JACK KAPICA
Globe and Mail Update Last updated on Tuesday, Apr. 07, 2009 12:25AM EDT
Microsoft's announcement that it will release Zune, an MP3 player to go head-to-head with Apple's iPod, is running into the usual flack from partisans, most of whom have denounced it because Microsoft does not innovate, just copy.
The Zune MP3 player will come with a new on-line music service that allows users to access it via the player's Wi-Fi connection. What's more, Zune is being designed without business partners, like so many of the company's previous digital media products.
Moreover, there will be a whole family of products under the Zune name to come next year, including an Xbox-like portable video game machine.
And brace yourselves: Zune will be accompanied by a PR blitz that promises to be as overwhelming as the half-billion-dollar Xbox 360 launch last year.
You can argue about innovation or development, but one thing hasn't changed for certain: Microsoft is using its very old strategy of "embrace and extend."
E-Mail Jack Kapica at jkapica@globeandmail.ca
Posted July 24, 2006, at 2:27 p.m.
Microsoft tries to save face: The usual cynics should be having fun pecking at a wounded Microsoft, which has decided to be a better corporate citizen by issuing a list of 12 "principles" describing how they will abide by various antitrust rulings.
Among the principles are a willingness to design its Windows Live suite of Internet services separate from Windows, so that customers can choose the Windows operating system with or without Windows Live; to open up Windows patents and license them to other developers; greater support for industry standards, creating more interoperable products; to license Windows to allow people to go to any website or use any competing application.
Of course the company is trying to make it look like it's been planning this all along, and not offering the principles as a grudging response to the antitrust cases Microsoft has lost in the United States and in the European Union. A week ago, the EU fined Microsoft a whopping $357-million (U.S.) for failing to comply with the terms of a March, 2004, antitrust settlement. And the EU would fine the company more each day until it complied.
The resolution of this case has resonance well beyond Microsoft, and well beyond whatever you think of the company's marketing practices.
Like a lot of other players, especially those in technology, the company's first response to the antitrust charges was to throw tons of money at its legal department and use a strategy of delay, block and appeal to wear down the opposition.
The strategy seemed to have worked to some extent in the United States, where resorting to the courts has become a national sport. It was less effective in Europe, where the culture sees the courts as a last resort, not a first one.
I'm hoping that the era of swashbuckling high-tech heroes will calm down a bit and think twice about shooting off their lawyers' mouths before negotiating settlements.
The whole legal strategy has done nothing for technology except to strangle it.
E-Mail Jack Kapica at jkapica@globeandmail.ca
Posted July 20, 2006, at 5:50 p.m.
A tree falls in Riverdale: On Monday night, I became a victim of the Big Wind that knocked down trees all over the Toronto area and robbed us of power.
As I write, past noon on Wednesday, all my power is still out, and I'm awaiting Toronto Hydro to find a free moment to reattach the wires; they're working double shifts helping all the other tree victims, and I just have to wait.
As a result, we have had no air conditioning, and find it difficult to sleep in this sticky heat. Our food is spoiling in the refrigerators. And although the sun sets quite late this time of year, we are without lights (save for battery-operated flashlights) in the evenings. We have no Internet and no television to amuse ourselves, and no light to read by. And until we found an old analogue telephone handset in the basement, our telephones were dead, because they had all been replaced by wireless versions, which need AC power to operate. The Internet telephone we have was also rendered useless, and we had to rely on the dwindling charges in our cellphones to connect to the outside world.
We've known all along that we are increasingly relying on power to run our lives, but the dying maple tree across the street brought the point home dramatically.
Aside from our physical and fiscal discomfort, however, we have been living in blessed silence: I never realized just how much hum and buzz runs through a thoroughly electrified house. Over the years we have become increasingly inured to the whir of the water pump in the basement, the hum of the cooling fans on our computers, and the strange, grumpy whine that comes from an older refrigerator's cooling system. My hearing isn't what it used to be, but I'm certain that I have just now noticed the absence of the buzz of some or our light bulbs, which my wife has noticed over many years.
At least my Blackberry kept me connected to the outside world, and so I was able to call contractors to fix part of my problem, but I had to use it sparingly for fear of losing its charge.
And all this has brought me to wonder what would happen when we all become so dependent on technology that we become totally helpless when crippled by a wayward tree branch. If I had serious money to invest (what journalist has?) I think I'd put it into developing a cheap backup generation system that doesn't run on fossil fuels, will keep my food cool and my communications running.
E-Mail Jack Kapica at jkapica@globeandmail.ca
Posted July 19, 2006, at 12:48 p.m.
Sinking in Paranoia Gulch: Word comes this morning from Sun Microsystems of Canada, which commissioned Ipsos Reid to do a study on the fear of iPods.
Yes, iPods. And those little keychain thumb drives. Each connects to a computer via the USB port.
Apparently three in 10 bosses are asking employees to leave such tech toys at home because corporate Canada has a rising fear of data theft, which can easily be copied to one of these devices and delivered into the hands of villains.
Even though I have not read any stories detailing the use of an iPod as a spying device — corporate embarrassment keeps that kind of revelation under wraps — I don't doubt it happens. What I do doubt is that it happens on such a scale that so many bosses feel they have to ban the devices.
The ease with which such devices could be used to spying seems to be matched to the ease of passing corporate policy against them. After all, it's better to be safe than sorry.
But at what cost?
Many workers have been relieved in boring jobs by the ability to plug themselves into the latest Gorillaz songs on their iPods, and stripping them of that faint comfort would probably result in an atmosphere toxic enough to foster, not discourage, spying. It would be a form of revenge.
It's a matter of trust: If employees can't be trusted to keep company secrets, then you probably shouldn't have any employees at all.
Besides, a lot of handheld computers and personal digital assistants can do the same thing, but they are called productivity devices, and are actually encouraged by employers as another way to squeeze an extra erg of enthusiasm from their staff.
By their own logic, then, we should ban Palms, iPacs and BlackBerrys as well. And any other device that copies data — which, come to think of it, they all do.
And where would that leave us?
E-Mail Jack Kapica at jkapica@globeandmail.ca
Posted July 17, 2006, at 12:05 p.m.
Cooling the hype: Those of us who toil in the vineyards of tech journalism should take a cold shower in the latest statistics from the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, just to wash off the hype and hysteria of the gadget makers.
With newer gadgets, we found out that in December, 59 per cent of Canadians used cellular telephones, 3 per cent used a Blackberry, 7 per cent used digital assistants, 12 per cent an MP3 player, 4 per cent iPod and 8 per cent a Web camera.
And all of 2 per cent of cell phone, Blackberry and PDA owners used these devices for watching television, 3 per cent for taking pictures or making videos, 7 per cent to obtain news or weather, and 4 per cent to get sports scores.
You'd think that the way we report on them, these gadgets were in the hands of at least half the population. But only 3 per cent used Blackberrys? The horror, the horror.
E-Mail Jack Kapica at jkapica@globeandmail.ca
Posted June 30, 2006, at 1:20 p.m.
Beijing begins to sweat: Of all the moves the control freaks in Beijing have made, one of the more puzzling is its proposed law reported by The New York Times to impose fines on media that report on "sudden events."
The bill would slap fines of $12,500 (U.S) on those media that carry reports on topics and events that Beijing considers harmful to social and political stability. Those media would be required to run the content past the party censors first.
The bill seeks to restrict coverage of mass outbreaks of disease, riots, strikes, accidents and other events. Each of these, we are to assume, would cause "social unrest" and therefore not serve the purposes of the state. Never mind that uninformed people might die as a result of ignorance.
It's not like this kind of censorship is new; the government mandarins have been sending out memos for years listing what can and cannot be reported. By and large, newspapers, TV and radio have obeyed, and there was no need for legal muscle. The new law, however, suggests something has changed.
