John L. Jarvis

A writer working abroad

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

The Good Life

I just finished Seth's It's A Good Life, If You Don't Weaken, and I'm filled with conflicting emotions: it's a beautiful book, and poignant at times, but I think it's how much I identify with the main character -- or rather, how I imagine I would've as a teenager -- that stirs the strongest feelings. Well, that isn't being entirely honest either, but I truly envy his talent, and if that emotion isn't the strongest in my breast as I type this, it's surely the second-most by the slimmest of margins.

I find myself looking for small similarities in our lives, hoping they'll illuminate larger ones. Peanuts, for example, was a favourite of mine as a child also, although I'd be stretching things to say that it ever inspired any of my infrequent doodling. No, more than anything, unfortunately, it's the melancholy we've shared that's the most striking. Particularly as a young man, I spent many a day as Seth did in this work, contemplating my mood, and its possible sources. Eventually I came to the conclusion that it was a bit of the chicken and the egg, in that such thoughts only spawned dark thoughts, or at the very least, perpetuated a dark humour. By cutting them off before they had a chance to take hold, I found myself a happier man. I believe Seth also came to this conclusion, giving voice to it when his character, Chet, speculates that he spends too much time pondering such things.

What concerns me about all this, and, oddly, what is also reflected in Seth's book, is a perceived lack of creativity in me since I've discovered these happier times. The reference is only in passing, with Kalo's mother quoting him on the benefits of a little misery in an artist's life. For some time, I've worried that, beyond the darkness of my own creation, I have not suffered; in fact, I would suggest that even in my deepest moments of self-pity, I would never suggest that I have been anything less than blessed with luck and good fortune. (I may curse such blessings at times, but only half-heartedly, if I'm honest with myself.)

I also envy Seth his prodigious memory. However he may ponder the benefits of those musings, there's no doubting their detail and vitality. I'm hoping I'll recall more as I apply myself to the documenting of them, but I certainly worry about the depth of that particular well as I write this. The other big question right now is my ability to draw. I have all the limited tools of that craft at my disposal now, so that somewhat-dreaded answer is surely close at hand.

That's heavy-handed; downright dire, in fact. I got a bit carried away. Truth be told, I'm having fun with this, and I expect to enjoy my dabbling in drawing as well. After all, unlike the fictional Kalo, I don't expect to raise a family on it.

Labels: comic books, drawing, seth, writing

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Thursday, April 23, 2009

ICG report on the Gaza stand-still

Efforts should focus on an outcome that meets [Fatah and Hamas'] immediate needs. Neither wants to give up the territory it controls, so for now let them keep it. That should not prevent forming a government that helps rebuild Gaza, gives Ramallah a foothold in Gaza and Abbas the greater legitimacy he needs to deal effectively with Israel – and with his own people...

Words matter, but actions matter more. The international community should judge the government on... willingness (or not) to enforce a mutual ceasefire with Israel, acceptance of Abbas’s authority to negotiate an agreement with Israel and respect for a referendum on an eventual accord. Hamas’s position on whether a Palestinian state would recognise Israel will matter only once that state exists. Prior to that, it is academic.

Sage words. It's hard to believe it's been two years since the last National Unity Government.

Labels: history, middle east, political system, security

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Thursday, April 09, 2009

More on my driver rating system idea

I witnessed an unusual traffic accident yesterday: what began as a typical rear-ending took a bizarre turn when the 'rear-ender' reversed at high-speed and rammed the 'rear-endee' again!

As I navigated the Ottawa Police Web-site later in the day, their instructions for submitting traffic complaints got me thinking about my driver rating system idea again: specifically, note how much information is required regarding the timing, the other driver, their vehicle, etc. Now, admittedly, I glossed over how a particular identifier would be represented as one of many potential vehicles in proximity with you, but, setting that aside for the moment, a lot of the information the police are looking for could be automatically generated; the process would also be more timely, and possibly even safer, if you compare it with the scenario where a person is trying to relay all that information over a handheld cell-phone while driving.

