Concerns over Microsoft’s new XBOX One

The information released today have allayed a few concerns, but a few new ones have been created.

– It’s said that the machine does not require an “always on” internet connection, but does it require a connection whatsoever? What happens when somebody doesn’t have an internet connection? Can they still use the machine to play games and watch live TV?

– To what extent will Live Gold be required to make use of the machine?

– Nothing seems to have been stated about the DRM fears, but recent news states that it is likely to be up to the game publisher whether or not always on is required, one time connection is required at startup, or none at all. Is any of that true?

The new kinect is explicitly required to be plugged in for the machine to work. This means there is a potential threat of somebody (whether it be Microsoft or a 3rd party hacker) spying on you. What are the options for opting out of any potential ‘market research’ using the kinect camera? Do you have to consent to Microsoft being able to track who is in the room for marketing? Does the device have to see somebody before you can use the machine? Can you turn off the ability for it to hear you when the machine is off?

Do you *have* to use voice commands and gestures to navigate the machine? Can the controller be used instead if you like?

Ethical Analysis of C-30 and the Patriot Act

The Conservative Party of Canada has, ever since 2006, made several attempts to introduce new legislation geared towards increasing police powers in areas related to surveillance and evidence gathering for matters involving the internet and other similar technological networks. These attempts, however, have never caused such an uproar among citizens all across the country as bill C-30, titled “INVESTIGATING AND PREVENTING CRIMINAL ELECTRONIC COMMUNICATIONS ACT”, did in February of this year. Most of the credit for waking up the country can be given to Minister of Public Safety Vic Toews, but it is not his gaffe that is the most concerning – it is the continued insistence that society needs to give up its freedoms in order to solve a problem that in some ways doesn’t even exist.

The stated goal of the Conservative Party is a laudable one; most reasonable people could be convinced to agree that there are issues with the current state of affairs whereby police officers have trouble getting timely access to critical evidence required to either stop a suspected crime, or to catch somebody who already committed a crime by using technology. Supporters of this bill would be hard pressed, however, to convince these same people that they should give up their charter right to personal privacy so the government can snoop on them just to catch a few wrongdoers. “Big Brother” imagery comes up frequently when these laws are proposed. The bill, however, is in a state of limbo and may very well effectively be dead; but this is not the last we will see of such attempts to erode the public’s privacy. Laws are being introduced, and some even being passed, all around the world.

To analyze a Government’s act of instituting such a law, I will use Act Utilitarianism; an ethical theory which attempts to measure the net gain in happiness, or “utility” as a consequence of an action. The Principle of Utility states that “An action is right (or wrong) to the extent that it increases (or decreases) the total happiness of the affected parties.” (Quinn, 80) And since C-30 has not been passed, I will use analogous laws from other jurisdictions that have actually been passed. The law most analogous to C-30 right now is the US’s “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism” (or Patriot) Act. Speedily enacted in October of 2001 after the terrorist attacks in New York, it received virtually no of being called un-patriotic and pro-terrorism. The stated goal of this law is not far from the one of C-30: It is designed to give police more powers so that they can properly stop terrorism from affecting US interests.

The moral question is “Would it be a good action for government lawmakers – with the intent of stopping the most heinous crimes – to take away the civil liberties of an entire population in order to facilitate the prevention of such crimes?” Framed in this way, most people would likely say no. But more often than not, this question is worded in such a way to invoke an emotional response in those reading it so that they’ll be coerced into saying yes due to the inclusion of “terrorism” and “child abuse” as explicit targets of the law. Nobody wants to be seen as soft on terrorism and child abuse, so people uneducated in the constitutional implications of creating these laws often support them in the name of the “greater good” without realizing the vast negative effects they have on law abiding citizens. This is what the Government of Canada was banking on when they titled their bill “Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act.”(Emphasis mine)

In order to answer this question, we need to look at the state of affairs before and after the laws are proposed or enacted.