If most of China's media bosses have been obedient, then the proposed fines are clearly intended to scare other people, those who have not enjoyed such an entente cordial with the government, and we can safely guess those are the ones who post information on the Internet. Beijing is obviously becoming increasingly discomfited by this state of affairs.
This bears watching.
E-Mail Jack Kapica at jkapica@globeandmail.ca
Posted June 27, 2006, at 4:38 p.m.
Magnetism and electricity: Last week came news that a high-tech device that zaps your head with a brief but powerful magnetic field can stop and perhaps even cure migraine headaches. This was on the heels of another high-tech medical discovery that attacks depression.
Cyberonics says it has received positive trial results for an antidepression device, which during two years of treatment, decreased a general decline in the desire or attempt to commit suicide, as well as hospitalization rates due to depression.
The device, called the VNS Therapy System, is an implantable pacemaker-like generator has received the green light for patients who suffer from drug-resistant depression. It was also effective in reducing the frequency of epileptic seizures.
What's really interesting here is not the newness of the devices, but their age. Magnetism and electricity for use as therapeutic treatments have been around for more than a century, but they fell out of favour in the mid-20th century, as researchers raced toward chemical cures. And Dr. Ewan Cameron's sleep-and-shock experiments at the Allan Memorial in Montreal gave electroconvulsive therapy a very bad name.
If these two advances work, then they will be addressing two of the most prevalent problems that plague society today: headaches and depression.
And can you imagine the subsequent wave of research that will go into high-tech cures after they do?
E-Mail Jack Kapica at jkapica@globeandmail.ca
Posted June 26, 2006, at 5:42 p.m.
Goodbye to an ugly font: I'm relieved to hear of the impending demise of Times New Roman, the workhorse font used by Microsoft as its default typeface. I know Times New Roman has its fans, but I'm emphatically not one of them.
I have frankly seen few fonts that are uglier, and was much more impressed with a large number of excellent Bitstream fonts that come with Corel's WordPerfect Office suite and CorelDraw. The only other way to get good fonts is to open your wallet real wide and offer your soul to Adobe.
Times New Roman was released in 1990, when the resolution of the average computer screen wasn't what it is today (I believe the technical word is "ghastly").
The reason for the demise of TNR is that Microsoft has had a 10-member Advanced Reading Technology Group, which has been beavering away for more than a decade to create and design fonts that are easy on the eyes, particularly for documents on-screen.
These are the guys who created a technology called ClearType in 1998, designed specifically for on-screen use. ClearType was better, but it was just a technology that relied on tricking the human eye into seeing the fonts in a clearer way. Then in 2003, they were asked to create new fonts that would make the most of ClearType technology.
A Canadian, John Hudson of British Columbia, who runs a font foundry called Tiro Typeworks, headed the team, and chose six of 30 font submissions as the new look of Microsoft on-screen.
The ClearType Font Collection will be Calibri, Cambria, Consolas, Candara, Constantia and Corbel, as well as a Japanese font called Meiryo, with Calibri and Cambria the basic typefaces for Office 2007 .
E-Mail Jack Kapica at jkapica@globeandmail.ca
Posted June 23, 2006, at 12:15 p.m.
Digital futebol: Recent stories, most of them published in North America and at least one in The Globe and Mail, wondered about the impact of the World Cup on employees, who work in offices where so many desktop PCs can stream video.
Some stories worried about the impact on network resources. "The 2006 FIFA World Cup may be turning enterprise employees around the globe into soccer fans, but IT experts say there are ways to prevent the tournament from winning the fight for network resources," wrote Shane Schick in itbusiness.ca on Tuesday.
Others talked bluntly about productivity. Forbes magazine ran a story headlined Managing World Cup fever at work, saying that "while conventional wisdom suggests the World Cup is a drain on worker productivity worldwide, some say it's just the opposite — employee morale and commitment rise, and the entire office benefits from what Graham Spencer, European marketing director for global professional services firm Towers Perrin in London, calls 'the feel-good factor' when your national team wins."
And CNNMoney.com, in a story headlined 2006 FIFA World Cup May Cause Global Loss in Employee Productivity and Network Bandwidth, reminded its executive readers that there are tools to stop this kind of nonsense. "To lessen employee distractions, Websense [a major maker of Web filtering productivity software] allows organizations to institute flexible policies to effectively manage employee Internet use," the article read. "Websense software gives IT administrators the ability to control access to internet categories, such as sports, gambling and streaming media, during anticipated high levels of traffic."
I don't recall many such stories the last time the World Cup was held, but four years ago we also didn't have the streaming-video capabilities we do today. Instead, I suspect that this time, much of the "concern" expressed by businesses about the FIFA "distraction" is largely fuelled by the fact that the United States' chances of winning anything are, as they say in the sport, "nil."
Can you imagine bosses complaining about distractions if the U.S. team were winning?
E-Mail Jack Kapica at jkapica@globeandmail.ca
Posted Dateandtime
Dr. McCoy to the rescue: Reader Walter Derzko wrote recently to alert us that Star Trek's medical tricorder has taken a step closer to reality. Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy used to wave something that was about the size and heft of a Palm handheld computer at some wretchedly wounded Trekker, and make both a diagnosis and offer instant treatment.
Well, the U.S. army and the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, are developing something very much like it. AcousTx Corp., of Seattle, has won a multi-phase contract by DARPA to develop a Deep Bleeder Acoustic Coagulation (DBAC) device.
The idea behind DBAC is to stop blood loss from wounds in the extremities, which are the major cause of preventable battlefield death.
DBAC is a portable system that will locate and treat bleeding vessels in arms and legs using ultrasound techniques to locate the bleeding and to direct the delivery of High Intensity Focused Ultrasound energy to stop the bleeding.
Hmm. Perhaps something good will comes of this war after all.
E-Mail Jack Kapica at jkapica@globeandmail.ca
Posted June 20, 2006, at 5:20 p.m.
A creepy business: A reader who took pains to be anonymous wrote to me this week to say that when he (I'm just assuming it's a "he") worked for a major Canadian bank, his on-line activity was monitored around the clock. He found it so discomfiting that he created a screen saver that said "STOP WATCHING ME." He would run the screen saver and turn his monitor off, so that anyone monitoring him would see it on a remote computer, but no one else near him could.
He reports that he quit the bank after he kept hearing remote laughter every time he turned on the screensaver, even though no one was within direct view of his screen.
"This is just plain creepy," he concluded.
I can't verify the story, but it becomes believable after reading a report released this week by Proofpoint, of Massachusetts, an on-line security company, which found that 38 per cent of large U.S. companies have actually hired staff just to read employee e-mail.
The survey, of 294 "decision-makers" at large corporations, shows that paranoia is way up these days, with executives expressing "uneasiness" about employees violating their privacy policies.
Fair enough, but when you have people going through all the company's e-mail and blog postings, there will be things in there that are sure to be objectionable, though not necessarily in terms of a violation of security. And I bet that most of the employees who get nabbed fall into this category — Proofpoint says that 7.1 per cent of the companies it surveyed fired employees for blogging and message-board infractions in the past year.
Interestingly, all this is framed in terms of "risk," suggesting security is what corporate paranoids are after, not things such as vile language, bad-mouthing bosses and so on. That's because 34.7 per cent of companies report their business was affected by the disclosure of sensitive material in the past year.
Companies fear that financial data, health-care information, or other private materials might be posted in blogs, sent through instant messaging, or transmitted by other means.
As we have noted recently with the National Security Agency's monitoring of phone calls and e-mail in the United States, a sense of urgency about security can give any authority the right to invade people's privacy, including low-level executives who feel they have a right to define a security breach.
And now in Canada, government lawyers have gone to the Supreme Court to argue that national security trumps everything.
But let's look on the brighter side: e-mail snooping is now a booming business, with high prospects for employment. I wonder how one becomes a corporate snoop, what the qualifications are and how much such a skill is worth in terms of salary.
