rwmtest

On May 15th the Canadian INDU parliamentary committee published my brief to their study on the Canadian Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic.  They published a PDF version .  This is a slightly edited (turn footnotes into links) version. Introduction I am submitting this brief as a private citizen with over 30 years experience in the Information and Communications Technology field. With population growth, aided by climate change, virus and other pathogen outbreaks are expected to be more common. With globalisation and increased global travel, pathogen outbreaks more easily become pandemics. While pandemics need to be understood as a fact of life, our response to pandemics and the various costs of those responses are policy choices. There are emergency preparedness plans with considerable resources, including preparedness drills, for other types of threats such as war, terrorism or school schootings. This has not yet been the case for pathogen outbreaks or pandemics. It seems our...

Mike Richardson posted a reference to the pizza metaphor of net neutrality. (Edit: Previous ink no longer works, so try The pizza metaphor of net neutrality ) I believe this analogy is part of the problem we are dealing with. If we think of "Internet Service Providers" (ISPs) as a flat service, then what I consider to be the core problems won't ever be able to be addressed. The flat network discussions will continue to confuse more fiscal conservative or libertarian-minded politicians like Maxime Bernier  into believing that removing Net Neutrality legislation is a reduction of government control, rather than removing the legislation amplifying the harmful impacts of other government interventions. If you separate the physical layers ( OSI model  layers 1 through " 2.5 ") from the various layers built over-the-top such as TCP/IP layers, then you get an entirely different picture. Right-of-way is a government imposed limit on property rights used to put infrast...

I've regularly  written about the OSI model  for digital communications.  I'm increasingly concerned that policy discussions that hide these layers are leading to policy failure.  I see this in the odd rhetoric coming out of the USA on network neutrality, which is the same country that originated the policy failures around technological protection measures. When I learned about digital networks in the late 1980s this included the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model  which describes the different interoperable layers that  digital communications enables.  This is in contrast with analog networks which were purpose built and inflexible.  Each layer in a digital network is built upon other layers, starting with the physical layer that describes specific electronics all the way up to the application layer which is the layer closest to the user. When discussing communications technology people often make analogies to transportation technology, si...

Re: Telecom Notice of Consultation CRTC 2017-49 : Review of the competitor quality of service regime While the consultation is in the form of a series of questions, my intervention requires context. While necessary at this time, I consider the "competitor quality of service regime" to be a transition policy to deal with problems caused by the way we managed convergence in Canada.  My recent submission to the Canadian content in a digital world consultations  was focused on convergence policy. If we are to solve the underlying problems on a more permanent basis we need to adopt policy that mirrors the OSI model layered approach of the underlying digital communications technology. The digital transition involved moving from purpose-built networks to a layered approach, and our regulations should have adapted from regulating as if the underlying technology were still purpose-built. In short, this would mean: Municipal layers 1 and 2 (or rather, what is now often called layer 2.5...

I was pointed to a Linux-centric article that included the following section which surprised the person who pointed it out: Windows 10 will be the last desktop version of the operating system that once gave Microsoft dominance in the PC software market. After that, Windows will be offered on a subscription basis and run from the cloud, but this will not be a Microsoft-exclusive cloud. Internally, Windows will be virtualized within software containers running on Ubuntu. I'd like to parse this quote a bit, and offer some of my own interpretation. Last Desktop version The inevitable disappearance of the desktop operating system has been discussed for decades.  It is really a poor fit for the modern era.  Unlike their more thin mobile counterparts, desktop operating systems really only work well if you have a systems administrator on-hand to handle issues ranging from malware to multi-application compatibility.  System administrators, on the other hand, really want to centra...

Policy makers during much of the 1990's liked to use the phrase "Information Superhighway", trying to make an analogy between transportation technology and communications technology. With all the recent talk about the future of Canadian television, I started thinking about analogies between transportation and our video distribution systems. Walking could be compared to over the air terrestrial transmission, which can't reach very far and can be thought of as the beginning of our transportation and video distribution journey. Riding animals was our next step for transportation, which in my mind is analogous to the creation of Cable, Satellite, and related "Broadcast Distribution Undertakings" (BDU).  We had some choice over what animal to ride, and we could get a bit further, but we were still moving slowly. Riding carts pulled by animals might be seen as the next step for transportation, analogous to BDUs going digital with BDU technology dependent set-top b...