The government of Canada, when trying to drum up support for C-30, claimed that Law Enforcement officials were running into barriers when trying to catch criminals or stop crimes where they need access to internet subscriber data. They say that there’s too much bureaucracy involved in obtaining the warrants they need, and as a result, the criminals often get away with their crime, or the crime that the police want to prevent often happens anyhow because they couldn’t get a warrant fast enough. They proposed to solve this problem by almost completely doing away with the requirement to obtain a warrant under certain circumstances, and by compelling internet service providers to comply with these law enforcement requests. Many professionals in this field, including Michael Geist, feel that these claims are unfounded at best.

Consider the biggest privacy concern with Bill C-30: the mandatory disclosure of subscriber information without court oversight. With ISPs and telecom companies complying with law enforcement requests roughly 95 percent of the time, at issue are a relatively small number of cases that to date have required warrants prior to any disclosure. I still think law enforcement has failed to produce a compelling series of examples where the current law has proven problematic. Further, it is not clear whether law enforcement was able to obtain the sought-after information through a warrant in the remaining five percent of cases, though anecdotal evidence suggests they typically were. Regardless, law enforcement wants greater assurances that the information will be available expeditiously in appropriate circumstances. (Geist, http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6324/125/)

A local source goes on to add the following:

But I think, just the broad power of access. I think that was the main problem. It didn’t even need to be a police officer anymore. Now it was a peace officer, which is a much bigger group of people. So, people who weren’t even police officers could somehow get a warrantless search, or get access, or require retention of data; which comes back to very basic principles of democracy and charter protection of rights that I think most people felt were being infringed. Like, OK. If someone wants to connect my ISP to my location, to say “this is where this person is accessing the internet from” because we think there’s a crime being committed, or someone is doing something illegal online, I think I should have the same right as I do when they haul me over in my car. So it needs to be a reasonable expectation that something has happened, or something is about to happen.  But they’ve broadened it in a lot of cases to reasonable suspicion, which most people feel is not enough, that that could very easily be abused by peace officers and police officers in cases where they’re either really focused on a potential suspect that they may not have any good evidence, that they may not have enough to get a warrant; well, now we don’t need a warrant, and we can deal with the consequences later.

These professionals feel that the proposed solution goes far beyond what’s required to solve the problem.

Taking a look, now, at the aftereffects of passing a law such as this, let me direct your attention to the USA’s Patriot Act: Here we have a law that was created to obstruct terrorism by, again, giving law enforcement much more powers than constitutionally given to them because of the (more often than not) perceived threat of terrorism. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) summarizes the biggest problem with this new law:

Section 215 allows the FBI to order any person or entity to turn over “any tangible things,” so long as the FBI “specif[ies]” that the order is “for an authorized investigation . . . to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities. (ACLU, http://www.aclu.org/free-speech-national-security-technology-and-liberty/reform-patriot-act-section-215)

The problem is that the new law created – among many things – a secret court for granting search and seizure warrants. This process is often nicknamed a “215 order” because these new powers are outlined in section 215 of the bill. Under this section, the government doesn’t need to show probable cause, nor reasonable grounds to believe that their target is engaged in criminal activity. And the worst part of this provision it is the fact that once the order is served, the recipient is prohibited by law from ever disclosing to anybody that they even received the order, thus preventing the target from knowing that their privacy has been infringed upon, and from using this fact to mount a defense against the allegations made against them. Canadian law has some parallels to this law in PIPEDA, but C-30 tries to amend this by adding more cases where service providers are not allowed to divulge handing over data to law enforcement.

Another consequence of endorsing the mindset that civil liberties are less important than public safety has led to the current issue at hand in the US with regards to warrantless wiretapping by the NSA.

News reports in December 2005 first revealed that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been intercepting Americans’ phone calls and Internet communications. Those news reports plus a USA Today story in May 2006 and the statements of several members of Congress revealed that the NSA is also receiving wholesale copies of their telephone and other communications records. All of these surveillance activities are in violation of the privacy safeguards established by Congress and the U.S. Constitution.

The evidence also shows that the government did not act alone. EFF has obtained whistleblower evidence [PDF] from former AT&T technician Mark Klein showing that AT&T is cooperating with the illegal surveillance. The undisputed documents show that AT&T installed a fiberoptic splitter at its facility at 611 Folsom Street in San Francisco that makes copies of all emails web browsing and other Internet traffic to and from AT&T customers and provides those copies to the NSA. This copying includes both domestic and international Internet activities of AT&T customers. As one expert observed “this isn’t a wiretap it’s a country-tap.” (EFF, https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying)

This act has quite reasonably disgusted many people and has provoked a lawsuit from the EFF. Sadly, however, the Obama administration has granted AT&T immunity over this debacle, shutting down most avenues of appeal.

Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, was the formation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). Both of these agencies are actively involved in denying and infringing upon basic constitutional rights in the name of preventing terrorism. DHS is, among many things, conducting warrantless searches of travelers’ laptops at the borders. The EFF is actively fighting against this breach of the US 4^th amendment to the constitution, but in the interim, they have provided a few good tips on what to do if you’re entering the US with electronic devices.

The Ninth Circuit’s recent ruling (pdf) in United States v. Arnold allows border patrol agents to search your laptop or other digital device without limitation when you are entering the country. EFF and many civil liberties, travelers’ rights, immigration advocacy and professional organizations are concerned that unfettered laptop searches endanger trade secrets, attorney-client communications, and other private information. (EFF, https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/05/protecting-yourself-suspicionless-searches-while-t)

The major common-sense argument against these practices (despite the government’s insistence that they’re necessary to stop the importation of things such as child pornography and copyright-infringing material) is that anybody wanting to import such material would be much better off just sending it over the internet where no intrusive border searches take place.

The TSA, on the other hand, is suffering from a much larger controversy – the use of at least 700 full body imaging scanners in 190 airports. This act has been dubbed “security theatre” by many people in the legal profession and the press as it is a huge invasion on travelers’ privacy while producing no results of attempted terrorist attacks. This has produced a large public outcry due to its very visible effect on travelling every day.

The Transportation Security Administration is feeling public heat these days over its combination of whole-body-image scanners and heavy-handed pat-down searches, and deservedly so. (EFF, https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/11/common-sense-and-security-body-scanners)

Many travelers have staged very public protests against the TSA by slowing airport security to a crawl through mass refusals to enter the body scanners, thereby forcing a lengthy, and often publicly viewable, pat-down.

While it’s clear that there are definite cases where law enforcement needs greater tools at their disposal to solve crimes, and to prevent especially bad ones from even happening – what’s also clear is that there are far too many cases of such measures going way too far. In researching this subject, I asked a local privacy lawyer what changes could be made to C-30 in order to preemptively put a stop to some of the sweeping problems as seen in the US today:

Narrowing the authorization. So that, instead of it being by a larger group of people in a larger group of circumstances, making that much more strictly controlled. So as part of the CBA preparations to make submissions on the bill, one of the talks about was saying – OK, it could be a smaller class of things, so exceptional circumstances. Dealing with exceptional circumstances very narrowly, and saying “Yup. There are some instances where… I don’t know, I think the example that most people used was ‘you intercepted some sort of online communication to indicate that there was a child in danger. So whether the child was being abused, or kidnapped, or whatever. You need to act quickly, and that’s totally reasonable. So there can no one against kind of figuring out where that’s going on now. But, in doing that, to again narrow it to only police – and not all peace officers – to narrow it to the minimum amount of information necessary, so they don’t have a right to everything – just the one piece of information they might need to get better evidence and find that out, and to again have that go before a judge as quickly as possible. So if you need to do that right away, then you’ve still only got a day or two days or whatever, to get before a judge and still make sure that there’s someone making a ruling that what you were doing is proper. So – very exceptional circumstances, narrow group of people, quick amount of oversight.

So, in summary, child abuse and terrorism is bad. Nobody in their right mind will try to deny that. But we must ask ourselves if it is morally right to institute a law that forces everybody to forfeit their constitutional rights and freedoms for the “greater good”. In evaluating the ethics of the action, let’s look at the effects:

1. Some might argue that as a result of the Patriot Act, and through the efforts of DHS and the TSA, it has become more difficult to commit terrorist acts on American soil. But there isn’t much (if any) evidence of the system actually working.
2. A massive amount of inconvenience caused by the law, added to the fact that nearly no positive results have been produced to show its worth
3. Many professionals and other intellectual people have demonstrated that many of the attempts by government to prevent terrorist acts are futile at best, and stupid at worst.

