Talking Internet data caps with Open Media
By Peter Nowak - Friday, May 25, 2012 - 0 Comments
Regulators are starting to come around, says the activist group
When it comes to broadband Internet, it seems like you can always count on regulators to turn a positive into a negative. Such was the case earlier this week when the U.S.’s Federal Communications Chairman Julius Genachowski defended so-called tiered pricing by internet providers–known in these northern climes as usage-based billing–as worthwhile efforts in fighting network congestion.
Critics in the U.S. quickly jumped on Genachowski for swallowing the industry’s excuses for shrinking caps, which was ironic given that his comments came only days after Comcast–the country’s largest cable provider–announced it was raising or doing away with its limits.
Up here in Canada, the reaction was similarly negative. York University professor David Ellis pointedly noted that Genachowski, who was once admired for his supposed progressiveness on Internet issues, has now apparently been suckered by the same fallacious reasoning our own regulators were once (and might possibly still be) enamoured with.
It’s a cliche that Canada might as well exist in a bubble, particularly technologically, as far as the U.S. is concerned because Genachowski should have looked north, where this topic has been debated ad nauseum, before making such a foolish proclamation. As Ellis points out, caps-as-congestion-fighters is an argument that has been largely discredited here. Too bad nobody told the Americans.
That said, I’m still wondering why many Canadians have such ridiculously low caps compared to Americans (typical plans on Bell and Rogers offer 60 to 70 gigabytes, compared to 300 or more on Comcast and the like). I put the question to Steve Anderson, head of activist group Open Media, and we ended up having a bit of a back-and-forth over email.
He said the reasons why Canadians are still paying too much for Internet services boils down to the following:
We only stopped things from getting worse with UBB – and now we’re only starting to actually fix the market – it’s a slow process. The government has completely failed to do anything to encourage next generation broadband. Other countries like the U.S. are investing I think like $100 billion. Here’s a bunch of other things they could be doing. [Network owners] repeatedly make it difficult for indies to deliver services.
Anderson also advocates patience with regulators, who are starting to come around:
I’m frustrated that we’re not really moving forward more quickly here in Canada. That said I actually think the CRTC is doing a reasonable job as of late – the state of the market developed over decades and it will take some time and multiple good decisions to fix it. I actually think the UBB decision was mostly good. They got the model right and costing wrong. The indies have survived and Distributel actually moved in to Quebec to offer serious competition to Bell and Videotron etc.. When they did so they explicitly cited the UBB decision for enabling them (they sent a letter to the CRTC to thank them). Also, more importantly – when the decision came in our main issue was that the costing was off and that they needed to start a transparent process to get at what the costs should be. The CRTC actually listened and is holding a consultation to considering that matter now… I think we need to be encouraging not slamming the CRTC right now.
I suggested that perhaps Open Media was being too Canadian, as in too polite. With Americans screaming bloody murder about their 300 GB caps, shouldn’t Canadians–and Open Media by extension–be more vocal in their opposition?
Anderson doesn’t think Canadians or Open Media are apathetic, but they’ve quieted down somewhat because there is positive movement in the right direction:
The CRTC really has taken a positive turn, and I think it’s just smart to give them space to do good things. If I just piss in their face even when they start moving in the right direction then I don’t carry much weight later when they fuck up… When the CRTC messes up, or the telecoms do something to create an inflection point – the outcry will happen again… If you look [at] the campaigns about internet issues we’ve run in the last year and a half it’s amazing how many people are active on these things. I actually think we have the most robust pro-internet movement in the world. Groups in the US and UK are copying our campaigns, and not the parts Open Media dreams up, the parts like #tellVicEverything that creative pro-internet [people] came up with after we raised the alarm. It’s inspiring to watch the EFF try to use that with CISPA and UK with their own issues.
One other issue we touched on was structural separation, one of my favourite topics. In some countries, governments have forced telecom giants to spin off their network operations into completely separate companies. Those companies then sell access to the network to all comers on equal terms, with the idea being that no one ISP is unfairly advantaged. Each is free to compete on items such as price, speed and service.
