I suppose earlier generations had to sit through all this huffing and puffing with the invention of television, the phone, cinema, radio, the car, the bicycle, printing, the wheel and so on, but you would think we would learn the way these things work, which is this:
1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;
2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.
Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are.
Douglas Adams, “How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet”, Sunday Times, 1999-08-29
May 11, 2011
QotD: The instinctive reaction to progress
Michael Geist: the “Lawful Access” legislation does not criminalize hyperlinking
At least, on a reasonable person’s reading of the proposed law, it doesn’t criminalize hyperlinks to material that “incites hatred”:
The source of the latest round of concern stems from the Library of Parliament’s Parliamentary Information and Research Service legislative summary of Bill C-51. On the issue of hyperlinking, it states:
Clause 5 of the bill provides that the offences of public incitement of hatred and wilful promotion of hatred may be committed by any means of communication and include making hate material available, by creating a hyperlink that directs web surfers to a website where hate material is posted, for example.
I must admit that I think is wrong. The actual legislative change amends the definition of communicating from this:
“communicating” includes communicating by telephone, broadcasting or other audible or visible means;
to this:
“communicating” means communicating by any means and includes making available;
The revised definition is obviously designed to broaden the scope of the public incitement of hatred provision by making it technology neutral. Whereas the current provision is potentially limited to certain technologies, the new provision would cover any form of communication. It does not specifically reference hyperlinking.
Michael is much more informed about this issue than I am, so I find his confidence as a welcome balm to all the concern raised about this issue. The bill itself, of course, remains a civil liberty disaster in other ways, even with this issue addressed:
As I have argued for a long time, there are many reasons to be concerned with lawful access. The government has never provided adequate evidence on the need for it, it has never been subject to committee review, it would mandate disclosure of some personal information without court oversight, it would establish a massive ISP regulatory process (including employee background checks), it would install broad new surveillance technologies, and it would cost millions (without a sense of who actually pays). Given these problems, it is not surprising to find that every privacy commissioner in Canada has signed a joint letter expressing their concerns.
How resilient is the internet?
Richard Clayton summarizes a recent study by European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) on the internet’s ability to cope with disruptions. Among the ways the internet is vulnerable are:
First, the Internet is vulnerable to various kinds of common mode technical failures where systems are disrupted in many places simultaneously; service could be substantially disrupted by failures of other utilities, particularly the electricity supply; a flu pandemic could cause the people on whose work it depends to stay at home, just as demand for home working by others was peaking; and finally, because of its open nature, the Internet is at risk of intentionally disruptive attacks.
Second, there are concerns about sustainability of the current business models. Internet service is cheap, and becoming rapidly cheaper, because the costs of service provision are mostly fixed costs; the marginal costs are low, so competition forces prices ever downwards. Some of the largest operators — the ‘Tier 1′ transit providers — are losing substantial amounts of money, and it is not clear how future capital investment will be financed. There is a risk that consolidation might reduce the current twenty-odd providers to a handful, at which point regulation may be needed to prevent monopoly pricing.
Third, dependability and economics interact in potentially pernicious ways. Most of the things that service providers can do to make the Internet more resilient, from having excess capacity to route filtering, benefit other providers much more than the firm that pays for them, leading to a potential ‘tragedy of the commons’. Similarly, security mechanisms that would help reduce the likelihood and the impact of malice, error and mischance are not implemented because no-one has found a way to roll them out that gives sufficiently incremental and sufficiently local benefit.
Fourth, there is remarkably little reliable information about the size and shape of the Internet infrastructure or its daily operation. This hinders any attempt to assess its resilience in general and the analysis of the true impact of incidents in particular. The opacity also hinders research and development of improved protocols, systems and practices by making it hard to know what the issues really are and harder yet to test proposed solutions.
H/T to Bruce Schneier for the link.
Belgian newspapers win appeal against Google
Apparently, even a short summary and a hyperlink are considered to be a violation of copyright in Belgium:
A Belgian appeals court has upheld an earlier ruling that Google infringes on newspapers’ copyright when its services display and link to content from newspaper websites, according to press reports.
The search engine giant is responsible for infringing the copyrights of the papers when it links to the sites or copies sections of stories on its Google News service, the Belgian Court of Appeals said, according to a report in PC World.
Google must not link to material from Belgian newspapers, the court said, according to the report (in French). No translation of the ruling is yet available.
[. . .]
The newspapers argued that they were losing online subscriptions and advertising revenue because Google was posting free snippets of the stories and links to the full article on Google News.
Google’s search engine offers links to the websites it indexes but also to “cached” copies of those pages. The copies are stored on Google’s own servers.
Brendan O’Neill: “The moralising Lib-Cons are New Labour in disguise”
Brendan O’Neill pronounces his verdict on the first year of the British coalition government:
For all the claims that the Lib-Cons are Thatcher in disguise, with the wicked Bullingdon-braised David Cameron only pretending to be touchy-feely and a friend of Nick, in fact the most striking thing about this government one year in is how similar it has been to its ugly predecessor New Labour. The moralisation of everyday life, including people’s parenting styles and their drinking and smoking habits? Check. A promise to create a new kind of society (Dave calls it the Big Society; Blair called it the Stakeholders’ Society) while actually increasing the role of the state in economic, political and personal affairs? Check. Blather about environmentalism and nervousness about pursuing nuclear power? Check. The bombing of a foreign country in the name of all that is morally pure and right? Check. The New-Labour-Lib-Con eras have shown that Britain is no longer fought over by clashingly opposing parties but rather is dominated by a samey, conformist and vision-lite political class: samey both in terms of its members’ social origins and their political obsessions.
