The destruction of public radio in Canada continues: Our beloved bureaucrats at the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission decided to allow the CBC to air commercials on Radio 2.
Dear CRTC: the CBC is not a private company. It is partially funded by the Canadian public. Its mandate is not to make money but to promote Canadian culture. Instead of allowing this travesty, how about holding them to account for the on-going destruction of a national treasure?
So Mr. Harper finally answered questions about the scandal brewing in Canada’s Senate. I found his comments rather pathetic, unfortunately.
In particular, this one: “it was Mr. Wright’s money, it was his personal money that he was repaying to the taxpayers on behalf of Mr. Duffy, it was his personal decision and he did this is his capacity as chief of staff, so he is solely responsible and that is why he has resigned.”
If Mr. Harper is speaking the truth, he should resign as he is obviously incompetent and out of touch even with his innermost circle of staff members. If he is lying, he should resign for, well, for blatantly lying to the people of Canada and for throwing his closest friends and associates under the truck for the sake of staying in power.
What an unsightly spectacle.
So pretend for a moment the following: In Moscow, the French ambassador gives an interview to a local French-language TV program that is broadcast to the expatriate French community in Russia. As he speaks, you notice that the flag behind him is not the French tricolor but Quebec’s flag, the Fleurdelisé. How would you interpret this? Exactly what is the ambassador trying to say?
Of course France’s ambassadors are generally more diplomatic than that. Even if they were to support Quebec’s independence from Canada, I doubt they would do so in such a crudely undiplomatic manner.
So then, when Hungary’s ambassador here in Ottawa gave an interview to Magyar Képek, a Hungarian-language television program broadcast on OMNI TV throughout Canada, why did he choose to do so standing in front of not Hungary’s tricolor, but the flag of Székely Land (also known as Szekler Land, or Székelyföld in Hungarian, a territory in Eastern Transylvania inhabited by Hungarian-speaking ethnic Székelys)?
I cannot help but wonder about the thinking behind this.
Looking out my window this morning, here is the winter landscape that I saw:
This is not what those blasted groundhogs promised. They are bold-faced liars, the little creeps. The next time you run into Punxsutawney Phil or Wiarton Willie, keep an eye on your wallet; you just don’t know what the little sons of bitches are capable of.
I’ve been reading a lot lately about Quebec’s recent language police fiasco, an overzealous Office québécois de la langue française cracking down on an Italian restaurant for its use of the non-French word “pasta” and other, similar terms on its menu. Of course I’ve been reading a lot about it lately; apparently, its news coverage exceeded by a factor of 60 (!) the coverage Quebec premier Pauline Marois received during her recent trip to drum up foreign investment in the province.
Yes, I could go on lamenting the superficiality of the news media these days, and I think I would be right. But I am thinking about Pastagate now for a different reason: I am wondering if I am the only one seeing strong parallels between a zealous police force guarding the integrity of a language and a zealous police force guarding the integrity of a religion.
At least officers of the language police do not come with canes.
It didn’t take very long for Hungary’s far right to turn the Canadian government’s giant billboards into a fascist meme.
Reacting to comments by Jason Kenney about the plummeting numbers of refugee claimants from Hungary, the infamous far-right Web site kuruc.info responded with a twisted version of the giant billboard placed by our ever so compassionate Conservative government in strategic locations in Hungary… namely, places with a high percentage of Roma population. The original billboards advised would be refugee claimants about the accelerated claims process. The version of kuruc.info is slightly different. It reads:
ANNOUNCEMENT FROM THE HUNGARIAN PEOPLE
Gypsies! We have had enough of you! Get out of here!
This is not your home!
To facilitate faster processing, we would rather pay!
Budapest – Delhi: only HUF 166,500
Don’t laugh, Jew, this also applies to you.
In the lower right, the official logo of Canada’s government is replaced by a map of “greater Hungary”.
I hope Messrs. Harper and Kenney are proud of the fodder they provided to these proud protectors of the Hungarian nation.
