This week, Industry minister Jim Prentice introduced Bill C-61 which contains amendments to Canada’s Copyright Act with the intention of updating the current law to take into account the widespread adoption and use of new digital media such as iPods and and other portable digital media devices.
Format shifting to be made legal
One of the major headline grabbing items in the bill is the explicit permission to allow transfer of content (at least some content) to multiple devices such as portable music and video players or computers. This amendment would legalize transferring the contents of a CD to your MP3 player or to your computer. There are some restrictions such as only one copy per device is allowed, that no DRM was disabled or circumvented in the process.
It is interesting to note that the clauses permitting format shifting include, music or “a work or other subject-matter that is a photograph or is contained in a book, newspaper, periodical or videocassette”. There is no mention of other formats such as DVDs nor other types of content such as online video or online photographs which if I understand correctly means that format shifting would remain illegal for these cases.
Legality of time shifting
Another reason for the “modernization” of Canada’s Copyright Act is to clarify the legality of time shifting which is the practice of recording a program in order to watch it at the user’s convenience. In the U.S., time shifting has explicitly been legal since 1984 when the U.S. Supreme Court decision on the Sony vs. Universal case was handed down. In Canada, there is currently no mention in the Copyright act regarding the legality of time shifting. Since users are effectively copying programs when using their VCR, computer or DVR, they are in violation of the Copyright Act.
If passed in its current form, Bill C-61 would explicitly allow time shifting which is great for consumers. There are however several caveats with this new allowance. It is not legal to keep recorded copies “longer than necessary in order to listen to or watch the program at a more convenient time”. It would be illegal then to keep recorded copies of your favourite shows. What the legal status of people’s existing collection of programs would be remains unclear. This also means that if you want to have a copy of a show long term, you would be forced to buy it on DVD or online even if you recorded every episode on your VCR or DVR. As I will discuss below, there are also DRM issues which could impact the use of time shifting.
Canada’s version of the DMCA
Although the amendments specifically allow consumers to copy legally obtained media onto various media devices for personal use, there are a lot of strings and conditions which have led many to label this Bill as Canada’s DMCA - a reference to the widely criticized United States’ DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act). In fact Michael Geist, a law professor a the University of Ottawa has pointed out that the Bill C-61 digital lock provisions are even more restrictive than the US DMCA.
DRM - making criminals out of consumers
One of the proposed amendments specially prohibit the circumvention and disabling of any digital locks or digital rights management (DRM). Since DRM is present on many CD, online downloads and almost all DVDs, it will effectively be illegal to make copies of these media onto portable players or for other purposes such as backups. Today, it is quite common for people to copy or “rip” DVDs in order to have a backup copy as well as to enble the transfer of the content onto portable video devices. Bill C-61 will now make this act illegal and designate a lot of people as criminals.
Making things even more confusing?
There still appears to be a fair bit of confusion over legalities of certain activities as well as the effect of Bill C-61 on people who currently have items which are currently legal but will no longer be legal if and when the Bill is adopted.
Will C-61 pass?
With the uproar regarding the introduction of this bill combined with the fact that federal conservatives are in a minority government means that this bill will probably not be passed without some modifications. Hopefully the government will listen to the outcry and change some of the more onerous DMCA like clauses.
June 16th, 2008
Posted by
Danny D'Amours |
Misc, Tech|
no comments
As many people inside and outside the academic community are aware, there is a steep decline in computer science enrollments in post-secondary institutions. For many in the computer science field, including software companies such as Google, Sun and IBM this is a troubling trend. If there are no CS students graduating, who will develop the next generation of software? Is there anything that can be done in order to see this trend be reversed?
How to increase CS enrollments and interest
There are several approaches that can be taken to attempt to address the decline in computer science students. Attempting to attract students to the field in high school and even elementary school is one approach. By involving and interesting students early, it is possible to form a more positive image of what is involved in computer science and teach and show them why pursuing a degree in the field is worthwhile.
Other bloggers have also examined the issue of how interest high school students. Cay Horstman has a look at declining CS enrollments and suggests perhaps that we should look at enhancing high school courses or offering advanced placement (AP) courses to students. Sonya Barry suggests involving industry professionals to act as volunteers in order to support and enrich high school programs. She also examines the issue of how to target and teach high school students in Once we have a room full of kids, what should we teach them?.
Restructuring CS degrees
Another approach which might attract some more students to computer science is to modify how CS degrees and courses are currently structured.
There are several CS specializations or different CS related degrees that can be offered to students. Some of the most common of these variations include software engineering, computer engineering and information systems. Typically these specializations require a core set of CS courses along with several courses in the chosen area of the field. By expanding these specialization options to areas such as HCI, bioinformatics or animation some students which were previously disinterested in a general core CS degree might become interested.
