New terminal at Canada's busiest airport opens today

The first passenger went through the new $4-billion Moshe Safdie-designed terminal at Pearson International Airport in Toronto today. The celebration to mark the terminal's opening will likely be a bit muted as its biggest tenant, Air Canada, is on the financial ropes. I had a story on CTV National News last night looking at the latest developments as the airline scrambles to find some new investors.

Sun Micro's Microsoft deal renews hopes

[From today's Globe and Mail]
Facing a future in which it could have ended up as a niche player hoarding a technology no one else wanted to buy, Sun Microsystems Inc. surrendered to its long-time rival Microsoft Corp. last week, to the delight of its own investors.
Before the markets opened on Friday, Santa Clara, Calif.-based Sun reported preliminary results for the quarter that ended March 28, said it would lay off 3,300 employees and agreed to use Microsoft's server technology in its products.
Sun's stock quickly took off, finishing the day 87 cents (U.S.) or 21 per cent higher.
Investors, though, were less enthusiastic yesterday, sending Sun's stock down 12 cents or 2.4 per cent on the Nasdaq Stock Market to close at $4.94.
“We are encouraged that Sun is beginning to execute on its restructuring plan,” said Steven Milunovich, an analyst at Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc. of New York. “[But] Sun's first-quarter preannouncement shows operating performance is deteriorating and the cost structure is still unsustainable.”… [Read the full story]

Arrest key win for NSA hackers

[From today's Globe and Mail]
A computer hacker who allowed himself to be publicly identified only as “Mudhen” once boasted at a Las Vegas conference that he could disable a Chinese satellite with nothing but his laptop computer and a cellphone.
The others took him at his word, because Mudhen worked at the Puzzle Palace — the nickname of the U.S. National Security Agency facility at Fort Meade, Md., which houses the world's most powerful and sophisticated electronic eavesdropping and anti-terrorism systems.
It was these systems, plus an army of cryptographers, chaos theorists, mathematicians and computer scientists, that may have pulled in the first piece of evidence that led Canadian authorities to arrest an Ottawa man on terrorism charges last week . . . . [Read the full story as it appeared in the paper]

First sprouts

Only three days after seeding, I'm already seeing sprouts. The Cosmos Superior, Cosmos Sensation and Evening Scented Stock have green shoots.
I rotated the seed planters so that they can all benefit from more light.
Meanwhile, outside, we've had some wickedly cold temperatures. We hit a low of -6 yesterday. Slightly warmer today, low of 1 and a high of 7 with some showers in teh forecast.

Spam and SPF

The service I use to register davidakin.com (and davidakin.ca, for that matter) is ready to implement SPF — Sender Policy Framework — what some in the Internet community say represents a real hope to cut down on spam and viruses. I'm not going to try to explain SPF for a couple of reasons. First, I'm still trying to figure it out and, secondly, the link I provided in the previous sentence does a much better job.
Basically, though, adopters of SPF will add some information to their DNS record that can be useful for operators of mailservers to determine if, indeed, mail that purports to be sent from a user at davidakin.com is indeed coming from davidakin.com.
I'm not sure if davidakin.com should activate SPF and I'm looking for input. Do you use it? What do you think? I'm willing to put up with a lot of spam and viruses because the inconvenience of having to deal with the crap in my e-mail inbox is nothing compared to my fear of missing some really important message. That's where I'm starting from when I start to evaluate anti-spam measures.

File-sharing ruling opens Pandora's box

Here's my story from today's Globe and Mail:

While at the University of Waterloo, Matt Goyer and his housemates didn't want to buy premium television channels such as The Movie Network.

But to make sure they didn't miss an episode of The Sopranos or Six Feet Under, both of which air in Canada on The Movie Network, Mr. Goyer and his friends would fire up a new kind of Internet-based file trading software application called BitTorrent and download episodes that had been digitized by other fans.

“You can get a ton of content. You name any TV show,” Mr. Goyer said yesterday from his office in Redmond, Wash., where he has started with Microsoft Corp. after finishing his studies at Waterloo this year.

Mr. Goyer and his friends scare companies that own the rights to television programs, films, software and books — content that can be digitized and distributed on the Internet with ease using freely available software.
In the wake of a Federal Court of Canada ruling yesterday involving the country's biggest record companies, some rights holders are worried that they have lost the ability to protect those rights.

“It would be unfortunate if people saw this decision and suddenly decided to use file-sharing to distribute copyrighted works. That's just not the case,” said Jacqueline Hushion, executive director of the Canadian Publishers Council … [Read the full story]

The Globe also publishes today a lengthy editorial on the issue of copyright form:

[The judge] ruled that posting thousands of songs on one's hard drive with the door open to downloaders worldwide does not amount to “authorizing” others to use them, any more than placing aphotocopier in a library does.

It's a bad analogy. Better to think of the uploader as a person who makes 300 photocopies of a book in the library and leaves them outside the door for anyone to pick up and take away. To our mind, the very posting of the files, accessible to all, clearly indicates an element of intent and encouragement. We hope a higher court will say so if the CRIA appeals the ruling . . . [Read the full editorial]

And finally, my colleague George Emerson jumps into the debate with an op-ed piece on the issue:

I hope our Federal Court judge's name [Konrad von Finckenstein] becomes a byword and a new rallying cry for our rights as citizens, consumers and taxpayers in the digital millennium. Maybe we'll have to shout, “Von, man, you rock!” every time we start to get back some of our privacy and property rights that are steadily being eroded by corporate greed and dumb legislation.

Mr. Justice von Finckenstein has, for the time being, slapped down the international entertainment industry's attempt to get what are, in effect, private corporate wiretaps on people who may or may not be sharing music files over the Internet. They already have them in the United States, thanks to current interpretations of a wrongheaded bill called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which Congress passed in 1998. [Read all of George's piece]

If it bleeds, it leads

My Globe and Mail colleague Ian Brown has an interesting story today about the ethical challenges faced by broadcasters and newspaper editors earlier this week over coverage of the murder and desecration of four Americans in Iraq. Many networks refused to show the footage of cheering crowds burning and mutilating the bodies. Some networks waited until after prime-time. Newspaper front pages the next day took a variety of approaches. Here's an excerpt from Brown's story:
“Concerns … gripped a late-afternoon meeting of Globe and Mail editors. Where normally three editors decide what picture will grace the front of the next day's Globe, this time 11 were involved, four of whom were women. Only one, deputy national editor Catherine Wallace, was in favour of using the most graphic of the pictures, a headless, armless, legless, charcoaled torso. “It was because I think that sometimes things are so barbarous that you should show how barbarous they are,” Ms. Wallace explained.
But The Globe's editors decided against the picture, based on three considerations: “the Cheerios factor” (not wanting to sicken breakfast readers), how much blood was shown (especially important in a colour picture), and how best to tell the story. “We were trying to find a balance between covering the story and not wanting to assault our readers,” editor Edward Greenspon added. “Your concern in these things is always, 'How do I best serve my readers?'””
If you can get a copy of the paper today, Brown's article is on A12 with thumbnail-sized colour reproductions of several of the front pages he refers to in his article.