Anderson says the CRTC is starting to seriously listen to Open Media’s suggestions that such a system should be implemented in Canada. But with incumbent companies fighting like hell to avoid structural separation in countries where there’s just one of them, I retorted by suggesting this is a pipe dream in Canada. With the combined lobbying power of a whole host of big cable and phone companies, there’s no way it’ll happen.
On that, Anderson capitulated somewhat.
“I still think it’s still worth raising separation,” he said. “It’s wise to ask for more than you think you can get.”
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Pinterest is all pink, puppies and pretty ponies
By Lisan Jutras - Thursday, March 1, 2012 at 1:58 PM - 0 Comments
Here is a world devoid of science, of politics, of dark humour, of a social conscience
Sergiu Bacioiu/Flickr
Everyone’s epiphany of what womanhood means comes at different times. For some, it’s their first period. For others, it’s getting married. More likely, it’s the first time some dude in a car yells “Nice cans!” For me, it was clapping eyes on Pinterest.
For anyone unfamiliar, Pinterest is an up-and-coming social network that is based on sharing mostly visual images. You can make albums (“Dining room chairs” “Nice rapper grills” “Wedding dress ideas” “Insides of butcher shops”) and fill them with photos of things you fantasize about spending more time with. The first Pinterest album I saw was a designer’s. It was like a beautiful mood board brimming with illustrations, landscapes and black-and-white nudes; as a visual resource, it made sense to me.
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On copyright silliness, U of T and Western beat Vic Toews
By Luke Simcoe - Thursday, March 1, 2012 at 1:53 PM - 0 Comments
Benson Kua/Flickr
Luke Simcoe is a guest blogger. He will be contributing the occasional post on web culture, the various kooks and cranks who inhabit the Internet, as well as copyright matters.
Between them, the University of Toronto and the University of Western Ontario possess a sizeable portion of Canada’s brain trust. Yet somehow, the two institutions recently agreed to a copyright deal so dumb that one observer accused them of a “complete capitulation to an important battle over the costs and parameters of access to knowledge in Canadian post-secondary institutions.”
In an under-reported move back in January, U of T and Western signed a new agreement with Access Copyright, the private body responsible for collecting and distributing royalties in Canada. Previously, Access Copyright collected an annual tariff of $3.38 per full-time student. Under the new agreement–retroactive to 2011 and extending until the end of 2013–that fee has ballooned to $27.50. Granted, the new fee eliminates the levy applied to photocopied coursepacks, but those coursepacks are already being phased out as more material becomes legally available online or through commercial databases. Continue…
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Truly ‘mature’ video games needed for aging gamers
By Peter Nowak - Wednesday, February 29, 2012 at 4:41 PM - 0 Comments
erin m/Flickr
Will there ever be a Call of Duty: Seniors’ Edition? It’s a question I found myself asking after speaking with a CTV reporter the other day.
The reporter was working on a story about a recent study that involved World of Warcraft and senior citizens. According to the study’s co-author, Jason Allaire at North Carolina State University, “People who played ‘World of Warcraft’ versus those who did not play experienced an increase in cognitive ability, particularly older adults who performed very poorly in our first testing session.” In other words, World of Warcraft–and video games in general—may be good for older people. Continue…
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Do we need more Vikileaks?
By Jesse Brown - Wednesday, February 29, 2012 at 4:39 PM - 0 Comments
How very boring that Vikileaks has turned out to be just a sleazy partisan attack from a Liberal staffer. It’s already being absorbed into the system: politics as usual. Rae is sheepish, Toews indignant, Trudeau tap-dances and the NDP are vindicated and can enjoy the show from a comfy distance. Oh well.
As an inside volley, the Twitter-smears were indeed foul play. I found them ugly, but effective. They violated the acceptable codes and norms of Parliament Hill. They used personal details to fight public policy. Adam Carroll, the staffer behind the account, needed to go.
