Monthly Archives: February 2009
Update: ‘More Secure’ (non-EDL) Drivers Licenses Coming to BC Soon!
( Source ) This, in part, resolves a confusion over how the government might collect enough images for the facial recognition built into EDL applications to work effectively – in order to ‘catch’ people who are applying for multiple licenses it will be incredibly helpful to streamline facial capture across all licensing. … Of course, in the report over the success of Phase 1 ( summarized here ), we found that every time that the system has identified a duplicate applicant based on facial recognition that it incorrectly identified the duplicate; every ‘flag’ has actually been an error. … For privacy advocates, the integration of facial recognition at the receipt of licenses means that the state can potentially create a massive facial database that could subsequently be used for non-driver’s license purposes (e.g. running a captured image of a criminal through the standardized database). Continue reading
Funny: Cisco and Valentines
I rarely find viral ads that I find amusing, but this is certainly one of them. Continue reading
Update: CRTC PN 2008-19 Filings
( Source ) I’ve only just now had a chance to start to summarize my thoughts on documents related to CRTC Public Notice (PN) 2008-19; Review of the Internet traffic management practices of Internet service providers that have been filed since January 26th, 2009. Below are points of interest that come up – my hope is in the next few days to integrate and update the initial summary document that I prepared for ISP filings, so that a more complete picture of what has been filed exists. … February 4, 2009 CRTC Response In light of the requests for comments by interested parties, and the responses by ISPs on January 26, 2009, the CRTC laid out what information ISPs would have to provide to subsequently be put on the public record . Continue reading
Update: Network Management, Packet Inspection, and Stimulus Dollars?
While Thomson takes this to (potentially) mean that ISPs and major content producers/rights holders might use this language to justify the use of packet inspection technologies, it’s possible that alternate management methods could be envisioned. … This is a real loss for any and all groups who rely on non-encrypted traffic for intelligence purposes; any drive that will get ‘common folk’ thinking about encrypting more and more of their traffic, accompanied with relatively easy ways of doing so, will substantially hinder the capture of actual content. How you read the implications of this depends on your perspective on privacy and surveillance, but it seems to me that it threatens to further escalate a ‘war’ that criminalizes huge swathes of the population for actions that are relatively harmless. Continue reading
