The answer depends on where you are. In some countries, doing so would cost you jail time. But in this liberty-crazy country, such a harsh punishment would be inconceivable. In some parts, imcaration is even the most economic way to drive, efficiently getting someone else to pay for your transportation. The version of the above CBC report which aired nationally mentioned that no Canadian province would charge more than 200 CAD for such an offense.
Wanna fully enjoy your liberty? Come to Canada and fully legally order a fake plate, almost for free! As a bonus, your actual license will be hidden, so that your car isn't imcarated by others!
Canada's liberty and vulnerability: Yours to Discover, Ours to Exploit!
]]>The Canadian media I follow the most―CBC/Radio-Canada and L'actualité―keep mentioning Meta and Google's reactions negatively. Which would be understandable given how interested they are, if it wasn't for the fact that in addition to running propagandist ads, they also cover the story with an unrestrained bias. Even the public broadcaster fails to at least disclose its conflict of interest, particularly intense given how underfunded it already is.
So I was pleasantly surprised to get a small break from this enduring and frustrating rhetoric when I saw the CBC's The National explain what it really was about in At Issue's latest edition, all thanks to Andrew Coyne, its economy-educated panelist. I was curious to hear more than this short intervention (at 02:55) on the topic from Coyne, so I went looking for articles online and found his excellent The best thing the government could do to save the media is to stop trying to save the media, which beautifully highlights the mass media's contradictions. Coyne says it well:
And yet, The Globe and Mail was expecting me to subscribe for more than 400 CAD/year to read Coyne's article. I've never read The Globe and Mail regularly, but I doubt it would provide that much value to a Quebecer like me, who has access to multiple other (less costly) quality news sources, and little time to follow them all.
I checked if there was a more reasonable way to read Coyne's view and quickly ended up on a website which has been shamelessly copying The Globe and Mail for years. The highrony of watching the same government tolerate crooks blatantly stealing our IP for years, while focusing its efforts on a counterproductive attempt to steal lost revenue back from innovators―merely guilty of being foreign―, is one sorry exemplification of how populist―if not downright ignorant―Canada has become.
Unwilling to let most of my readers choose between financial health and theft, I searched for a more accessible neutral article on the topic and was impressed by Michael Geist's remarkable The Bill C-18 Reality: Everyone Loses When the Government Mandates Payments for Links. This truly free article dismantles the media's rhetoric, as in this brilliant example:
But I can't conclude without pointing out just how contradictory C-18 proponents remain. As Coyne noted:
But even as the law is about to enter into force, months after Meta restricted linking to CBC News content, the CBC is still advertising Meta:
Even 5 months into a Meta boycott by the government (including CBC/Radio-Canada), the CBC is still advertising Facebook for free, as this surreal press release shows:
Coyne had warned of unintended consequences, as taxing access to credible information effectively favours disinformation. But looking at the lies deliberately spread in the above CBC pages, this concern may have been unjustified… The foreign link tax will just replace local sources of disinformation by more numerous and foreign sources of disinformation.😒
And yet here we are despairing about the public's waning trust in journalism and complaining about disinformation, while spending on fancy projects to restore trust, rather than starting with the basics. If CBC News can't avoid conflict of interest, can it not at least avoid sensationalism and obvious bias in its stories?
]]>With many more steps still left, I can only hope that the process will complete and result in a framework as good as what's being proposed, with a free "business model" (as it's called) and an open source implementation, at least on the client side. I am impatiently waiting for history to write itself…
]]>The About Us page of Canada News Media (or "CanadaNewsmedia" or "Canadanewsmedia"―just the about page uses all 3 forms) only offered a couple paragraphs of uninformative marketing speak. A 5-minute web search didn't find any more genuine information about it. According to HypeStat, the domain was created in December 2017. And indeed, the Wayback Machine shows it has been copying The Globe and Mail and others for more than 5 years.
So what's my take? I believe Canada News Media is no more than a cheap, rogue, half-broken website blatantly violating the copyright of the sources it copies, profiting thanks to abundant clickbait.
Having now read the article, I must say it's highly ironic that I could read it from free from an illegal website which has been operating at the expense of journalists and readers for years, when the government is putting ridiculous efforts into sucking Bad Big Tech. Coyne's article starts:
Indeed, how much better informed would we be if―rather than entering a public fighting show against giants and common interest, artificially favoring a few lucky media―our government focused on the boring enforcement of existing, rational legislation, protecting all media against theft, and accessorily protecting everyone against misinformation as a bonus?
But why is it you had to consent thousands of times? Sure, the web is a chaotic network of way too many websites. I had about 5 cookie prompts just while I was researching this post. But just before that, why did I have to also consent to cookies when scheduling my fifth vaccine against SARS, using the same browser profile, and the same website? Can all websites be so bad?
