Facebook’s stock has never been lower (with me)

By Jesse Brown - Tuesday, May 22, 2012 at 12:48 PM - 0 Comments

Sean MacEntee/Flickr

Facebook is worth less and less to me.  No, I didn’t buy any stock–I speak only of the site’s value to me as a user. It’s tanking.

Like everyone else on Facebook, I’ve always been ambivalent about Facebook. The shameless FB addict, gleefully abandoning any notion of privacy as they sext, post and poke, is mostly a media creation. The Pew Research Center studied teenagers and found that they actually care deeply about their privacy online–who sees what is a big concern. They just don’t understand how to control their Facebook privacy, and neither do I. Between Facebook’s ever-changing and ever-expanding Privacy Policy and the constant addition of new and conflicting features, I’ve lost the plot. I don’t know who will see the things I post any more than I know a “group” from a “page” or a “list” from a “subscription.” I’m in the dark, and I wonder if Facebook likes it that way. For years, the site grew more and more complicated as it got more and more popular. Whatever impulses I had to abandon it were overruled by the sheer necessity of using it.

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Major League Baseball: the intellectual property behemoth

By Luke Simcoe - Friday, May 18, 2012 at 12:12 PM - 0 Comments

Former Major League Baseball star Jose Canseco. (Patrick Doyle/CP)

Luke Simcoe is a guest blogger. He contributes the occasional post on web culture, the various kooks and cranks who inhabit the Internet, as well as copyright matters.

Major League Baseball is once again crying foul over someone’s attempt to have a little baseball-related fun on the Internet.

The league’s latest victim is Atlanta Braves’ fan Everett Steele. Earlier this year, Steele noticed his fellow fans consistently misspelling the team’s name as “Barves” online. He made a few jokes about it on twitter, and before long, the #Barves hashtag had become a moderately successful Internet meme. Hence, in an homage to both web humour and their favourite baseball team, Steele and his wife began making and selling Atlanta “Barves” t-shirts. And, as proof of their fandom and all-around gregariousness, the couple donated the proceeds to the Atlanta Braves Foundation, which supports nonprofits in and around Atlanta.

Within days of the media getting wind of the story, though, Steele got beaned by a cease and desist letter from MLB. According to the league, the Barves logo served to “dilute and/or tarnish the distinctive quality of the Braves Marks” and was thus in violation of the law. Lacking the funds to take on one of the world’s largest sporting businesses in court, Steele shuttered his AtlantaBarves.com website and stopped selling the shirts.

“There were more lawyers CC’d on the cease and desist letter email than I’ve met in my entire life,” Steele told a local news outlet. “So there’s not much fight they’re going to get out of me.”

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Judge was right to keep Rafferty’s laptop out of the trial

By Jesse Brown - Tuesday, May 15, 2012 at 4:43 PM - 0 Comments

Dave Chidley/CP

A new villain is emerging in the wake of the Tori Stafford trial: Judge Thomas Heeney.

Justice Heeney has been upbraided in a Globe and Mail masthead editorial and by the Toronto Star’s Rosie DiManno for not allowing into evidence the results of an improper search of Michael Rafferty’s computer. The Globe argues that Heeney had the authority to fudge the rules and let the evidence in, and therefore he should have. DiManno calls Heeney “stupid,” and suggests that if Rafferty had walked, it would have been Heeney’s fault. They’re both wrong. Justice Heeney made the right call, both in terms of delivering justice for Tori Stafford and her family, and with regards to his duty to the law.

As the Globe itself has reported, police fumbled the case by failing to obtain the secondary warrant they needed to search Rafferty’s computer. They had warrants to search his house and car, but to search Rafferty’s hard drive as well, they would have needed a warrant specific to that purpose. The Justice of the Peace and an O.P.P. forensic detective explicitly told investigators this, and there’s no question that they would have received the needed warrant if they had just asked for it. But they didn’t.

Had Justice Heeney ignored this and let the laptop in, he might have introduced an element of vulnerability into Rafferty’s conviction upon appeal. He could have put the crown’s case at risk and opened it up to legal challenge by accepting evidence the defence could have argued was inadmissible. The judge erred on the side of caution, and it’s hard to fault him for that.