Some colleges and universities are taking this approach a step further and tailoring the core set of CS courses based on the wanted specialization. Georgia Tech for example has introduced a threads approach in which students pick two out of eight threads to follow. These threads include options such as Computer Modeling, Computers and People and Computers and Media. The student’s prerequisite core CS courses will then be determined based on the threads selected by the student. In the words of Georgia Tech, this model eliminates the “one size fits all” CS curriculum.
Other universities are restructuring how they teach CS to ensure that courses concentrate on core CS fundamentals such as problem solving, data structures and algorithms as opposed to struggling to programming language syntax and other non fundamental issues.
Will the students come back?
There is no doubt that reversing declining computer science enrollments is a difficult task. There are several additional factors which are not directly under control such as macroeconomic factors such as the job market, the valuation and hence accompanying salaries and prospects of CS graduates. Despite tons of efforts in recruitment and attractions, if there are no stable well paying jobs for graduates, except for the hardcore passionate computer geek, students will simply not enroll. There are signs however that things might be turning around.
May 23rd, 2008
Posted by
Danny D'Amours |
Tech|
4 comments
Google’s Android Developer Challenge
With the introduction of its Android mobile platform, Google announced the Android Developers Challenge which has $10 million in prizes for great mobile applications built for Android.
Phase 1 Round 1 winners
The first phase of the challenge which was just completed, resulted in 50 applications being shortlisted, the developers receiving $25000 and the chance to go on to the next round where up to $275000 will be up for grabs to the best applications.
It appears that Google has already received its money’s worth. Before even a single phone or handset is built, Google managed to get a nice little roster of applications created. The winning 50 applications are shown here (PDF - 4 MB). Although I can’t attest to the quality of the submissions, there appears to be some really interesting ideas in the list. Silicon Alley Insider narrowed it down to their favourite 5.
One application that I was impressed with was AndoidScan which can recognized bar codes from books, CDs or DVDs and will fetch reviews and perform a pricing comparison with a dozen online stores. If it works as advertised, it could end up being a really handy application. As expected, a few applications are mobile social applications and few deal with sharing routes or quickly sharing pictures and other data while on the go. All appear to have some potential.
Android vs. iPhone vs. Blackberry
Google is obviously trying to attack the chicken and egg problem of handsets and applications. By providing a lineup of useful apps, handset providers will be more likely to make the plunge and create new Android or Open Handset Alliance based handsets. Applications will also be the key battlefield in the competition between the Android platform and the iPhone and Blackberry. Google is hoping that by building a strong SDK and attracting developers to the relatively open platform that great applications will emerge which will raise the profile and popularity of Android.
Gotta love competition….
May 20th, 2008
Posted by
Danny D'Amours |
Tech|
no comments
Assessing the flood damage
If you are interested in seeing the extent of the damage from the great Fredericton flood of 2008, there are several videos and pictures available on the internet. I will list a few of the better sites and video which show how the Fredericton area has been impacted by this 2008 flood.
Fredericton Flood 2008 videos
May 3rd - 30 minute video (and pictures) from the government of New Brunswick taken from a boat on the river surveying damage in the rural areas of Maugerville and Sheffield.
May 1st - 36 minute aerial video (and associated aerial pictures) from the New Brunswick government of the Fredericton area starting at Lincoln, flying west over the downtown Fredericton area and continuing upstream on the south side over the river to Mactaquac Dam. The video then continues back to Fredericton on the north side of the river and continues downstream to Maugerville before circling back upstream to downtown Fredericton. Unfortunately the video is not of the highest resolution so it often hard to see the flooding particularly in the city except in obvious areas such as the Westmorland street bridge. The last couple of minutes of video however do have a better look at downtown Fredericton and the extent of the flooding. The devastation in the rural areas of Maugerville and Sheffield is readily obvious however.
A YouTube search Fredericton flood for Fredericton also has a few personal videos of the 2008 Fredericton flood from the ground.
On the ground flood pictures
There are several bloggers posting on the ground flood pictures including Charles Leblanc and MacBros.
Some major media sites, in particular the CBC and have also created a section on their site where people can post their own flood pictures and videos.
A Flickr search for “Fredericton flood“also brings up more 1300 photographs taken from various people around the city.