Take for example a debate between security expert Bruce Schneier and the former TSA boss Kip Hawley. Bruce summarizes the very real cost of the TSA’s security theater:

Kip Hawley doesn’t argue with the specifics of my criticisms, but instead provides anecdotes and asks us to trust that airport security—and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) in particular—knows what it’s doing.

He wants us to trust that a 400-ml bottle of liquid is dangerous, but transferring it to four 100-ml bottles magically makes it safe. He wants us to trust that the butter knives given to first-class passengers are nevertheless too dangerous to be taken through a security checkpoint. He wants us to trust the no-fly list: 21,000 people so dangerous they’re not allowed to fly, yet so innocent they can’t be arrested. He wants us to trust that the deployment of expensive full-body scanners has nothing to do with the fact that the former secretary of homeland security, Michael Chertoff, lobbies for one of the companies that makes them. He wants us to trust that there’s a reason to confiscate a cupcake (Las Vegas), a 3-inch plastic toy gun (London Gatwick), a purse with an embroidered gun on it (Norfolk, VA), a T-shirt with a picture of a gun on it (London Heathrow) and a plastic lightsaber that’s really a flashlight with a long cone on top (Dallas/Fort Worth).

At this point, we don’t trust America’s TSA, Britain’s Department for Transport, or airport security in general. We don’t believe they’re acting in the best interests of passengers. We suspect their actions are the result of politicians and government appointees making decisions based on their concerns about the security of their own careers if they don’t act tough on terror, and capitulating to public demands that “something must be done”.

In 2004, the average extra waiting time due to TSA procedures was 19.5 minutes per person. That’s a total economic loss—in –America—of $10 billion per year, more than the TSA’s entire budget. The increased automobile deaths due to people deciding to drive instead of fly is 500 per year. Both of these numbers are for America only, and by themselves demonstrate that post-9/11 airport security has done more harm than good.

The current TSA measures create an even greater harm: loss of liberty. Airports are effectively rights-free zones. Security officers have enormous power over you as a passenger. You have limited rights to refuse a search. Your possessions can be confiscated. You cannot make jokes, or wear clothing, that airport security does not approve of. You cannot travel anonymously. (Remember when we would mock Soviet-style “show me your papers” societies? That we’ve become inured to the very practice is a harm.) And if you’re on a certain secret list, you cannot fly, and you enter a Kafkaesque world where you cannot face your accuser, protest your innocence, clear your name, or even get confirmation from the government that someone, somewhere, has judged you guilty. These police powers would be illegal anywhere but in an airport, and we are all harmed—individually and collectively—by their existence.

Techdirt, http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120330/04122218301/how-tsas-security-theater-harms-us-all.shtml

Based on the observations of the effects of the US’s Patriot Act, I have to conclude that under the theory of Act Utilitarianism, the introduction of such a law is immoral.

Windows 8 is in…

Windows 8 is interesting to say the least. It does give me a few mild concerns, but I’m attempting to stay optimistic about it, and have adopted a “wait and see” approach. After all, it has only just reached RTM status, and there are no computers out yet to take full advantage of the software.

What does concern me though — and I have yet to see anything good or bad in this regard — is that some open source programs will effectively be banned from the ARM versions of the tablet due to potential legal issues. Take VLC, or Media Player Classic for example — They both support DVD playback without valid licenses from the governing body responsible for such things. This means that they will very easily get taken off of the Windows Store with so much as an accusation of copyright infringement or some other faulty DMCA claim written to Microsoft.

The solution in this case, I guess, would be to remove DVD access to those versions. After all, tablets won’t accept optical discs anyhow. But what about other missing codec licenses that I’m unaware of? How does Microsoft feel about having WMV code in ffmpeg? What about RealMedia? There are tons of media codecs supported by ffmpeg (and thus VLC) that are not open source like Ogg Theora, Vorbis and Matroska.

Really hope that it won’t be an issue to get a functional media player for free that plays everything, and doesn’t try to sell more music and video like Xbox Music/Video does right now.