One other thought: People hired to look for information leaks must of course know what secrets the company wants contained. In other words, the e-mail and blog snoop must know the company's secrets to identify them in e-mail and blogs, the way a policeman should know the law to be able to identify people who break it.
And that just adds to the list of people who know the company secrets.
Is this counterproductive, or am I just being obtuse?
E-Mail Jack Kapica at jkapica@globeandmail.ca
Posted Friday, June 16, 2006, at 10:17 a.m.
The buzz on that buzz: A couple of weeks ago I reported on the "mozzy tone," a ring tone copied from an anti-teenager device by a British company called Compound Security Systems. The idea is that the 17,000 Hertz tone, which sounds like a really angry mosquito (or "mozzy," in Strine), is pitched carefully so people without age-related hearing loss can hear it. The tone drives teens crazy, and they tend to evacuate an area where it's played.
But the teens have turned the tables on the anti-teen crusaders by using the tone as a cellphone ring tone, so they can make surreptitious calls in the classroom, where the (older) teachers can't hear the sound.
But the whole thing has come full circle, as a company called Opera Telecom, in conjunction with Melodi Ltd., has started selling Mozzy Tones. On this side of the Atlantic, the tone is available from Fork, which offers a sampling of the tone at 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 and 20 KHz. I tried them all, and about the only thing my tired ears could hear was something at the 14 KHz range, which was basically a faint hiss, but extremely annoying.
What's really encouraging about the story is that the creator is taking this in great stride. Simon Morris, Marketing Director for Compound Security, said that "The high-frequency buzzer device that we originally developed was actually designed to irritate youngsters and deter them from hanging around outside shops. However, someone managed to reinvent the mosquito noise as a ring tone and it has proven to be extremely popular — you've got to give the kids credit for ingenuity."
E-Mail Jack Kapica at jkapica@globeandmail.ca
Posted June 15, 2006, ay 12:124 p.m.
Sympatico makes a deal with the devil: Further to Sympatico's dropping of Usenet newsgroups, I decided to sign up for my "free" subscription to NewsHosting.com, which Bell customers are told is replacing Sympatico's Usenet servers.
The results were considerably less than encouraging.
In signing up, users are asked for, among other things, two e-mail addresses — their "primary" address and a second address. Apparently, "primary" means something different to NewsHosting.com, based in Winter Park, Fla., than it does to me.
I have my own personal e-mail address, which points to my Sympatico address, and I use it for all my communication. For me, it's a primary address. But NewsHosting.com uses it as proof that I am with Sympatico, although it somehow forgot to mention that part. So when I gave them the other e-mail address, NewsHosting.com acknowledged that I had signed up successfully for an account, but wouldn't activate it.
I sent a query to tech support, which promised to answer within one working day.
I waited five days without an answer, until it dawned on me they might be using my "primary" e-mail address as proof of Sympatico membership. I signed up for another account with my Sympatico address as the primary address, and it went through immediately.
This kind of service is atrocious.
Then I tried to download some newsgroups using a newsreader I have, and I couldn't believe how slow NewsHosting.com's server is. I was too dispirited to try to measure the speed, but it's safe to say it was a pre-dial-up speed.
Then I tried to download some binary attachments. Not a one was playable or viewable, but all of them counted toward my monthly cap of 1 gigabyte.
This is unacceptable.
Perhaps Newshosting.com doesn't see its Sympatico customers as worth of even minimal service. But I've certainly lost my desire to ask whether they offer better service to the people they charge up to $285 (U.S.) per year.
It's cavalier these days to say that Usenet has become a haven for moral degenerates and angry pre-adolescents with a gift for insult, and has therefore become quaint, like the Geneva Convention has for the Bush Administration. But there is much to learn from Usenet's groups — I myself check out various groups to see what the prevailing mood is out there, just to keep up with my job. And I check out many different groups depending on my interests.
If Sympatico wants to argue that it's dropping Usenet because of a lack of interest, so be it. But to offer such a lousy service as a salve to its cost-cutting move is an insult.
E-Mail Jack Kapica at jkapica@globeandmail.ca
Posted June 14, 2006, at 11:03 a.m.
What's the question again? Those of us who have been raised to understand that the most difficult question ever posed — the Ultimate Question Of Life, the Universe and Everything, as enunciated by Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy — will be surprised to see that Yahoo has asked for their own version of the Important Question.
Instead of dealing with philosophers, as HHGG did, Yahoo's Ask the Planet project will go to the finest minds of the day — celebrities. Philosophers are so 1970s.
The project is at Yahoo Canada Answers, a "social search service that taps into the collective knowledge of the community to answer questions about ... well, everything", says Yahoo. As examples, it offers such profundities as how to get your VCR clock to stop flashing 12:00, or the name of the best restaurant in downtown Timbuktu, or how to house-break your new puppy.
Golly. If these are the really deep questions of the day, I guess I'm either psychotic or the rest of the world is really out of step with me.
Other celebrities include golfer Mike Weir, pregnancy and parenting maven Ann Douglas, Tech TV media personality Marc Saltzman, former US Vice-President Al Gore and theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking. The last big question on Yahoo Canada Answers will be asked by Bono, U2's lead singer.
But Yahoo, whose press release seems not to have heard of Douglas Adams, should learn from the supermegacomputer Deep Thought, which said the answer to the Ultimate Question was 42. Loonquawl, one of Adams' philosophers, was outraged, and yelled, "Is that all you've got to show for seven and a half million years' work?"
"I checked it very thoroughly," said the computer, "and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never actually known what the question is."
Beware, Yahoo.
E-Mail Jack Kapica at jkapica@globeandmail.ca
Posted June 13, 2006, at 11:53 a.m.
Usenet's death revisited: I have further news on Bell Sympatico's decision to stop Usenet for its subscribers.
Over the weekend, I decided to move to my new, free but limited account at NewsHosting.com, in Winter Park, Florida, which Bell said I should do if I still want to avail myself of some (far fewer) Usenet features.
I followed all the instructions to the letter, chose a username and password, and submitted it. I then received an e-mail with a link in it to validate my request. I clicked on that link all weekend, and all I got was NewsHosting's deepest regrets that it was not possible to access the service at this time. It was not available on Saturday, Sunday or Monday.
I sent NewsHosting an e-mail message, and have heard nothing in return. Beyond that, I really don't know what else I can do.
I received quite a few responses to my blog entry on Friday:
Glad I found your column regarding Bell's idiocy. It took me some time to figure out why my attempted posts were being rejected. Interestingly, what Bell or the new news host failed to add in their FAQ is that in Outlook, you must delete your old Bell account — including all those groups to which you subscribed — and re-enter the lot once you've added the new news account info. People just have to remember to write them all down.
Not that my voice matters, nor the $110 I spend on a bundled service are of any importance to Bell, but I actually need the newsgroups for a very elemental thing: to add weekly posts and let readers in specific newsgroups know my DVD and film music site exists. It's not worth subscribing $10 (U.S.) for such a basic right, as I see it, so I guess I'll have to find other means of advertising the site's existence (such as podcasting).
I guess the only sad chapter to Bell's decision is that their move further reduces the desire of other providers to keep newsgroups. Most of the groups have degenerated into spam-heavy forums, often packed with posts by angry know-it-all infants with a large profane vocabulary; but I'll miss the browsing, and the occasional question to which I can add something of value. It may be an evolutionary step in the Web, but Bell's silent trashing was more insulting. I'd actually have given them credit for simply sending an e-mail: "It's no longer profitable. It wastes bandwidth. It's a legal headache. And it'll be gone May 25. Sorry."
Or something like that.
Mark R. Hasan, editor, KQEK.com
I didn't receive any notification either. I was puzzled that there had been no new messages in ANY newsgroups, so I went to Bell's website and read their announcements. I also discovered that they've changed the user agreements. Anybody who doesn't cancel before the new agreement takes effect has implicitly accepted the new terms.
Amazing what you find when you ignore the leopard.
