Their first recommendation was to “…put in place more effective age verification [...]]]> The US Federal Trade Commission recently released a report about how online/virtual ‘worlds’ protect underage children from harmful or explicit images. They investigated the mechanisms these companies put in place to ensure that children 13 and under did not access “things they shouldn’t.”

Their first recommendation was to “…put in place more effective age verification methodology.”  Well, holy shit! They cracked it! It angers me when an agency, government or not, comes up with a recommendation that is as useful as, “My plan is to come up with a plan.” A 2-year-old could have figured out that the reason why they can log into adult online ‘worlds’ is because there is no mechanism to prevent them!

But what is the solution? The fact of the matter is there is none. Just as 16-year-olds can use their sibling’s ID to get into a bar illegally, condoms are not 100% effective, and people continue to inexplicably love Two and Half Men, there is no protection that can successfully eliminate an intentional desire to do “things they shouldn’t,” except blocking out the potential altogether. In this example, that would include shutting down all bars, not having sex, and killing Charlie Sheen. Alternately, there is the the always popular ‘lock yourself in an opaque box’.

There are really two problems at play here, and neither have to do with technology.

1. Accidental access: While this kills my sex analogy because in my research, accidental sex isn’t that easy… You can certainly accidentally wander into a bar, a naughty website, or flick onto a tv show that shouldn’t be on the air.
2. Purposeful circumvention:  You can purposely attempt to buy beer underage, lie about your birth date on the web or in paperwork, and tune into CBS.

Before we go any further, we will never stop number 2. As I said above, the FCC, FTC, FDA et. al. and their world wide equivalents can do all they want and spend billions of currency units, but if someone wants to do something and they can find a way, they will do it. Just as Philippe Petit (“Man on Wire”, highly recommend watching), DB Cooper, the 9/11 perpetrators, etc., etc. proved: “You can do whatever you want.”  By the way, does anyone else see the irony in that guidance councillors use that phrase as a build up to young students, and then we spend government money trying to figure out ways to prevent young students from doing so?

Now in the accidental case the FTC found that even in ‘virtual worlds’ that were kid friendly, there were sexually explicit references, violence, and other “things they shouldn’t” have access too. This is nothing new, I mean go back and watch old cartoons, movies, read comic books, or walk down any street in a major city. Now stop. The reason we have to go back and re-watch the cartoons and movies, or re-read the comic books is because in most cases we were too innocent to get the joke. The reason why this next generation (who have been surfing for porn since they could double click their index finger) is growing up so fast is not because there are subtle references in their world to all of this, it is because sex, violence, drugs and the like are promoted on a daily basis to them as ‘bad’, and ‘bad’ things are intriguing! Remember?! Forget the sexually suggestive graphic in Sims online. 12-year-old girls see women in short skirts on tv or on the street and then go and buy “Cosmo: The pedophile edition” to find out why, or the 8-year-old who knows in explicit detail what a blow job is because MTV bleeps out mysterious words, so the curious mind has to go and find out why! And to add to it all, today they have the capability find out quite quickly, whereas when we were young we only had older siblings or ‘the cool aunt’.

We played cops and robbers as kids and never even put together the fact that this was violence personified.  Today they play cowboys and Indians and are scolded because it is racist to portray Indians in that manner!

We try and protect kids against things they don’t understand, and they therefore want to understand it, and at an age too young to comprehend it. Instead of letting them hear the word “Fuck” and explaining that society doesn’t want them to use that word (A-whole-nother blog entry there), or letting them play with blissful ignorance without imparting our adult morals, we attempt to hide what has always been in the open and then wonder why they become more interested in it. Kids don’t need our adult constructs forced upon them. While we need to monitor their access to various things, whether it be bad TV or naughty websites, we should do this in an effort to guide them morally, not force them to learn adult life lessons at a younger and younger age.

PS: I hate Two and Half Men.

By now we have all heard about Conan and Leno dueling it out for the sacred 11:35 slot on NBC. However, the situation brings to light something that hasn’t yet sunk in at most major corporations yet. The public is changing.

1)      A UK worker being fired for comments that her job was boring.