Even if the laptop had been legally searched, one has to wonder whether the Crown should have been permitted to use the evidence gleaned from it. Let’s consider the implications of Judge Heeney allowing the jury to hear the Crown’s argument that by Googling search terms like “underage rape,” Michael Rafferty was  actively planning his crimes. I might very well Google “murder” when planning a murder–and in the Shafia trial, that was indeed the case–but there are limitless other reasons why I might do so.

Rafferty’s searches were more specific, but proving that they were done in order to plan his crimes, rather than say, out of a deviant erotic interest, is very problematic. The Google searches, just like the child porn police found on his laptop, would have provided jurors with damning evidence about Rafferty’s character, but little proof of his guilt in this specific crime. In other words, they would have succeeded in characterizing Rafferty as an absolute scumbag- the kind of guy you don’t mind sending up the river, whether or not you’re absolutely certain that he did it. As Judge Heeney ruled, their value as proof–their “probative value”–was “minimal,” but their capacity to prejudice the jury huge.

It would have cost us all something more. Our justice system needs to be very careful about setting precedents around using Internet histories as evidence. The Internet is where we go to explore out of curiosity, often (erroneously) thinking ourselves anonymous. Drawing connections between our online wanderings and our physical actions takes us on a slippery slope. Rafferty’s interest in disgusting sexual crimes is a moral abomination, and the possession of child pornography a crime in and of itself. But both are a very different thing than the crime he was convicted for.

The Star‘s Rosie DiManno disagrees. She writes that it was “crucial” for the jury to know that Rafferty “had an unhealthy interest in child pornography and bestiality” (as opposed to a “healthy” interest in them?). How was this crucial? What mattered was not Rafferty’s movie collection or his Google history. What mattered was that he raped and killed Tori Stafford.

Jesse Brown is the host of TVO.org’s Search Engine podcast. He is on Twitter @jessebrown

Byron Sonne cleared of all charges

By Jesse Brown - Tuesday, May 15, 2012 at 2:04 PM - 0 Comments

Aaron Vincent Elkaim/CP

If it can’t explode, can we call it an explosive?

If you didn’t detonate an explosive, and you didn’t make an explosive, can you be guilty of possessing explosives?

If you publicly announce that a fence can be climbed, are you encouraging people to climb that fence?

Is it credible that a grown man would be passionate about model rocketry and gardening?

Those are some of the questions it has taken our justice system almost two years to answer in the case of Byron Sonne, the self-described “security geek” who dared to scrutinize and mock the billion dollar security operation built to protect the 2010 G20 summit in Toronto. The answers, which I heard Judge Nancy Spies deliver today before a courtroom packed with Byron Sonne’s supporters, amounted to this:

Byron Sonne did nothing wrong.

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Anonymous 101

By Jesse Brown - Thursday, May 10, 2012 at 2:03 PM - 0 Comments

JacobDavis/Flickr

Is anything on the Internet more misunderstood than Anonymous?

Call them a “group” or “hackers,” or “cyber-activists,” or “cyber-terrorists,” and you’ll be mostly wrong and totally reductive. They’ve been more accurately described as a “culture,” an “idea,” or a “phenomenon,” but those all seem kind of flaky and much too flattering. Anonymous defies description and classification by design, tying those of us who aim to understand them into knots. Good for them!

For real insight into Anonymous, I turn to Gabriella Coleman, a McGill professor who approaches them as the subject of  anthropological study. Writing this week for Al Jazeera, Coleman aims to clear up some sloppy thinking about Anonymous, while putting forward a reasoned defence of their value. Her piece is combatively titled “Everything you know about Anonymous is wrong.”

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Privacy simplified

By Jesse Brown - Tuesday, May 8, 2012 at 1:36 PM - 0 Comments

Facebook’s privacy policy is 6,946 words long. Google’s is a comparatively spartan 2,281 words. Read them lately? I didn’t think so.

Website privacy policies, like their terms of use agreements, are onerously long, bafflingly complex legal documents that hundreds of millions of people accept without ever reading. As social media sites accrue more and more of our personal information while always developing new ways to exploit our data, they are increasingly targeted by hackers and law enforcement. In short, those long privacy statements, which we never read and which get longer all the time, matter more and more.

That’s why a trio of Yale students have developed a free service for websites called Privacy Simplified. Answer a few questions about your site and PS will generate a series of icons you can display to clearly explain the most important aspects of your privacy policy. For example, here’s what Facebook’s would look like:

And here’s what it all means:

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Data for dinner

By Jesse Brown - Friday, May 4, 2012 at 11:03 AM - 0 Comments

Cali2Okie/Flickr

Data-mining is hitting the restaurant business.