Rogers' service is worse than Bell (they gave everybody in my condo a "free" upgrade to digital cable, then sent out bills for activation fees and equipment rental).
I wonder if Primus DSL is any good. Their bundle of local phone, Long Distance, and DSL is cheaper than Bell's. Have you heard anything about them ?
Mark Freedman
I always enjoy reading your blog, particularly when you have comments about Bell Canada and customer service. One day I should tell you about my experience cancelling my Expressvu service.
As you are aware Bell is supposed to have submitted a plan to the CRTC to outline how it proposes to spend million of dollars on getting high-speed internet access to rural communities. I would be particularly interested in anything you manage to find out from contacts about how this is to be done.
I live in a rural community where WiFi distribution is not possible due to line-of-sight problems. We do have fibre at the road and there is high speed DSL about 20 km away on a main highway. There is also a high-speed DSLAM switch about 10 km up the road in a location where only bush wolves, frogs and herons live, installed by an independent telco, the Westport (near Kingston, Ontario) WTCcommunications provider, presumably anticipating future demand.
As you noted in one of your recent blogs, hugeness brings with it a kind of false credibility. More on experiences with Google and their Adsense one day if you are interested.
Colin Beckingham, Desert Lake, Ont.
Thank you for that column, Jack. I thought I was the only person in Canada who noticed when Rogers shut down their Usenet service last December. Complaining did me no good. I particularly resented their rationale that Usenet is "an old technology." Harrrumph I used it daily, nearly as much as I use the WWW. Ask a question in technical groups about some oddity of how Excel or Photoshop is behaving, and within 24 hours a guy from Sweden and another from Hong Kong gives you the answer. Ah, but only to be kind, Rogers informed us that we can still get Usenet access if we go to Giganews and pay about $20 per month. Hey, what a deal Rogers jacks up my monthly fee one month, cuts my service the next month, and tells me I can still get the service if I go somewhere else and pay more. Grrr.
Well, I did look around at various Usenet services. I tried Giganews for a short while but found was not impressed by their pricing and download limits, which I very quickly overshot. A little investigation took me to Newshosting where, at about $10 per month I get 2 MB of downloads per month. Looks like some sort of one-man operation, but after five months of their service, I'm resonably satistifed. For posting I have to go to Google Groups.
I'll never forget how I was treated by Rogers, though. If we ever get a chance to kick sand in their face, I'll rush to get first in line.
D. Schreiber
E-Mail Jack Kapica at jkapica@globeandmail.ca
Posted June n12, 2006, at 2:10 p.m.
No reason to complain? In Douglas Adams' Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a bureaucratic alien with a taste for bad poetry admonishes our hero for not knowing that the Earth was to be blown up to make room for a hyperspace bypass because the plans had been on display on Alpha Centauri for the previous nine months. Actually, they were "on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard."
I always think of this whenever Sympatico makes changes to its Internet service.
On June 6, Sympatico discontinued its Usenet newsgroup service. All existing Sympatico newsgroups have been removed. Except, oddly, for Sympatico business customers, for whom the newsgroup servers are still running.
Of course, Sympatico is keeping its Web-based discussion forums (at www.bell.ca/internetforum). And anyone who wants to keep subscribing to Usenet can go to NewsHosting, a Usenet provider unaffiliated with Sympatico, which will give Bell Sympatico customers 1 GB per month of Usenet service at no cost. Only this service does not let you post to those groups, just read them.
If, however, you want the premium service, NewsHosting will be happy to provide it — at $285 per year.
I don't recall any notice of the take-down, which was probably on file in that same lavatory on Alpha Centauri.
Nor did other customers, who called Sympatico tech support, only to be told that Usenet service is not federally regulated and so Sympatico can cut it unilaterally without reducing your ISP fees. It was, in short, a freebie, and we can't complain.
I do understand that Usenet newsgroup activity has fallen off dramatically of late; in December, when Rogers cancelled its Usenet service, I was told that the number of Rogers subscribers still exercising access to the newsgroups was down to single-digit percentages.
There might very well be a good business case for dropping Usenet, but assassinating it strikes me as heavy-handed. And if equivalent access to NewsHosting's Usenet service is really worth $285 a year, I can't help but see this business decision as a windfall for Bell Canada.
I really do resent the fact that I was either not told about it, or was told way down under the usual self-promotional blather I get regularly from Sympatico, which tells me breathlessly about services that hold no interest for me, and which I reject as spam. If Sympatico had indeed mentioned it in the fine print, the information might as well have been on Alpha Centauri, and I would have found it if I had only bothered to go there.
E-Mail Jack Kapica at jkapica@globeandmail.ca
Posted June 9, 2006, at 4:14 p.m.
What's Google up to anyway?: For some time I've been wondering what it is about the Internet that makes it so friendly to super-giants: Why is the medium that everyone thought would level the playing field for small businesses so readily accept the likes of Microsoft, Google, eBay and Amazon.com? The kind of domination these goliaths exercise has no equal in almost any other industry.
The news this morning that Google, primarily a search engine, has released Google Spreadsheets appears to be a natural progression of this mania for world dominance: the giants are now fighting the other giants.
Google Spreadsheets, a Web-based application, is a stripped-down competitor to Microsoft's Excel, and is being regarded by the industry as another assault on Microsoft's market dominance despite Google's protests to the contrary. Microsoft is, by all reports, eyeing it nervously. Not because it's a better product, but because Google is following a strategy that built the Internet into what it is today.
It's not just the spreadsheet that Google is offering. The search-engine giant has recently bought or developed office productivity tools such as an on-line word processor, Web-based e-mail, instant messaging, a calendar, a desktop search, and Web page and blog creation tools.
All these are products are being offered for free; Microsoft, however, has long ago stopped giving anything away for free.
If anything is clear, this Battle of the Bulging Behemoths appears to be about weapons, not products. Google, awash in cash, can afford to keep throwing free applications out at a time when Microsoft's strategy has been to make sure everybody is paying for its software — witness Microsoft's intense interest in stopping software piracy.
Giving things away for free (in exchange for brand loyalty) is how the Internet was built. Now it appears we're back to the good old days.
E-Mail Jack Kapica at jkapica@globeandmail.ca
Posted June 6, 2006, at 4:20 p.m.
Women and the IT world: Reducing schoolgirls' reluctance to enter computer careers to their perception that IT is "boring," as a Microsoft survey announced at a Toronto conference this morning, is disengenuous and misleading. I'm sure the survey correctly identified the word "boring" as being the most commonly used reason, but as any father of teenage girls will tell you, "boring" is simply a word meaning they're just not interested in something.
But a simplistic conclusion like this suggests that all we need to do to increase female presence in IT is to make IT sexy and exciting.
It won't work.
I've seen countless surveys commissioned by well-intentioned but unenlightened interests suggesting that it's the universities that are at fault for not graduating enough IT students. That kind of thinking serves only the interests of those companies that want to hire kids fresh out of school who will work for little pay.
From where I sit, the real problem is with the corporate mindset. Many of today's managers were educated in the 1970s and 1980s, when the mantra was to cut, downsize, trim, lay off, outsource and generally chisel their work force's benefits and pay packets to appease an increasingly avarisious shareholder.
The result is a terrorized work force, and nowhere is this more visible than in the high-tech industry, which is filled with men whose main qualities are complacency, agreeableness and subservience. And they know that their employers will always look for more ways to trim the payroll, the most frequent excuse being the need to find workers "with new skill sets." By which they mean more recent graduates, who demand smaller salaries than established workers who are starting families.
You can't attract women to such a workplace atmosphere. "It's not that women are less effective or productive — they just have different priorities," wrote Warren Farrell, author of Why Men Earn More, in Forbes magazine a few weeks ago. Unlike the corporate mindset, only 29 per cent of women found money to be the primary motivator, while for 76 per cent of men, it was the motivating factor.
"Women," Mr. Farrell concluded, "prioritized flexibility, fulfilment, autonomy and safety."
