Yesterday’s decision by Supreme Court of Canada about police ability to search a phone during arrest is wrong. The split decision (4-3) illustrates the difficulty of the issue, and as the dissenting judges rightly pointed out, it gives too much room for interpretation and judgement by law enforcement in case…
This has popped up in my inbox a couple of times over the last few weeks. I think it’s an important initiative, and decided to share. It’s an online tool to write a letter to editor to your local newspapers, expressing your disapproval of Bill C-13. https://openmedia.org/SpyBill/
(Cross posted from Facebook) An emotionally charged weekend. Twenty five years ago tomorrow, the Berlin Wall came down. I’ve added a post about that day on my freedom-25.ca website. I took a bit of hiatus from writing there… a lot of the memories and recent events were just too painful…
On October 20, 2013, the House of Commons vote approved the “Cyber bullying” bill C-13. I don’t have to go into details on all the problems with the bill, you can google it. That the conservatives voted in favour is not surprising – they sponsored the bill, and the government…
NDP leader Thomas Mulcair says the man behind last week’s shooting in Ottawa was not a terrorist. Predictably, PM Stephen Harper took issue with Mulcair’s comments. Even more predictably, the intellectual heavyweight as he is, Liberal leader Justin Trudeau offered a deep thought in the form of “The RCMP was clear,…
This week, it was revealed that two of the most powerful software companies transmit private data to their servers. In case of Apple i-Cloud, even the contents of unsaved documents are transmitted. Have you ever typed a letter, only to find it too harsh, and decided not to send it?…
Internet would have been East Germany secret police pipe dream: http://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-stasi-spied-on-social-networks
I said on multiple occasions that I am not a proponent of a ‘revolution’ – history has too many examples of what’s wrong with that concept. This article may explain both what’s wrong with revolutions, and why some people think one might be inevitable.
Tomorrow is October 23rd. On that day 24 years ago, my family landed in Canada, after an epic escape from Communist Czechoslovakia 15 months earlier. Earlier this summer, I started a web site that chronicles that journey. You can read it at http://freedom-25.ca/. I had to take a break because…
A fascinating account on how easy it is to ‘de-anonymize’ publicly available data: http://research.neustar.biz/2014/09/15/riding-with-the-stars-passenger-privacy-in-the-nyc-taxicab-dataset/