Category: Technology

The government fights for its "lawful access"

Across our newspaper chain today, I argue that the C-30, the government’s so-called “lawful access” legislation, is bad, that, “there is no excuse for this kind of intrusion on the privacy rights of Canadians and certainly not one from a government that says it champions the idea that the federal government ought to respect individual liberties and rights.” [Read my full column on this]

Last night, perhaps seeing that there were a great number of pundits criticizing this bill [here’s the Post‘s Matt Hartley, for one], one of the aides for Public Safety Minister Vic Toews circulated three examples Continue reading The government fights for its "lawful access"

Text of C-30: The bill that would allow warrant-less Internet wiretaps

Here is the text of the Bill C-30, tabled this morning in the House of Commons. Among its provisions, it would allow police to obtain customer data and other information from your Internet service provider (ISP) and other telecom provider without first obtaining a warrant from a judge. NDP MP Charlie Angus calls this “an unprecedented bill that undermines the privacy rights of Canadians.” Continue reading Text of C-30: The bill that would allow warrant-less Internet wiretaps

For the record: Industry Canada and lawful access (c. 2006)

On Sept. 11, 2007, I filed a request to Industry Canada under Canada’s Access to Information Act, asking that department for any memos, briefing notes or presentation decks that had the issue of “lawful access” as their main topic. [Here is a Justice Department FAQ page on the issue and here’s a decent summary of where things stand about now on this issue] I got the response to this request — all 391 pages of it — more than four years or, to be precise, 1,578 days after asking. By law, departments are supposed to respond within 30 days. Continue reading For the record: Industry Canada and lawful access (c. 2006)

Steve

The following statement was issued this evening by Apple's Board of Directors:

We are deeply saddened to announce that Steve Jobs passed away today. Steve’s brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives. The world is immeasurably better because of Steve.

His greatest love was for his wife, Laurene, and his family. Our hearts go out to them and to all who were touched by his extraordinary gifts.

A memo Apple CEO Tim Cook sent to Apple employees today:

Team,

I have some very sad news to share with all of you. Steve passed away earlier today.

Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being. Those of us who have been fortunate enough to know and work with Steve have lost a dear friend and an inspiring mentor.

Steve leaves behind a company that only he could have built, and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple.

We are planning a celebration of Steve’s extraordinary life for Apple employees that will take place soon. If you would like to share your thoughts, memories and condolences in the interim, you can simply email rememberingsteve@apple.com.

No words can adequately express our sadness at Steve’s death or our gratitude for the opportunity to work with him. We will honor his memory by dedicating ourselves to continuing the work he loved so much.

Tim

c

 

Asian Cyberspace on the Rise: Challenges and Opportunities for Canada

The guy who runs the very cool Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto just published this:

Asia now comprises nearly 45% of the world’s Internet population. China alone – home to the world’s largest number ofInternet users – makes up more than half of the region’s entireInternet population. The China Internet Network Information Centre estimates that China’s online population rose  6 per cent to 485 million in 2011.  What is remarkable is that nearly two-thirds of Chinese, and close to 70 per cent of the Asian population as a whole, are not yet even online.
As this growth continues,the culture of global cyberspace will change. The concept of “Asian values” may have limited merit in academic circles, but there is no doubt that a sociological and political shift will occur that will affect cyberspace writ large. With these new users will come new ways of using and governing cyberspace, both at home and abroad, which will have far reaching implications for the world.

Interesting, no? Read on …

 

The Internet could break. No, really, it could break.

Now, it's unlikely that it will break. Indeed, researchers publishing under the imprimatur of the The European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) say as much in the opening of their report from last month on the “Resilience of the Internet Interconnection Ecosystem” [5.8 mb PDF]. (You do know that the Internet is not, in fact, one network but is, instead, the ultimate network of networks. I continue to argue with copy editors that the Internet, for that reason, should always be capitalized for the term describes only one thing and one specific thing — much like the third planet from the Sun which is always called Earth … but I digress). Hurricane Katrina, terrorist attacks, Mafiaboy — you name it — nothing has been able to bring the Internet to its knees … at least so far [pdf]…

…it does appear likely that the Internet could suffer systemic failure, leading perhaps to local failures and system‐wide congestion, in some circumstances including:

  • A regional failure of the physical infrastructure on which it depends (such as the bulk power transmission system) or the human infrastructure needed to maintain it (for example if pandemic flu causes millions of people to stay at home out of fear of infection).
  • Cascading technical failures, of which some of the more likely near‐term scenarios relate to the imminent changeover from IPv4 to IPv6; common‐mode failures involving updates to popular makes of router (or PC) may also fall under this heading.
  • A coordinated attack in which a capable opponent disrupts the BGP fabric by broadcasting thousands of bogus routes, either via a large AS or from a large number of compromised routers.