No, most high-tech companies encourage ferocious competitiveness, and even encourage it in company game rooms, where men play first-person-shooters to relax. Most women are not interested in such activities, and so are excluded from these informal workplace networks. That leaves them unaware of opportunities and out of the decision-making processes.
Radia Perlman, a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, called that kind of climate "intimidating" in an article in CNET News recently. Given that women are often humble and self-questioning, she said, tech companies should work to tone down cut-throat cultures.
If Microsoft and other high-tech companies want to make IT careers interesting to more women, then all they have to do is to clean up their own offices first.
E-Mail Jack Kapica at jkapica@globeandmail.ca
Posted May 31, 2006 at 1:52 p.m.
Now everyone's a journalist: So Apple Computer has lost its case against a trio of websites that leaked information about an Apple project code-named Asteroid. Apple claimed the information was "confidential" and sought to identify the culprits behind the leak to on-line media outlets.
Apple appears to have assumed the leakers were its own employees, and they were violating trade secrets. Apple subpoenaed the Internet service providers of three on-line journalists to turn over e-mail records aiming to uncover those possible sources, and presumably do horrible things to them in retaliation.
Last year, a lower court ruled in Apple's favour, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation, representing the on-line writers at AppleInsider.com, PowerPage.org and MacNN.com appealed. This time the verdict was resoundingly in the favour of the defendants.
The EFF was effusive. "Today's decision is a victory for the rights of journalists, whether on-line or offline, and for the public at large," group's attorney said.
While I applaud the court's defence of sources for journalists, I worry that after this, any people who write on-line will be able to wrap themselves in the mantle of journalism. They will not necessarily feel bound by the ethics of journalism, as professional journalists know them. If this comes to pass, it will serve to cheapen the profession and induce greater mistrust of the media.
The court said, "We decline the implicit invitation to embroil ourselves in questions of what constitutes 'legitimate journalism.' The shield law is intended to protect the gathering and dissemination of news, and that is what petitioners did here."
A court that refuses to define what journalism is, but will protect all who claim to practice it leaves a lot of leeway for self-definition.
This issue isn't over with.
E-Mail Jack Kapica at jkapica@globeandmail.ca
Posted Dateandtime
The secret cellphone: British school kids have turned the tables on a technology designed to annoy teenagers, reports the Brtitish news site Metro. They've co-opted a high-pitched sound that cannot be heard by adults as a ring tone for their cellphones.
The sound, called The Mosquito, was developed by a Welsh company called Compound Security as a method for shooing teens and gangs away from areas such as storefronts. The logic is that teen ears are sensitive enough to pick up the annoying buzz, but adults over 20, suffer from presbycusis, or age-related hearing loss, hear nothing.
Savvy kids realized that if they could have a ring tone that adults can't hear, they could receive calls and text during class and their teachers wouldn't have the foggiest what was happening. Using the cellphone during class time is forbidden.
The tone (now renamed Teen Buzz by users) is said to be in the range of 10 to 20 kHz.
It all sounds very cool. But there is a fly — or mosquito — in this ointment: First you have to have a cellphone that can reproduce a sound in that frequency. And how many phones out there can do that?
E-Mail Jack Kapica at jkapica@globeandmail.ca
Posted May 26, 2006, at 4:42 p.m.
The price of publishing on the Web: We all thought the Web was a medium far cheaper than print. But that's changing.
Increasingly, we're seeing anti-defamation lawsuits being launched about on-line content — the latest being the one launched by Kazaa owner Sharman Networks and CEO Nikki Hemming against P2PNet.net, based in Lake Cowichan, on Vancouver Island. The suit is a little odd, since P2PNet.net is a champion of peer-to-peer file-sharing, which is the same business that Kazaa is in.
Officially, the suit alleges defamation about some content that site owner Jon Newton found in wide circulation, originating in a report by Associated Press. Tellingly, the suit also wants Mr. Newton to release the name of a person who posted a comment about Kazaa under a pseudonym on the P2PNet.net site. That poster appeared to know an awful lot about the case being fought in an Australian court by Sharman, and it's likely Sharman desperately wants to find out who it was.
In his own defence, Mr. Newton says his site has no mechanism to track down the identity of the poster.
Aside from the merits of the P2PNet.net case, the situation has major repercussions for the rest of the Web. A former freelance reporter (he sold a number of medical stories to The Globe and Mail in the 1980s), Mr. Newton has little money and lives in a remote area. P2PNet.net, which he started as a hobby, has taken over all his time, he says, but he makes no money worth taking by lawyers.
In fact, Mr. Newton can't even afford his own lawyer, which is why he's trying to raise money via a PayPal account (by this morning, he has raised a whopping $360.78 from 11 donors).
Sharman clearly won't get much financial satisfaction from Mr. Newton, but it will cost Mr. Newton a lot before Sharman goes away.
In the meantime, a similar situation faces far bigger fish, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft's MSN, AOL and Ask.com. They all feature sponsored links on their search websites, and security specialists at McAfee SiteAdviser recently reported that 8.5 per cent of those advertiser links were "risky," meaning they had some form of malicious code in them.
The problem here is that these search engines, each having prospered even better than I have, are not taking responsibility for the sponsored links. And it is just a matter of time before some aggressive lawyer decides to sue a search engine for the damage an ad does to someone's machine.
Newspapers (and TV networks), however, are very sensitive to this. I have seen many occasions in which advertisers have been banned for various reasons. But the process of selling an ad and vetting its contents requires eyeballs, and eyeballs cost money to hire. Which is why newspapers are still more reputable.
In both these cases, the impoverished Mr. Newton and the filthy rich search engines, did not budget for the unexpected. And they're finding that not taking responsibility can be very costly.
E-Mail Jack Kapica at jkapica@globeandmail.ca
Posted May 24, 2006, at 1:30 p.m.
Bandwidth caps again?: Bell Sympatico is changing its end-user licence agreement. Most of the changes appear routine, but one paragraph stands out:
"The General section of the Acceptable Use Policy has been amended to expand upon the limitations relating to your use of the service, namely, prohibiting you from using the service to generate levels of Internet traffic sufficient to impede other users' ability to transmit or receive information."
Now the copy of the EULA available on Sympatico's website is dated last September, and does not contain the new language mentioned in the notice, so we can't judge what it will be like. And we don't have much time to decide — if we don't like the new EULA, we have until June 1 to cancel our subscriptions; after that, we have to abide by it.
The change, as described above, sounds like Bell is once again trying to limit subscribers' "unlimited" connection to the Internet. It also sounds like Bell is about to install bandwidth-shaping policies, using technology that can tell if you're "impeding" other users.
Okay, let's be blunt: Sympatico is obviously talking about peer-to-peer communication, because P2P takes up the lion's share of Internet traffic.
If I'm reading the change correctly, Sympatico will prohibit me from using the service to generate a volume of traffic that Sympatico alone will determine.
At least in the bad old days, Sympatico could inform you when you exceeded your bandwidth "cap" and charged you for it. But any mention "bandwidth cap" today is likely to cause a major subscriber revolt.
I've got a call in to Sympatico about this. I will post any developments.
E-Mail Jack Kapica at jkapica@globeandmail.ca
Posted May 23, 2006, at 4:48 p.m.
StatsCan jumps: A reader who doesn't wish to be identified just wrote to me to say that my blog entry for May 8 (More Browser Wars) was almost immediately overcome by events: the quick action of the Statistics Canada programmers. When blogs and e-mail newsletters started complaining that the on-line form for Census 2006 wouldn't display properly for those who were using open-source browsers, such as GNU/Linux or those without a proprietary version of Java, StatsCan adjusted its website to accommodate them.
It was done in a matter of a day, from when the issue became significant item in blog and Web discussions, said the reader, who sounds an awful lot like he was part of the programming effort.
So instead of issuing a nasty defence that there are too few open-source browser users to justify the expense of making the site available to all, StatsCan simply regarded the matter as one of its "challenges and oversights" and fixed it pronto.
