As ISPs move away from principles of network neutrality toward differential pricing based on applications and content (check out the comments of a Bell South executive and rumours of Rogers blocking BitTorrent and podcasts), the role of government becomes ever more important. Politicians searching for a vision to capture the imagination of Canadians during this election campaign should reject the prioritization of greater network surveillance embodied in MITA and instead set out a vision of greater network access.

Hear hear. Make the internet what it has the potential to be.

WiFi Visions

bucy wrote:

Decius wrote:

A new front in the political wars over sex and violence in video games opened Tuesday when Senators Hillary Clinton and Joseph Lieberman called for a new crackdown on the industry by the federal government.

Remember that a vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote for more of this kind of stuff. You know, children who are never exposed to reality and never have to make their own choices about right and wrong do a real good job of taking care of themselves when they go to college.

I guess it isn't really surprising that the whole Parents Music Resource Center flap with Tipper Gore and Jello Biafra from 20 years ago is playing itsself out again in the context of video games...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_panic

Everything old is new again.

RE: Senators target 'graphic' video games | CNET News.com

McTeague's worries stem from the concert Jackson had with veteran rapper Jay-Z at the Molson Ampitheatre in 2003 where a young man was shot, in addition to a streak of gun violence Toronto has experienced since the summertime.

However, Volpe has not yet received any requests from the ministry to unauthorize the rap star's entrance into Canada.

Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty also expressed his opinion on the matter, stating gun violence in Toronto is "much more complex than a rapper's lyrics and image". However, there are some students who feel differently.

Somebody think of the children!

MP wants ‘Fiddy’ banned

EFF has participated in each of the two prior rulemakings (in 2000 and 2003), each time asking the Copyright Office to create exemptions for perfectly lawful consumer uses for digital media that are encumbered by DRM restrictions. For example, we asked that DVD owners be allowed to skip those "unskippable" ads at the beginning of DVDs. We asked that people who bought copy-protected CDs be allowed to get them to play on their computer. We asked that consumers be allowed to bypass region coding to play a DVD purchased in another part of the world. The Copyright Office rejected all of these proposals.

They're attempting to put this same measure through with Bill C-60 in Canada (not the entire DMCA, just the bit about making circumvention illegal.) It makes me angry to know I don't really own my media at all. This is why I don't buy from ITMS anymore.

DMCA Triennial Rulemaking: Failing Consumers Completely

Doctors say the woman's new face will be a "hybrid" between her donor's face and her own face before the attack. In the five hour long operation, the donor's tissues, muscles, arteries and veins were attached to the patient's lower face. It is more favourable to use skin from another person's face instead of skin from another part of the patient's body, as the texture and colour of the skin are more likely to match.

Incredible.

First face transplant performed on French woman

In a research paper appearing in the November/December 2005 issue of IEEE Security and Privacy, we analyzed publicly available information and materials to evaluate the reliability of the telephone wiretapping technologies used by US law enforcement agencies. The analysis found vulnerabilities in widely fielded interception technologies that are used for both "pen register" and "full audio" (Title III / FISA) taps. The vulnerabilities allow a party to a wiretapped call to disable content recording and call monitoring and to manipulate the logs of dialed digits and call activity.

In the most serious countermeasures we discovered, a wiretap subject superimposes a continuous low-amplitude "C-tone" audio signal over normal call audio on the monitored line. The tone is misinterpreted by the wiretap system as an "on-hook" signal, which mutes monitored call audio and suspends audio recording. Most loop extender systems, as well as at least some CALEA systems, appear to be vulnerable to this countermeasure.

John Markoff has a story on this today.

Ha... They were using old school dtmf techniques to detect call status! Thats a bizarre approach. You'd think they'd have some device that spoke SS7 and the network would simply send the digital call traffic to them. U: I just read the paper. Apparently there IS no good reason they are using inband signals. Its a good paper. Read it.

Of course, this kind of vulnerability isn't what I'm really interested in with respect to CALEA equipment. The big question is how does Law Enforcement get access to the CALEA system and is the security/authentication of that access method sufficient to prevent other parties from using the system. I've heard unsubstantiated whisperings that it isn't... U: The paper seems to allude to this suspicion as well...

Blue Boxing Wiretapping Systems

The response from the Pentagon was mixed with Rumsfeld's spokesperson Bryan Whitman saying that he was unaware of such practice and raised the concern that "this article raises some question as to whether or not some of the practices that are described in there are consistent with the principles of this department."

I'd likely be more disturbed by this if we weren't bombarded by propaganda and advertising every day in our own media. Granted, not a really great way to foster democracy, but is it any different for us?

U.S. military covertly pays to run stories in Iraqi press

Palindrome wrote:

Ever since we started the Music Genome Project, our friends would ask:

Can you help me discover more music that I'll like?

Those questions often evolved into great conversations. Each friend told us their favorite artists and songs, explored the music we suggested, gave us feedback, and we in turn made new suggestions. Everybody started joking that we were now their personal DJs.

We created Pandora so that we can have that same kind of conversation with you.

Pandora is a pretty neat tool. I've found it lacking in a few areas (Neither The Ventures nor The Shadows, both 60's surf rock groups, populated at all). Personally I'm a fan of Last FM, which uses a plugin to publish your listening, compares it to other users to create 'neighbors' who share your musical taste and let you randomly stream your neighbors selections, so it branches out pretty quickly.

RE: Pandora

Is the apocalypse nigh? I sure think so. The last one happened at the height of Atari's power, they were invincible, pumping out hit after hit. Pac-Man, ET, Asteroids, movie tie-ins, overflowing arcades and a rabid fan base. They were in the spotlight of the mainstream press, songs making the top 10, and money coming out of their ears. What could go wrong?

To start with, a flood of games that, for lack of a better term, sucked. There were gems, but they tended to get drowned out in a sea of mediocrity. Magazines were afraid to give big titles a bad review, and scores creeped up in the name of advertising dollars. Comic books were awash in ad pages for the latest Parker Brothers 2600 cartridge, and the magazines covering the industry were thick and glossy.

To me this is really just a side effect of the amount of money going into it. Once you get these gigantic budget projects going, of course the majority will be crap. It's easier to cash in on a safe bet than to innovate, but hope is not lost. We've seen the Katamari Damacy games, Guitar Hero, Resident Evil 4 (the best retooling of a stagnating series I've ever seen). There's plenty of innovation going on, and if the majors get too bad, there's really always the independents like Troika.

The industry is in for a gaming crash

The handbook is a plain-English treatise, intended as a user-friendly guide for those seeking a better working grasp of corporate governance, shareholder communications and securities litigation.

It couldn’t come at a more à propos time – when shareholders in the U.S. and abroad have become fatigued by corporate fraud, but also frustrated by management and directors over a host of governance issues, including executive compensation, board independence and board access.

I really like the idea of educated and conscious shareholder pressure on a company. When life gives you a flawed corporate system based primarily on profit, make the people that the company is accountable to educated in methods of keeping a company on the level.

Too bad there isn't a handbook for making them care.

Shareholder Activism Handbook Give Shareholders An Edge