Wired reports on tools like, Compeat, and Hotschedules, which provide managers with daily anaytics, breaking down what food and drink was sold, to whom and by whom. One expects this sort of thing at Milestones, but Wired reports that celebrity chefs like Tom Colicchio and Daniel Boulud are also embracing the technology in their restaurants.

The focus right now is on servers. Perhaps a manager is fond of Tina, the friendly and competent waitress whom customers and cooks both seem to love. Well, she may be a nice person, but her data reveals that poor Tina hasn’t been moving enough vino lately, and remember that slightly smelly skate that chef tried to unload in an over-sauced special? Tina only sold four of them last night. Seems that when customers ask her what’s good, she actually tells them. Time to have a chat with Tina.

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Canada, blacklisted again

By Jesse Brown - Tuesday, May 1, 2012 at 3:58 PM - 0 Comments

Lone Primate/Flickr

You can set your watch to it.

The inclusion of Canada on the U.S. Trade Representative’s annual “301 Priority Watchlist,” ostensibly a blacklist of the world’s 10 worst abusers of intellectual property, has become as predictable as tax day. Each year for the past four years, we’ve been told that we are a nation of pirates and thieves, keeping company with epic bootlegger nations like Russia and China. And each year, no proof is given to back up the smear. The USTR provides no hard facts or data illustrating the extent of piracy and counterfeiting in Canada. Instead, the report simply reminds us that we haven’t adopted the right kind of intellectual property laws. And what kind is the right kind? The American kind, naturally.

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Meet the Brogrammers

By Jesse Brown - Friday, April 27, 2012 at 12:11 PM - 0 Comments

slworking2/Flickr

The first time I visited Silicon Valley, I met up with a very young Internet millionaire from Toronto who was on his third or fourth startup, I can’t remember.  He kept a condo back home and one in San Francisco, two of the most overheated real estate markets in the world. In high school he had been a geek, but now here he was, living the dream. So what did the dream look like?

Well, his West Coast condo looked like a dorm. It was sparsely furnished with bare-bones Ikea, his fridge was dirty and empty, and nary a poster hung on the wall. An intern slept on his couch, every night. There was, of course, an XBox. On an elevator ride down, we ran into his neighbour–another young dude wearing a hoodie, a baseball cap and a backpack. I was soon informed that this individual had just “exited” his startup for an eight figure sum. I met many guys like this in Silicon Valley. They worked 80 hour weeks together and then went out together for greasy food. They lived with each other and gamed with each other. It was hard to tell the millionaires from the interns. Some told me of girlfriends, but I didn’t meet any. I didn’t know it at the time, but these guys were Brogrammers.

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Why are Canadian students still paying through the nose for textbooks?

By Jesse Brown - Wednesday, April 25, 2012 at 3:12 PM - 0 Comments

ailatan/Flickr

You don’t hear much about the cost of post-secondary education dropping, but here’s one area where students should be spending less money than ever: texts. I’d say textbooks, but that’s just it–the costly hardcover textbook’s day is all but done. Ditto the cumbersome photocopied course pack. A slew of cheap and free options are available to a professor assembling a syllabus. There’s Open Access, a growing international movement to forego the price-gouging of the academic publishers and publish peer-reviewed scholarly works as freely available material. There’s the ever-expanding public domain. There are millions of high quality essays and articles freely and legitimately posted online. There are affordable subscription-based databases and collections. There’s Google Scholar to sort through it all. And there are fair dealing exceptions to Copyright, which will be extended to educational uses as soon as this summer.

Add it up, and students should be enjoying some much needed relief when it comes to the cost of study materials. But instead, they’ll likely be paying more than ever. The Association of Universities and Colleges Canada, representing dozens of our top schools, have just signed the most expensive copyright licensing deal ever offered to them by the collection group Access Copyright.

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How Julian Assange became what he hated: a TV guy

By Jesse Brown - Friday, April 20, 2012 at 4:21 PM - 0 Comments

(Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP Photo)

Confession: I watched Julian Assange’s TV show. I promised myself I’d ignore it, but curiosity got the better of me. I wish I’d stuck with my instinct, because it annoyed me to the extent that I’m now going to compound the problem by writing about him. Sorry everybody.