This is a phenomenally fast reaction, and it will be the reason StatsCan expects to get 15 to 20 per cent response to our on-line census — in New Zealand, in contrast, only about 9 per cent responded on-line to their first on-line census last year.
This makes the 2006 Canadian census is the first major census undertaking anywhere in the world. It's the first time we've tried it, and if it succeeds, we have the programmers to thank for a good chunk of it.
At the same moment, however, IT Business Canada reported this morning that StatsCan has been so good at this that the programmers have been victims of their own success: Users overloaded the portal on Tuesday night, and Census2006.ca on Wednesday told visitors that "the site is temporarily experiencing traffic far beyond capacity."
The issues have forced StatsCan to extend the deadline for the on-line questionnaire to May 23.
E-Mail Jack Kapica at jkapica@globeandmail.ca
Posted May 18, 2006, at 10:50 a.m.
Snow White's revenge: Not much technology scares me but there's one that just terrifies me: It's called the Persuasive Mirror. This "mirror" is designed to show unhealthy eaters what they could look like in the future if they fail to improve their diets.
Okay, so encouraging a healthier lifestyle is a Good Idea, but the Persuasive Mirror sounds like a nasty piece of business, just like the one Snow White's dreadful stepmother had.
A prototype was built to look like a bathroom mirror. All you have to do is look into it. The "mirror" uses two cameras placed on the sides of a flat-panel display and combines video streams from both cameras to obtain a realistic replication of a mirror reflection. Advanced image processing is used to, um, "enhance the person's reflection."
Webcams and sensors placed around the house monitor visits to the refrigerator, treadmill usage and time spent on the couch. Software analyzes the data to determine how that behaviour will influence your future appearance, including obesity.
Look into the mirror and watch your face growing fat before your eyes.
You can also see the consequences of too much time spent in the sun, or the benefits of your pedometer worn during a brisk walk or run. The effects of other unhealthy behaviours such as drinking, smoking or drug use are planned for future versions of the mirror.
The mirror is part of a new science called captology, which is the use of computers as persuasive technologies created for the purpose of changing people's attitudes. And it was developed by Accenture, a management consulting and outsourcing company.
But what baffles me is that the mirror was developed at Accenture's Technology Labs in Sophia Antipolis, France.
The last people I'd expect to obsess about weight to the extent of developing sduch a contraption are the French. I mean, aren't they the ones with the healthiest diet?
E-Mail Jack Kapica at jkapica@globeandmail.ca
Posted May 17, 2006, at 2:58 pm.
Happy stumbling: Over the years we have become blasé about surfing the net, a little jaded even. Now three Canadians are seeking to put the wow back into the Web.
Garrett Camp, Geoff Smith and Justin LaFrance have created StumbleUpon, a browser plug-in (or extension) for Mozilla's Firefox browser, which is designed to surprise surfers.
StumbleUpon places a button on the Mozilla browser, and with a (free) registration, surfers tell the plug-in their personal preferences by checking radio buttons from a long list of interests. Then when they click the "Stumble" button, the browser delivers them to websites, news articles, photos, videos, or Wikipedia pages according to the listed preferences.
Surprise random page generators have been around for a while, but StumbleUpon adds users to a community that rates each site with a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down," and offers comments on the content. With each rating, StumbleUpon learns individual users' personal preferences and delivers increasingly relevant content.
StumbleUpon has become popular in the three years since it was created, and has already logged almost 2 million downloads. So far, more than 850,000 people from 139 countries have reviewed, rated and categorized five million websites pages since the service was launched.
The three brains behind StumbleUpon have now moved to San Francisco, where they have been welcomes by Silicon Valley angel investors, enabling them to get out of "stealth" mode and allow millions more to begin stumbling.
On Wednesday, they are launching StumbleUpon officially in the United States.
The idea works on three levels: Not only does it deliver sites that contain material of interest to users, it also offers a feeling of community. Moreover, it also allows advertisers to target their audiences according to the audience's preferences, meaning that StumbleUpon might have a sound business model on its hands.
E-Mail Jack Kapica at jkapica@globeandmail.ca
Posted May 16, 2006, at 4:12 p.m.
Son of Y2K: Remember the Y2K bug? There might be a similar one that would hit Canada, warns reader Marianne Moershel of Madoc, Ont.
When the reduction in the GST takes effect, it might generate some real headaches, she says.
While major corporations and largest software companies (think Intuit) will adjust properly, there are a lot of homemade spreadsheets and databases out there whose makers hard-coded the 7 per cent (".07" and "7%"), perhaps out of the fatalistic view that we're stuck with it forever.
"Do managers know," Ms. Moershel asks, "that they have to ask whether the GST is calculated correctly in all their reports? This is especially true of the standard ones that they've relied on in the past such as budgets, forecasts and other financial reports."
Ms. Moershel's warning is a little chilling. I can imagine all too easily that the people who hard-coded spreadsheets and databases with the 7-per-cent solution are long gone from the enterprise, and searching through the code of every database and spreadsheet would be a headache most managers would love to forget.
E-Mail Jack Kapica at jkapica@globeandmail.ca
Posted May 15, 2006, at 2:55 p.m.
Everyone's a critic: Ottawa copyright lawyer Howard Knopf's Excess Copyright weblog has uncovered the hot news that the London-based Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT — get it?), in collaboration with the Federal Express courier service and Britain's Revenue and Customs department, have trained two black labradors, called Lucky and Flo, to sniff out DVDs that might be located in boxes, envelopes or other packages, as well as discs concealed among other goods that could be sold illegally in Britain.
The Motion Picture Association of America, which apparently speaks for the British organization, released a press release called World First As Dogs Trained To Detect DVDs touting this incredible advance in technology.
Knopf's punch line? "Jack Valenti must be proud. When he ran the MPAA, he was certainly known for being dogmatic."
My own concern is what will happen to these dogs when the MPAA and its global servants discover a way of marketing movies in DVD globally, and don't need Lucky and Flo any more for fear they will find too many false positives. Will Lucky and Flo simply be shot?
Perhaps the dogs could still be employed, protecting the public from all the movies that stink.
E-Mail Jack Kapica at jkapica@globeandmail.ca
Posted May 12, 2006, at 10:30 a.m.
Life in support hell: A colleague is so concerned about his privacy that I knew him for years only by his on-line avatar.
So when the a local cellphone company decided to start sending the caller's name as well as phone number in the caller ID, he grew restive. So he called customer support to see whether he could drop the name, while displaying only the caller's phone number. He knows how easy this should be — he works for a provider of Voice over Internet Protocol telephone services.
He took a transcript of the conversation:
Support: "This is not possible. We don't offer that service."
Customer: "Okay, I'd like to complain about this."
Support: "I can note that in your account."
Customer: "I'd like to complain about this and have somebody actually read it, like a manager. I'd like the customer support rep to e-mail his manager and whomever else and note my dissatisfaction with this new service."
Support: "This isn't possible. I have no way to do that."
The customer then tried to get him to say yes, he'd simply e-mail somebody to register a complaint. He politely but adamantly refused.
The customer then asked where he could complain.
Support: "Well, you can e-mail customer support and somebody will definitely read your e-mail."
Customer: "Who will read it?"
Support: "A customer support rep will read it and ..."
Customer: "Wait, just a customer support rep? Anybody else?"
Support: "No."
Customer: "So I can't complain to you, because nobody will care. I can't e-mail customer support to complain, because only another support rep will read it, who will also refuse to send it to anybody who cares."
Support: "... That's right."
The support then went on to say that the executives in the boardrooms decide what services will be offered, and how marketing is involved.
Support: "Is there anything else I can do for you today sir?"
Customer: "No."
E-Mail Jack Kapica at jkapica@globeandmail.ca
Posted May 11, 2006, at 2:15 p.m.