But what if Vikileaks had indeed been the lunchtime project of a random, anonymous Canadian? Continue…
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Hulu and Netflix launch original Web programming
By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, February 28, 2012 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments
Streaming giants take first step toward the Internet replacing regular TV
Evan Agostini/AP
Clearly there aren’t enough videos on the Internet. In February, the streaming giants Hulu and Netflix branched into original programming, with Hulu launching the comedy Battleground a week after Netflix unveiled its drama Lilyhammer. Despite their proclamations that this is the first step toward replacing regular TV, both shows reflect just how little money the companies are willing or able to invest: Lilyhammer takes place in Norway so that Norwegian television can pick up a lot of the tab, while Battleground creator J.D. Walsh joked, “Wait, other shows have a writers’s room?” to TV Guide. But with TV content less readily available to Web services, this may be the first step toward planning for the future: like cable companies, the Web firms realize that original content is a more durable investment than reruns. Of course, they might make more money if they’d make Hulu available in Canada.
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After Vikileaks, we can protect privacy, or outgrow it
By Adam Goldenberg - Monday, February 27, 2012 at 3:58 PM - 0 Comments
How the Facebook generation is handing the Earth over to the meek
Dave Makes/Flickr
“We need to talk about your Facebook photos,” one of my supervisors told me, soon after I started working on Parliament Hill. “There are a bunch of you in drag. You need to take them down.”
She was right. As an undergraduate, I had been a member of an old-fashioned theatre troupe. Our show had ended one year with the entire all-male cast—myself included—in pink three-inch heels, doing high-kicks, dressed as sequined swans.
There are pictures. Lots of them. I saw no problem, but my new boss did. “Do you really want to see yourself in makeup on some Conservative blog?” she asked. Continue…
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The Internet vs. Hamza Kashgari
By Gabriela Perdomo - Friday, February 24, 2012 at 11:56 AM - 0 Comments
How an online lynch mob left a Saudi writer facing a death sentence
From the green-clad tide of pro-democracy demonstrators who took to the streets of Tehran in 2009 to the ongoing demonstrations in Egypt, we’ve been led to believe that social media can be a force for good. Young people inciting others to action against repressive regimes through Twitter; witnesses putting videos on YouTube decrying state-sponsored violence; Facebook groups inviting protesters to gather at a square to chant for freedom. Yet in the case of Hamza Kashgari, a 23-year-old newspaper columnist from Saudi Arabia, the Internet has emerged as the source of repression.
Saudi Arabian authorities have charged Kashgari with blasphemy, apostasy and atheism for a series of tweets about the Islamic prophet Muhammad he posted on Feb. 4. On the prophet’s birthday, Kashgari wrote: “I love many things about you and hate others, and there are many things about you I don’t understand” / “On your birthday, I shall not bow to you” / “I shall not kiss your hand. Rather, I shall shake it as equals do, and smile at you as you smile at me. I shall speak to you as a friend, no more.” (Translations from the WashingtonPost and the Christian Science Monitor.) Minutes after the posts went live, hundreds of angry tweeters were using a hashtag translated as “Hamza Kashgari the dog” urging authorities to punish him. (A hashtag is the “#” symbol used to identify topics on Twitter; dogs are considered unclean animals by many Muslims, so calling someone a “dog” is particularly offensive.) Continue…
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Orangutans and gorillas go bananas for tablet computers
By Kate Lunau - Thursday, February 23, 2012 at 10:10 AM - 0 Comments
And offer zoo researchers insight into their brains
Shutterstock; Photograph by Jessica Darmanin; Photo Illustration by Levi Nicholson
The three orangutans at the Milwaukee County Zoo have a new toy. Once a week, zookeeper Trish Khan brings out an old iPad for them to play with. “I downloaded a bunch of apps I thought might interest them,” she says. One favourite is Doodle Buddy, a fingerpainting program; they also like apps that turn the iPad into an instrument that can be tapped like a drum or strummed like a guitar. “They love to watch videos,” she says. The adult female, MJ, “loves David Attenborough,” who makes natural history films. Khan carefully holds up the iPad instead of handing it over; the ape could easily break it in half.