An interesting read about “Intellectual Property”

Here’s a very interesting short read about the fallacy surrounding the notion of “Intellectual Property”, courtesy of the Free Software Foundation & GNU:

Did You Say “Intellectual Property”? It’s a Seductive Mirage

by Richard M. Stallman

It has become fashionable to toss copyright, patents, and trademarks—three separate and different entities involving three separate and different sets of laws—plus a dozen other laws into one pot and call it “intellectual property”. The distorting and confusing term did not become common by accident. Companies that gain from the confusion promoted it. The clearest way out of the confusion is to reject the term entirely.

According to Professor Mark Lemley, now of the Stanford Law School, the widespread use of the term “intellectual property” is a fashion that followed the 1967 founding of the World “Intellectual Property” Organization (WIPO), and only became really common in recent years. (WIPO is formally a UN organization, but in fact represents the interests of the holders of copyrights, patents, and trademarks.) Wide use dates from around 1990. (Local image copy)

The term carries a bias that is not hard to see: it suggests thinking about copyright, patents and trademarks by analogy with property rights for physical objects. (This analogy is at odds with the legal philosophies of copyright law, of patent law, and of trademark law, but only specialists know that.) These laws are in fact not much like physical property law, but use of this term leads legislators to change them to be more so. Since that is the change desired by the companies that exercise copyright, patent and trademark powers, the bias introduced by the term “intellectual property” suits them.

The bias is reason enough to reject the term, and people have often asked me to propose some other name for the overall category—or have proposed their own alternatives (often humorous). Suggestions include IMPs, for Imposed Monopoly Privileges, and GOLEMs, for Government-Originated Legally Enforced Monopolies. Some speak of “exclusive rights regimes”, but referring to restrictions as “rights” is doublethink too.

Some of these alternative names would be an improvement, but it is a mistake to replace “intellectual property” with any other term. A different name will not address the term’s deeper problem: overgeneralization. There is no such unified thing as “intellectual property”—it is a mirage. The only reason people think it makes sense as a coherent category is that widespread use of the term has misled them.

The term “intellectual property” is at best a catch-all to lump together disparate laws. Nonlawyers who hear one term applied to these various laws tend to assume they are based on a common principle and function similarly.

Nothing could be further from the case. These laws originated separately, evolved differently, cover different activities, have different rules, and raise different public policy issues.

Copyright law was designed to promote authorship and art, and covers the details of expression of a work. Patent law was intended to promote the publication of useful ideas, at the price of giving the one who publishes an idea a temporary monopoly over it—a price that may be worth paying in some fields and not in others.

Trademark law, by contrast, was not intended to promote any particular way of acting, but simply to enable buyers to know what they are buying. Legislators under the influence of the term “intellectual property”, however, have turned it into a scheme that provides incentives for advertising.

Since these laws developed independently, they are different in every detail, as well as in their basic purposes and methods. Thus, if you learn some fact about copyright law, you’d be wise to assume that patent law is different. You’ll rarely go wrong!

People often say “intellectual property” when they really mean some larger or smaller category. For instance, rich countries often impose unjust laws on poor countries to squeeze money out of them. Some of these laws are “intellectual property” laws, and others are not; nonetheless, critics of the practice often grab for that label because it has become familiar to them. By using it, they misrepresent the nature of the issue. It would be better to use an accurate term, such as “legislative colonization”, that gets to the heart of the matter.

Laymen are not alone in being confused by this term. Even law professors who teach these laws are lured and distracted by the seductiveness of the term “intellectual property”, and make general statements that conflict with facts they know. For example, one professor wrote in 2006:

Unlike their descendants who now work the floor at WIPO, the framers of the US constitution had a principled, procompetitive attitude to intellectual property. They knew rights might be necessary, but…they tied congress’s hands, restricting its power in multiple ways.

That statement refers to Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 of the US Constitution, which authorizes copyright law and patent law. That clause, though, has nothing to do with trademark law or various others. The term “intellectual property” led that professor to make false generalization.

The term “intellectual property” also leads to simplistic thinking. It leads people to focus on the meager commonality in form that these disparate laws have—that they create artificial privileges for certain parties—and to disregard the details which form their substance: the specific restrictions each law places on the public, and the consequences that result. This simplistic focus on the form encourages an “economistic” approach to all these issues.

