Category Archives: Politics
Online Voting and Hostile Deployment Environments
Elections Canada cannot secure an online electoral process, and that process is too important to risk to the Internet. Paper voting is annoying. It’s not necessarily as convenient as using a smartphone to move your money around. It takes time. It’s also one of the very few political expectations/hopes that are put on Canadians every few years. It is not too much to mail in a vote, go to a polling station, or (quite reasonably) abstain from voting for political, personal, or other reasons. It is too much to expect that we would endanger the entire electoral process just to attract those who are already unwilling to take a half-hour of their time every few years to cast a ballot. Continue reading
ISPs, Advocates, and Framing at the 2011 Telecom Summit
While some commentators have accused this Canadian Telecommunications Summit of merely rehashing previous years’ content – it is true that each Summit does see similar topics on the conference agenda, with common positions taken each year – there are some interesting points that emerged this year. Continue reading
Review: Network Nation – Inventing American Telecommunications
So, who would I recommend this book to? Obviously, scholars in the field will find this book incredibly profitable. Given today’s tumultuous politics of telecommunications in North America the book offers advocates, members of the public, and policy makers a concise history of what went on in the preceding two centuries of telecommunications regulation. Continue reading
Deep Packet Inspection and Consumer Transparency
Deep packet inspection and Quality of Service infrastructure regularly mediates Canadians’ digital communications. Given the importance of our digital systems I think that ISPs should remain compliant with technical and regulatory transparency requirements, but also ensure that their policies are also transparent and understandable to end-users. Continue reading
