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TED talks: Hans Rosling show the best stats you’ve ever seen
November 30, 2011 — xanthippaThe Agile Panda: US Bill Creating the Great Firewall of America
November 19, 2011 — xanthippaA few places have been picking up on the implications of the US SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) bill, but I think that The Agile Panda has a very good analysis of the situation with comparisons to how this is being done in China.
Michael Geist, of course, has an excellent post: SOPA: All Your Internets Belong to US
“To put this is context, every Canadian Internet provider relies on ARIN for its block of IP addresses. In fact, ARIN even allocates the block of IP addresses used by federal and provincial governments. The U.S. bill would treat them all as domestic for U.S. law purposes.”
Yes, SOPA would define ‘all’ Canadian IP addresses as being under US jurisdiction – and if you want to argue about it, just to get your foot into the door to register a complaint, you must acknowledge US has jurisdiction…no, I am not being circular, SOPA is. And, as we have seen with other internet legislation, an accusation is sufficient to force your ISP to deny you service – as well as all online financial services would be cut off based on an accusation.
Lovely, is it not?
The Agitator points out that the US is trying to make it a federal crime to lie on the internet.
As I have said before – and doubtlessly will say again – we really really really need a diffused peer-to-peer internet alternative that will, by its very structure, be uncontrollable.
H/T: Hacker News, Blog of Walker
xda-developers: The Rootkit of All Evil – CIQ
November 18, 2011 — xanthippaDo you have a smart phone?
Then you might want to read this article at xda-developers about CIQ (CarrierIQ), which proclaims on their own website:
“…we give Wireless Carriers and Handset Manufacturers unprecedented insight into their customers’ mobile experience.”
‘Unprecedented’ is right!
It is understandable that any business would like to have a deep insight into their customers’ needs and desires in order to serve them better: satisfying customers is good for business.
However, customers also have a right to – and most have at least some expectation of – privacy.
The problem arises when customers are not even aware of the volume and detail of information about them that their mobile devices routinely report to their carriers: this lopsided information level makes any meaningful discussion about privacy vs data-mining virtually meaningless.
From the article:
“This [CIQ software] is given root like rights over the device, which means that it can do everything it pleases and you will have nothing to say about it.”
“…Because of all the metrics that could be obtained via the different triggers, that same network admin will not just know that you got a dropped call at 5 pm in California, but he/she will also know where in California you were located, what you were doing with your phone at that given time, how many times you accessed your apps until that time, and even what you have typed in your device (no, this last one is not an exaggeration, this thing can act as a key logger as well). Scared already? If not, here is a snippet of some…”
“…what kind of permissible purpose is out there that can allow a company to legally place a key logger on something and use it when you are not even getting service out of them?”
And, of course, we know no person or corporation would ever abuse any information they get access to!
Read the full article and weep.
H/T: CodeSlinger
Soon, we might be sitting around unvaccinated and in the dark
November 17, 2011 — xanthippaFunny, how things work out when competing ‘special interests’ collide…
A few years back, the incandescent light bulb industry was on a verge of a revolution: a new, more energy-efficient version of the incandescent light bulb was developed and the people who manufacture them were about to re-tool in order to produce them. Their plans got scuttled when, jurisdiction after jurisdiction, politicians announced that they would ban ‘the incandescent light-bulb’ because of its inefficiency…
Yes, the politicians were not letting the marketplace decide.
And yes, they were not willing to differentiate between the old-style, inefficient incandescent light bulbs and the new, high-efficiency incandescent light bulbs: they announced they planned to ban them all!!!
The natural result of this was that the manufacturers did not invest their hard-earned money in order to change the production in their factories from the old fashioned incandescent light bulb to the high-efficiency one: there simply would not have been enough time for them to earn back their investment in the short time before ALL incandescent light bulbs will have been banned…
In a very short time – as of 2012 – it will be illegal to sell incandescent light bulbs in Ontario….despite the fact that there is no viable alternative on the market.
Oh, there are alternatives – they are just not viable…
Alternative number one is the LED light bulb. I have recently bought the best (way more expensive) LED ‘light bulb’ the market has to offer….and, frankly, it simply does not produce anywhere near the light levels an incandescent bulb does. Quite literally, it leaves one in semi-darkness..,
The other alternative, of course, is ‘the curly bulb’ – you know, the type David Suzuki posters have been promoting for years!
Yes, they do produce ‘light’.
But, they are not an acceptable choice, for a number of reasons…
Some people find the light they produce is ‘harsh’ and ‘uncomfortable’.