Economics operates here, as it often does, as a vehicle for unexamined assumptions. These include assumptions about values, such as that amount of production matters while freedom and way of life do not, and factual assumptions which are mostly false, such as that copyrights on music supports musicians, or that patents on drugs support life-saving research.

Another problem is that, at the broad scale implicit in the term “intellectual property”, the specific issues raised by the various laws become nearly invisible. These issues arise from the specifics of each law—precisely what the term “intellectual property” encourages people to ignore. For instance, one issue relating to copyright law is whether music sharing should be allowed; patent law has nothing to do with this. Patent law raises issues such as whether poor countries should be allowed to produce life-saving drugs and sell them cheaply to save lives; copyright law has nothing to do with such matters.

Neither of these issues is solely economic in nature, and their noneconomic aspects are very different; using the shallow economic overgeneralization as the basis for considering them means ignoring the differences. Putting the two laws in the “intellectual property” pot obstructs clear thinking about each one.

Thus, any opinions about “the issue of intellectual property” and any generalizations about this supposed category are almost surely foolish. If you think all those laws are one issue, you will tend to choose your opinions from a selection of sweeping overgeneralizations, none of which is any good.

If you want to think clearly about the issues raised by patents, or copyrights, or trademarks, or various other different laws, the first step is to forget the idea of lumping them together, and treat them as separate topics. The second step is to reject the narrow perspectives and simplistic picture the term “intellectual property” suggests. Consider each of these issues separately, in its fullness, and you have a chance of considering them well.

And when it comes to reforming WIPO, here is one proposal for changing the name and substance of WIPO.

My Letter to Parliament

I’ve written this letter, and have sent it to Stephen Harper, Vic Toews, and my local MP. I urge others to do similar. You can find their contact information here.

Re: Bill C-30, “Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act”

I am writing to you to today to express my opposition to this act, as tabled.

First of all, I am extremely disappointed to hear that the Conservative Party of Canada has stooped so low as to conflate this bill’s opposition with child predators. As I’m sure you’ve already heard, Vic Toews has been quoted saying “He can either stand with us or with the child pornographers.” He has since tried to deny what he said, but it’s on official record, and has been captured on YouTube for everybody to see. I do not appreciate being accused of siding with child pornographers simply because I oppose the forfeiture of my personal privacy. I am not a criminal, and thus do not warrant being treated like one.

Secondly, a major (and valid) concern over the potential cost to consumers for the mandated collection of data, and the potential threat of hacking into this major pool of data, is going unanswered by supporters of the bill. They should know very well that this law would create a massive financial burden on internet providers, which will only get passed onto consumers.

Finally, although the intentions are noble, I strongly distrust the government in having un-warranted access to this information when it wants to suppress dissent. The title of the law claims that it’s designed to protect children, but the body of the law does not limit itself one bit to that goal. This will open the doors to unintended uses, and will eventually lead us down a slippery slope toward a total police state.

We must oppose this law right now, in its current form. Anything else would be to sacrifice our human rights to privacy.

One of my absolute favorite tweets of all time:

https://twitter.com/#!/firstcircle12/status/169831774409592832

On Politics and “For The Children” laws.

I absolutely detest when government tries to pressure its citizenry into submission by pulling out the “Child Porn” card.  They always frame their new laws to say that you are a child rapist if you oppose them, regardless of how ridiculous that statement is.

And the current proposed law, C-30, dubbed the “Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act” is no different. Legislators want to create an environment whereby law enforcement has easier access to the information they need to combat such crimes online, but they’re doing so by completely trampling over the rights of innocent people. Reasonable concerns over the warrantless disclosure of subscriber data are voiced by Canadians, yet supporters of the bill want to hear nothing of the sort. They accuse the opposition of siding with child predators, when all we’re doing is demanding that we keep our right to privacy. I will not put up with that kind of accusatory bullshit, and I hope that others call them out strongly as well.

I do agree that modern technology permits criminals to get away a lot easier than before, but I do not believe that the solution to this problem is to completely give up our civil freedoms for the sake of catching a few bad guys. We’re not a police state, nor do I want us to ever become one. Instead, why not consider some alternatives, like what Michael Geist suggest. And why not, for once, stop using “for the children” as some kind of battering ram to get shitty laws passed.

But I’m sure that the conservative government, with their “tough on crime” stance, will hear nothing of that either.

