By Jesse Brown, CBC technology columnist:
The Obama administration has placed Canada on the United States’ copyright blacklist. Under Bush, we were on their “Watch List”. Now we’re on the “Priority Watch List”. Scary!
Continue reading "Jesse Brown: Obama the copyright cyberbully" »
By Jesse Brown, CBC technology columnist:
Hossein Derakshan is a Canadian citizen who has been rotting in a Tehran jail since November. To the best of our knowledge, he has yet to be charged with anything (though it’s safe to assume that his detainment has something to do with the fact that he’s a highly opinionated and influential blogger). His case has gotten far too little attention from our government and from our media. But last week, someone finally took notice: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
By Jesse Brown, CBC technology columnist:
The latest YouTube remix sensation has nothing to do with Christian Bale, little boys high on laughing gas or sensitive country musicians. It has to do with an anti-same-sex marriage ad produced by a group called the National Organization for Marriage.
Continue reading "Jesse Brown: Anti-gay ad inspires pro-hilarity remixes (and YouTube cowardice)" »
By Jesse Brown, CBC technology columnist:
Tweetin’ Toronto Mayor David Miller spoke and took questions at the Mesh Tech Conference in Toronto today. I was tapped to interview him and lead the Q & A. Mayor Miller used the opportunity to announce a new transparency-in-government website, toronto.ca/open. It’s set to launch this fall.
By Jesse Brown, CBC technology columnist:
This summer, the CRTC will finally rule on whether traffic shaping by ISPs is legal. To do so, they’ll hold hearings, and in those hearings, opinions will be heard. Yours can be among them. Yesterday the CRTC opened an online public consultation on net neutrality.
Continue reading "Jesse Brown: Your chance to weigh in on Net Neutrality" »
Newgrounds.com is a site for lovers of funny, lewd animation and fun, lewd flash games. Its user base skews heavily towards young dudes, and its online forums unsurprisingly feel a lot like your grade 10 friend Doug’s musky basement.
Continue reading "Jesse Brown: Epic win for Newgrounds community" »
Last month in a Swedish courtroom, a minor historical event took place in under 140 characters. “EPIC WINNING LOL” went the message, announcing that half of the copyright infraction charges against The Pirate Bay torrent tracker site had been dropped.
It wasn’t the first Twitter message to emit from a courtroom, but as far as I can tell, it was the first “tweet” to come from a defendant at his own trial- the Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde.
Now, The New York Times reports on other cases of mobile devices disrupting the courts.
By Jesse Brown, CBC technology columnist:
Google has announced some new features for its AdSense network, and a predictable flood of horrified headlines have followed.
So what are we supposed to be afraid of?
Continue reading "Jesse Brown: Who's afraid of "behaviour tracking"?" »
By Jesse Brown, CBC technology columnist:
Chalk one up for the copyfight.
An atrocious amendment to New Zealand’s copyright law was slated to go into effect this week: it would have required ISPs to kick users and sites off of the Net based on unproven allegations of copyright infringement. Under the now infamous Section 92A of the New Zealand Copyright Act, major media companies would have had the ability to ban citizens from the Net entirely, leaving users no recourse.
Continue reading "Jesse Brown: Worldwide copyfight heats up down under " »
By Jesse Brown, CBC technology columnist.
Earlier this month Canadian techies were excited to learn that our federal government was taking a serious look at open source software.
I thought it was a good move too, and was excited to finally do a positive story about our government’s approach to tech. For once we’d be leading the pack, not lagging miserably behind! But I may have gotten excited too soon...
Continue reading "Jesse Brown: Government strangely closed about open source" »
By Jesse Brown, CBC technology columnist.
Monday (Feb.16) is the CRTC's official deadline for public comments about traffic throttling and net neutrality. The comments will inform their hearings this summer, where the CRTC will decide whether or not to allow all manner of network "management".
If you care about this, say so now.
Continue reading "Jesse Brown: Last chance to chime in on Net Neutrality" »
By Jesse Brown, CBC technology columnist.
A few months back I reported on security problems with RFID chips, the radio scannable tech embedded in next-generation Enhanced Driver's Licences. EDLs are in use in B.C. and set to hit Ontario en masse this summer. The problem was that sensitive info could theoretically be "sniffed" by anyone with a cheap RFID scanner.
Well, it's no longer theoretical.
Continue reading "Jesse Brown: Ethical hacker sniffs passport tags in driveby" »
By Jesse Brown, CBC technology columnist.
Anyone who watches Degrassi: The Next Generation, or NBC’s To Catch a Predator, knows that the internet is teeming with sexual predators eager to lure kiddies away through IM chats into unspeakable real world situations. With this persistent menace in mind, 49 U.S. state attorneys general created an expansive task force to study the problem of online solicitation of minors and to recommend safety measures.
Their finding: There is no problem.
Continue reading "Jesse Brown: Kids have nothing to fear but kids themselves" »
By Jesse Brown, CBC technology columnist.
British PM Gordon Brown was planning to exempt Members of Parliament from transparency rules that would require them to disclose their expenses, just like all other public servants. The exemption (unsurprisingly) had wide, cross-party support and was sailing ahead into law.
But then the "Internets" happened.
Continue reading "Jesse Brown: Flash mob Facebook protest in UK gets results in 48 hours " »
By Jesse Brown, CBC technology columnist.
Whistle-blowing, muck-raking Wikileaks has done it again, and in a big way.
The full-disclosure website has released no fewer than 70 United Nations investigative reports classified as "Strictly Confidential" (and 530 other UN reports, too).
By Jesse Brown, CBC technology columnist.
Each year Macolytes around the globe breathlessly await the introduction of cool new technology at the Macworld expo. But this year, the coolest news was not the addition of great new tech, but the subtraction of bad old tech. DRM will soon be gone from iTunes, and that’s cause for excitement, whether you use Apple’s music store or not.