Milwaukee’s project has been such a hit that zoos across North America, including Toronto, are clamouring to get some. “We’ve got about 20 zoos waiting,” says Richard Zimmerman, director of the non-profit Orangutan Outreach, which is running a campaign called Apps for Apes that aims to get more tablet computers to zoos. Eventually orangutans in different zoos will be able to visit each other via Skype or FaceTime—maybe even start Internet dating. “Orangutans have to move zoos for mating,” says York University’s Suzanne MacDonald, who studies animal behaviour and cognition. “It would be really cool if they could meet over the Internet first and see if they got along, or if they’re terrified of each other.”
Milwaukee got its first iPad almost by accident. “Our gorilla keeper was on Facebook and saw a picture of a gorilla on an iPad,” Khan says. “She commented, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if I could get my gorillas an iPad?’ So a gentleman who’d just bought a brand new one gave his older one to the gorillas.” The zoo now has four split between gorillas and orangutans, but orangutans seem to prefer them. “Gorillas have a different way of interacting,” MacDonald says. “They look at things sideways, because it’s a threat to look at it directly. Orangutans like to look directly at things and figure them out.”
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Mobile games locked in Mortal Kombat
By Peter Nowak - Wednesday, February 22, 2012 at 2:27 PM - 0 Comments
(Warner Bros./AP Photo)
The PlayStation Vita, which launches on Feb. 22, has been getting a lot of press over the past few weeks, for a number of reasons. On the one hand, with gaming hardware continually getting more powerful, manufacturers are slowing down the rate at which they release next-generation machines. Home consoles such as the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 are now into their seventh and sixth years, respectively, which is considerably longer than the previous generation (the original Xbox, for example, had a four-year run before the Xbox 360 arrived).
Sony’s next-generation handheld is also getting a lot of attention because it is being released into a vastly different world than its predecessors. Over the past few years, smartphones and tablets have arisen to become mobile gaming powerhouses, leading observers to speculate on whether the death of portable systems such as the Vita is nigh. I spoke with Jack Tretton, CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment America, on the topic last week and he, of course, doesn’t see it that way. Continue…
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Vikileaks: a bad way to make a good point
By Jesse Brown - Thursday, February 16, 2012 at 5:15 PM - 0 Comments
“Vic wants to know about you. Let’s get to know about Vic”Thus begins the Vikileaks Twitter account, a mean-spirited, vindictive, and very effective effort to humiliate and discredit Public Safety Minister Vic Toews. The account claims to draw its material from publicly available court documents from Toews’s divorce. In less than 100 tweets (so far), its anonymous author assassinates Toews’ character in ways personal and professional. I learned more about Toews than I cared to.
I won’t pass along the dirt. I don’t have to. It’s out there for anyone to read—and a lot of people are reading. As I write, the account has been active for about 48 hours, and it already has over 7,000 followers. Even if the account is shut down, its revelations will live online forever. And it probably won’t be shut down. Publishing court records is perfectly legal. Continue…
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The Why We Broke Up Project
By Elio Iannacci - Thursday, February 16, 2012 at 8:30 AM - 0 Comments
Daniel Handler is collecting romantic sob stories online to promote his latest book
Maira Kalman/HarperCollins Publishers
Burned by a bad romance? Scarred from a messy relationship? Need to unload after a Kardashian, Klum or Kutcher-type split? Instead of drowning your sorrows, author Daniel Handler asks that you post them online.
The man formerly known as Lemony Snicket has created a Tumblr page, the Why We Broke Up Project, which invites visitors to post romantic sob stories for digital publication. Handler’s request for submissions is simple: willing participants are asked to share the reason why they broke up with their respective exes. Blog tags such as “I can’t believe how disgusting you were” and “I can’t believe there was someone else” help over-sharers categorize their entries.
