November 2010 – Page 4 – a sibilant intake of breath

De-cluttering

During the next eight months, I will be moving twice. First, to the Beaver Barracks, in Ottawa. Then, to Toronto.

When I went to Oxford, I brought only a suitcase and a suit bag with me. When I returned, I had those plus two big cardboard boxes I mailed. I anticipate the move to Toronto involving a bit more baggage, but not enormously more. As such, between now and July, I will be selling or giving away most of my bulky possessions.

If you are in need to low-quality furniture, you might want to consider dropping me a line. I will need most of it for a few months yet, but it is never too early to express your interest in something. My free stuff listing is also likely to pick up new items in the next while.

It Gets Better

I think people living in places like Vancouver, Toronto, and Ottawa sometimes get a distorted sense of how much anti-gay hostility still exists in the world. Gay people living in more conservative areas still face a substantial amount of discrimination, bullying, and condemnation. Dealing with that must be especially difficult for young people, who don’t yet have access to the kind of resources, networks, and self-sufficiency they will acquire with time.

As such, I think Dan Savage’s ‘It Gets Better‘ initiative deserves praise. The project consists of videos arguing that the lives of gay teens will improve, with the specific aim of discouraging people from committing suicide. Savage says the project seeks to “speak directly to LGBT kids about surviving bullying and going on to lead rewarding lives filled with joy, family, and love. We didn’t need anyone’s permission to tell them — it gets better”.

Groups that have contributed include Google employees and other individuals and organizations. There is also an active Facebook page.

Tony Fouhse’s photography

Tony Fouhse is an Ottawa photographer doing great work in a range of fields, from commercial advertising to artistic portraits of Ottawa crack cocaine addicts. He has a Flash-based website (sorry, owners of iPads and new MacBook Airs) and a weekly blog.

His work was discussed in the Photojournalism and Documentary Photography I am taking through the School of Photographic Arts: Ottawa. It makes me want to undertake some more involved photographic projects, rather than just taking advantage of what there is to photograph in the general vicinity of my home.

Netflix streaming in Canada

I used to be a subscriber to Zip.ca, a DVD by mail service. I decided to give it up for a trio of reasons:

Since I couldn’t really choose the order in which I received films, I often got ones I wasn’t in the mood to see
The service was fairly expensive
I received a number of scratched and unplayable discs

Now, I am trying the new video streaming service offered in Canada by Netflix.

By far the biggest problem is selection. There are some fairly obscure television shows like Blackadder and League of Gentlemen, but no Simpsons, Seinfeld, Arrested Development, Sopranos, 24, Mythbusters, etc. The same goes for movies. I start searching for high quality films I have been meaning to see, and rarely find what I am looking for. With the Netflix streaming service, you watch what is available rather than what you want. Some of what is available is certainly decent – such as the first three seasons of Mad Men – but it definitely doesn’t have the same scope of options as the iTunes store or Zip.ca.

That said, Netflix streaming is quite cheap. It only costs $8 a month, which probably explains how popular it has become:

According to Sandvine, a network management company that studies Internet traffic patterns, 10 percent of Canadian Internet users visited Netflix.com in the week after the service launched. And they weren’t just visiting—they were signing up and watching a lot of movies. Netflix videos quickly came to dominate broadband lines across Canada, with Netflix subscribers’ bandwidth usage doubling that of YouTube users. At peak hours (around 9 p.m.) the service accounted for more than 90 percent of the traffic on one Canadian broadband network.

My sense is that Netflix streaming is really competing with free streaming sites. Against them, it has a number of advantages. The interface is fairly good, and it is unlikely to be laden with malware. There aren’t heaps of broken links to be dealt with. Also, there are no daily time limits for use.

Given how much bandwidth Netflix is eating up, it seems likely that there will be an outcry from internet service providers (including those rendered more powerful by a recent CRTC decision). Netflix itself will likely face pressure to pay ISPs, while users are likely to find themselves hit with extra charges for bandwidth usage.

Climate timelines

The timelines associated with climate change are of an entirely different magnitude from those associated with ordinary politics. The greenhouse gases we emit today will still be affecting the climate in thousands of years, in a time when our current leaders and forms of political organization will have become as obscure as those of the Ancient Greeks are to us now. It is possible that only scholars in under-funded departments will be aware of what the state of global politics looked like in 2010. People with the degrees they issue may worry about how they will find jobs, having specialized in such an obscure and irrelevant field. Quite possibly, the average person will have never heard of Barack Obama, the European Union, the economic resurgence of China, or the existence of Canada.

On the other hand, it is possible that the politics of 2010 will be remembered in the distant future for the same reason the general outlines of Ancient Greek society are remembered now: because they will be seen as an important explanation for why the world is as it has become. In that case, it seems likely that our time will be primarily remembered as the period in history when people could have stopped dangerous climate change, but failed to do so because of their short-sightedness and selfishness.