There is evidence that implementations of the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) are surprisingly fragile. There is evidence that some concentrations of infrastructure are vulnerable and significant disruption can be caused by localised failure. There is evidence that the health of the interconnection system as a whole is not high among the concerns of the networks that make up that system – by and large each network strives to provide a service which is reliable, most of the time, at minimum achievable cost. The economics do not favour high dependability as there is no incentive for anyone to provide the extra capacity that would be needed to deal with large‐scale failures.

Freeman Dyson reviews Gleick's The Information: From drum language to the human genome

Freemon Dyson reviews James Gleick's The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (Pantheon):

In 1945 Shannon wrote a paper, “A Mathematical Theory of Cryptography,” which was stamped SECRET and never saw the light of day. He published in 1948 an expurgated version of the 1945 paper with the title “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” The 1948 version [PDF] appeared in the Bell System Technical Journal, the house journal of the Bell Telephone Laboratories, and became an instant classic. It is the founding document for the modern science of information. After Shannon, the technology of information raced ahead, with electronic computers, digital cameras, the Internet, and the World Wide Web

…

The consequences of the information flood are not all bad. One of the creative enterprises made possible by the flood is Wikipedia, started ten years ago by Jimmy Wales. Among my friends and acquaintances, everybody distrusts Wikipedia and everybody uses it. Distrust and productive use are not incompatible. Wikipedia is the ultimate open source repository of information. Everyone is free to read it and everyone is free to write it. It contains articles in 262 languages written by several million authors. The information that it contains is totally unreliable and surprisingly accurate. It is often unreliable because many of the authors are ignorant or careless. It is often accurate because the articles are edited and corrected by readers who are better informed than the authors.

Jimmy Wales hoped when he started Wikipedia that the combination of enthusiastic volunteer writers with open source information technology would cause a revolution in human access to knowledge. The rate of growth of Wikipedia exceeded his wildest dreams. Within ten years it has become the biggest storehouse of information on the planet and the noisiest battleground of conflicting opinions. It illustrates Shannon’s law of reliable communication. Shannon’s law says that accurate transmission of information is possible in a communication system with a high level of noise. Even in the noisiest system, errors can be reliably corrected and accurate information transmitted, provided that the transmission is sufficiently redundant. That is, in a nutshell, how Wikipedia works.

The information flood has also brought enormous benefits to science. The public has a distorted view of science, because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries.

On the death of a Twitter friend

I never met Penny Lankshear. In fact, until a few hours ago, I did not know that the Twitter friend I knew only as Penlan was, in fact, Penny Lankshear,  a retired librarian living in Stratford, Ont. [As I come back to this post two years later, in Feb. 2013, I see Penlan is now someone else’s Twitter handle. Click through. I wonder if the new user knows about the Penny … – Akin]

I now know her name — and a little bit more than that — because she died.

Some now are blogging about her passing and I’m thankful for that to learn more about Penny. [I refer here to blog posts by James Curran, Liberal Arts and Minds, and Susan Delacourt].

So why am I both touched and saddened to learn of Penlan’s — Penny’s — passing even though our only relationship was through Twitter? To be honest, I don’t exactly know the answer to that.

I suspect though that it has something to do with that fact that our relationship, such as it was, was based on the fact that I believe we took each other seriously. I wanted to read what she had to say and, though I don’t know for sure, she seemed to be interested in what I had to say. She would re-tweet and comment on my stuff and I would do the same to her. She was, as it says in her Twitter profile bio, a “voracious follower” of Canadian politics. I, too, of course, am a “voracious follower” of federal politics. And that common connection – a serious interest in federal politics — was apparently all it took for each of us to take each other seriously when we bleated something out on Twitter.

And really, isn’t that what all of us want when it comes to political discourse? We want to know that others are listening to us. That we will not be insulted, demeaned, or hollered at for what we say about politics in this country but, rather, that our contributions will be considered, debated, and taken seriously.

