Off By One

Nothing on internet censorship (note: If you’re on a Canadian ISP and reading this, there are now sites blocked for all Canadians. Right now they’re kiddie porn only… but it’s a short step from that to deciding other sites are objectionable and blockable. Your ISP — the one you pay to provide you with internet access — is doing this. Respond as you will).

What I’m actually posting on is an excellent interview with Maynard James Keenan (of Tool) at the Onion AV Club.

The quote that really got me is this one:

All I can do is say I smell a rat. I don’t know where it is or what kind of rat it is, but as an artist, I can express how [I feel about it]. But I couldn’t responsibly stand up and tell people which way to go, because then I’m just as guilty as the people who are telling everybody else what to do and where to go.

He’s quite a guy, one with whom I’ve no doubt that I could argue for days.

Although the likelihood of any of my readers directly using the freedoms that they have at present with regards to circumventing digital content management schemes is low-to-nil, it still occurs to me that you might be interested in bill C-60, which would take these silent, but vital, rights from you.

So, well, here’s a very well-spoken law professor’s take on it, by way of 30 days of DRM

After reading about some disturbing events in the US detailing the arrest and mistreatment of citizens whose only apparent crime was the recording of police activity (see here, with discussion here, and here, with discussion here), I’m interested in looking out for my own rights in that respect, as a Canadian citizen.

I’ve realized that much of what I expect to be true in my interactions with the Police is informed by my consumption of US media, where, for example, there are property rights enshrined in the constitution, and the 4th amendment exists. Here in Canada, neither of those things are true.

I’m not so much interested in what the practical rights are, but rather what my legal rights are.

I’ve contacted the CCLA (Canadian Civil Liberties Association) on the subject, and will be posting this to Ask MetaFilter later this evening (Update: Did so, it’s at the other end of this link), so follow along as I try to find out what my rights are.

Maybe I’ll get lucky, and actually learn something.

David Brin, author of (amongst other things) “Glory Season” and, more relevant, “Earth,” is what one might call a surveillance utopianist, if such a term might be coined.

He argues (and argues well, I might add) that a world where our expectations of privacy have eroded to the point of total worldwide information transparency, to a degree where secrecy is one of the few true crimes left in the world, would be a good thing. “Earth” is founded, vaguely, on this idea, and although its protagonist seeks secrecy for just reasons, Brin himself gives every indication that he believes privacy to be an anachronism, a legacy of humanity’s brutal rise into civilization, and one best left behind.

I do not agree.

Bruce Schneier wrote an article for Wired magazine a short time ago on the value of privacy that I think bears reading. He contends, and I agree, that even the off-the-cuff responses we have to that old saw (“If you’re not doing anything wrong, why do you care if someone is watching”) are misdirected. Saying “The definition of wrong is in the hands of the government, and it keeps changing,” or “If I’m not doing anything wrong, you have no cause to watch me” is an implicit admission that privacy is intended to protect wrong actions.

This is not, and should not, be the case. The right to privacy protects our ability to grow, learn, and change. It protects the essential dignity of a loner who would otherwise fear constant examination by a society he rejects. It forms a fundamental component of interpersonal relations, or should we all feel that we must have sex in full view of the world, lest we be violating someone else’s right to examine our every behaviour?

This claim upon the details of my life is specious, and unethical, and must stop.

This claim upon the details of your life is no more right than the claim made by a peeping tom that nobody is hurt if he only looks in through the window.

As Schneier quotes Cardinal Richelieu: “If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.”

This must not become the way of our free society, lest our society cease to be free.

So, I just attended my first-ever keynote presentations, yesterday and this morning.  I can already see that there’s a lot of variation in delivery styles and value of content.  Yesterday had Joel Spolsky going over the importance of glitz in software development.  This is something I personally see a use for, but will admittedly be of limited use to my workplace software development, given that we develop the buried backend that makes the pretty output, not the output itself.

Today I was treated to what was, by and large, a discussion on the Apache project and differences in licensing models.  The former was a bit interesting — I didn’t know Apache had a database — but the latter was, at best, dull.  Licensing is interesting, don’t get me wrong, but I already know the basics of it, and it borders on religious for most people — they’re not going to change preferences based on a keynote.

An aside:  For the record, “LAN spigot” is the stupidest name for an RJ-45 outlet I’ve heard in ages (overheard just to my right, moments ago).

Well, the presentation I’m attending is about to start, so I should probably pay attention.  Later…

So, I’ve been thinking.

I’m watching the software piracy world being shaken up repeatedly by increasingly successful interventions in both distribution and production by the authorities of various nations, usually acting in the name of private, for-profit industry groups.

