Off By One

Buried under the avalanche of holiday-related product placements that hit once every year for about, oh, three months, a major change in Canadian copyright legislation is about to take place, and — despite Minister of Industry Jim Prentice’s claim that this change will “put consumers first,” there’s little enough of that to be seen in the proposed legislation.

Now, I’m not going to parrot the analysis here, because one of the biggest friends that this type of law has is an uninformed populace. What I’d ask instead is that you (the two of you still reading this after my long silence) spend a morning informing yourself about the way laws like this will affect your freedom to consume and produce art in the Canada we’ll live in for the foreseeable future. If you need a starting point, as I’m sure that you do, I can offer a couple:

If you want a great video showing you what is happening in the US — whose DMCA is the template for the act that will be introduced in Canada sometime in the next week and a half — then I recommend Lawrence Lessig’s TED talk: How Creativity is Being Strangled By the Law. It’s 20 minutes, but it’s well worthwhile.

If you’re more inclined for a local perspective, you can do far worse than Michael Geist’s Canadian DMCA articles. Geist is a lawyer specializing in the internet — specifically issues with respect to privacy and e-Commerce, and he’s one of our best early-warning systems for dangerous copyright legislation.

And, in the end, if you come to the end of these links — and please at least skim them — and you want to do something, there’s an article on what you can do, too. I, for one, am going to be contacting Laurie Hawn and Jim Prentice. Hopefully on some level they listen.

Update

I just sent this to Jim Prentice

Good day, Mr. Prentice;

I am not one of your constituents in the strictest sense, being from Edmonton. I do live in Laurie Hawn’s constituency, and I am a Conservative voter in both the capital- and small-c- senses. It is in the latter capacity — as a philosophical conservative — that I write you today.

I believe that Canada’s future as a vibrant culture and an economic powerhouse can be better assured by removing barriers to innovation and reducing the challenges with which creative persons must contend to produce their art. Coming into the earlier parts of the 21st century we have an unparalleled opportunity to take the fruits of our technological process at this early stage of their development and use them to broaden our collective horizons in ways that you and I cannot possibly imagine at this time. This will not, however, happen if we as a nation do not protect the freedoms necessary to create new art from old, a process which has been ongoing for almost all of human history, with a lull only in the early parts of the 20th century when the costs to create new media prevented all but the largest corporations from participating. That imbalance has now righted itself, and the technology of creativity is now democratically available again. The question is, with what will these newly-enabled artists create? What will be their raw material? Moreover, how will others see their work? The restrictive legislation that is to be tabled later this month lacks critical provisions for fair use and for reverse engineering, both of which are driving forces of invention.

Make no mistake, I am not a ‘copyleft’ fanatic; I am a software developer by trade and I make my living on copyright and the protections it provides. I do not wish to see a regime wherein my work is freely available without compensation to any Tom, Dick, or Harry who decides that they want it. Moreover, my friends who are artists run the gamut from the “give it away” to the “it’s mine and I should be paid for it” on the spectrum. What is true, however, is that the legislation that you are expected to introduce this month will hurt all of us in ways that are eminently predictable, since we have the immediate example of the United States to see.

In conclusion, I ask that you reconsider your stance on consumer consultation before introducing this bill. When creating content has become so trivial (witness YouTube, although perhaps you’ll share my sense of disappointment with most of that content) it’s important to realize that the only difference between a ‘consumer’ and a ‘creator’ in this century is likely to be in the size of their wallet.

Thank you for your time.

Because I’ve recently read the tragic news that a Russian spam baron was found dead under suspicious circumstances, and because that’s probably not a good long-term solution to the problem, I bring you:

The universal spam solution critique

Your company advocates a

( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won’t work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Microsoft
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Yahoo
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid company for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down! 

Two articles in the Wall Street Journal, one titled Are We Teaching Our Kids To Be Fearful of Men? and its sequel, Avoiding Kids: How Men Cope With Being Cast as Predators.