Others find the light that comes from ‘curly bulbs’ triggers their migraines.
Scientists in the UK have conclusively demonstrated that it triggers people’s immune systems to attack healthy tissues – especially in immunocompromised individuals, like, say, people with lupus (SLE) and so on.
But, EVERYONE is affected by the ‘curly bulbs’ at the end of their life-cycle: they contain mercury!!!
Enough mercury, in fact, that if one breaks, people are advised to treat the area in which it broke as a toxic hazard area…
Soon, this could come to an end: there is a possibility that an international treaty would ban the use of mercury in light bulbs (as well as in vaccines) in the near future!
Where this would leave us, who live in areas where the incandescent light bulbs will have been banned, is anyone’s guess.
OpenMedia.ca: You and half-a-million Canadians changed the internet
November 16, 2011 — xanthippaToday, I received this email from OpenMedia.ca:
This is what we’ve been waiting for. Together we’ve stopped Big Telecom’s plan to impose usage-based billing (Internet metering) on all Canadians. Big phone and cable companies tried to rig the market but they were caught red-handed.
A year ago the CRTC decided that big telecom giants could force their small competitors to adopt metered billing. This would have killed Big Telecom’s independent competitors, and it would have meant a more expensive and controlled Internet for all Canadians. It was this outrageous move that led OpenMedia.ca to launch the now half-a-million strong Stop The Meter petition that forced the CRTC to reconsider their plan.
Yesterday, finally, the CRTC pulled back from its mandatory metered billing decision. This decision won’t stop all big telecom metering, but it could provide a much needed unlimited, independent option for many Canadians. It is truly rare for people to outmaneuver Big Telecom lobbyists, but together, we did it. Thank you for playing a crucial part in safeguarding the affordable Internet.
We changed the foundation of Internet billing in Canada—that’s a game changer—but we’re concerned that uncompetitive pricing may be buried in the pages of the policy that the CRTC released yesterday. We’ll study the details of this decision closely in the coming days and, with your help, take whatever action is necessary to push for fair pricing.
What’s next?
We held the line on Internet affordability and prevented Big Telecom from taking complete control, but they still dominate about 94% of the Internet service market. This is why Canada is still falling behind the rest of the world on speed, pricing, and (as we all know) customer service.
Big Telecom makes record profits while Canadians are overcharged and disrespected. Those profits are then used to lobby for more control and price-gouging. Now more than ever we need to break this cycle.
The only thing Big Telecom companies understand is their bottom line, so let’s hit them where it hurts. Let’s get as many Canadians as possible to switch to an independent provider.
Here’s what you can do now:
- We know it’s not possible for everyone to switch to an independent provider right now, but let’s all please pledge to use an independent provider when it is possible.
- If possible, switch to an independent provider like Acanac, Teksavvy, or Distributel who have supported our public engagement campaign, or other indie ISPs that you can find through the “Make the Switch” resource page we started here: http://openmedia.ca/switch
Here’s the plan:
Get the CRTC to allow indie ISPs to offer an unmetered Internet.
A wave of Canadians cancel their service with Big Telecom, and subscribe to an independent competitor—delivering a swift financial cannon shot directly at Big Telecom’s lobbying budget.
Businesses, civil society groups, and people across Canada work with policy-makers to fix our broken telecom system once and for all.
We’ll let Prime Minister Harper and Industry Minister Paradis know how many Canadians have made this pledge.
As an active member of the pro-Internet community, your participation is key.
For our digital future,
Steve, Lindsey, and the OpenMedia.ca Team
P.S. The CRTC’s decision yesterday is likely to meet an aggressive reaction from Big Telecom. Let’s push forward for Internet openness and affordability now, while they’re still reeling from our success. Let’s get moving! Pledge to switch today.
ThunderF00t: ‘The Stagnation of YouTube’
November 12, 2011 — xanthippaWhat he is describing is yet another application of the ‘Filter Bubble’:
The ‘Filter Bubble’
November 10, 2011 — xanthippaThere is a most brilliant (and relatively short) TED Talk – a must see for anyone who uses a search engine.
Slowly but surely, most search engines and social networks are tracking each of our histories and editing out things they think we would not like. This means that searching for identical keywords can produce vastly different search result for different people – which is fine, IF we could ‘opt out’ (at least some of the time)…but most of us don’t even know this is happening!
This, in my never-humble-opinion, is a problem. And it is the topic of the above mentioned TED Talk by Eli Pariser – he refers to it as ‘the filter bubble’.