Before I unburden myself, a note to Assange’s supporters: I know you feel your guy has been unfairly maligned and mocked by an international conspiracy to defame, imprison, and possibly kill him, even though he may not have broken any laws. And I think you’re probably right–he has been. But that doesn’t mean he’s not an ass.

And let’s face it, he’s such an ass.  He establishes this in the first minute of the World Tomorrow, through an epically self-aggrandizing intro-montage that places Assange as some kind of messianic figurehead of both the Occupy movement and the Arab Spring. He overplays the victim card by running footage of a rabid Fox News commentator barking that the U.S. should just “illegally shoot the son of a bitch!” Let’s remember that U.S. senator Joe Lieberman called for Assange to be tried for treason against the American government, a fantastical suggestion given that Assange is not a U.S. citizen. And Lieberman came within inches of the Vice Presidency, so he’s by no means a cable news cartoon character. Lieberman’s is a much more telling clip of the actual persecution Assange faces at the hands of the powerful. But I guess it wouldn’t make for as good television.

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How does Google know what I’m looking at?

By Jesse Brown - Thursday, April 19, 2012 at 12:04 PM - 0 Comments

helgabj/Flickr

Google announced new tools yesterday to help marketers measure how their ads are doing. One of these is Active View, which claims to reveal whether or not an online display ad was in fact seen.

Let’s think about that for a second.

Google has always been able to tell its advertisers whether an ad was served. They also can report how many times it was clicked on. These numbers aren’t guesses, they are hard data, the kind of exact information Google loves. But what happens in between those two metrics? If an ad is served but not clicked on, did it fail? The entire history of television ads would suggests otherwise. Nobody really expects me to buy a Twix bar at the exact moment I see an ad for one on TV. I’m supposed to slowly learn to associate Twix with deliciousness and decadence and sexual magnificence or some such twaddle, until one day I find myself needing to make a candy decision and hey, there it is! This kind of slow brainwashing is what television was built on, but it’s proven very hard to replicate online. If I see a dozen Twix ads on the Internet today, it’s certainly possible that they will have some subtle, even subliminal effect on me, but unless I click on one of the ads, how would Twix ever know? And if the ad is served on Google’s ad network, how will Google ever get paid? It’s a problem Active View promises to solve.

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Do Canadian cops need warrants for GPS tracking?

By Jesse Brown - Friday, April 13, 2012 at 12:51 PM - 0 Comments

The American Civil Liberties Union recently shocked Americans with news that dozens of police departments across the country were tracking suspects through the GPS chips in their phones without any court oversight. American cell providers such as AT&T and Sprint were routinely handing over real-time location data of their own customers to police, without requiring warrants. Sprint even created an easy-to-use web portal to automate the process, and provided police with a private data price-list. For example, $30 buys police a month of realtime location tracking data on a suspect. The ACLU’s findings also uncovered indiscriminate GPS dragnets–the police could buy info from cell carriers that allowed them to identify every individual found nearby a certain cell tower. There seems to be no consensus and few precedents in American law on the legality of such methods, and police are making the most of this murkiness.

So is it happening in Canada, too?

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MintChip is a fresh idea

By Jesse Brown - Tuesday, April 10, 2012 at 12:45 PM - 0 Comments

The concept of virtual currency tends to elicit dismissive chortles.  For example: Bitcoin, the peer-to-peer eCash system, has become a punchline in tech circles.  Who would trust a form of currency that’s already been attacked by hackers?  Who’d trust a form of currency that only has value if the people who use it believe that it does?

Newsflash: you would. In fact, you do.  Cash is hacked on a daily basis- counterfeiters and fraudsters have been plying their trades for as long as currency has existed.  And as soon as we stopped bartering in chickens, we accepted the terms of faith-based  currency.  If everyone decided that gold was no longer valuable, it wouldn’t be.   Currency itself is already an abstraction, and one which we’ve long since removed from the physical world via credit cards and bank accounts.  Most of our money is already digital.  So why not put it online, where it can move around easily?

We already have, of course, through online credit card transactions and through intermediaries like PayPal, but both come with problems.  We’re still uncomfortable handing out our credit card info to most websites, so unless we’re dealing with the Amazons or Apples of the world, PayPal becomes the trusted middleman.  But PayPal takes a significant cut, freezes transactions based on political pressure, and is far from frictionless.  The result is that online commerce, booming as it may be, is still stunted. The early Internet dream of micropayments, where I might sell you this blog post for 6 cents, instantly transfered as soon as you click through to it, remains unrealized.

