Lex Ferenda

Anita Ramasatry at Findlaw.com writes about Abertay Dundee’s degree in Ethical Hacking and Countermeasures. Of course, you wouldn’t know that from the article, which doesn’t mention the degree title. Oops. Anyway, the analysis is brief and focused on US law. And concludes that a hypothetical US course along similar lines wouldn’t be in legal trouble.

I’m actually a little more disturbed by all the promises of monitoring students to make sure no bad guys get in. Bad guys are entitled to an education too, and the fact that they misuse the knowledge is hardly a new thing. I don’t see loyalty tests for chemistry students, despite the obvious bomb-making potential, and it smacks a little of technohysteria. The failures of bad networks and shoddy policing shouldn’t be passed on to university admins to justify them poking around in someone’s background. Outside of the obvious case of courses like nursing and teaching where background checks are commonplace, why should your past hacks affect your future course? Methinks the university doth protest too much.

The National Council for the Blind of Ireland (NCBI) has sent out a release (below) caling attention to the proposed cancellation of Audioscope, a weekly radio show on RTÉ that deals with a variety of issues around the blind/visually impaired communities. It’s presented by Bethan Collins, a stalwart of the accessibility debates in TCD and a well-known person-about-campus; she’s both student and teacher in occupational therapy. And it’s a good show - but more so, to many people, it’s a crucial connection and source of news and is exactly what a public service broadcaster should be doing.

There is a petition up on d’olde Internet. Please sign it! And yes I know all the problems with online petitions but this is a back-up to a direct, local lobbying effort and it builds moral support for that as well as whatever impact on the broadcaster. If you have time and are interested, add a personal comment when doing so, as they too will be useful to the NCBI in their work.

*NCBI URGES RTE TO REINSTATE PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCAST *

The National Council for the Blind of Ireland (NCBI) has called on new Radio
1 boss Ana Leddy to reverse the decision to scrap the only programme on
national radio dedicated to people who are blind and vision impaired.

While no official announcement has been made by RTE, NCBI understands that
RTE’s decision to remove the weekly programme was taken last Friday.

Des Kenny, Chief Executive of NCBI, said, “Audioscope has played a unique
and important role in Irish broadcasting for over 30 years now. Not only
does it provide news and information of specific interest to people who are
blind or vision impaired on the national airwaves, but it also increases
awareness of sight loss among the wider population.”

Mr Kenny added, “The numbers of people who are blind or vision impaired is
increasing annually. With an ageing population and increasing numbers of
people living with diabetes and other health issues, the need for RTE to
continue broadcasting Audioscope is greater than ever. It would be a real
blow if RTE were to scrap the programme now.”

NCBI is seeking a meeting with senior figures at RTE to discuss the future
of the programme.

*Ends*

Thousands of news outlets are publishing extracts from or stories about the now-infamous cosy little chat at the G8 summit between Tony Blair and George Bush. Blogs, message boards and so on are no different. Something that struck me, though, was the slight differences between the various transcripts that were posted on major news sites.

To illustrate this, I’ve compiled a side-by-side analysis based on the transcripts from MSNBC, the (London) Independent, BBC News and the Washington Post (all links are to the transcripts). Each transcript is ‘as published’ except that commentary etc has been excluded, and the text divided up into sections for easier reading. The BBC transcript starts later than the rest. I’ve only reproduced the sections with both Bush and Blair; some publishers also included the chit-chat between Bush and various others before the immortal “Yo, Blair” was uttered.

This little joust of mine doesn’t give any more political information, although it does fill in gaps (e.g. most transcribers failed to catch Blair’s joke that he knitted the also now infamous sweater gift that Bush received), and also underline the difficultly of transcribing a muffled conversation!

In any event, if you are seeking further information on the Special Relationship (TM), please go here or here. And if you have a taste for silly lipsynched videos after those two, then I highly recommend this (Bush only). All of these have been floating on the Web for some time but they bring a certain sillyness to the analysis of this week’s muffled conversations. Handy, eh?

