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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is a small site, with no real impact, and no political pretensions — I don’t provide a service to people who want info on the government, although I criticize sometimes. However, the fact that linking to this is cause for subpoenas from my own government… Well, let’s just say that suppression of free speech is abhorrent under all circumstances. Especially when it involves the very people in positions to suppress it.

This USian blogger is pumping out information about the Adscam trials, although I’m not sure what his angle on it is, and as far as I’m concerned is providing a valuable service.

Just remember — if you’re co-national with me, it might soon be illegal for you to read those links.

It’s worth noting, as someone else in the blog community has in response to this, an old saw about the internet: It will treat censorship as network damage and simply route around it. This is a feature, not a bug.

Anyway, the workload is lightening off a bit — I may be reachable for conversation (for the masochists among you) soon, and after next weekend I actually expect to have time to relax!

So.

Let’s see… an ISP will (if this passes) have to provide detailed information about any subscriber to the police, without a warrant? What the hell?

Words fail me, not least due to the degree that I’m tired. But I hope that you can see the way I do on this one — this is just flat-out wrong.

Trust me, read one of those some time. They’re bloody creepy, and they’re getting worse, not better.

Word has come down from a research team (via a major authority on cryptography) that the SHA-1 hash algorithm has been broken (discussed here and here)

This is a bit tough to grok if you’re not a crypto-nerd, but essentially what this means is that one of the fundamental ways of signing (not encrypting, that’s a whole different ball of wax) a document cryptographically has been compromized. This isn’t immediately fatal, but it does bring computation of these hashes into the realm of possibility sooner rather than later. Essentially, the team conducting the research has cut a factor of 2^11 (2048, for the binary-impaired) off of the time required to force a hash collision (NSFNG(Not Safe For Non-Geeks)). This cuts the work involved down from approximately 1208925819614629174706176 attempts to 590295810358705651712. Scary, isn’t it?

What this means, basically, is it is plausibly possible for an attacker with the computer resources of the NSA or a major world-class computing centre to get someone to sign a document, then substitute another one for it that will pass as having been signed legitimately. This has fairly broad implications in an age where the validity of electronic evidence is being questioned (pdf).

Still, I guess it’s not that big of a deal. Something better will come up, I’m sure.