Beware the e-cards: Sending an e-card to Mom on Mother's Day? Be careful, warn malware-watchers at McAfee. The free ones could be loaded with spyware.
McAfee evaluated e-cards to come up with a list of the best and worst. The company says that despite the colour, sound, animation and fun, many greeting cards might just have nasty little surprises in them, such as spam, spyware and adware, even viruses.
The top 10 e-card sites to stay away from (the links below are safe; they go to McAfee's Site Adviser with fuller descriptions of the e-card companies):
2000greetings.com: Sign up and watch your inbox fill up with offers from major national advertisers like JC Penny, Tiffany, and Overstock.
fun-e-cards.com: There was nothing fun about the 29 spam e-mails per week received after signing up.
freewebcards.com: resulted in 36 e-mails a week offering a tax refund, auto loan or credit card.
funsilly.com: One of the 50 weekly e-mails received after signing up here said, "How to Have a Happy Life." One way would be to avoid Web sites like this.
funnyreign.com reigns as one of the highest volume, non-adult Web sites in McAfee SiteAdvisor's vast database. This e-mail sign-up received 1,075 messages per week on average.
fukkad.com is an aggregator of light-hearted material (jokes, quotes, poems, etc.) that uses an Active X prompt to install Roings adware, IMIServer and TargetSaver during one visit.
celebwelove.com: Celebrity-themed e-cards might bring you to Celebwelove.com, but how long you stay depends on where you click. Users are redirected to other dangerous sites, often without their knowledge.
eForu.com site provides greeting cards, as well as celebrity photos and a joke directory. It also breached browser security when McAfee visited it.
ecard4all.com is similar to fukkad.com, and loaded McAfee's test machine with Roings and IMIserver.
MyFunCards.com is a heavily trafficked e-card site that requires users to download a "free" toolbar to access 1,000 e-cards. The toolbar helpfully includes unrelated software like Smiley Central, Cursor Mania, Popular Screensavers, the MyWebSearch search box and Search Assistant.
What a rogue's gallery.
But McAfee SiteAdvisor says that for every dangerous site, rated site, there is a good alternative, and many of the most popular e-card sites tested safe and offer a limited selection of free cards — the catch is that the clean players reserve the best material for their paid subscribers. Among them are:
Hallmark.com, from the venerable greeting card company.
WorldWildlife.org offers free e-Cards from the World Wildlife Fund featuring wild animals or sea creatures. Sometimes they send not so subtle messages to donate.
AmericanGreetings.com and its subsidiaries, BlueMountain.com and EGreetings.com, account for about 75 per cent of all e-cards sent.
E-Mail Jack Kapica at jkapica@globeandmail.ca
Posted May 10, 2006, at 1:45 p.m.
The census and the Americans: The 2006 census is roiling bloggers, in a more serious concern than which browsers work with the on-line census form.
In 2003, Statistics Canada contracted out part of the census machinery to Lockheed Martin Canada, the Canadian division of U.S. weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin, which is supplying the scanners that StatsCan is using to read the forms that people fill out in pencil. The previous way was to use humans to type data from the paper forms into computers.
This decision to do this was to cut enormous amounts of money from the process, and to get census figures published two months earlier than before.
But the blogosphere is rife with rumours that the presence of a U.S. defence contractor (albeit by subsidiary) will automatically make the census data available to American authorities under the U.S. Patriot Act, which allows the Federal Bureau of Investigation to force U.S. companies to secretly share data.
Lockheed Martin was hired to supply the scanning equipment in 2003, and privacy advocates, peace groups and politicians raised enough concerns that StatsCan changed the contract to ensure that employees of Lockheed Martin and IBM Corp., another U.S. subsidiary working on the 2006 census, would have no access to the data. Under the deal, IBM is providing the technology that makes it possible to fill out the census forms on-line, the first time this is being done here.
The U.S. companies got involved as a result of the North American Free Trade Agreement, under which the Canadian government must give equal consideration to U.S. corporations when contracting out services such as the census, including those that have a direct connection with U.S. defence agencies, such as Lockheed Martin.
This of course does not satisfy the blogosphere, which is calling for a kind of passive resistance in which Canadians fill out the form with the absolute minimum of information — The Statistics Act makes it an offence to refuse to provide the information, or to provide false information.
A website dedicated to the issue is CountMeOut.ca, which offers such resistance as "Don't do the Census online, as StatsCanada encourages; offer only minimum co-operation with the Census; and be creative. Make noise. Complain. Protest. Get others involved."
As a sample, CountMeOut.ca offers a view of a form in which the data is entered upside-down, forcing StatsCan to enter the data manually, and to blot out part of the bar code that appears at the bottom of the sheet.
E-Mail Jack Kapica at jkapica@globeandmail.ca
Posted May 9, 2006, at 11:20 a.m.
More browser wars: The Canadian government has caused quite a stir in the open-source software community.
For the first time, we can fill out our census forms on-line. You'd think people would be happy to have this option, but not so with the OSS crowd. They're furious.
That's because the on-line version of the census form won't work for those who use some browsers supported by GNU/Linux, or for those people who will not install a proprietary version of Java.
Remarkably, Statistics Canada's first foray into on-line census-taking supports four versions of operating systems (Windows 98, 2000, Me or XP and Mac); it supports Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser 5.01 and above; Netscape Navigator 7.0 and above, Firefox 1.0.4, Mozilla 1.7.8, and Safari 1.2.4 with webkit 125.5.7.
That's a lot of preparedness.
But you can't fill out the census if you use a variety of GNU/Linux distributions and recent versions of Mozilla, Epiphany, Firefox, Konqueror, and Opera, even if they are equipped with suitable versions of Sun Java.
On-line, the fury is wild. I've seen geeks use words such as "corrupt," "irresponsible" and "endorse one vendor's product over free alternatives" to describe this form of "blatant discrimination" against the least-used browsers. About the only qword I haven't yet seen si "treason," but I'm sure that's coming too.
The problem stems from the government's use of Secure Channel, a set of services developed by Public Works and Government Services Canada and contracted to a consortium of companies led by Bell Security Solutions, a division of Bell Canada.
Secure Channel offers bi-directional encryption using SSL and 1,024-bit Public Key Infrastructure, and logs the IP addresses from which the system is used.
Not all browsers will support such security measures. To do that, you must have a browser with Java virtual machine from Sun Microsystems Inc. (Version 1.4.2_3 or higher), Microsoft virtual machine (any version), or Apple JVM (1.4.2_5 or higher) that supports 128-bit encryption.
I am sorely tempted to dismiss the open-source community as a bunch of complainers and suggest they fill out the census forms by pencil and mail them in, the way we've done it for decades. After all, we hardly want the federal government to expend the kind of money required to develop software to suit the fragment of the population that wants to go this way.
But the open-source community is onto a greater problem.
There are still no standards for browsers, even after the cessation of the old browser wars. And surely the government must be able to deal with its citizens in a way that doesn't force them to use certain products to guarantee secure transmissions.
This is not the government's responsibility. I put the blame on software makers who will not agree on certain standards. Surely that day must come, and come soon.
E-Mail Jack Kapica at jkapica@globeandmail.ca
Posted May 8, 2006, at 1:30 p.m.
Blackberry whine: A disgusted Ontario Appeals Court judge hurled his Blackberry across his office the other day. The reason: After upgrading to version 2.0 of the Blackberry Internet Service, he was getting too many spam messages, especially those offering to enlarge certain body parts.
That's because Blackberry maker Research In Motion has made major changes in its Internet e-mail service, and although RIM warns you of the changes, few of us will read the warnings carefully - to our disadvantage.
BIS 2.0 has been implemented some weeks ago by Telus, and a few days ago by Sympatico. Rogers is expected to upgrade soon. The changes will become quite noticeable, especially to those on-the-go types, like lawyers and judges, who use the Blackberry Web-mail accounts, and those who use their Blackberry addresses as their primary e-mail addresses.