“For practical and therapeutic purposes, I’m glad the site is up,” says the 41-year-old San Francisco-born author, who has personally responded to entries that move him. “For selfish reasons, too.” That’s because it was created to promote his latest book, Why We Broke Up, an illustrated young adult novel. “When I tell people about the book’s premise—that it is about a dramatic teenage love affair that ends badly—it usually prompts them to launch into their own troubled story of a former boyfriend or girlfriend.”
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Lessons from Woody Harrelson’s ‘epic fail’ on Reddit
By Luke Simcoe - Monday, February 13, 2012 at 5:31 PM - 0 Comments
Please welcome Luke Simcoe to the blog. He’ll be contributing the occasional guest post on the Internet and the various kooks and cranks who inhabit it.
memegenerator.net
Woody Harrelson knows what it’s like to be famous in real life, but after a failed attempt to promote his latest film on Reddit, he’s learning what it’s like to be infamous on the Internet.
As part of the press junket for the upcoming Rampart, Harrelson participated in one of the social news site’s popular “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) threads. Almost immediately, one user asked the former Cheers star about a time he supposedly crashed a high school prom and slept with a female student:
“I swear this is a true story. I went to a high school in LA and you crashed our prom after party (Universal Hilton). You ended up taking the virginity of a girl named Roseanna. You didn’t call her afterwards. She cried a lot. Do you remember any of this and can confirm or have you been so knee deep in hollywood pooty for so long that this qualifies as a mere blip?”
Harrelson denied the allegation, but things only got worse from there, as he refused to answer questions that didn’t pertain to the film and left the conversation shortly thereafter.
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Can Facebook be worth $100-billion?
By Chris Sorensen - Friday, February 10, 2012 at 10:35 AM - 0 Comments
The website’s upcoming IPO has tongues wagging
Facebook’s upcoming IPO has tongues wagging on Wall Street amid expectations the social networking site could fetch up to a US$100-billion valuation, and make founder Mark Zuckerberg and many of his employees very rich in the process. That includes a homeless graffiti artist who painted the walls of Facebook’s original Palo Alto, Calif., headquarters and took his payment in stock (now worth as much as $200 million). But, while there’s no questioning Facebook’s popularity, with nearly 850 million users and counting, several potential investors are still scratching their heads over the company’s business.
A close look at Facebook’s filings with U.S. securities regulators last week revealed a company that’s very much a work in progress. Though Facebook is profitable with enviable margins—it earned US$1 billion on revenues of $3.7 billion last year—there’s still a lot of revenue growth that needs to happen to justify a US$100-billion valuation. Google Inc., for instance, had a price-to-sales ratio of 8.7 when it went public in 2004, according to financial website MarketWatch. Facebook’s is closer to 26.
Investors clearly have huge expectations for Facebook’s future given its ballooning subscriber base, the growing number of hours users spend on the site each day, and the fact that few people ever delete their profiles for fear of being cut off from their vast network of “friends.” The belief is that advertisers will find it all an intoxicating elixir. “With close to a billion users, this is the Web story of the decade,” says Carmi Levy, an independent tech analyst and writer.
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Biting into Apple
By Colby Cosh - Tuesday, February 7, 2012 at 10:20 AM - 0 Comments
Consumers are waking up to the ugly truth about how iPads and iPods
Wang Yishu/ChinaFotoPress
“All companies have secrets,” goes an epigram in Adam Lashinsky’s new book. “The difference is that at Apple everything is a secret.” Lashinsky’s Inside Apple shines an X-ray on the bizarre culture of rivalry and silence that Steve Jobs built at the tech giant’s famous campus in Cupertino, Calif. The price of working for Apple in America, it turns out, is security harangues, legal threats, and paranoia—along with extensive explanations of exactly why you, as an Apple employee, ought to be paranoid. Without obsessive secrecy, Apple’s new-product rollouts wouldn’t have the dramatic quality that keeps the cultists mesmerized.