2)      Employees [...]]]> I’m tired of reading about people ‘losing privacy’ with Facebook and Twitter. People are not losing their privacy; they are losing their common sense. There was an article this morning in the paper which cited examples of ‘loss of privacy’:

1)      A UK worker being fired for comments that her job was boring.

2)      Employees in a service industry being reprimanded for posting negative comments about customers on their social sites.

3)      Causing of problems in relationships when one person makes relationship-based remarks, or when a person ‘updates their relationship status’ without approval of the other party.

Hold on, none of those are examples of losing privacy; they all made their opinion public on purpose. Everyone at one time or another is bored at work. Everyone complains about idiots they have to deal with, and everyone has relationship troubles. It isn’t the fact that those people had those thoughts; it is the fact that they consciously made the thought public. Consciously making something known to people is not losing privacy, losing privacy is something that you didn’t make known to people, becoming known to people. For example, having your private diary published, or your best friend write a tell-all book about you, or a doctor telling everyone about your genital herpes is a loss of privacy.  Standing on a box in the middle of Times Square and screaming that you have genital herpes, or handing out free copies of your sex tapes to strangers is not a loss of privacy.

If Facebook openly released all of your pictures to the general public, not just registered Facebook users or specifically your ‘friends’, then that is an invasion, but they don’t (I didn’t say can’t). In fact, they are putting in more restrictions around what can be seen.

We live in a knowledge-starved world. We put Tiger Woods on the front page because we found out he had a secret, but then scream bloody murder when someone finds out ours. We can’t have it both ways.

The sad part is that government agencies are spending millions to study Facebook for security holes, when in reality we live in a society that cares less about privacy and more about reading about our acquaintances’ lives than ever before.  If something isn’t meant to be public, don’t make it public. It is as simple of that. Posting “I’ve had a horrible day,” is enormously different than posting “I hate my boss and work is shit.”  Facebook does not require the same level of professionalism as a man in a suit in front of a microphone (but then again, even Obama called Kanye a “Jackass”), but it does require some common sense.

And you want to talk about privacy? Well how about laws that restrict who you can love/marry, in what orifice you can have sex, or upcoming flight rules that you can either be photographed in an ‘naked scanner’ machine or have your genitalia juggled before you can get on an airplane? We don’t live in a private society at all when a government can invade it like that. BTW: This is for another entry, but ‘naked scanner’ is by far the newest gross exaggerated term. Given the above two options I will gladly let a couple people stare at my colourless, featureless ‘naked’ body only to have the picture removed immediately upon exiting the scanner. It’s not like Playboy is standing behind them saying “Yep, I’ll take that one for our ‘frequent flyers’ issue.” In those pictures you are no more nude than that chick’s silhouette on a trucker’s mud flaps.

This last year 3 or 4 guys got caught for misuse of a firearm and animal cruelty because they did really stupid, depraved things to a duck during a hunting trip. They got caught, not because someone discovered the duck, but because they posted themselves on YouTube doing it. Had that not happened, the ducks would have decayed or been eaten and, assuming they wouldn’t brag about it (which is a stretch based on the video), they certainly wouldn’t have been charged.

Why haven’t we learned from this? Because we are not used to a truly global media. While screaming on top of a box in Times Square all of your dirty secrets certainly isn’t maintaining privacy, it is not the same as electronically posting something that within seconds the entire world can see… Until, of course, someone starts streaming your NYC rant. Which really poses the question, do we have any privacy anymore? If anyone can video/photograph us doing anything and YouTube it, wouldn’t you think that would make everyone more afraid than the stuff they knowingly post? It sure does for me…

There was a Republican senator on CNN this week denouncing Obama because “…he took 3 days to respond to the [...]]]> As we all know by now on Christmas day a man attempted to detonate an explosive on a flight as it was descending into Detroit. The media reported this almost immediately as a “terrorist attack”.

There was a Republican senator on CNN this week denouncing Obama because “…he took 3 days to respond to the attempted terrorist attack,” and “…was too busy with the war in Iraq and pushing his Healthcare agenda to care about airport security”.