The reason, RIM tells me, is that BIS 2.0 (the upgrade from BIS 1.8) gets rid of the Web-mail feature. You can no longer go to your service provider and see your e-mail on the Web-hosted account. Your Blackberry will now talk directly to your e-mail servers.
This is an important change and might cause confusion to those accustomed to working with the Blackberry in certain ways.
For instance, if you have a Sympatico e-mail account (a POP account, in geek speak) that your Blackberry checks, you will be able to delete an e-mail message from your Blackberry and the Sympatico server as well. If you don't set your Blackberry preferences to keep that e-mail message, it can be gone from your desktop box when you get home.
This is confusing stuff, but it's necessary to know because BIS 2.0 will change your Blackberry's behaviour.
The biggest change will be in spam.
BIS 1.8 allowed people to filter their e-mail by the "from," "to," "Subject line" and "text" fields. The first three are basically useless as spam filters, but the one that works, the "text" filter, is dropped by BIS 2.0. And so the above-mentioned judge, who had earlier been able to filter certain messages by entering the word "penis" into the text-filter field, was suddenly swamped with enlargement pitches after he changed to BIS 2.0.
RIM acknowledges this as a problem, but adds quickly that it's working on its own spam filter as fast as it can. RIM also recommends that spam-haters get a Web-based e-mail address and use that as a primary address; Web-based e-mail providers have spam filters in place (they're not perfect, but they're better than nothing). RIM recommends a Yahoo Web-mail account, because RIM has a "push" agreement with Yahoo. (RIM promises "push" e-mail accounts for other ISPs in the future.)
Charges are being made for deleting messages. For those who do use another service for their e-mail accounts (not from Blackberry), one option is to delete them on the Blackberry only, another to delete messages on both the server and the Blackberry. The third option is the default: You will be asked whether to delete the message on the server or on the handheld only, a tedious extra step (my recommendation: delete your messages on the Blackberry alone, then manually delete them at home.)
None of these changes really affects those Blackberry owners who have an account only with their corporate Blackberry Exchange Server, which has spam filters in place and its own system or erasing messages.
One of the benefits of the new system is the elimination of quotas on e-mail set by the BIS 1.8 Web-mail service. Users were limited to a few megabytes, which was proving to be hell for e-mail with attachments. Now the limit is the one set by your principal e-mail service (Yahoo Web-mail, for instance, offers a 3 gigabyte limit).
Another is that BIS 2.0 will allow users to send e-mail from any of their accounts - some people have several. You can send personal e-mail from your personal account, for instance, and business e-mail through your business account.
This also seems like a good time to remind Blackberry owners about how their devices get e-mail. The Blackberry checks your home account (POP) once every 15 minutes; if it finds something, it checks again three minutes later.
If, like me, you leave your home computer on all day long and have set Outlook (or whatever e-mail program) to check for e-mail regularly too, there will be a race to see which client gets the e-mail first, especially if your home system is set to delete your e-mail from the server (as it should be).
BIS 2.0 has not changed this behaviour, But it helps to understand it when resetting your preferences.
It is also worth noting that Blackberry users have the option of moving up to BIS 2.0. They can decline, but at some point in the future - RIM wouldn't say - they will have to.
E-Mail Jack Kapica at jkapica@globeandmail.ca
Posted May 5, 2006, at 3:55 p.m.
The dying handheld: Market analysts at IDC News Service reported the other day that unit sales of handheld devices fell below 1.5 million in the first quarter of 2005, the ninth consecutive quarter that worldwide shipments of personal digital assistants have declined.
First-quarter shipments of handheld devices in 2005 were 1.47 million, down an astonishing 22.3 per cent from the same quarter a year earlier.
The reason: The cellphone has won the market, sporting secondary features that PDAs consider being their primary appeal.
But PDAs and cellphones are racing madly at each other, and should reach a point at which it would be difficult to distinguish between the two.
Bottom line: Whatever you buy today should be toast tomorrow.
E-Mail Jack Kapica at jkapica@globeandmail.ca
Posted May 5, 2006, at 1 p.m.
Big Music's lesson: The recording industry of late has been driven almost entirely by a fear of technology, especially by Napster, and has been fighting a rearguard action against anything that disrupts its old — and highly profitable — marketing model.
The big four — Universal, Warner Music, EMI and Sony BMG — fought this by dragging individuals, most of them kids, into court for downloading music over the Internet, and by going after the companies that make peer-to-peer software. The message is clear: The industry hates new technology as well as its own customers.
But Big Music then went after someone its own size, and lost.
After months of negotiations with Apple Computer to revise the pricing system for music sold on iTunes to a variable pricing model, the recording oligarchy collapsed on Monday and renewed its contracts with Apple to sell all songs at 99 cents each (U.S.).
The industry's opening position had been designed to be lucrative to its members, but Apple's hard-nosed boss Steve Jobs started the negotiations saying no, and never blinked. It was the industry that caved in. And they caved completely.
The renegotiation is significant — neither because it reflects on the recording industry's profit motive, nor about antiquated copyright laws nor about artists' rights.
It's significant because it should be the last nail in the coffin of the industry's doomed campaign to rid the world of technology that has disrupted its analogue marketing model.
The recording industry should not see this as a victory for technology. It should see the iTunes contract instead as an acknowledgment that you can't roll back technological advances that are inconvenient to your business strategy. The industry's long-held position of bullying its audience and government had shoved aside the entire notion of adapting to an evolving marketplace.
Most of the rest of the world is adapting to the new technology. It's time for the recording industry to do the same.
E-Mail Jack Kapica at jkapica@globeandmail.ca
Posted May 3, 2006, at 10:48 a.m.
Brazil a tech powerhouse?There's too little news coming out of Brazil tech sector. The country has been cranking up the heat on its tech revolution for a few years now, and has reached a high level of development.
Not that it's a welcome barometer of success, but Brazil is near the top of the world's busiest spammers and scammers. You don't get that kind of infamy is your population isn't learning something.
The high-tech marketing analysts at IDC Brazil expect to see an increase of 14 per cent in IT spending, to reach $235-million (U.S.) this year. The government is much to credit for this — it spent $208-million on IT in 2004, which made it Brazil's third-highest technology investing sector, accounting for more than 60 per cent of the investments.
More than half of Brazil's high-tech exports can be categorized as aircraft and spacecraft, with telecom equipment coming in far second.
E-Mail Jack Kapica at jkapica@globeandmail.ca
Posted May 2, 2006, at 4:18 p.m.
Big Music's vacuum: While Big Music's lawyers continue their dogged fight to return the pop recording industry to its pre-Napster state, circa 1996, an increasing number of musicians are announcing that the CRIA does not, in fact, speak for them. And as a result, these artists are looking elsewhere to promote their music.
Several bands have claimed great results using the Internet, and now others claim to be getting similar results from podcasting.
Last July, an indie band from Toronto called Uncle Seth sent some of their songs to a website called the Podsafe Music Network. In less than a year, the band has developed a fan base from Florida to England.
"We knew very little about podcasting, except that it seemed to be a way to get some on-line exposure for our music," lead singer Tara Thompson said. "I don't think any of us realized there was this amazing international community we're now a part of."
So far, all Uncle Seth's fame has come from people who have their own podcasts. These anonymous individuals liked Uncle Seth's music so much they played it on their podcasts. Now Uncle Seth has decided to launch its own podcast.
It's too early to tell yet whether podcasting is really a good promotional medium — at the moment, unknown bands might be getting a popularity boost simply because of the novelty of the medium, and not necessarily because the medium will be fair to every band.
Still, it's a sign that the recording industry has created a vacuum, and bands are beginning to fill it.
But here's a curious thought: If podcasting develops into a workable system for bands, more of them will move to it as a way of publishing their stuff. Then might we expect Big Music's lawyers to close that down too?
E-Mail Jack Kapica at jkapica@globeandmail.ca
Posted May 1, 2006
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