Under Jobs, Apple was traditionally just as secretive about its manufacturing arrangements abroad. Which is what made the company’s Jan. 13 press release so portentous. Its opening words: “The following is an alphabetical listing of Apple production suppliers.” Nothing special for a publicly traded company, you might say, but the list, from AAC Technologies Holdings Inc. to Zeniya Aluminum Engineering Ltd., had long been sought by Apple-watching activists and critics without success.
“For Apple, this is huge, the equivalent of the Berlin Wall coming down,” says Leander Kahney, a tech journalist who edits the Cult of Mac news website. “It goes against all the company’s instincts. There’s a lot of trade-secret stuff the company has released here.”
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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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Twitter is censoring–but don’t rush to judge
By Jesse Brown - Monday, January 30, 2012 at 3:36 PM - 0 Comments
Since announcing its uneasy compromise with censorship last week, Twitter has unsurprisingly taken a lot of heat–much of it on Twitter. The company blog raised flags immediately with its mealy-mouthed characterization of oppressive, censorious nations as places that merely have “different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression.” One of these nations, Thailand, has a particularly different idea about these contours–it thinks that if you disrespect their King, you should be imprisoned for up to 20 years (in the Internet age, this disrespect includes “liking” disrespectful Facebook content). This week, Thailand was the first country to high-five Twitter on their swell new policy. Can a gift-basket from Syria be far off?The fact that Twitter is willing to cut a deal with the oppressive monarchs and tyrants of the world is unsettling at best, and an online protest movement has quickly mobilized. Hashtags like #TwitterCensored and #BoycottTwitter proliferated over the weekend, and groups including Reporters Without Borders condemned Twitter’s decision. But I’m not sure that they’re right.
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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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The touch-screen classroom
By Kate Lunau - Thursday, January 26, 2012 at 9:30 AM - 0 Comments
How technology can reinvent how and where children learn
Courtesy of Michelle Lui
At Eden High School in St. Catharines, Ont., students are banned from using their cellphones in the hallways. In Eric Moccio’s classroom, it’s a different story. Moccio, who teaches music and media arts, employs his students’ phones as a teaching tool: he recently had them vote via text message on the topic of an upcoming video project. Moccio projected a live chart to the front of the class, which “readjusted to show numbers as votes came in, American Idol-style,” he says. Another time, he ran a scavenger hunt, texting clues to students as they searched through the school. (That day, he got special permission from administration, and each student carried a signed note of permission to use their phone.) Today’s smartphones can do much more than just make calls; “they’re computers,” Moccio says, and with so many students carrying powerful devices in their pockets these days, “we’d be fools not to use them.”
Despite the technology-rich environment that surrounds kids outside school walls, most classrooms are lagging. Administrators worry that the use of phones, iPods and tablets could cause distractions, promote the rise of cyberbullying and other bad behaviour, and maybe erode literacy skills, fretting that students might start including textisms like “CUL8R” in their essays. While some school boards have resorted to bans on some technologies, not all educators agree that’s a good idea. In September, the Toronto District School Board, Canada’s largest, reversed a rule that personal devices should be turned off and out of sight within its schools, after trustees recognized that smartphones and other devices might actually enhance student learning. Now, teachers like Moccio are experimenting with new ways to use not only smartphones but tablet computers and interactive whiteboards. Indeed, proponents say that, at its best, technology can change virtually any place into a classroom—or transform a classroom into somewhere as remote and different as a Borneo rainforest.
Perhaps no school board has embraced the smartphone’s potential like the one in St. Mary’s City, Ohio, which offers a glimpse of how lessons might be taught in the future: through what’s called “mobile learning.” There, the board buys smartphones and distributes them to kids in Grades 3 to 5. (Calling and texting are disabled, and the Internet is filtered.) These phones come equipped with specialized software, including an animation program and PiCoMap, a brainstorming tool, and each one has a slide-out keyboard.