Of course he fucking was! The American people elected him because that’s what he’d said he’d do!  Airport security is not a political issue. Blaming Obama for a bomber boarding a plane in Amsterdam is like blaming the Queen because Royal Mail lost your package. A government owned agency failed here, not the leader of the government.

I promise you if Obama was told “Hey, man… Some Nigerian guy is gonna board an airplane in Holland with a bomb in his underpants,” he would have called someone and said “Yo, can you figure out how to stop that from, you know, like, happening?”.

Also on CNN they had a former head of the 9/11 commision on who commented that Obama was reluctant to use the word terrorism and therefore was undermining the event. I don’t care if the attacker is on a terrorist mission or a deranged girl scout who was driven to commit mass murder because of an unfortunate cookie selling incident: If a plane blows up it is a failure of the security preventing that from happening, which is exactly what Obama said it was.

World leaders don’t have a red S on their chests and fly around at night saving damsels in distress, they are human, and if you think world leaders know everything about their countries like some sort of human-embodied-omnipotent being, then your sadly mistaken. It’s just like the fiasco of the environmental conference in Denmark. Sending Stephen Harper to an environmental convention is as useful as sending Andy Dick to a vagina convention. Neither know anything about the subject, except what they are told by their peers. Let people who know science sort out the environment issues and make a global recommendation. You wouldn’t hire the CEO of Canadian Tire to fix your car right? You’d hire the mechanics who he employs to do it, because they are the experts.

All of this is to use the media to enhance public perception, because in the end that’s what wins elections, and the Obamas/Harpers/Browns of the world all want to keep their pay cheques. Harper has to flash his smile in Denmark so that when the opposition puts their foot in their mouth for the millionth time of this parliament he can say “Well, I care about the environment, see? I saved my boarding pass!” And in the same way, even if you’ve never flown and have zero intention on doing so, having you PM or President stand up and say, “I am doing everything I can to protect you,” (whether from scary Nigerians or that pesky global warming) makes it desirable to vote for them.

The truth is, flying affects a fractionally small proportion of the population. It’s the media that portrays this as an issue of the masses and politicizes it. Restricting people from having liquids because someone once wanted to use a liquid for evil on a flight makes as much sense as making condoms out of steel because one in a few hundred break. (For more on this I suggest this article)

I am not going to die because a newly-wed couple wants to fly to the Dominican on their honeymoon, and you aren’t going to die because someone who happened to be born in Yemen is on your flight. We’re going to die because people die. I know we loving playing God, but in the end we all die. Whether a nutjob blows us up, or we have a heart attack after eating the large fries at TGIF, we will die. And for the record nutjobs come from everywhere, not just the 14 nations now on a permanent ‘frisk list’ by US order.

Flying is safe, don’t let a hypochondriac set of politicians and a fear mongering  news network who couldn’t fill a day with 30 minutes of actual news change your mind about that.

With the fall of Napster, Supernova, Pirate Bay and now this I [...]]]> Recently the file sharing site Mininova decided to stop hosting any torrent that was not sent in from a registered user with rights to the material that was being posted. It was if a million file sharers suddenly screamed and then were silenced…

With the fall of Napster, Supernova, Pirate Bay and now this I wonder the impact any of these widely publicized mini-victories has had?

The American “War on Drugs” was a late 60′s initiative and while various reports indicate drug use is down, an equal or greater number seem to report little change. Which isn’t surprising to me. If I ask any random yes or no question to any x number of people the result will likely vary from survey to survey.

It is impossible to determine the exact number of drug users for a variety of reasons. Avoiding the “since drugs being illegal, there is an apprehension about discussing their use” cliche, consider how I could go about calculating the number of smokers.

Obviously countries, and regions within those have different habits of smoking habits. If you broke down those regions based on something say like #of packs sold in a week, then determined the average number of cigarettes a smoker in that region smoked you could then calculate an estimate on the number of smokers in that region. Add all the regions up and (albeit with a fairly high margin of error), you could still get an idea of # of smokers..

There is no way to do this with illegal drugs in most of the western world. There is no idea how much of the product exists, and therefore no idea how much is sold and therefore no accurate measure of the use, or for that matter the change in use.