On the point of representing particular identifiers on a person's appliance, the balance between the cost and complexity (and safety) is at the crux of the problem: ideally, the system would visually represent the makes, models and positions involved, updating the information every few seconds, on a sizable screen that can be centrally located in the vehicle's dash. However, at a minimum, a multi-line text display of license plate number, make, model, colour and direction (with respect to your vehicle: so, front, back, left, right, etc.), updated regularly, would suffice. (You wouldn't want to rely on the license plate alone, since the vehicle could be screaming through an intersection on a path perpendicular to yours; also, straining to read a plate in your rearview mirror could be a serious distraction.)

One final point on the subject of this system being a target: all the contact information that the police require from the person reporting the incident shouldn't be included in this system. Depending on how drivers are issued their RFID tag and associated identifier, the DMV system or a separate system could be queried by police using the reporting appliance's identifier. That way, people who want to know the address of everyone who drives down their street need access to more than this system.

Labels: infosec, ottawa, privacy, psychology, reputation

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Friday, April 03, 2009

Canada in Afghanistan: Mixed Messages

"This is antithetical to our mission in Afghanistan," Harper said in an interview with CBC News... "Making progress on human rights for women is a significant component of the international engagement in Afghanistan. It's a significant change we want to see from the bad old days of the Taliban," he said.

The Canadian government has been making these sorts of statements since we first committed soldiers to the NATO mission in Afghanistan. It makes sense, at first blush: even the pacifists have difficulty arguing that improving the lives of young girls isn't a worthy cause. However, returning to this simple message too often runs the risk of pushing the primary purpose of the mission -- that is, the destruction of al-Qaeda's safe havens in the region, and the regime that tacitly supported them -- out of the public discourse. And while this may be of little consequence initially -- in terms of public support -- should the simple, secondary (or even tertiary) purpose ever noticeably diverge from that primary purpose, serious problems can arise.

And that's what Harper was dealing with today: a relatively small change in Afghan politics gave rise to existential questions about our mission in that country. Don't misunderstand me: I support the notion of fundamental human rights, and I think the details that I've read about this new law violate some of them; however, Afghanistan is hardly the only country to enact such laws, and it isn't close to being the worst.

Add to this the clear indication of how Harper's interview might have gone, had his government stayed on the AQ-busting message:

"It is probably more likely that al-Qaeda would be able to launch a serious terrorist attack in Europe than in the United States because of proximity," Obama said. "This is not an American mission, this is a NATO mission. This is an international mission."

Now, Obama's message may not have brought the promises of extra soldiers that he'd hoped for, but he needn't worry about the cries from human-rights groups (or worse still, from grieving families who feel mislead) derailing him. Nor need he fear his statements haunting him later: he's correct, and will be seen as consistent as he continues to push his administration's new strategy for the region.

Labels: afghanistan, canada, political system, security

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Saturday, February 14, 2009

How's my driving? on a municipal scale

After being tailgated for a dozen blocks or so by a big black pick-up with tinted windows, a thought occurred to me: as I saw him cut-off two other vehicles in less than a block of the double-lane road we were all travelling on, I wondered about a world where the three of us could present our combined assessment of that person's driving in some sort of public forum. This led me to further speculate on a system that went beyond public shaming, where enough poor assessments could affect someone's insurance rating or the number of points on their driver's licence.

At its most basic, the system would combine RFID tags and readers, and some simple appliance that would provide little beyond Internet access. As a practical aside, maybe the system could be partially financed by asking people to buy the optional appliance (that would include the RFID reader), while the RFID tag would be universally deployed in the licence plate. In other words, rating how others drive would be optional, but everyone within a certain radius would be able to rate your driving regardless.