It turns out the answer is mostly negative. The main reason is unfortunately legislative; according to 2 sources I found, the EU's maximum consent duration is just 1 year.
According to CookieYes's "How long does cookie consent last?":
According to Proton Technologies AG's Cookies, the GDPR, and the ePrivacy Directive:
Is that to say we are doomed to endless clicking? Not quite, since a software solution is apparently possible. The UK's 2012 Guidance on the rules on use of cookies and similar technologies already stated:
I just wish at least one browser will get there before more decades go by. How good would it be to go back to the good old times...
Comme l'explique Québec Science dans un éditorial de Mélissa Guillemette, il est bien plus simple d'user d'un brin de rhétorique que d'écouter la science. Le gouvernement évite ainsi une gestion de changement, et―qui sait―pourrait arriver à survivre quelques années de plus.
Il est permis de rêver à ce que notre pays serait devenu si nos prédécesseurs s'étaient autant démarqués en matière de populisme. Peut-être serait-on arrivés à lutter contre le tabagisme bien plus efficacement si, au lieu d'instaurer une taxe favorisant la contrebande, on aurait tout simplement choisi de subventionner Imperial Tobacco. Après tout, ce sont bien à eux que l'on doit les regrettées Player's Lights!
]]>However, the impact in my context is quite different. The employer accepts even some of the poorest applicants, either because it's indeed unable to evaluate aptitudes, or because public sector rules force it. I've worked with a colleague clueless not just about IT in general, but even about security, who was paid more than I did, as a so-called "expert". Indeed, an incredible share of the Quebec government's security openings offer an expert bonus.
But the most important crisis is not in information security jobs. It's in the security of generalist IT workers. Employers just don't grasp how security works. People who don't know IT just think of it like they would think of residential security.
Want to prevent intrusions in your home? Install a stronger door and lock.
Want to prevent intrusions in your PC? Install a firewall.
Your home keeps being broken into anyway? Buy an alarm system.
Your PC keeps being broken into anyway? Buy an antivirus.
Similarly, most people think of IT security as a feature, rather than as a quality. A feature which can be added. Unfortunately, such IT security features tend to be heuristic and buggy/costly. It's more accurate to picture security as low insecurity than as a sum of measures. And insecurity is a sum of flaws. Real security comes when the entire information system is built with security in mind, by IT workers who all keep flaws in mind.
The problem is not so much that we don't have enough resources for security. It's mostly that we don't have them at the right place and time. Getting a 10 M € budget to overhaul security after a major breach will get you nowhere close to where an extra 2 M € over the project's life would have. When a system's architecture was rushed due to lack of resources, patching gets costly and nowhere as efficient as a rewrite, which would be too risky.
What we do need is developers and other IT workers all putting security first. Not just as an afterthought (at best). It's been called the security-first mindset, security-first culture, or developer-first security. But for security-first to happen, developers need the means first. As long as development is rushed and QA a lucky bonus, we will keep producing bugs of all kinds. Developers need to have the necessary knowledge and to feel responsible. And for this, their reputation needs to track their full record.
As long as most IT workers will stay ignorant or careless about security, organizations will keep getting hit. If you want peace of mind, prepare for security early.
Le mot de la rédactrice en chef, Claudine St-Germain, dans l'édition d'octobre de L'actualité1
illustre bien que cette rentrée et cette affirmation surréaliste ne sont pas des exceptions, mais malheureusement bel et bien représentatives d'une situation généralisée qui―on ne peut qu'être d'accord sur ce point―doit effectivement changer!
Le résultat d'un manque de vision d'ensemble, et d'une fragmentation. Initialement, celui d'établissements adoptant des systèmes différents, sans réfléchir à long terme. Et maintenant, celui d'une province trop petite pour se permettre une solution… avant encore bien des efforts gaspillés et de nombreuses tragédies.
While it's much better than my 3 previous handhelds, my new phone is far from perfect. Bugs were there on day 1, and the fingerprint reader is still so much less reliable than on my Nexus 5X. Overall, defects are visibly each week. Yet, I am pleasantly surprised to hear of the progress Google is making this month. Not so much by releasing Android 14, which is a modest improvement, but rather with the Pixel 8, which comes with the open-source Android and 7 years of security support. As Android 14 is showing, the evolution of handhelds is slowing down… which allows their maturation to start, and support to finally adapt to this new status.
I'm eager to see Google release affordable editions making this (early) maturity widely available, and hoping that by the time I replace my Pixel 6a, 7-year support has become the norm in a somewhat sustainable market where durability is an expectation.
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