perhaps not taking this inevitable technological advancement into account, the same way Malthus didn’t consider the improvements brought about by the Industrial Revolution.

The worrywarts are also perhaps being too cynical about human nature. While some are right to point out that rich, advanced countries simply waste too many resources, we do have a certain pragmatism too, which explains all the effort being put into developing alternative energy sources and more sustainable food production. If a shortage problem really does happen, it’s reasonable to expect that people in rich nations will lend a helping hand, the same way they did during the African famine of the 1980s.

Should we waste less stuff? Sure, butpeople know on a subconscious level that the Malthusian population bomb theory is just a myth–no matter how much the media tries to scare us.

Boo! A brief history of technology scares

By Peter Nowak - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 at 12:50 PM - 0 Comments

Halloween isn’t the only time when everybody seems to enjoy being frightened. We must enjoy it year round, given the steady diet of fear the media keeps us on. It’s particularly true in the technology world. Over the past year, we’ve had the ongoing Wi-Fi cancer scare, more stories about the potential problems with biotechnology and lots and lots of attention paid to how the Internet is threatening our privacy.

Alas, a glance through time shows this is nothing new. People have been worrying about the effects of new technology since, well, fire.

Here, then, are five great examples from history. Continue…