As I see it, a city-run, Internet-accessible system would allocate a certain (small, at least initially) number of slots to each citizen on a periodic basis (say, monthly). It would have to be signature-based, but it would also need to scale well -- I'm thinking at least a million users (municipal in the sense of Ottawa, in other words... Manhattan would need a different system entirely) -- so I'm wondering if it would have to be session-based also, as opposed to some sort of asymmetric system that piggy-backs off the driver's licence renewal. Either way, the goal would be to make it somewhat difficult to spoof another person's identity, keeping in mind that cryptographic complexity is at odds with the 'simple' appliance I mentioned earlier.

With these slots, a person could choose to rate any other identifier that their RFID reader is picking up at that moment. Obviously, the more complex the rating system, the less safe it would be to operate while driving, so I'm thinking that each identifier around you (i.e., other drivers) is assigned a number, and once you press that number, you then press '1' through '5' to rate that person's driving. (And maybe you have a different set of buttons for the rating system, so that it's clear that '1' is poor or '1' is stellar -- colours introduce other problems... maybe smiley faces and frowns -- since no two surveys are ever the same in that regard.)

So, to go back to my earlier example, if I pick up and rate that truck on my rating system appliance, and the two others who were cut-off do the same, this city-run system would pick up three ratings of one identifier's driving with very similar timestamps. At this point, some sort of reputation system would qualify each of our ratings based on a number of factors: how often we submit ratings, how often those ratings are corroborated, both by drivers around us, and by other drivers at other times of the day, how other drivers rate our driving, the number of years we've driving, how many accidents we've had, etc. I'm going beyond the basic system with some of these factors, but the idea is that you would vary the number of slots each person gets, and the factors considered by the reputation system over time, studying whether there were any appreciable benefits to introducing any of these complexities.

Because one of the many unspoken costs behind this idea is the potential for abuse. It's fine to speculate on a secure, city-run system, but if we tie in too much information, or use the rating that pops out to impose serious penalties on people, the system would become too valuable a target to reasonably secure. However, if it's used to augment the systems we already have in place, I think it could work: if I knew that running this yellow light could get me my second poor rating of the day (and a strongly-corroborated, poor rating, if the intersection's busy), I'd probably think twice about doing it.

And that's where the real strength of this system would be: you would want there to be very little incentive to damaging a person's reputation, either by falsely submitting many uncorroborated ratings of others in their name, or by falsely submitting many poor ratings on their driving. The idea would be that identifiers that repeatedly came up as poor drivers, as rated by many different people, both at the same time, and over a significant period of time, would have that reflected in a permanent record of some sort, keeping in mind that the most recent year's record would carry more weight than the one before it (i.e., much like accident records now).

As a side-note, this is my hundredth post; and in just six short years! ;-)

Labels: infosec, privacy, psychology, reputation

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Monday, July 28, 2008

Letter to my MP: Concerns and Suggested Changes to Bill C-61

Mr. Poilievre:

As discussed in our meeting last week, I have a number of concerns with the proposed amendments to the Copyright Act in Bill C-61. The lack of public consultation (to date) on this bill also concerns me, and in lieu of such a process I ask that the suggested changes to C-61 herein be sent to the Minister of Industry and those responsible for chairing its parliamentary committee (once it is convened).

Concerns with Bill C-61

First, I will elaborate on three of my concerns specifically to give my suggested changes some context:

1. Playing legitimately-purchased DVDs on a Linux computer will constitute copyright infringement, according to the definitions of technological measure and circumvent in Bill C-61 (section 41.1);

2. Backing up legitimately-purchased digital media (e.g., movies on DVD, music on CDs, music from on-line music stores) will constitute copyright infringement, according to a number of sections of C-61, including, but not limited to, section 29.22 (1) (d), and in some cases, 29.22 (1) (c); and

3. Playing movies from legitimately-purchased DVDs on a video iPod will constitute copyright infringement, according to a number of sections in C-61.