So, well, I don’t wish to jump on a politically motivated populist bandwagon over what, in the big scheme of things, is just (very) small change but still, let me try to get this straight.
Apparently, if I defraud the Canadian government to the tune of a hundred thousand dollars and I am dumb enough to get caught, all I have to say is “oops, I made a mistake”, offer to repay the funds I stole, and all is forgiven.
If only the world worked this way. Except that, well, it does, at least if you are a Canadian senator, like the honorable (?) Mike Duffy. Claiming that it was just an accounting mistake (the forms were apparently too complicated) Mr. Duffy not only offered to repay the $100,000 (give or take) that he stole, he now has the audacity to call the attention surrounding his case a “distraction” that interferes with the important work he is doing for his “home province”, Prince Edward Island, where he hasn’t lived in many decades.
No, Mr. Duffy, it’s not a distraction. It means simply that you tried to steal our money and you got caught. And what you did, embezzling the government to the tune of a hundred grand, is something that would land most of us ordinary mortals in jail for a significant amount of time as common criminals.
I have been password protecting my smartphone ever since I got one, and more recently, now that Android supports encryption, I took advantage of that feature as well.
The reason is simple: if my phone ever gets stolen, I wouldn’t want my data to fall into the wrong hands. But, it appears, there is now another good reason: it seems that at least in Ontario, if your phone is password protected, police need a search warrant before they can legitimately access its contents.
Privacy prevailed… at least this time.
I always thought of myself as a moderate conservative. I remain instinctively suspicious of liberal activism, and I do support some traditionally conservative ideas such as smaller governments, lower taxes, or individual responsibility.
So why am I not a happy camper nowadays with a moderate conservative government in Ottawa?
Simple: because they are not moderate. To me, moderate conservatism means evidence-based governance. A government that, once its strategic goals are formulated, puts aside ideology and governs on the basis of available facts and the best scientific advice they can obtain.
But this is not what Mr. Harper’s conservative government is doing. Quite the contrary, they engage in one of the worst of sins: they try to distort facts to suit their ideology. Most recently, it is Fisheries and Oceans that is imposing confidentiality rules on participating researchers that “would be more appropriate for classified military research”.
I am appalled.
I was reading about full-disk encryption tools when I came across this five-year old research paper. For me, it was an eye-popper.
Like many, I also assumed that once you power down a computer, the contents of its RAM are scrambled essentially instantaneously. But this is not the case (and it really should not come as a surprise given the way DRAM works). Quite the contrary, a near-perfect image remains in memory for seconds; and if the memory is cooled to extreme low temperatures, the image may be preserved for minutes or hours.
Decay of a bitmap image 5, 30, 60 seconds and 5 minutes after power loss in a 128 MB Infineon memory module manufactured in 1999. From https://citp.princeton.edu/research/memory/.
So even as we worry about public servants losing USB keys or entire laptops containing unencrypted information on hundreds of thousands of people, it appears that sometimes even encryption is not enough. If a lost laptop is in a suspended state, an attacker could access the contents of its RAM using only a rudimentary toolkit (that may include “canned air” dusters turned upside-down for cooling).
I wonder what the future will bring. Tamper-proof hardware in every laptop? In-memory encryption? Or perhaps we will decide that we just don’t care, since we already share most details about our personal lives through social networks anyway?
On that note, Canada’s government just decided to scrap a planned cybersurveillance bill that many found unacceptably intrusive. Good riddance, I say.
It has been a while since I last saw a temperature like -27.9 on our thermometer. And that’s just on our balcony!
Then again, this is Canada in January, so perhaps it’s not that unusual. Still, it is one of those days when I am really glad that I work from home.
This giant billboard was spotted in the city of Miskolc, Hungary:
In English, the billboard reads:
ANNOUNCEMENT BY THE GOVERNMENT OF CANADA
To reduce abuse, the refugee system of Canada has changed.
Refugees whose claims are found to be without grounds
are sent home much more quickly.
