rwmtest

I sent the following as a letter to my federal member of parliament, David McGuinty. I suspect it would be useful for others to send similar letters to their MP if this issue disturbs them as well. Mr McGuinty, MP for my riding of Ottawa South, I wanted to make sure you are aware of a citizen from the security/hacker community I am part of that is still in prison from before the G20 summit. There is an audio story about the issue: http://www.tvo.org/cfmx/tvoorg/searchengine/index.cfm?page_id=613&action=blog&subaction=viewPost&post_id=13995&blog_id=485 "The strange, suppressed story of Byron Sonne, the G-20 security hacker who has been held, unconvicted, for 6 months and counting. An interview with technology journalist Jesse Hirsh." I find this very disturbing. There is a media ban on talking about the issue, with this being a case of a security person investigating the security measures being set up for the G20. In our community, security research...

I just received a call from someone looking for support for OpenOffice in the Ottawa area. They did a search, and my company came up. While I would have had better answers for them in the past, I realize that with all the changes initiated this year that I am not as up to speed on the current situation as I once was. I'm offering what I know, in the hopes that other people will add comments. In the past the lead developer and primary copyright holder for OpenOffice.org was Sun. Sun was sold to Oracle in April 2009, and the relationship between Oracle and the various Open Source communities that Sun had participated in have been very strained. In the case of the OpenOffice.org project, the lead developers within and outside of what was previously Sun have largely left to create the The Document Foundation , which produces a community driven derivative of OpenOffice.org called LibreOffice. The second largest participant in OpenOffice.org was Novell, which was acquired by Attach...

As someone who disagrees with the HST I have been receiving notices from the Ontario NDP and the federal NDP about their disagreements with the HST. As is often the case, just because someone disagrees with something doesn't mean they disagree for a compatible reason. Why I disagree with the HST I consider the HST to be a tax shift from products onto services. Services were previously taxed with the GST, but not PST, and thus services only had the 5% GST applied. Now in Ontario services have to charge 13% (an increase of the 8% from Ontario). This will mean that products will seem comparatively less expensive than services in those scenarios where one is competing with each other, such as repair/reuse compared to replacement of damaged goods. This will have a net negative impact on our environment. This is in my mind the opposite of a Green Tax Shift type of initiative which would tend to be removing taxes from services and placing them onto products. If the HST were to be rem...

The radio was on this morning with CBC's The Current . The topic was municipalities and the licensing of massage parlours that range up to places that offer body rubs. In the wake of some narrow aspects of prostitution laws being struck down by an Ontario court, it is now in vogue to have talk shows where people express their views on this topic. There was the ludicrous suggestion by some social conservatives that if a municipality made any money from licensing activities of a sexual nature that they are essentially pimps. CBC's The Current decided to expand on and do a show promoting this ludicrous suggestion. Normally a journalist will find a variety of people with a variety of views, and allow them to have a discussion. Unfortunately in this case Anna Maria Tremonti decided to impose her own morality onto every question, essentially having her and her social conservative guest from out east gang up on a Guelph city councillor. I didn't even hear the Guelph council...

Replying to: johndegen.com: words and their power John, You can go ahead and name names in my case. I participate in these forums under my real name as I stand by my comments, and will continue to fight for creators rights and free speech rights against ideas (and sometimes persons) that I feel are harming these rights. I am the (or one) person who is saying that if filtering is happening by someone that is not an authority, government or otherwise, then that filtering is not censorship. Having your SPAM filters too high, or deleting messages you don't like for any reason from a private forum you administrate, is not censorship. We are both disturbed by each others comments. I find it disturbing to see someone (ab)use the word censorship in this manner as, in my mind, it belittles victims of actual censorship. I have been fighting for free speech likely as long as you have (given we are about the same age), possibly longer online (just because I'm a geek that got online as...

On social issues I consider myself a pretty liberal parson, and am OK with people being whoever they want to be. My limits come when those activities harm others: your right to swing your cane ends at my nose, and all that. After being told I represented the "copyleft" so often by folks associated with Access Copyright, I decided to do some thinking (and writing) on that. Far from being a redefinition of an existing term, it is a new term that turns out to be useful for understanding some of the conflicts between creators in the copyright debate. One thing I get frustrated with, however, is when people abuse language by redefining terms to fit their temporary purposes. There are terms that are very heavily loaded that should be used in their dictionary meaning, or not at all. One of those terms that is all too loosely abused is calling people anti-Semitic, often levelled at people who think the country of Israel should be treated as and critiqued like any other, and who...

Mike Nickerson has been one of those friends/acquaintances I've known for a long time, having met fairly early on when I moved to Ottawa in the 1980's. Among other things he runs something called the Sustainability Project - 7th Generation Initiative . While much of my personal policy focus over recent years has been on exclusive rights run amok, something I consider linked to sustainability, I have been a supporter of his project for some time. It's nice to see some actual policy commentary about the G20, which I read in a message he sent out to his contacts. He suggested sending letters to the editor, but I am just going to reproduce his letter here to what may be a totally different audience in the hopes it will spark others to think about these issues too. To the Editor: When the G20 met, there was talk about the need for structural change in the global economy. While this is true, there is little evidence that the world's leaders acknowledge the fundamental cha...