Playing DVDs on Linux

Software called DeCSS is required to play the majority of commercially-produced DVDs on the Linux operating system; this software decrypts the Content Scrambling System (CSS) – an encryption and authentication scheme designed to prevent the direct copying of video files off of the discs themselves – on these DVDs. CCS is administered by the DVD Copy Control Association, which excludes Linux from the licensing it requires of the manufacturers of all DVD-related equipment (including DVD players, for example).

By defining a technological measure as “any effective technology, device or component that... controls access to a work...” – as opposed to focusing on those that control the right to reproduce the work (i.e., copy-protection measures), which is all that is required by the WIPO Internet Treaties – Bill C-61, section 41.1 prohibits the use of DeCSS, thereby prohibiting the playback of legitimately-purchased DVDs on any computer running the Linux operating system.

Backing up digital media

By the same reasoning, making a backup copy of the movies on legitimately-purchased DVDs – in case the original is scratched or otherwise rendered unreadable – is also prohibited by Bill C-61. Section 29.22 (1) (c) also prohibits making a backup copy of the music on legitimately-purchased CDs that include any sort of digital rights management software, as well as the music in files legitimately purchased from on-line music stores such as Apple's iTunes store – again, in case the original is scratched (in the case of CDs), corrupted (in the case of music files), or otherwise rendered unreadable.

However, Section 29.22 (1) (d) is even more troubling, as it prohibits both of the methods I currently use for backing up all of my music (including the music on legitimately-purchased CDs without any sort of DRM software): 1) making backup copies to blank DVDs; and 2) Carbonite's on-line backup service. The latter is a service that, for a fee, allows the user to designate certain files on their computer(s) for backup to the company's servers.

By using either of these methods, I am making more copies of this music than I have devices to play it; however, given the money I have invested in this music, and the time I have invested in making it available on my computers and iPods (likely the equivalent of many weeks at least, given my collection of approximately 700 CDs), I think that I am justified in wanting to back it up.

Playing DVD movies on an iPod

Making a copy of a movie on a legitimately-purchased DVD for the purpose of playing it on my video iPod is also prohibited by Section 41.1.

Suggested changes to Bill C-61

In the light of my stated concerns with Bill C-61, I present two options to address them:

1. The Private Use option:

   1. Retain the Copying for Private Use section of the Copyright Act (i.e., C-42, Section 80); and

   2. Amend it to cover digital media in general, including, but not limited to, music, movies and video games; and

   3. Amend the definition of technological measure in C-61, Section 41 to focus on controlling the right to reproduce a work (i.e., copy-protection measures); OR

2. The Backup Exemption option:

   1. Retain the Computer Programs section of the Copyright Act (i.e., C-42, Section 30.6); and

   2. Amend it to cover digital media in general (as outlined above); and

   3. Amend the definition of technological measure in C-61, Section 41, as outlined above; and

   4. Replace the reference to “videocassette” in C-61, Section 29.21 (1) with a more general term that could refer to any number of video formats we might have in the future; and

   5. Remove C-61, Sections 29.21 (1) (c) and 29.22 (1) (c).

Rationale for suggested changes to Bill C-61

In addition to the reasoning I provided as part of outlining my concerns with Bill C-61, I would like to highlight some examples of international law that support the changes I have suggested to Bill C-61.

Regarding the definition of technological measures

New Zealand's Copyright (New Technologies) Amendment Bill¹ includes the following definition:

TPM or technological protection measure—

(a) means any process, treatment, mechanism, device, or system that in the normal course of its operation prevents or inhibits the infringement of copyright in a TPM work; but

(b) for the avoidance of doubt, does not include a process, treatment, mechanism, device, or system to the extent that, in the normal course of operation, it only controls any access to a work for non-infringing purposes (for example, it does not include a process, treatment, mechanism, device, or system to the extent that it controls geographic market segmentation by preventing the playback in New Zealand of a non-infringing copy of a work)²