It’s a global problem, and one that the Royal Canadian Mint is attempting to solve.  MintChip is their new virtual currency. Like BitCoin, it’s as anonymous as cash, leaving no electronic record of who paid what to who.  Unlike BitCoin, it’s backed by a central authority, which is bad news for the anarcho-crypto Illuminati-fearing libertarian crowd, but good news for people who actually use it.

Will it be hacked? Probably. But a currency guaranteed by a wealthy and stable mint can sustain a certain amount of fraud without collapsing.  The Royal Canadian Mint has launched an app challenge to kickstart MintChip.  Good luck to them.

Jesse Brown is the host of TVO.org’s Search Engine podcast. He is on Twitter @jessebrown

How Arizona tried to make it illegal to say mean things online

By Luke Simcoe - Monday, April 9, 2012 at 11:06 AM - 0 Comments

@YourAnonNews

Lately, it seems you can’t swing a LOLcat by its tail without hitting some public official flaunting their ignorance of the Internet. We’ve seen everything from Vic Toews trying to haul Anonymous before the Canadian Parliament to New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly claiming that “the Internet is the new Afghanistan.”

Not wanting to miss out on the party, legislators in Arizona recently tried to make it illegal to say mean things online. Two weeks ago,the state senate unanimously passed Arizona House Bill 2549, which reads:

“It is unlawful for any person, with intent to terrify, intimidate, threaten, harass, annoy or offend, to use any electronic or digital device and use any obscene, lewd or profane language or suggest any lewd or lascivious act, or threaten to inflict physical harm to the person or property of any person.”

Regardless of the fact that we shouldn’t be legislating civility, or that the right to be as asinine and hyperbolic as possible is one of the basic tenets of the Internet, the law had “First Amendment violation” written all over it. The language was overly broad, and no definition of terms like “annoy” or “offend” was given, meaning the bill could have criminalized being a jerk in the comments section of a website.

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Security theatrics and Byron Sonne

By Jesse Brown - Thursday, April 5, 2012 at 2:45 PM - 0 Comments

Pat Hewitt/CP

“You guys sure as hell didn’t find any combined explosives, ’cause I didn’t make any.”
-Byron Sonne, under interrogation by Detective Tam Bui, June 26, 2010

It’s called “security theatre,” the bombastic display of body scanners and bomb squads paraded out in airports and at mega-events like the G-20 to deter terrorists and make us all feel safe. Does it stop terrorists who aren’t scared by the costumes and gadgets? Or does it miss them entirely while ensnaring hapless goofs who stick out from the crowd?

Those are the real questions yet to be answered in the curious case of Byron Sonne. They likely won’t be addressed until his criminal trial is over (the judge is deliberating now, verdict expected on April 23rd). That’s when, if he is cleared, Sonne has vowed to take legal action against the police for incarcerating him for 11 months and ruining his marriage and reputation.

But we may have to wait even longer for answers to the big questions, as the spectacular security show is back on. Yesterday, police bomb-squads returned to Sonne’s former residence in Forest Hill, two years after their first raid, and dug up his backyard.

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E-pirates draft a statute on best practices

By Luke Simcoe - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 at 2:00 PM - 0 Comments

Isaac Brekken/AP Photo

Luke Simcoe is a guest blogger. He contributes the occasional post on web culture, the various kooks and cranks who inhabit the Internet, as well as copyright matters.

Try to picture an Internet pirate in your head.

Maybe it’s some guy in his parent’s basement, swathed in blue light and surrounded by cables linking his PC to his television. Maybe it’s Kim Dotcom, dividing his time between yachting in the Mediterranean and playing Modern Warfare 3. Heck, maybe it’s even Angelina Jolie from Hackers. Whatever your picture entails, chances are your personal pirate doesn’t spend his time engaged in a lot of consensus building and debates about best practices.

And yet, it would seem that’s exactly what many of them do.

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Stalking women? There’s an app for that.

By Jesse Brown - Monday, April 2, 2012 at 1:52 PM - 0 Comments

girlsaround.me

This suggestive geometry app was deemed unacceptable by Apple’s fickle censors, but here’s something that made the cut: Girls Around Me, an app for “hunting” women. It’s a simple tool that aggregates personal location data from Facebook and FourSquare from strangers who have (knowingly or otherwise) left their profiles set to “public.” Girls Around Me looks for girls around you and plots them on a Google Map. Click on a nearby girl and the app will pull their information and photos for your creepy stalking pleasure. Would be pick-up artists (and/or rapists) can troll a neighbourhood, gleaning the relationship status, academic histories, likes and dislikes, and vacation photos of women they’ve never met who happen to be walking close by.