He raises a lot of good questions.
One possible answer to at least one of these questions is a search engine that markets itself with proud claims that it will not bubble or track you! If you have not heard of them, take a peek at DuckDuckGo.
While on the topic of technology, Michael Geist has been doing some important work reporting on the Digital lock dissent. He has also posted a most excellent ‘link-library’ to help people support their arguments when they try to dispell the myths the digital lockers are promulgating.
H/T: Tyr
Shoes for the blind
November 3, 2011 — xanthippaOK – this is just cool!
A new tool to help blind people to get around: a shoe with a built-in GPS and a directional vibration generator to indicate the direction to walk in as well as a proximity detector to warn them of obstacles in their way.
(This could be useful not just for the visually impaired – it could be a useful device for those of us who like to read while walking…)
Here is the article with a video – worth a peek.
H/T: Hacker News
Measles outbreak among vaccinated kids: how it that possible?
November 2, 2011 — xanthippaVaccination is an important weapon in our arsenal of weapons against infectious diseases, as I have written about before.
However, there is a very real problem with how our health officials are presenting vaccination. It appears calculated to make people distrust the very tool they are touting!!!
After all, most people are not stupid: we can tell when we are being told things that demonstrably are not true. This includes oversimplifications to the poin of error: we see the real-life results while the ‘experts’ are describing ideal ‘lab conditions’ outcomes…and the two are never the same. (I’ll come back to this point later.)
I am convinced that the vast majority of anti-vaccination sentiment ‘out there’ is among people who have once believed the health officials statements which touted the benefits of vaccinations, overstated its effectiveness and understated (or left out cmpletely) its risks. There is no critic so hardened as one who was once a true believer and was proven wrong by real-life experience!
What do I mean?
If somebody sold you, say, suit of body armour and told you this armour can stop any bullet so that you will be safe wearing it anywhere in a combat zone – but omitted to tell you that the neck and joint areas of the suit are not actually armoured, you went out and got shot through the elbow, you might be annoyed. Had you known, you would have behaved differently – guarded your unarmoured bits better… But, having been told that the armour is impervious, you will not be as trusting when they try to sell you the next suit of armour…
There are two main things that health officials are not properly informing people about when it comes to vaccination:
Now that this is out of the way – it troubles me greatly to see how the latest ‘measles outbreak’ is being handled by the health officials and/or and mainstream media.
Background:
All school kids (with only very few conscientious objectors and health exceptions) are vaccinated against measles. Yet, despite this, every few years, there are measles outbreaks. What sets this one apart is how the story is being spun.
The first statistics that came out were that there were just under a hundred kids infected in the initial outbreak, but well over half of these kids were ‘properly vaccinated‘. This seems to have baffled the health officials beyond belief – suggesting that these health officials are woefully unaware of the efficacy of vaccines…
Not only do vaccines have a surprisingly low rate of efficacy (some are below 20%), the ‘protection’ they confer on someone is not identical to the ‘protection’ that having the illness would. This is a function of our immune system: the sicker a germ makes it, the more dilligent it is about storing the antibodies against it – both in strenght and in length of time it ‘stores’ the antibodies for (hence the need for ‘booster shots’). Since vaccinations only produce a very mild, immitation version of the disease, the body does not consider these antibodies ‘priority antibodies’ and will often drop them if it has too many other antibodies to worry about.
Therefore, we have consistently seen that may childhood illnesses like measles and chicken pox appear in teenagers or young adults, when they are much more dangerous illnesses than had they been suffered through in childhood. This is what one would expect to see in a ‘properly’ vaccinated population!
It is similar to the not-often-mentioned fact that until very recently (when arrivals of people from the third world changed the situation), the only cases of polio were found in children vaccinated with the live vaccine and the grandparents who were looking after them. No vaccination confers protection for more than 20-30 years – something our health officials also should be stressing.
But, back to our story: since the initial news story, the outbreak has grown to over seven hundred. Since the percentage on unvaccinated kids is small, it seems reasonable to presume that, as before. more than half of these students were also ‘properly’ vaccinated.
So, how do the health officials propose to deal with the outbreak?
That is insane!
And irresponsible beyond belief!
Either the strain that is ravaging the teens has mutated from the original – which viruses do on a regular basis, in which case giving them the ‘standard’ vaccine would have no effect (there has not been sufficient time to adjust the vaccine), or there is a genetic pocket of people whose immune systems don’t respond to vaccination typically….in which case vaccinating them some more is both idiotic and dangerous.