Here’s what it means:
Continue reading "Dropping DRM: What the Macworld proclamation means to you" »
By Jesse Brown, CBC technology columnist.
What do text messages actually cost?
Interesting revelation in the New York Times: text messages, which can cost consumers twice what they did just three years ago, actually cost cell phone providers nothing ... or at least, next to nothing.
By Jesse Brown, CBC technology columnist.
Smartphones are sexy and mobile internet combined with GPS could one day have a big impact on the way we talk, create and organize. Throw in iTunes’ App store - or better yet, a fully open-source alternative like Google Android and the implications could indeed be massive. But it hasn’t happened yet. For all of the hooplah, smartphones remain shiny, convenient gadgets - not global gamechangers.
Why? Because not enough people have one yet. Big things only happen once technologies are cheap enough (or free enough) to be everywhere. When your great-aunt has an iPhone, that’s when you know that the world has changed.
With that in mind, here are the three boring old technologies that made things interesting in 2008:
Continue reading "Forget the iPhone: 3 technologies that actually mattered in 2008" »
By Jesse Brown, CBC technology columnist.
Canadian radio and television must contain a certain percentage of content made in Canada, by Canadians, and about Canadians. So sayeth the CRTC. But so far, the CRTC has kept its hands off of the Internet.
That may soon change.
Continue reading "Jesse Brown: Does CanCon have a digital future?" »
By Jesse Brown, CBC technology columnist.
I’ve been asked to report on how Canadians on the web have reacted to the current political turmoil.
Here’s an educated guess: by looking up “prorogue”.
Then maybe some wiki-research on Canada’s Parliamentary system.
After that, everybody chose a side and started creating online petitions, Facebooks groups, Youtube videos and the rest. Here’s a roundup:
Continue reading "Jesse Brown: Coalition confusion? Here’s your partisan toolkit " »
By Jesse Brown, CBC technology columnist.
Here are three things that suck about being Canadian right now.
Continue reading "Jesse Brown: Is Canada becoming a digital ghetto?" »
By Jesse Brown, CBC technology columnist.
Millions of people pretend to be someone they’re not on the internet. On the scale of fraud, I’d say most people consider creating a fake online persona to be slightly less harmful than, say, sneaking in to a movie.
Then again, most fake online identities don’t result in suicide.
Continue reading "Jesse Brown:15 years for violating MySpace’s Terms of Use?" »
Australia’s biggest Internet Service Provider, iiNet, has agreed to take part in a “ridiculous” trial of a government web filter just to “prove how stupid it is.”
The above quotations come from iiNet executive Michael Malone, in response to the Labor Government’s plans to block all “illegal” content at the ISP level, which would make Australia the world’s only first-world Western democracy to do so.
Barack Obama won because of the internet. That’s where he fought the smears, raised the cash, and got out the vote.
Plenty of pundits are citing his superior use of technology as the decisive factor, and they’re right.
But let’s put the point in context: Obama is no geek-wizard. His campaign didn’t code any groundbreaking new tools or conjure up some all-powerful White House-nabbing algorithm. It’s convenient to picture a team of young team-Obama hackers casting a digital spell over America, but to borrow an Obamian phrase - that’s just sloppy thinking.
$250 billion and 750,000.
Those two daunting numbers will be familiar to anyone who has been following the corporate and governmental push for stricter Intellectual Property legislation. The first - $250 billion - is the figure commonly cited as the amount of money lost to I.P. piracy annually. The second is the total number of jobs lost. These figures have been used by the U.S. Department of Commerce, Customs and Border Patrol, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the FBI, the International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition, The International Trademark Coalition, and countless media reports. The numbers are big, daunting, and useful to anyone trying to prove that piracy must be stopped.
But the numbers are bogus.
By Jesse Brown, CBC technology columnist.
No one seems to be able to clearly explain why the world is suddenly facing a complete economic meltdown, but that hasn’t stopped politicians and pundits from pointing fingers.
The Democrats blame the Republicans (“See? This is what happens when you don’t regulate Wall Street!”). The Republicans blame the Democrats (“See? This is what happens when you let just anyone buy a house!”). Neither side makes a very compelling case, and so a new culprit has slowly emerged as an all-purpose scapegoat- computers!
Continue reading "Jesse Brown: Let’s blame computers for the financial meltdown!" »
By Jesse Brown, CBC technology columnist.
Sometimes I have trouble explaining why copyright reform is so important.
Defining it as a cultural issue and a civil rights issue can be difficult when most people think of it (if they think of it at all) as a consumer issue, or worse yet, a technological issue (dinner party tip to passionate geeks: nothing glazes more eyeballs than tech "issues." However important they are to you, they all come out sounding like Linux vs. Vista to everyone else).
At worst, my spiel can come off like I'm going to elaborate rhetorical lengths to justify downloading free HBO. Perhaps that's why I'm so pumped by this - the killer preview for the new NFB doc RiP: A Remix Manifesto:
By Jesse Brown, CBC technology columnist.
Here's a roundup of links to help you quickly get up-to-speed for Tuesday's Canadian federal election.
By Jesse Brown, CBC technology columnist.
It’s broken.
Or jammed, or crashed, or otherwise unable to sign up anymore phone numbers belonging to Canadians who would prefer not to be bothered by telemarketers. The National Do Not Call List website crashed too, but seems to be back up now.
This due to a stampede of sign-ups in the first 12 hours of the list’s existence. Anyhow, it’s taken the CRTC three years to get this thing online, and hiccups aside, everyone who wants in on the off list will soon get it.
Or will they?
Continue reading "Jesse Brown: Do not call the do-not-call list" »