May 4th, 2008
Posted by
Danny D'Amours |
Fredericton|
one comment
Fredericton is flooding
It appears that the spring of 2008 will go down in the books as a bad flood year for Fredericton and the Saint John river. Over the past few weeks warm weather has quickly melted a large amount of snow in the Saint John valley watershed. There was such a large amount of snowpack which had accumulated over the winter that in the last week of April, the river has reached and surpassed the flood level of 6.5 meters. In fact the river reached 7.2 meters on April the 24th. Luckily, the following weekend was nice and dry which allowed the water levels to subside slightly back down to the 7.1 meter level which while above flood level is not a level which impacts too many people or a lot of property.
And the rain falls down…
This week however the weather has turned against us with a very large rainfall on Tuesday which is forecast to continue until Wednesday morning. This rainfall could dump over 100 millimeters of water over the Saint John river watershed which will quickly raise already high water levels by a significant amount. There is also some rain forecast for Friday and late in the following week as well.
How high will the Saint John go???
The New Brunswick government’s RiverWatch program is predicting a rise of the river in Fredericton to the 7.4 meter level on Wednesday morning and the 8.2 meter level on Thursday morning. If their predictions are accurate, this spring flood would be second highest recorded water level after the 1973 flood in which the Saint John river crested at 8.61 meters. The last significant flooding event in Fredericton (and the only one that I experienced personally) took place in 2005 when the river crested at 7.83 meters. In 2005, Saint Anne’s Point flooded over which caused traffic detour and delays as all vehicles had to detour though downtown in order to access the Westmorland street bridge. House at low elevations in Fredericton were also affected by the floods on street such as Burpee Street and Waterloo Row. Pictures of the 2005 flood can be seen www.ronniecat.com and at webshots.
Flooding beyond Fredericton
The flooding will also impact residents along the entire Saint John river valley as low lying and rural areas such as Maugerville, Jemseg and Sheffield will be severely affected as the water levels rise and access routes and highways are no longer accessible. These areas have had greater flooding and damage in previous flooding events and there is no reason to believe that 2008 will be any different. Fredericton may get the most media coverage but there are a lot of people outside of the city who are fearing the flood.
Tracking the 2008 flood
There are several resources which can be used to monitor the 2008 Saint John flood. The provincial government’s Riverwatch site tracks water levels on a daily basis and provides a two day water level forecast. The site also contains road closures, alerts, historical information on previous floods and photos (including an aerial video) of the 2008 flood.
Environment Canada also has a stream and river monitoring site which tracks in real time river levels.
I also came across an interesting paper on using GIS for decision support in flood scenarios with Fredericton specifically being examined. There is an interesting map on the third page which shows spring flooding areas as well as a hypothetical flooding event if the Mactaquac dam were to ever fail. Interesting scenario planning…
Here’s hoping for the best
Spring flooding is nothing new to the Fredericton area or the Saint John river valley. In fact a lot of people seem to be used to the flooding and refuse to leave their home to escape the possibility of being stranded. Hopefully the river won’t raise as much as forecast and spare property and home owners along the river. It certainly isn’t easy or cheap to pick up the pieces from a flood.
Let’s hope for a long spell of dry weather…
Update (April 30th): The forecast has been revised for the water level of the Saint John river to rise to 8.6 meters which would equal or surpass the historic 1973 flood.
Other web resources for updates and pictures include:
Update (May 3rd): The Saint John’s water level in Fredericton peaked on 8.35 meters on late in the day on May 1st. Luckily the water levels have quickly come down and now stand at 7.6 meters with a projected decline to the 7.1 meter level on Monday.
Now the cleanup begins….
April 30th, 2008
Posted by
Danny D'Amours |
Fredericton, New Brunswick|
one comment
Unity for VMWare Workstation
I previously mentioned that the upcoming VMWare Workstation 6.5 was going to include a feature VMWare’s Fusion product called Unity which allow a virtual machine applications to be detached and shown in its own host window. This feature allow “foreign” applications on a virtual machine to be treated more like a native application and so can greatly enhance the experience of using applications from another OS.
Download the beta
Well it appears that VMWare Workstation 6.5 Beta 1 is now available for download and testing.
The beta currently only has support for Windows guest operating systems so you cannot run detached Linux applications but my usage will only be running Windows apps on a Linux host anyway. I do only have a few Windows administration applications that I require access to regularly. In the beta Unity claims to support Linux Compviz window effects for guest applications as well as support for virtual desktops which means that you can move guest apps onto any virtual desktop.
More features to enjoy
Additional features include:
- support for certain card readers
- link state propagation which allows a roaming laptop to propogate the network state changes (connection, IP address, etc) to be automatically reflected in guest VMs
- improved 3D graphics support in the guest VMs
First impressions
After downloading the beta, the first thing that I notice is that the vmware config which is required after every kernel upgrade has been integrated into the workstation startup. Yeah!!!