I am not arguing that the War on Drugs hasn’t worked, I am arguing that there is little they could do to prove it has and it has been going on since the 60s!

Assuming we know that for 40 years the government of the US (and many other countries) has put billions into fighting a war on something which we also know still exists and have no real way of measuring any affect, what does that mean in the case of Internet file sharing? Is the War on Pirated Music/Video identical to the War on Drugs?

Before every movie in the UK there is an ad with a famous person saying don’t copy this movie and there are plenty of celebrity anti-drug campaigns out there.  The agencies doing the fighting have just as much propaganda available see the little bit I did on drug propaganda previously and the RIAA’s wonderful news releases on their slowly being killed industry which set a new record for profits last year.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not indicating that because music and theatres are making money this legitimises  illegal actions, what I am simply putting forth is that fighting something that isn’t going to go away is like randomly waving your hand in the air with hopes it’ll hit and kill a fly.

It took 40 years to make an insignificant dent (if there is one at all) in drug use with “The War on Drugs” and its Most Wanted culprits are still in daily use. My bet is that the Internet landscape will change so vastly in the next 40 years that by the time the corporations fighting this massive swarm of file sharing website “flies” by waving lawsuit “flyswatters” randomly around the world the technology will have advanced far past today’s torrents and will become even more widespread.  Their method is too much like peeing in the Atlantic Ocean:  It isn’t going to change the pH level of the Pacific.

First lets be clear:  These guys are NOT hackers. They are not. At very best they [...]]]> Regarding the recent news of the e-mail phishing scam on Gmail, Yahoo! and Hotmail (and presumably others) my blood has been absolutely boiling over the horribly inaccurate, sensationalistic comments that are being published in all sorts of reputable newpapers!

First lets be clear:  These guys are NOT hackers. They are not. At very best they are clever people who realized that you can get people that are less clever to tell you things they shouldn’t. This is not new to e-mail, Facebook, corporate logins… In fact people take advantage of less clever people all the time. 3card monte in some form has existed for centuries and continues to fool people! Yesterday and today a fake Amber Alert message has been circulating the web, thousands have been fooled into propagating a false message. Tricking people is not the same as hacking. mafiaboy is a hacker. Kevin Mitnik was a hacker (although he was never malicious and wrongfully imprisoned).

The people who did this have done nothing wrong (I assume the lawyers for the above companies will disagree)… They asked for people’s passwords and the people gave them to them, I can do that right now: Please send me your passwords… In fact post them directly below this entry so that everyone can see them…. Sure they set up a fancy phishing site and sure they claimed to be someone they aren’t, but that is immoral, not malicious. Now, the people that use those passwords for malicious purposes are the ones breaking the law. Just as it is illegal for me to open your (snail) mail. (and yes, I concede these people could be one and the same, but it is important to distinguish that, which the media is not)

The problem, and I know I have beaten this to death, is that people seem to think technology is something new, and it isn’t. It is an adaptation of something. All technology is is an advancement of a previous incarnation of something else. Cell phones are an advancement of cordless phones, which are an advancement from corded phones, where were an enhancement on dial phones, which were an advancement on  the original switchhook phones, and the cycle goes back to the first person to every tie a string between two cups. The concept and basic requirement is the same in all of these cases: I have information and I want to share it with someone who isn’t within sound wave receiving distance of my voice.

And finally, the calls for “increased security” and “more education” at these companies is absolutely preposterous.  There is NO level of security or education that can prevent a person divulging personal information. How hard is it to understand “Don’t tell people your password.”? And yes, these guys used a sophisticated website to garner this information, but how is Google to prevent people from writing a webpage that looks like theirs? I mean I could mock up a Gmail page and have it be identical to it. How do you teach the mass public to make sure the website they are typing personal data into is legit? Well forward this Blog URL to 15 people and you will find out, because if you don’t you will have bad sex for the rest of your life! I mean after dozens of friends sending me hundreds of those over the past 10 years I am sure they all learned that that is a scam…

Contrary to popular belief, people do not learn from their mistakes.