Sorting v. teaching in universities

Young people around the world spend tens of thousands of dollars and years of their lives getting university degrees. Partly, that is justified by the unique experience of being a university student. At the same time, it is argued that university confers lifelong benefits. I can think of three major ways in which that could happen:

Students learn about the things they are actually studying, whether that’s ancient Greek drama or engineering
Students learn skills in the process of studying, such as time management and interpersonal skills
Universities sort people: separating those who can handle the kind of competition they foster from those who cannot

While I think universities push the first argument hardest, it is the second and third that are most plausible. Most people only have a small amount of time to devote to sizing up a stranger. That is especially true of anybody who might hire you. What a university degree conveys in a small amount of space is that you have the skills required to get through that process. Rather than actually invest the time and effort to evaluate your capabilities, the person evaluating you can accept this information ‘as read’.

Perhaps one practical message to derive from this hypothesizing is that there are two sorts of university degrees that can be pursued. There is the minority subset where the actual information you learn is the most valuable thing. This includes fields like engineering, medicine, and accounting. Then there are those in which ‘soft skills’ and the sorting process are the principal value, at least from the perspective of employers.

Free Sophos for Mac

Despite what some people seem to think, Macs are vulnerable to malware. Apple even built limited antivirus capabilities into Snow Leopard.

At the moment, Sophos Antivirus is giving away their Apple version. It could be useful for avoiding the (relatively few) bits of malicious Mac software. Also, for avoiding passing along infected attachments to friends.

Midterm day

Despite all the complaints from both left and right, I think Barack Obama is a promising president, whose tenure has largely been wasted on the financial crisis so far. Nonetheless, he does have some decent achievements to point to, most notably on health care, and there is a lot more he could accomplish with adequate Congressional support.

Hopefully, today’s elections will be less dire for the Democrats than many have been expecting.

While some of the complaints about Obama from the right have been non-sensical (all that secret Muslim / socialist stuff), what really seems to endanger him is a loss of enthusiam from his core supporters. Certainly, he could have done more on issues like gay rights and climate change. Nonetheless, it doesn’t make sense to punish him for inadequate action by rewarding those who will do even less on those issues, or even try to roll back the modest progress that has been made.

The Republicans seem to understand the value of unity and pulling together far better than Democrats do. That may be a big part of why they seem to be so much more effective at driving their agenda, despite how it tends to serve the needs of a powerful minority more than those of the population at large.

California’s Proposition 19

Tomorrow, the people of California will vote on Proposition 19: a measure that would make marijuana legal to grow, own, sell, and use in small quantities. The two major arguments being used are economic – since the measure would let counties and municipal governments levy taxes on the stuff – and security-focused – since marijuana is currently one of the sources of financial support for Mexico’s brutal drug gangs.

I have argued before that the best approach to drugs is to legalize, regulate, and provide treatment for addicts. Hopefully, California can set a progressive precedent for the rest of the United States (unlike other examples).

Spying between friends

Richard Alrich’s GCHQ: The Uncensored Story of Britain’s Most Secret Intelligence Agency describes a number of instances of longstanding allies conducting espionage against one another, including signals intelligence (SIGINT). Aldrich describes how the ‘Echelon’ system run by British and U.S. intelligence was used to “read the traffic of their minor allies, including France and West Germany”. This system is now estimated to process five billion intercepts per day, probably filtering them for suspicious words and phrases. Aldrich talks about how, after the second world war, Britain’s codebreakers were “doing extensive work on Britain’s European allies, regarding them as either insecure or untrustworthy, or both”.

Of course, more awkward allies have been a higher priority for codebreaking and other forms of covert activity. During the interwar period, Russian ciphers were the the “core business” of Britain’s codebreakers, and apparently work on them didn’t stop despite their subsequent alliance. The Soviets were also spying on the allies, though with more of an emphasis on human intelligence (HUMINT). For example, John Cairncross worked at GCHQ’s predecessor – Bletchley Park – and warned the KGB of the impending German armoured offensive at Kursk, one of the decisive battles of the war. He also saw some of Britain’s early thinking on atomic weapons while working at the Cabinet Office, while his fellow Russian spy Klaus Fuchs was virtually able to provide the blueprints of the devices built at Los Alamos. The Soviet Union achieved other notable HUMINT successes throughout the Cold War, such as the John Walker espionage within the navy. Surely, there are other examples that are still secret.

Allied SIGINT against Soviet targets continued after 1945, as GCHQ and others started to intercept messages between Moscow and the capitals of new client states.

The most subtle reference to inter-allied spying comes from a passage on the Diplomatic Wireless Service, developed in 1944 and 1945. Aldrich describes how the DWS was primarily a system of military SIGINT collection stations, but that it also “doubled as a secret monitoring service working from within British Embassies and High Commissions”. High Commissions are only located in Commonwealth countries, on whom Britain is presumably still spying. They seem to be returning the favour, as demonstrated by another anecdote from the book, in which Prime Minister Tony Blair discovered his hotel room in India to be laced with listening devices that would have had to be drilled out of the walls to disable.