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Bill C-11: copyright, the movie
By Jesse Brown - Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 2:49 PM - 0 Comments
Correction: in an earlier version of this post, I bungled the numbers of every copyright bill mentioned, each time they were mentioned. You realize that I’ve been covering this stuff for years, right? I regret the error, and will try to get more sleep tonight.A ragtag group of plucky idealists stand up to bullying corporations who seek private profit at the expense of public freedom. The protesters’ message spreads, their numbers swell, and the people stand united. They demand action from politicians whose allegiances have strayed, and they speak truth to power in creative and inspiring ways. Their voices combined cannot be ignored. The people prevail.
It’s awfully cheesy—a Hollywood remake of a much darker foreign film. In the original Canadian version, the people got screwed.
That’s how SOPA is different from Bill C-11. When the anti-SOPA protests were heating up a few weeks back, I’ll admit it, I was bored. I’d seen this movie before, and I knew how it was going to end. I was wrong. SOPA is dead, while Bill C-11 is set to pass.
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There’s no easy way out for RIM
By Jesse Brown - Monday, January 23, 2012 at 1:23 PM - 0 Comments
Trendsetter/Flickr
Now is the time for all the armchair CEOs to tell Thorsten Heins how to do his job.
RIM must focus on software and kiss developers’ asses. RIM must focus on hardware and create a SuperPhone. RIM must make a better tablet. RIM must ditch tablets entirely. RIM must stop trying to look cool and focus on business clients. RIM must get cool and target hip young clients. Opinions are like smartphones–every pundit has 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…
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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.
InvisibleIndustry Minister Christian Paradis has said the rules for the auction will be unveiled “soon.” -
The day the Net stood still
By Jesse Brown - Thursday, January 19, 2012 at 1:01 PM - 0 Comments
Yesterday’s SOPA protest changed everything or nothing, depending on who you ask.
Wikipedia went dark, as did Reddit and many smaller sites. Google stayed live, but presented U.S. visitors with the above–a chilling break from the usual whimsical “Google Doodle.” Hundreds of millions of people who knew little about SOPA, learned of it. Lawmakers got the message, and many withdrew their support for the ham-fisted and technologically illiterate anti-piracy law. The bill itself may not be completely dead, but it’s pretty damn close. Beyond the direct issue at hand, many regarded the event as a watershed in American politics. SOPA-critic Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren said:
“This is an important moment in the Capitol. Too often, legislation is about competing business interests. This is way beyond that. This is individual citizens rising up.”
On the other hand, maybe nothing changed at all. The Obama administration had already publicly trashed SOPA, and the bill’s chances were shaky at best. The disappearance of Wikipedia for a day led to many jokes about factually incorrect homework assignments, but we all somehow got by. And sure, millions of people signed petitions or changed their Twitter picture, but such “slacktivism” is easily dismissed–what’s a disgruntled mouse click worth, anyhow?
It can be worth plenty–plenty of money, and plenty of votes. The SOPA backlash was nothing less than America’s digital spring. The Internet flexed its muscle, and Washington flinched. The people now know what a little slacktivism can do, and so do their representatives.
Jesse Brown is the host of TVO.org’s Search Engine podcast. He is on Twitter @jessebrown
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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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Police: No ‘good examples’ of why we need Lawful Access
By Jesse Brown - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 at 10:28 AM - 0 Comments
www.stopspying.ca
For the past 12 years, Canada’s cops have been pushing for new laws that would allow them to skip the pesky formality of having to get a warrant before spying on us on the Internet. (For some background on these Lawful Access laws, check out these posts.)
Critics of Lawful Access, such as our federal Privacy Commissioner and every provincial Privacy Commissioner, argue that police have yet to provide sufficient evidence that court oversight has actually slowed them down or stopped them from fighting crime. And now, Canadian police themselves are saying the same thing.
The online rights group OpenMedia.ca has obtained and released a message it says was recently sent by the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police (CACP) to law enforcement colleagues urgently requesting that they provide “actual examples” of cases where the need to get warrants before accessing private information from Internet Service Providers “hindered an investigation or threatened public safety.” The message goes on to admit that though a similar request had been made two years ago, it failed to produce “a sufficient quantity of good examples.”