Ethan Zuckerman brings news of today’s major blog-buzz-story, blocking of some major blogsites by Indian ISPs (or so it seems - blog murmurs can sometimes be misleading, of course!). Apparently a list has been issued by national authorities and ISPs are carrying out the orders. We’ll see where it goes.

ISP blocking is an interesting matter. It of course is riddled with holes. However, for a ‘mainstream’ audience, which is normally the matter of most concern to authorities, it is remarkably efficient. The truism about the Internet interpreting censorship as damage and routing around it has the caveat that many people on the Internet interpret censorship as a threat and route themselves away from it. There is a lot of anger from Indian bloggers who are being assertive and organised in defence of their freedom to write but I am always worried about the echo-chamber of blogging, where it can seem like a resistance is present, but there is a Nixonian silent majority who, at the first sign of difficulty, give up and do something else with their time.

(107 being the section of the US Copyright Code that deals with fair use)

Despite all of these rights
All people can reproduce
To report, criticise, or teach
Because that is fair use

Yehuda Berlinger is a genius. Here’s the entire code in verse. Beautiful. Notified by Eoin, who is probably trying to find a way to set it to Gilbert and Sullivan music by now.

The Free Software Foundation Europe held an important conference in Barcelona last month. They have gone to some trouble to compile transcripts, videos etc, all accessible from this index page - bookmark and read at your leisure, or download the lot.

With thanks to Ciarán O’Riordan.

Trinity College Dublin (TCD) and University College Cork (UCC), as the two
leading research universities in Ireland, have identified a number of research
areas in which they have complementary strengths and wish to develop these
areas in tandem to ensure maximum intellectual, educational and economic
benefits of the two universities in national and international terms.

Full press release in comments; also on UCC’s site; amusingly, it’s not on TCD’s yet (it was emailed to staff and students today).

Is this a good thing? Posturing or progress?

Thoughts welcome, especially from those affiliated with any of the now-deemed third, fourth, fifth, sixth or seventh-best universities

A while back, I referred to the nomination/election process for ICANN. By way of update, I now note the good news that Kieren McCarthy, a journalist in Britain, has applied for the ICANN board vacancy.

Kieren is probably the only journalist that I always end up citing for anything ICANN-related, as he has always added detail (especially in articles for the Register) that others miss (probably because they’re too busy giving the Governance for Dummies schpiel and throwing in some random ad hom abuse about the UN) and is thus virtually a primary source on ICANN and governance goings-on. If he’s chosen, I’ll have to find someone else to rely on. But selfishness aside, go Kieren!

I don’t usually put embedded videos on Lex Ferenda. This being a serious scholarly place and all that (yeah, sure). However, I do so tonight, to recognise that the Google Video Top 100 now contains that great favourite of Internet past and now present, the ham(p)sters…

CHUM, the famously independent Canadian media mini-group (including the original CHUM radio stations, MuchMusic, CityTV and other outlets that share the CHUM/City characteristic of veering between mainstream and mad) is (if approved by the CRTC, the regulatory agency) on its way to the Bell world, after a takeover bid that became public today.

It’s Bell Globemedia that’s making the bid. They are the people who currently own CTV (the largest private network), the Globe and Mail (the grand old national newspaper), and a whole rake of cable and satellite channels, and bits of the Toronto Maple Leafs and Raptors (hockey and basketball respectively).

BG itself is owned mostly by Bell Canada Enterprises (what was once upon a time the Canadian bit of Bell as in Alex Graham) and also by the Thompsons (long-time newspaper business). Though this too is subject to change. BCE are planning to get out of BG (i.e. to concentrate on telephones, Internet and so on) and sell most of their stake to the Thompsons and to Torstar (the Toronto Star group, which includes some TV as well as the newspaper).

There’s a great chart from the regulator that gives you an idea of all the links. It’s funny even just with visual impact alone. For now, BG are swearing that they will keep separate newsrooms in areas where they now own separate TV stations (most major Canadian cities, by my reading of it) but this is still A Big Story. Goodbye CHUM - or hello angry regulators?