I’m seeing an ever-increasing degree of technical control exercised over the viewing and distribution of electronic media.

I’ve seen my ISP decide that they should clamp down on my use of the internet connection I’m paying for, and like others in the same business space, lie to me about what they’re doing.

It’s getting so that I’m going to have to start paying for everything.

And, to be honest, I’m pretty okay with that. Well, except for the traffic shaping shit from Shaw.

The thing of it is, I’m about to be in a position from which I can afford to pay for my software. Across the board. It’s kind of nice, actually. As discussed previously on this blog, I approve of software developers’ rights to charge for their creations, and have always had ethical issues with the means by which I have acquired them. Soon, that’ll be in the past. It’s already begun, in the sense that I’m starting to pay for the little shareware utilities that I use, and I foresee doing so in greater quantities as time passes. Couple that with increased reliance on Free/Open Source software, and I have realized that — at the moment — my computer at home is almost completely clean of illegitimate software. It’s a nice feeling.

The title of this post is a bit misleading — I’m not really being forced into ethical behaviour, here. It just so happens that concurrent with my own push to be more upstanding, the sources of my content are leaving me no other choice. It’s a valid statement, that ethical behaviour is meaningless without the option of behaving unethically. But I made my choice before it became impossible, and I feel that it makes me a better person.

Found on the net: The Search for Net Neutrality

Meaning, of course, that we’re still looking for it. It seems, and I’ve run into this issue myself over the last few months, that our wonderful ISP overlords have decided to quietly engage strict controls on the nature of the content that we will be allowed to get over their wires… You know, the ones you pay to use?

Read the article. And, if anyone knows of any way to derail this — legislative action, consumer agitation — I’d love to know. I’m not interested in ineffective protests or street marches — this is the internet, not Vietnam. But I’d like to make some kind of difference, here.

This has also been discussed on /., which should surprise nobody.

“I believe in the rights of the individual.”

Beware of people claiming this, as it is often followed by a statement supporting the restriction of those rights. This time is no different.

I believe in the rights of the individual.

But I am starting to wonder about the domains in which those rights are exercised. Is it supportive of individual rights to permit corporate entities the same rights as actual people?

This comes about from reading a book on privacy issues — Database Nation — which enumerates a lot of abuses of the increasingly-connected and documented world we have created for ourselves. Now, I know I’m not the first person to read a book like that and say “Oh noes! How can I hide my porn habit now?!” but I do see some truth in his statements about how the right to privacy might be protected.

The problem is, I don’t necessarily accept that there is a right to privacy, per se.

Anyway, assuming that there is, I’m not sure who is less qualified to protect it — private industry, where they can make money for selling and abusing the information that they are supposed to protect, or government, repository of all things personal, with a vested interest (lately, especially) in making sure that we all conform to standards of behaviour that may or may not be driven by religions that we don’t all share.

It’s ucky.

Anyway, Char complained about a lack of posting, so I figured I’d polish off this draft. So there.

Well, it’s more noise, more erosion…

This “travesty of legal action”:http://www.canada.com/windsor/windsorstar/news/story.html?id=906ecfe4-1adc-45e2-998d-cb5c96f01fb2 (also referenced “here”:http://www.edmontonsun.com/News/Canada/2005/08/20/1180942-sun.html, “here”:http://www.canada.com/national/nationalpost/soundoff/story.html?id=1f0563cf-c372-4224-a917-5a3f27e0455b, “here”:http://www.canada.com/technology/story.html?id=360edf23-b247-4f51-af14-45ced083696a, and “here”:http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20050819/COTLER17/TPNational/Canada) is… well, it’s pretty nasty.

Read it. And then marvel at the vast silence in the media (after a possible two or three days of notice) on the subject. And marvel further at the staggering indifference of the population at large to this.

This class of stupidity makes me sad.

Although we already pay a levy on our blank media under the assumption that we will illegally copy media, thereby — under the law of the land — rendering such copying legal, it seems that some segments of our lawmaking bodies wish to strip this right from us.

Which is, regrettably, not surprising in the least.

Feh. Just thought I’d pass that on, as well as a link to Digital Copyright Canada, a blog focusing on those kinds of issues. Worth keeping an eye on, if only for the occasional sense of outrage.

In other news, this week I completed the first runs of the application controller that I’ve been working on. My boss is in the process of adding new functionality all over the place, but at least he has time to help me out whenever I make my thrice-plus-daily visits to his office. All in all, it’s been a satisfying week, although I’m alone for the weekend, as Char is out camping with some friends for the next two days.