Windows On ARM and my muddled feelings over consumer lock-in.

I’m really beginning to wonder if I really want to support Microsoft’s new tablet version of Windows 8. I was previously all gung-ho about getting a Windows 8 tablet when they came to market; but since reading about the UEFI scandal whereby device manufacturers are forbidden from allowing a user to disable the secure boot feature on an ARM device, my morals regarding consumer choice are somewhat getting in the way.

It’s a difficult scenario though… Apple and Android both lock their devices down to use their OS only as well. So how does that make Microsoft’s move any different? Part of the problem, I guess, is that Windows on ARM will only allow you to install software and drivers via the official Microsoft Windows Store. This means that if somebody were to manufacture an ARM tablet that doesn’t force the user to use Windows only, then they likely cannot put Windows 8 on it, since there is no way to get authorized drivers for the hardware. There’s also the problem that Windows 8 for ARM devices will not be sold directly to consumers – it will come only pre-installed on the device.

In the end, I may very well end up forgoing my morals and get one anyhow. It makes me somewhat of a hypocrite though, because I’ve decried Apple devices for so long for almost the same reasons. Android hasn’t suffered from my disapproval like what Apple/iOS has, but it’s still lower favored than Microsoft’s potential offering in my books.

I’ll just have to wait and see what happens. As things stand right now, my options may very well be to get a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, or stomach the sudden discomfort I’ve developed for Microsoft and get a Windows 8 tablet.

Ellen Responds to One Million Moms

Ellen Responds to One Million Moms | The Mary Sue.

I’m really happy to hear that J.C. Penny refused to back down, and stood behind their initial decision to hire Ellen as a spokesperson. It’s sad that we have to put up with bigotry these days, but we all suffer from it. We’re human after all.

This has gotten me to think, though… Through the ages, there have always been issues with two or more polarizing views where you have radical opinions on either side. Take slavery for example — back in the day, many held the opinion that Black people were not equal to their White neighbors. A war ensued between the North and South of the US, and the North won, thereby freeing the Black slaves. Today, it’s beyond impossible to imagine that slavery was ever a good idea, but back then, some people firmly believed that they were right. The same thing can be said about other issues, such as women’s rights. Women have been denied many rights in the past because of many reasons ranging from religious views to plain old chauvinism on men’s behalf. Hell, in some countries, women are still treated like inferior human beings for these very reasons. Many would argue that women still are not treated 100% equally with men in even the most modern societies.

Every generation has their conflicting opinions. Right now, it’s topics such as LBGT rights and marriage equality. Both sides have very strong feelings about the issue, with some for and some against. While Human Rights activists would like to see everybody treated equally and fairly under the law, religious conservatives would rather keep things the way they are… As somebody who is obviously for equal rights, I have a hard time to understand the points of view presented by my opponents on this issue. But I still try to respect it and analyze all arguments. Who is “right”?

The idea behind Direct Democracy is that everybody has a vote on every issue. There are no voted representatives. On any given issue, there are two or more sides, and the popular vote gets to control the law. It’s not hard to imagine that this would be a good system for anybody who holds a majority view on any given topic; But what about if you’re on the losing side?  If religious fundamentalists in the US had their way, same-sex marriage would be explicitly illegal. If I had my way, I’d convert all marriages – both traditional and same-sex – to civil unions, and let the church decide on whom to marry. But who’s right? Both sides would argue that their views are correct while the other’s is false.

For this reason, I’m glad that we don’t have such a form of democracy. Yet the system we have is far from perfect as well. Our elected officials are prone to corruption, and have to try to make moral decisions regarding what’s right and wrong, regardless of what the popular vote may be. Ideally, they have to accept arguments from both sides, and weigh the issue.

So this brings me back to my original question – when it comes to a controversial issue such as marriage equality, which side is right? I tend to believe that a liberal application of laws is the best way to go, but obviously not everybody agrees with me. After all, I’m an atheist, and the religious fundamentalist folk would see me as wrong just for that very reason. But who are we to say that anybody who disagrees with our opinion is flat-out incorrect?

The interesting thing about opinions, though, is that they can be fluid, and change over time. After all, that’s why we made slavery illegal.