Plus this creates the false impression that the problem is being contained, when all this activity will have no significant impact whatsoever. People need to take personal precautions – yet the authorities are assuring them that they don’t need to since they have everything under control…
I know I am sounding like a broken record, but…
Vaccinations are an important tool for combatting infectious disease. But, like all tools, it must be used properly and its limitations must be clearly stated and generally understood – and this is not happening right now. Our health officials, through their attempt to manipulate us to all make the ‘right’ choice and misrepresenting the effectiveness of this tool are actually undermining people’s trust in it and feeding the anti-vaccination hysteria!
Risks Associated with Vaccinations
November 2, 2011 — xanthippaEvery medical procedure has risk associated with it. EVERY ONE!!!
That is not to say that the risk is large: getting a blood test, for example, is a very low risk medical procedure. The benefit of learning from a bloodtest the information a doctor needs to treat a patient far outweighs the risk of getting an infection or something going wrong during or following a blood test for most people. Yet, you might not want to perform daily blood tests on a patient with hemophilia…
The same is true for vaccination: the danger of something going wrong is very, very low. But it is there.
In my experience, doctors and other health officials are likely to vastly understate these dangers: some because they truly believe that the risk is so small and the patient too dumb to make a right choice on their own, some undoubtedly do it because they actually get money for having vaccinated over a certain percentage of their patients. Either way, doctors and medical officials rutinely mis-state the dangers associated with vaccines and manipulate people into ‘getting the shot’.
People pick up on being manipulated – and most dom’t like it…
Yes, most people are poor at risk assessment – but that does not give anyone the right to deny them the very information they need to make their own choice. Part of being a grown up is making one’s own decisions – right or wrong!
There is a second part to my ‘risk’ rant: another aspect of the risk associated with vaccination which medical and health officials are simply not giving the general public sufficient information they need to make an informed decision. The fact remains that we know that some people are much more likely to have adverse reactions to vaccinations than the average person would.
Have you ever been told this? Most doctors who are not immunologists whom I have spoken to about this are woefully undereducated and, in my never-humble-opinion, almost criminally ignorant about this.
People who have problems with their immune systems are much more likely to have a dangerous reaction to vaccinations (and it is less likely that vaccines will actually work on them). Again, there are many factors to consider, so each person ought to do some independent research into this. People who have immune system diseases (like lupus and so on) are the most likely to have very bad reactions to vaccinations. Close behind them are people with immune system disorders: asthma, serious allergies (peanuts, milk, eggs) and so on.
[Aside: the theory of vaccination is that the ‘skin’ of viruses has a ‘fingerprint’ (made up from unique proteins in the bilipid wall of the skin of the virus). Once our body identifies the germ, it tries to create all kinds of antibodies and tests to see if any will kill the pathogen (infection). This trial-and-error method is slow and while it is going on, the germs multiply and make a person sicker. Once an effective antibody is found, the body makes a lot of it and uses it to kill the germs. Vaccination introduces dead or weakened pathogens into the body: this causes the immune system to make antibodies against. Then, the immune system ‘stores’ the antibody and whenever it encounters the germ again it can start to make lots of it right away, skipping the trian-and-error step. This prevents the germ from multiplying before the body is ready to fight it, so that it is defeated before it can make the person ill.]
Since the potential of acquiring immunity through vaccination (based on healthy immune systems – not ones that don’t work right) is seriously decreased and the danger of an adverse, potentially life-threatening reaction to a vaccine is greatly increased in people with immune systems which do not function properly, these people need to be fully informed of all the specifics and decide on a vaccine by vaccine basis which course of action carries the least possible risk.
This, of course, is not a concern for people with healthy immune systems.
There are other risks associated with vaccination, which do affect everyone. When multiple-pathogen vaccinations (such as the controversial MMR) are administered – or several single vaccinations are administered at the same time or very close in time to each other, there is some indication that the probability of an adverse immune system reaction is increased. However, I am not as knowledgable about these risk factors as about the risks associated with vaccination in people who are immunocompromised, so I am not comfortable saying more than that this has been identified as a risk factor.
Yes, there are risk factors associated with vaccinations. My post is nowhere near exhaustive – it just hits the highlights. Despite all of these, vaccinations are an important tool to keep infectious diseases under control.
Information is power. It is my deep conviction that if doctors and health officials gave people accurate information about both the benefits and the risks of vaccination, people would make more informed choices. Because they would be aware of the true (however small) risks, many of the hysterical reactions to vaccinations would be minimized, if not eliminated altogether.
Xanthippa's Chamberpot 