Girls Around Me was downloaded over 70,000 times before Cult of Mac wrote about it last week. To call the ensuing discourse a “controversy” would be to suggest that someone out there doesn’t think that the App is gross and dangerous. Even its Russian developer, i-Free Innovations, responded with a “yeah, we know” of sorts, and voluntarily pulled it from iTunes’ App store. But even as they did, they issued a statement complaining about being treated as a “scapegoat” in the privacy debate.

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How Hollywood uses Megaupload

By Jesse Brown - Friday, March 30, 2012 at 12:16 PM - 0 Comments

Kim Dotcom (Brett Phibbs/AP Photo/New Zealand Herald)

Kim Dotcom, the indicted Megaupload tycoon, has some news about his accusers: they’re also his customers. The defiant Dotcom (real name, Kim Shmitz) lobs some grenades back at his attackers in an interview with the filesharing news site Torrentfreak. Among other claims, he insists that many movie industry employees were paying him for online file storage. So, while the Motion Picture Association of America was lobbying the U.S. Government to pursue criminal action against Megaupload, employees of its member companies were using Megaupload to, well, mega upload (and, one assumes, to mega download).

There’s little doubt that Dotcom’s claims are true. As anyone who works in media can tell you, moving around gigantic files is still a mega pain. Email attachments are usually capped at 10-30 megs. When people in creative fields need to share large, uncompressed audio,video, and photography files, cloud services like Megaupload come in very handy. This lends support to Dotcom’s argument that Megaupload has many legitimate uses and is not simply a piracy enabler.

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Toews feeds trolls

By Jesse Brown - Tuesday, March 27, 2012 at 2:36 PM - 0 Comments

Adrian Wyld/CP Images

They never forgive, they never forget. Vic Toews should expect them.

Our Public Safety Minister painted a giant digital bullseye on himself today by continuing his silly crusade against an organization that doesn’t really exist. “Anonymous,” he told a Parliamentary committee, “is a threat to us all”. You could almost hear the lulz.

One has to feel a bit sorry for Toews. Few middle-aged technology neophytes have so successfully summoned the dregs of the Internet as Toews did when he told Canadians that they either stood with his Internet snooping bill or they stood “with the child pornographers”. Quicker than you could say “Beetlejuice,  Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice,” Toews was dealing with a tell-all Twitter account and a threatening ultimatum video from Anonymous. In it, Toews is asked to withdraw Bill C-30 and resign, or face the consequences.

As it turned out, the @vikileaks30 Twitter account was the partisan work of a Liberal staffer, who fumbled the ball by accessing his account through a Parliamentary computer. He was traced, exposed and forced to resign. Emboldened, Toews is now pursuing a far more nebulous foe- the “group” that posted that nasty video. He doesn’t know how to proceed, but asks for the help of the police and of “experts” to help him gain satisfaction. He won’t get it, but may end up with more than he asked for.

My instinct is to mock, but instead, I will educate. Vic, if you’re reading, here’s how it works:

• Anonymous is not a group.  There’s no clubhouse, no membership fees, no secret handshake. Anyone can drop in and participate for a moment and then leave without a trace. Members have no persistent identities, even to each other. Anonymous is better described as an online culture. Or just, y’know, this thing that happens.

• The threatening ultimatum that scared you so might have been whipped up in 10 minutes by a 10 year old. As chilling as they seem, these “official” Anonymous videos are trivial to make, often created by inputting a few sentences into a text-to-speech program and laying it over stock footage with scary movie-trailer music. Thousands of these videos have been created, lobbing threats at everyone from NATO to Justin Bieber .

• Usually nothing happens as a result of these videos. Each is a piece of bait, and most wriggle away on the hook and die un-nibbled. But if a target responds and throws some punches into the air- then it’s on. The more high-profile the victim, the bigger their response; the more attention it gets, the better.

• Video “operations” then become full-on “raids,” and soon thousands of faceless goons the world over come at you with whatever they can. This usually means hacking, mockery, and sending pizzas to your house. It can feel like you’re under physical attack, but it’s usually all just zeros and ones. Ignore it, and it goes away. Lean into it, and it never ends.