Further details: valtozas.kanada.hu
What’s wrong with this billboard, you ask? Perhaps nothing. It is, after all, important information. And it is located in a Hungarian city that, according to the Government of Canada, is the source of most unfounded refugee claims.
But it also happens to be a city with a high Roma population.
Still, it is not an easy black-and-white issue. It is true that Canada receives a disproportionately high number of false refugee claims from Hungary, an EU democracy, and many of the claimants are Roma. But it is also true that the situation of many Roma in Hungary is more like what one expects to see in sub-Saharan Africa, not in an EU country. And while many Hungarians readily blame the Roma for their own economic plight, it is hard to argue that the palpable fear they feel when a right-wing paramilitary unit marches through a Roma village is of their own doing.
Curiously, the Hungarian ultra-right is not happy about Canada’s toughening stance on Roma refugees. They’d much prefer to see all Roma leave Hungary and settle in Canada.
I only noticed it in the program guide by accident… and I even missed the first three minutes. Nonetheless, I had loads of fun watching last night a pilot for a new planned Canadian science-fiction series, Borealis, on Space.
The premise: a town in the far north, some 30 years in the future, when major powers in the melting Arctic struggle for control over the Earth’s few remaining oil and gas resources.
In other words, a quintessentially Canadian science-fiction story. Yet the atmosphere strongly reminded me of Stalker, the world-famous novel of the Russian Strugatsky brothers.
I hope it is well received and the pilot I saw last night will be followed by a full-blown series.
I may be a loyalist royalist but I don’t usually much care about the comings and goings of the Royal Family and I am no art critic either. However, I cannot refrain from commenting on the official portrait of Kate Middleton. It’s like all the goodness has been sucked out of her. Like a charmectomy operation. All the warmth that makes her photographs such a pleasure to look at… none if it is present in the painting. What was the artist thinking?
I am supposed to be a geek but I guess I also have some chicken genes, since I never felt a particularly great urge to risk bricking my smartphone just for the sake of being able to run geeky apps on it that require root permission.
This all changed now that I actually have a spare smartphone, having accepted an early upgrade offer from Rogers. This spare, a SONY Xperia X10, served me faithfully for over two years. It is still a pretty decent phone, but I admit I like our new Samsung phones better.
So what does a cowardly geek do with a spare smartphone? Why, exactly what he did not dare to do while that smartphone was still in service. First, he tries to root it… which turned out to be a relatively easy process, although there were some tripping points like making sure that you enable USB debugging.
But while rooting the phone did let me do some fun things with it, the phone was still locked to the Rogers network. So I decided to take the plunge and purchase an unlock code for the grand total of about eight bucks from cellunlocker.net. (I picked this unlock provider after doing a bit of research; they seemed cheap yet reliable.) It took a bit longer than promised to get the unlock code (almost a full day instead of a few hours) but it worked as advertised.
So how do you test if the phone is unlocked? Well, it says that it is unlocked, but is it? My wife’s Samsung phone says it’s unlocked, too, but it rejects non-Rogers SIM cards. How do I know? I actually have two non-Rogers SIM cards, a non-registered one from a data stick I used to use in Hungary, and a registered and valid SIM card from my TELUS data stick. I shoved this one into the X10 and presto… it works! In fact, much to my surprise, it seems to work as a phone, too, although I am loathe to try to make calls with it, as I have no idea how much TELUS would charge for a voice call on what is supposedly a data only plan.
So what will I do the next time I travel overseas? Take this X10 with me to use with a local provider’s SIM? Or perhaps unlock my new Samsung phone? Sounds like a plan… maybe I’ll have the courage to do so this time. For what it’s worth, I did order a cheap micro-SIM cutter and a set of adapters that will help me cut down a regular SIM card to the size the Samsung phone accepts, yet still use that SIM card in other phones.
It will be fun.
Alas, the cat sanctuary on Parliament Hill is no more.
Now all we have there is politicians. This depresses me greatly.
This is what my cellphone greeted me with this morning:
It wasn’t much warmer on our balcony either.