Workstation 6.5 beta also opened up my 6.0 Windows XP image without a problem and after a quick install of the updated VMWare Tools, I was able to enable the Unity feature and use Windows applications in detached mode.
Here is a screenshot of Workstation 6.5 running on my laptop with MS Word and Windows Notepad running in detached mode.
Is everything perfect?
There have been a few complaints on the message boards about the slowness of the beta due to debug mode being enabled but that seems to be a reasonable compromise. After all this is a beta….
There are also a some acknowledged problems with graphical glitches with windows and some known beta limitations such as lack of multi-monitor support.
Hopefully beta 2 will smooth out some of these rough patches.
See this blog post for more information : Workstation 6.5 Beta 1 - Now with 100% more Unity!
Update (May 3rd): For anybody who is interested, it appears that it IS possible to remove debug mode on the Workstation 6.5 beta 1. I haven’t tried this personally but other claim to have had success.
April 25th, 2008
Posted by
Danny D'Amours |
Tech|
4 comments
Fedora 9 is nearing completion. The final freeze of the code has taken place and the code is almost ready to ship. The 29th of April is the expected release date for this cutting edge Linux distribution.
There is even a preview of the release notes which lets us see what nice features the upgrade has in store for us.
New and improved features
Some of the new and improved features are:
- installer now has the ability to resize ext2, ext3 and ntfs partitions as well as encrypted partition support
- Gnome 2.22 which include the Cheese webcam application and improved networked filesystem support
- NetworkManager 0.7 which adds support for GSM and CDMA cellular connections, multiple devices and ad-hoc networking
- OpenOffice 2.4 which has some nice new features as seen in this review on OOONinja.com
- Firefox 3 beta 5 with its improved performance, refined user interface and improved security management
- PackageKit has become the newest default package management application
- /sbin/init has been replaced by Upstart which in addition to starting and stopping services can supervise running services for failures and restart them
There are some nice upcoming features. It appears that the move from Fedora 8 to Fedora 9 is once again an incremental evolution and maturing of the Fedora platform. There doesn’t appear to be any breakthrough revolutionary changes in the Linux distro but the constant and incremental improvements will continue to be welcomed by Fedora users.
April 10th, 2008
Posted by
Danny D'Amours |
Linux|
no comments
It is being reported by Engadget (via elinux.org) that Google’s Android software stack now runs on Nokia’s N810 internet tablet. Wow!
From the details on elinux’s page, getting Android up and running on the N810 doesn’t appear to be a simple download yet but I’m certain that with time, the process will be quite simple. Since both the N810 OS2008 and Android run on top of Linux, it would seem plausible that Android apps could be run from OS2008 without having to completely reflash the tablet. However, it currently appears that Android requires a specially patched linux kernel which obviously is different from the stock OS2008 kernel.
The Android platform is still immature as an operating system and thus does not have a large amount of applications written for it. If it takes off however, the N810 could leverage that popularity and availability of applications. Having a many devices as possible able to run Android applications also helps Google to solve the chicken and egg problem with attracting a critical mass of users and a critical mass of applications to their OS/platform.
April 8th, 2008
Posted by
Danny D'Amours |
Nokia N810/N800/770|
no comments
I’ve often been frustrated with nice PDFs that I wanted to quickly add some detail to or simply modify. Without forking out a lot of money for the Adobe Acrobat suite the only option until now was to take a screen capture and modify the bitmap.
Inkscape the open source graphical editing tool has just released version 0.46 which now has the capability to import PDFs. The PDF is converted to the native SVG format for editing purposes. You are then free to markup the PDF or modify it as you seem fit.
In order to try the functionality out, I loaded up a Fredericton Transit Route Map pdf from: http://www.fredericton.ca/en/transportation/resources/TransitMap13-.Brookside.pdf
I then modified the image by drawing a rough outline of what the service area for the bus route might be. I then saved it as a PDF. There are a few screenshots below:
Using Inkscape will be a good way to do quick PDF annotations. On a side note, OpenOffice 3.0 will apparently also have a PDF import capability.
April 3rd, 2008
Posted by
Danny D'Amours |
Tech|
no comments
Have you ever wondered what people read about on Wikipedia? Are you curious about what articles are the most popular?
It is now possible to see how many page views an article has had in a certain month at the Wikipedia article traffic statistics site. The site also shows a “Top 1000″ articles per month as well as a graph of daily page views for an article.
Although the stats are susceptible to manipulation, it still can give a good insight into what people are viewing and searching for over time.
I would like be able to chart how the volume changes over longer periods of time but getting access to this data in an accessible format is cool in of itself.
April 1st, 2008
Posted by
Danny D'Amours |
Tech|
no comments
