Thoughts

This category identifies postings that are philosophical in nature.

Update – Bill 85 (Photo Card Act)

/ Christopher Parsons

It looks like Ontario has managed to do what politicians in the UK have been struggling to accomplish for years. This morning the Liberal government of Ontario passed Bill 85, the Photo Card Act, which will see updates to the identity documents that Ontarians typically carry on their persons. While the UK government has been stymied at every turn by no2id when they’ve attempted to roll out a sophisticated identify card, the coalition and advocacy groups in Ontario that have opposed the inception of drivers licenses that contain biometric data and radio frequency identifiers (RFIDs) have been less successful. While the Conservatives had been expected to speak against the bill, this did not, in fact, happen. My money is that the politics didn’t cash out to oppose it.

I’ll post updates as they arrive, and be putting together a post-mordum report in a few days.

Update 1: CTV has an article discussing the EDLs

Study: Stolen Web Content Sees More Traffic Than The Original

/ Christopher Parsons

is reporting that a recent study from Attributor Corp., a copyright enforcement company, shows that content that is stolen makes more money than the original content itself. I don’t find this terribly surprising, but the solution (hunting down copyright violations) seems to be a Sisyphean task; no matter how many take-down notices that you send out, when content is taken across international borders it’s almost impossible to easily take it down if you’re dealing with an uncooperative content host.

What’s the solution then? The study suggests that content owners need to find a better way of monetizing their assets – figure out how to generate more revenue (potentially by studying how the thieves do it) so that even if content is ‘stolen’ you’re still ahead of the game. The nice thing about this solution is that it recognizes that you can’t ever, really, stop copyright infringement online – the best you can do is learn to roll with it.

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Short Thought Concerning Enhanced Drivers Licenses

/ Christopher Parsons

A colleague of mine asked that I write a short post that summarizes the issue and my concerns with the Enhanced Drivers Licenses that Ontario is proposing to implement in the near future. Per his request, I’ll writing this.

Beginning July 1, 2009, the American government will require Canadians and Americans who enter the United States through its land borders to carry either a passport or an ‘enhanced’ identity document. The Ontario government, in response, is preparing to pass Bill 85 – Photo Card Act, which will see the government offer these identity documents to the Ontario public. These identity documents are required to contain a radio frequency identification chip that emits a unique number whenever it is within range of a reader, raising deep concerns surrounding mass surveillance of North American populations. Researchers have consistently proven that the anemic protections suggested by the government, such as placing the identity document in a radio-blocking sleeve, to be relatively ineffective in blocking the interception of the radio’s unique identifier. Further, advocacy groups have noted that it is relatively inexpensive to purchase a reader, raising concerns that non-government bodies and individuals can capture this unique identifier.

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Abandoning Your Privacy, One Radio Wave, One Smile, at a Time

/ Christopher Parsons

In a recent piece, “Tracking Your Every Move: ‘Enhancing’ Driver’s Licenses at the Cost of Privacy,” I noted that the proposed Ontario enhanced drivers license changes threaten to seriously diminish people’s privacy. These proposed licenses will include a small RFID chip that emits a unique identifier when brought into proximity of a reader – this number is not associated with any personally identifiable information that the provincial government holds, but does (per the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada) constitute personally identifiable information in its own right. The Commissioner’s office, in their whitepaper entitled “Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) in the Workplace: Recommendations for Good Practices”:

An RFID tag containing a unique identifier has the potential to become a “proxy” for an individual when it becomes associated with that individual. In such circumstances, it will become personal information. This would be the case with an RFID-enabled identification badge or uniform. Location data gathered by scanning tags associated with individuals is also personal information (Source). Continue reading →

Bell Mobility and Solo Mobile make mobile Internet access safer

/ Christopher Parsons

This is going to be relatively brief, just given a lack of time on my part (who knew that take 4 grad courses in a term, plus doing personal research, would be so time intensive *grin*). After reading a post by Mark Goldberg over at Telecom Trends I found out that Bell is planning to provide parents with a feature that would let them limit web content that their kids could view online. Given Bell’s history of using Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) devices to shape bandwidth use, I wanted to see what the technology they were using to prevent children from accessing particular websites.

The Technology

Bell is investing in Unipier Ltd.’s Intelligent Policy Manager (IPM). From the whitepaper (links to .pdf) on this particular piece of technology, we find that:

The Intelligent Policy Manager communicates with traffic and content interception and enforcement systems such as: IP level deep packet inspection systems, HTTP and SIP proxies, messaging gateways and 3rd party access gateways. Using these systems to
forward events to the IPM, allows it to apply policies on these events. In addition, the IPM integrates with various networks, BSS and content enablers in order to carry out specific actions such as: charging, sending messages or reformatting a piece of content.
Unipier’s IPM also integrates with back-end subscriber, partner and device repositories in order to fetch relevant context information.

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