I like the CBC. CBC Radio 2 is pretty much the only radio station I listen to these days (though I admit I liked them a great deal more before they changed the station’s format and eliminated some unique programs, most notably Jurgen Gothe’s Disc Drive). In the evenings, I like to watch local news on CBC Ottawa. CBC Newsworld still has some excellent documentaries. And so on.
The CBC is about to have its licenses renewed. It is asking the CRTC for “more flexibility”, including permission to run commercials on Radio 2. And this makes me pause. Do we really need the CBC?
Yes, I think Canada needs a public broadcaster. One that is dedicated to provide Canadians with unbiased information; one that takes on a role of cultural leadership.
But no, we absolutely do not need an ill-managed private broadcaster that loses a billion dollars a year in public funds.
I have heard of the conspiracy theory that Stephen Harper’s government is purposefully allowing the CBC to be steered in this direction, as a means to devalue and, ultimately, destroy the CBC for ideological reasons. I don’t like conspiracy theories but I admit I sometimes wonder…
Apparently, it’s real. Some Americans, bitterly disappointed with Obama’s re-election, are considering emigration. At first I didn’t want to believe this but I now personally heard about a medical professional from the southern United States who is contemplating moving to Canada.
Well, we are a big country, a welcoming and tolerant place. Still… are you sure you will fit in? I feel compelled to repost a picture I ran across on Facebook a day or two ago.
I gave this post a provocative title intentionally. I am a one-time conservative voter. One reason why I feel disenchanted with conservatives (not just in Canada, mind you) these days is that they seem to have politicized science at every opportunity. Sure, others have done the same thing in the past (liberals are certainly no knights in shining armor) but the past is the past, right now I am worried about the present. Reproductive health, stem cell research, environmental science, climate change, you name it… if they don’t like the result, they attack it, and if the result withstands politically motivated attacks, they move on to attack the researcher. Or, as the case might be, they do their darnedest to undermine the integrity of the data.
This is precisely what happened when Canada’s conservative government eliminated the mandatory “long form” census that was sent to 20% of Canadian households. Sure, there were legitimate privacy concerns that could and should have been addressed (I even wrote a letter to the Chief Statistician myself many years ago when we received the long form census and found some questions a tad sensitive, and the safeguards against being able to personally identify responders inadequate.) But eliminate the long-form census completely, making it “optional”? That is a bone-headed stupid move. The most charitable interpretation is that the government simply didn’t know what they were doing because they don’t understand statistics. A more sinister possibility is that they knew exactly what they were doing, and they are undermining the integrity of Statistics Canada’s data sets on purpose. In light of what has been done and said in recent years, despite my general dislike of conspiracy theories, I am leaning towards accepting this interpretation.
And now the results are beginning to arrive, demonstrating the validity of all those concerns. According to the data collected, the percentage of people in Canada whose mother tongue is English remained the same despite the fact that in the meantime, Canada received 1.1 million new immigrants, 80% of whom had a mother tongue other than English of French. Or that the number of people in Canada whose mother tongue is a non-official language supposedly dropped by 420,000, again despite the above-mentioned immigration statistics.
Of course these results make no sense. What they reflect is a faulty data collection methodology. A methodology forced upon Statistics Canada by a political leadership that finds it appropriate to meddle with science.
The damage due to such meddling is profound and lasting. There is the immediate damage of distorted results. This can be fixed easily; for instance, if Canada were to return to the long form census, this one census could be discarded as an outlier and the long-term integrity of the data would remain assured. But by politicizing the science and polarizing researchers, they undermine the process itself, creating a partisan mindset. Defenders of scientific integrity will unavoidably find themselves participating in political debates and feel forced to adopt polarized positions. Climate scientists often sound more like preachers of a religion than impartial researchers. Could this be, at least in part, due to the polarized atmosphere in which their scientific results are scrutinized? Ultimately, it is the integrity of the scientific process that suffers, and that’s bad news for all of us, regardless of our political views.