The Lithuanian Law No. IX-1355 of March 5, 2003, Amending the Law on Copyright and Related Rights³ includes the following article:

Article 75. Limitations for Application of Technological Measures

1. When technological measures applied by owners of copyright, related rights and sui generis rights prevent the users of such rights from benefiting from the limitations of copyright, related rights and sui generis rights, provided for in paragraph 1 of Article 20, subparagraphs 1 and 2 of paragraph 1 of Article 22, paragraph 1 of Article 23, Article 27, subparagraph 2 of paragraph 1 of Article 29, subparagraphs 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 of paragraph 1 of Article 58, and paragraph 1 of Article 63 of this Law, the users of the rights must be provided with conditions or adequate means (i.e. decoding devices and other) enabling to use legitimately accessible objects of copyright, related rights or sui generis rights to the extent necessary for the users of the rights to benefit from the limitations of copyright, related rights and sui generis rights provided for their interests.

I would point out that Lithuania has acceded both treaties that make up the WIPO Internet Treaties.⁴

Finally, the Norwegian Copyright Act⁵ includes the following section:

§ 53a. It is prohibited to circumvent effective technological protection measures that the rightholder or others he has given permission employs to control the copying or making available to the public of a protected work.

...

The provisions of this section shall not hinder research into cryptology. Nor shall the provision in the first paragraph hinder private users in gaining access to legally acquired works on that which is generally understood as relevant playback equipment.

Regarding Personal or Private Use

New Zealand's Copyright Amendment Bill also includes the following section on personal use:

81A Copying sound recording for personal use

(1) Copyright in a sound recording and in a literary or musical work contained in it is not infringed by copying the sound recording, if the following conditions are met:

(aa) the sound recording is not a communication work or part of a communication work; and

(a) the copy is made from a sound recording that is not an infringing copy; and

(b) the sound recording is not borrowed or hired; and

(c) the copy is made by the owner of the sound recording; and

(d) that owner acquired the sound recording legitimately; and

(e) the copy is used only for that owner’s personal use or the personal use of a member of the household in which the owner lives or both; and

(f) no more than 1 copy is made for each device for playing sound recordings that is owned by the owner of the sound recording; and

(g) the owner of the sound recording retains the ownership of both the sound recording and of any copy that is made under this section.

(2) For the avoidance of doubt, subsection (1) does not apply if the owner of the sound recording is bound by a contract that specifies the circumstances in which the sound recording may be copied.

Lithuanian Law No. IX-1355 also includes the following article on personal use:

Article 20. Reproduction of Works for Personal Use

1. It shall be permitted for a natural person, without the authorisation of the author or any other owner of copyright, to reproduce, exclusively for his individual use, not for direct or indirect commercial advantage, in a single copy a work published or communicated to the public in any other mode, where the reproduction is a single-action.

Regarding backup copies

Finally, in the following article, Lithuanian Law No. IX-1355 also discusses the idea of multiple backup copies for use in the event that the original is unusable (as I discussed in my concerns above):

Article 30. Making of a Back-up Copies and Reproduction for Adaptation of Computer Programmes

1. A person who has a right to use a computer programme, shall, without the authorisation of the author or other owner of copyright, have the right to make back-up copies of the computer programme or to adapt the computer programme, provided that such copies or adaptation of the programme are necessary:

1) for the use of the computer program in accordance with its intended purpose, including for error correction;

2) for the use of a back-up copy of the lawfully acquired computer programme, in the event the computer programme is lost, destroyed or becomes unfit for use.

Sincerely,

John Jarvis

Labels: canada, copyright, ottawa, political system

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Thursday, July 17, 2008

Nepean-Carleton page on a Fair Copyright for Canada wiki

I'm maintaining the Nepean-Carleton page on the Fair Copyright for Canada, Ottawa Chapter wiki and I'll be including the latest information on my efforts to talk with Mr. Poilievre there.

Labels: canada, copyright, ottawa, political system

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