I’m just going to let these speak for themselves.

Found via MetaFilter.

ICBM.

Thank you, MetaFilter.

If you’re an internet forum reader of any kind, watch it to the end.

I was going to resist…

I’ve got more consoles now than I’ve had in my life (Char with her PS2, PS1, and GC, me with my Xbox and Wii) but god damn it, this Bioshock demo is going to suck me in, I just know it.

Of course it’s coming out for the PC, where I have to reboot to play.

I think I might run Windows for a while. Just until the shakes end.

Or I’ll buy a goddamned 360, not because I believe in it as a platform, but because playing the sequel to System Shock 2 is, actually, worth $700 to me. Yes, it was that good.

Further adventures in the internet: Conspiracy Theories.

Not a list of them, nor debunking, but instead an examination of what they have in common and some ideas about why people believe them.

Nothing heavy, but I found it nifty.

You know, I feel sorry for the iconoclasts of the world; it’s not easy to convince people that their particular brand of fixed idealism is a bad approach, and the more religious the adherence the harder it is to combat.

This particular line of thought comes about while reading an essay by Freeman Dyson entitled Heretical Thoughts About Science and Society, wherein Mr. Dyson discusses some of his own personal heresies vis-a-vis global warming. Although he makes coherent arguments, he is doomed from the start not by flaws in his arguments, nor by the unimpeachable truth of the ideas he’s criticizing, but instead he’s doomed to forever tilt at windmills on this subject because — like religion and political orientation — belief in climate change, for or against, is based not on reason but on faith.

So, I feel sorry for Freeman Dyson. I feel sorry for Bjorn Lomborg. I feel sorry for Al Gore (although for different reasons — he’s part of the solution here, and part of the problem there) and for Richard Dawkins and James Randi.

/me blows the dust off

Wow. That’s gotta be a record.

I couldn’t say why I’ve been so blasé about the whole ‘blog’ thing the last while. I’ve just had little to say, and less inclination to spew random junk onto the web.

So, in a sense trying to get back into the swing of things, here’s something fascinating I found on Metafilter today: Coping with Autism. It’s a bullet-pointed self-help guide for people with autism that offers an interesting insight into what differs in their approach to the world. Autism is one of those things that fascinates me, as something that is not quite a disability, but is often viewed as one.

Anyway, hope you all find this interesting.

This is a two-pronged posting:

Domain name change

First, as you probably failed to notice when you clicked into the comments on the pages, there’s a new name for this site, in terms of ways to get to it: www.offby1.net. The old offlineblog.com address won’t stop working, so worry not, but offby1.net is now the preferred URL, and all links on the site will point to it, as soon as I figure out how to walk my MySQL database and convert all of the old URLs.

Anti-scientific idiocy

Second is a pointer to some more ludditism: The New Internationalist, a newsmagazine recommended to me by Char is a mostly-interesting alternative view on the world; not one with which I agree on most points, but nonetheless a refreshing perspective, but subject to some of the common flaws of its kind, including this example of total technological paranoia, calling for a small, but scary, symbol for nanotechnology, and demonstrating a complete inability to distinguish means from ends. This mini article is analogous to calling for a warning label on all products made with screwdrivers.

Why can’t people pull their heads from their asses and ensure that they know what they’re protesting? I want to ask if it’s too much to ask for people to inform themselves, but the ‘protest movement’ is an adequate demonstration that I needn’t bother; it is too much to ask.

A choice quote:

Yet invisible nanomaterials are already being used in our food, cosmetics, pesticides and clothing, even though they are not labelled and we do not know what their health and environmental impacts might be.

Uhm…

You do know that your “invisible nanomaterials” are completely indistinguishable from atoms, right? It’s almost like (gasp!) matter is entirely made up of some “invisible nanomaterials” whose characteristics are not completely understood.

Thanks to this asshole, I just lost the Game