• Fighting Anonymous is impossible by design, but it’s funny to Anonymous when someone tries. The more laughs (lulz) a target creates, the longer a raid lasts.

This could be a long one.

Jesse Brown is the host of TVO.org’s Search Engine podcast. He is on Twitter @jessebrown

Selling Google’s weaknesses to the government

By Jesse Brown - Thursday, March 22, 2012 at 2:11 PM - 0 Comments

mediafury/Flickr

The world of hackers has largely been conceived of as a world of black and white. When a “black hat” hacker discovers a security vulnerability in a piece of software or a website–say, a method for intercepting emails or accessing strangers’ bank accounts,  he exploits it for personal gain, often breaking the law in doing so. When a “white hat” hacker makes the same discovery, he reveals it–either to the company that makes the technology or to the public (the latter is usually a better way of making sure the company in question actually fixes the problem).

Now, a fascinating piece in Forbes reveals a third kind of hacker, who exploits security vulnerabilities for a hefty profit, but does so without breaking the law. But don’t call them “grey hat” hackers–the results of their work may actually be more destructive than your typical act of black-hat cyber fraud.

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Ira Glass’ guilt trip

By Jesse Brown - Tuesday, March 20, 2012 at 3:00 PM - 0 Comments

CP Images

Q. Do you ever wonder if this desire to make things more “narrative” is a problem?

A. Maybe if I were a better person or a different kind of a reporter I would see a problem, but I don’t. It’s hard to do something that’s compelling. The best way to get it across is to attach the traditional devices of narrative: all the things that make it engaging and interesting. I don’t see a down-side to it.

-Ira Glass, interviewed on The Sound of Young America, November 2007

The dust is settling from the Mike Daisey affair. If you missed it, Daisey is the theatrical performer who presented parts of his one man stage show on the public radio program This American Life. The piece was about the atrocious working conditions at the Chinese factories where Apple products are made. Last week it was revealed that while the claims made against Apple are true, Daisey’s account of witnessing these things firsthand was largely fabricated.

This American Life dedicated a full episode to a retraction of the episode. It is one of the most uncomfortable pieces of radio you’ll ever hear. Host Ira Glass dissects Daisey’s lies with Daisey present. The exchange is equal parts lawyerly cross-examination and maternal guilt-trip. The episode is called Retraction, but it could easily have been titled “How could you do this to me?” 

Glass takes full responsibility for his part in airing the fabricated episode, but he seems very, very disappointed in that Mike Daisey. He can’t even bring himself to make his signature Torey Malatia joke at the end of the show. When it’s all said and done, Glass has apologized so thoroughly to his listeners that he emerges almost more noble and trustworthy than before the incident. This American Life will march on, lessons learned. Daisey, meanwhile,  is left behind in a smouldering heap–his reputation tarnished, then set ablaze, its ashes buried, the burial site pooped on.

I listened to the Retraction episode as soon as it was posted last Friday. It hasn’t been sitting well with me.

To be clear: This American Life is a journalistic enterprise of a high order. Over the past 17 years, no program or publication has done more to make important news stories sound important. And it has achieved this largely through narrative. For a “serious” news story to become a This American Life story, it will need a carefully constructed narrative arc, it will require cinematic flourishes, great writing, dramatic music, and most of all, it will require a strong central character for us all to relate to. The same storytelling techniques used by David Sedaris to talk about his family life are applied by This American Life to frame major world events.

But real life events rarely work this way. Is there one individual whose true life story fully encapsulates the Iraqi war or the European financial crisis? If so, This American Life is looking for her. News stories like this have to be cast like Hollywood movies.

Mike Daisey knew that, and he wanted the part. So he lied to Ira Glass and to Glass’ fact-checkers. His guilt is so clear and so painful that This American Life made a story out of it.

Jesse Brown is the host of TVO.org’s Search Engine podcast. He is on Twitter @jessebrown

Hoping for a wireless revolution in Canada

By Jesse Brown - Thursday, March 15, 2012 at 12:08 PM - 0 Comments

Yesterday Industry Minister Christian Paradis emerged from the secret invisible fortress he’s been hiding in since his appointment to announce the new rules that will govern the upcoming auctions of wireless spectrum.  He revealed a number of conditions designed to foster competition and extend services to rural areas, chief among them being the welcoming of foreign capital into our newer, smaller wireless providers.  Let’s hope the measures achieve these goals, and more.  If ever there was an industry in need of disruption, it’s Canada’s wireless sector.