So, thank you, Penny, wherever you may be now, for taking me seriously. (I should point out, in case it’s not clear that “taking me seriously” does not mean she always agreed with me. Indeed, she often disagreed with me. But she took my reportage seriously enough that she wanted to respond to). You have no idea how how important and meaningful that is for journalists who are always wondering if anyone ever cares about the things we write.  And, similarly, thank you for your contributions to the debate. I and many others, it’s now clear, took your contributions seriously. We wanted to hear what you had to say.

But beyond that, Penny’s death has forced me to think about the relationship, such as it is, that I have with other pseudonymous Twitter followers who, like Penny, contribute in positive ways to online political discusssions and who seem interested in the contribution I have to those discussions. I find myself asking myself this evening: Is everyone else OK? What are your names? Where do you live? What can I do to help?

Twitter and the Internet are strange beasts. I reported on Internet culture for a decade from 1995-2005 and was fascinated by how computer-mediated communications affect human relationships. And now, for reasons, as I said, I’m not quite clear about, I feel saddened to learn of the death of someone for whom the relationship consisted of little more than a frequent “Re-Tweet” or the occasional “modified tweet”.

MIT professor Sherry Turkle, who I have long admired for the her thinking and commentary when it comes to issues about how human relationships are being changed by the impact of always-on, Internet-connected gadgets, has a new book out right now called Alone Together. I have not yet read it but it’s generating a lot of reviews and commentary. She is, if I read the reviews and discussion correctly, down on new technologies, like Twitter, that we are using.New York Times review Jonah Lehrer says Turkle has concluded that the Internet is “a ball and chain that keeps us tethered to the tiny screens of our cellphones, tapping out trite messages to stay in touch. She summarizes her new view of things with typical eloquence: “We expect more from technology and less from each other.”

I’m looking forward to reading Turkle’s apparently bleak assessment of how we have become “Alone Together” but I will read it knowing that, without Twitter, I would never have known that “Penlan” was a woman named Penny Lankshear who may even have been from the town I was born in and who wanted to talk about politics for all the right reasons.

 

New from Pew: Cell phones ubiquitous; tablets now in 1 in 20 homes

Last fall, the Pew Internet and American Life Project wanted to see what kind of gadgets were in American's households. The results are out now and a chart from Pew is below. I would think that these results would be broadly similar for Canada (although I wouldn't be surprised to learn of greater rates of PC ownership.).

The takeaways: Everyone has a cell phone. Tablet PCs, like the iPad, are already in one in 20 households.

Absolutely fascinating: John Sculley on Steve Jobs

I've run into John Sculley  and shot the breeze with him whenever I've attended my favourite conference, PopTech, in Camden, Maine. Sculley has a fabulous place there just down the street from the opera house that is PopTech's home. I was a tech reporter back then, back in the days when the Internet was all new (I was an AOL member when it had less than 5,000 members, so there) and ebay and Amazon.com had yet to be invented.

One of the companies that fascinated me then — and still does — is Apple. Sculley was Apple's CEO for a decade or so in the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. He'd come to Apple from Pepsi where he had great success marketing the hell out of Pepsi and stealing Coke's market share and Apple's board wanted him to do the same thing with computers.

In this fabulously interesting interview, Sculley admits that he didn't know a thing about computers — one reason why he made the near-disastrous decision to stick with Motorola processor rather than Intel's x86 processor in the 1990s — and he talks a lot about Steve Jobs and how Jobs apparently doesn't talk to Sculley anymore.

Jobs was Apple's largest single shareholder when Sculley got hired as CEO but, though Jobs wanted to be CEO, the Apple board of directors picked Sculley instead.

Sculley would eventually get fired by Apple's board. Wikipedia has this verdict on Sculley's tenure at Apple:

“Sculley increased Apple's sales from $800 million to $8 billion. However, his stint at Apple remains controversial due to his departure from founder Steve Jobs's sales structure, particularly regarding his decision to compete with IBM in selling computers to the same types of customers. He was ultimately forced out of Apple in 1993 as the company's margins eroded, sales diminished and stock declined”

Two CEOs later, Jobs came back (I think the stock was around $13 then and is now about to hit or has hit $300), rescued the company, and the rest is history.

Apple, obviously, is Steve Jobs and Steve Jobs is Apple. But Sculley (pictured above next to a very young Jobs) was there for some important moments in Apple's history — the development of AppleTalk and of QuickTime, for instance — and, if you're at all a geek, this interview is an absolutely fascinating must-read.