Copyright Canada

"The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a class-action lawsuit against AT&T on January 31, 2006, accusing the telecom giant of violating the law and the privacy of its customers by collaborating with the National Security Agency (NSA) in its massive and illegal program to wiretap and data-mine Americans' communications."

LINK: http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/att/

Wireless Nomad Co-Op, a subscriber-owned ISP I work with in Toronto, made it on to Now Magazine's list of top 10 technologies for 2005, their "Tech 2005 Top 10."

From the magazine's web site:


Tech 2005 Top 10 list #5: FREE WI-FI

Cities around the world have begun to reimagine Internet access as a utility rather than an upper-middle-class privilege. Philadelphia, San Francisco, even the island of Mauritius are on their way to becoming wireless and totally free. NYC Wireless and Montreal's Isle Sans Fils have made headlines for popularizing the feasibility of free wireless for everybody. Toronto has its own grassroots Wi-Fi community in the hands of local upstarts Wireless Toronto and Wireless Nomad, both offering community service."


LINK:

Lots of people interested in making copyright work for Canadians will be getting together Thursday night courtesy of the Social Tech Brewing Co.

what: gathering of public domain defenders
where: 215 Center for Social Innovation, 215 Spadina Ave, Toronto
when: Thursday, February 2, 2006, 6:30 p.m. until 8 p.m.

"It's timely that the night after the $250-a-plate fundraiser for Sarmite Bulte and the "balanced meal" counter-dinner hosted by Online Right Canada- and just days before a federal election that has brought Canadian copyright issues back into the media spotlight - Social Tech Brewing should have opportunity to bring you such an incredible line-up of voices for freedom and fair use."

LINK: Brought to you by: http://socialtechbrewing.org

LINK: http://upcoming.org/event/51961/

"AMS Visualizer is a logical graphical extension of th amstracker command-line tool. It displays a 3D image of a PowerBook 15 that appears to "hang" in space. Note that the PowerBook model is hardcoded, but it would be easy to make the image correspond to the physical machine the program is being run on. The orientation of the on-screen image is a real-time approximation of the computer's physical orientation. Thus, if you tilt the PowerBook left, the image will immediately tilt left; if you roll the PowerBook backwards, the image will roll backwards, and so on."

LINK: http://www.kernelthread.com/software/ams/ams.html

http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/total-share.ars

Steven Page from the Bare Naked Ladies says:

"As I’ve said to friends, we can’t expect to tell our fans “see you in court” and then “see you at Massey Hall next fall” – we have to choose one, and I choose the latter. This current litigious atmosphere is simply a product of the record business trying to prop up a dying, obsolete business model. The labels aren’t the enemy; they’re often run by people who love music and are passionate about the promotion of Canadian culture, but their responsibility is not to the Canadian people, but to their parent companies’ shareholders."

bnlblog.com

http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/information/carpenterslevel.html

By launching a censored search engine for China, Google is compromising its position as the search engine of record: by providing massively censored search results for an entire country they've shown they can't be trusted as a neutral intermediary, at least not in the way many hoped they might. Google has now taken a side: the side of censorship, the side of state control, a side the Internet is not on. Today, they are cooperating with a one-party dictatorship to suppress democratic rights and political dissent- how long will it be before they start cooperating with any politician to suppress opposing views and unpleasant facts? As a public company, they answer to their shareholders, not their users... but the management should remember, "do no evil" as a company motto is a valuable part of their brand, and shouldn't be squandered.

But think about it: Google has agreed to help the Chinese government cover up a massacre of over a thousand students peacefully protesting for the democratic right to vote. Maybe the protesters are right, maybe they weren't. Whichever side you're on, though, it happened- and letting power dictate truth is to surrender freedom and reason.

Lego is finally wising up: they just released a line of ultra-cool Japanese anime-style giant robots as part of their ExoForce series. Lego has always been the best toy ever: sure, there were a few dark years in the late 90s and at the turn of the millennium, but somebody at Lego gets it and gets it good. Fully poseable, 10 inches tall, with giant blasters and Lego minifigs with spiked blue hair, these are the toys I dreamed of when I was eight years old!

Beyond being cool, I think these are the first post-modern Lego sets. Just like Joss Whedon's hybrid Sino-Anglo Firefly/Serenity future where cowboys swear in Chinese, a Danish company selling most of its products to English-speaking North Americans has its new toys covered in Chinese characters.

Japanese animation used to be hard to find; you had to either get a copy from a friend's copy VHS cassette, or wait around after school until the guys running Suspect Video in Mirvish Village would finally roll out of bed and open their shop. Now it's everywhere, even the robot toys that were almost impossible to find over here. Lego doing Star Wars was a good move: Lego moving into anime robots is just awesome.

On top of all that, each of these mecha comes with a new kind of brick I've never seen before: it's transparent plastic, the size of a regular 2 x 4 Lego brick, but it has a little watch battery and an LED light inside. The LED connects to a little flexible fiber-optic tube that kids can plug into the laser sight on the mecha's laser rifle. Squeeze the button on top, and a little red laser designator lights up!Lego is finally bringing cheap electronics into their plastic bricks, paving the way to a day when kids (okay, well, growing-ups too) will be able to make programmable robots and other devices since it by clicking some Lego bricks together. 2016 is going to be a great year to be a kid...`