It’s not that we pay too much (although we do).  It’s not that our services are lagging behind international standards in speed and coverage (although they are). The real problem is that we’re getting left behind. Wireless networks are getting so fast in other parts of the world that they are rendering moot the infamous “last mile” problem of networking.  First, each and every home needed its own telephone line. Then cable. It looked like fibre would be next, and the costs would be enormous, especially in a country like Canada where we’re all so darned spread out.

But while we’ve been wringing our hands over this problem, countries unlucky (read: poor) enough to have skipped telephone and cable networking have entered the wireless era with guns blazing.  Foreign mobile firms have entered 2nd and even 3rd world economies in South American, Eastern Europe and Africa, investing hundreds of millions of dollars in state-of-the-art wireless infrastructure and then charging whatever the people can afford for access.  Eventually the investment is returned and  almost all new income is profit. Governments have eagerly welcomed these companies, as they connect entire populations in a handful of years. The benefit to these economies has been incredible.  After decades of digital isolation, entire populations are rapidly getting online, joining the information economy, performing digital services and starting businesses.

And then there’s Canada.

If wireless service here were comparable in price and speeds to wired service, Canadians would quickly grow uncomfortable with the many bills we pay for our data.  Why pay a cable TV bill, a phone bill, a broadband Internet bill, a cellphone bill and a datastick bill when all of these services boil down to zeros and ones we send and receive through the air?  It would be like having to pay one bus ticket if you’re only wearing pants, another if you wear a shirt and another for your shoes.  The bus doesn’t know or care what you’re wearing, and zeros and ones don’t know or care if they add up to a Skype call, an episode of 30 Rock or an MP3 download.

But our incumbents do.  If we leave wireless innovation to our handful of massive telecom firms, we can expect to remain a digital ghetto.  Sure, they have and will invest in next generation wireless networks, but they can be counted on to mete out these services in drips and drabs, charging us through the nose for every minor incremental improvement in speed.  Worst of all, they will fight tooth and nail to segregate our data, resisting the natural convergence I’ve described.  If they don’t, they know that wireless will cannibalize their incredibly lucrative “last gen” services.  They know this will happen eventually, but they want the process to take as long as possible. We can’t afford that.

Ottawa’s last wireless spectrum auction, with its set-asides for new entrants brought us WIND, Mobilicity and Public – bargain providers who largely piggyback the incumbent networks in order to offer us reasonably priced cell phone service (CORRECTION: since launching, the new carriers have built out their own networks and only “piggyback” for roaming services. Thx Jamie). In just a few years, they have succeeded in driving prices down across the board. They have challenged the fictions of “system access” fees and domestic long-distance charges. But all together, they only comprise 4% of the market.

We need more than for these providers to simply stick around.  We need them to disrupt.  We need foreign firms to pump money into them, build out their own networks, and offer services that are not only faster than anything we’ve seen, but cheaper and use-neutral.

I’m still parsing the difference between set-asides and caps, but let’s hope Ottawa’s new terms for the next two spectrum auctions will bring revolution to our market- not evolution.

To put it bluntly, the first company to offer Canadians all the high-speed wireless data we can eat, however we care to eat it, for under $100 a month, will win this market.  And it’s a plum.

Jesse Brown is the host of TVO.org’s Search Engine podcast. He is on Twitter @jessebrown

Using homeless people as WiFi hotspots

By Jesse Brown - Monday, March 12, 2012 at 1:15 PM - 0 Comments

Photograph by hardlynormal.posterous.com

I am not making this up: homeless people are being used as human hotspots by a marketing firm.

It’s called a “charitable innovation initiative,” which loosely translates to “disgusting marketing ploy.” It’s happening right now on the streets of Austin, Texas, where the technology portion of the South By Southwest festival is underway. It works like this: you see a homeless dude hauling around some gear and wearing a t-shirt that says, “I’m Jimmy, a 4G Hotspot.” You pay (what you want) with cash or via SMS and then loiter around the guy for 15 minutes of the most awkward Internet access you’ve ever had. Yes, he keeps the money. No, that doesn’t make it okay.

Homeless Hotspots is brand-less for beta-testing, but if it’s deemed a success, expect future iterations to be brought to you by Verizon or whatnot.

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