This is a problem. It causes an unrealistic expectation of what this thing we have built can and cannot do. This becomes more of a problem now that our society is fairly integrated with it. Ten years ago, people were kind of crawling around and exploring this new-fangled thing. Today, people are participating in it. It has defined our society. We now have this thing sitting around that can reach everyone in the nation that everyone can be a part of.

You may remember that I am a fan of Barack Obama. I have mentioned in passing that one of the reasons why I support him is because of his promise to make government data online in universally accessible formats, which is one of the many things he has included in his technology platform. The thing is, though, this will not be a huge thing to anyone who doesn’t understand how computers work. Most people don’t see why this will help “create a transparent and connected democracy”.

Of course, this ties into the other issue of open formats. People don’t understand why keeping documents as Microsoft Word files is a bad idea. People don’t understand why digital rights management is unnecessary. People don’t question service providers on things like bandwidth caps or network neutrality.

I am a fairly large proponent for using technology to improve our democracy. It stems largely from the same basic argument that I laid out in my last post about social relationships and technology. We’re still not taking technology seriously and using it properly. Again, the same basic problem is the people. Technology is not magic. It doesn’t automatically solve all our problems.

How does our government become corrupt? We let it become corrupt by being uninformed and apathetic. Technology solves one of those problems. Obama’s technology platform gives people the tools to be informed. Making government data available, making live feeds of government proceedings available, web tools to track government finances, and using wikis and blogs for public communication are all ways to give people information and let them do something with it.

It’s these sorts of things that convince me of Obama’s trustworthiness. And the wonderful thing is that he’s proven this power. He’s already crafted legislation that created USAspending.gov, he’s centralized his supporters on his website by giving them forums and blogs, and he’s managed to outraise every other candidate using his website and refusing lobbyist money at the same time. It’s also these sorts of things that have convinced me of the power of technology to shape an open and accountable government.

And this is why we need to understand how all of this works. I’m sure you can see how easy it would be for someone to do just the opposite of all of this and actually take away our rights and freedoms using technology, simply because we don’t understand it. It’s already started with digital rights management and the DMCA in the US. This is why technology occupies a large weight in terms of my political considerations. It’s definitely the reason why I’m an NDP supporter, what with their support of network neutrality and real copyright reform (as opposed to the Conservatives’ and Liberals’ capitulation to American interests).

Again, technology is something that we shouldn’t and can’t be afraid of if we want to harness it for good. If we don’t, we’re just letting it sit around as an easy way to catch up on TV shows when it can be so much more. And the danger is that if we don’t use it, someone else will.

The other podcast I’ve subscribed to is The Rissington Podcast, done by Jon Hicks of hicksdesign and John Oxton. The two are fairly recognized (on the Internet at least) British web designers who work at a former air base RAF Rissington. The page has a snazzy design and they are also quite entertaining. They also have some spots that they do like a typeface of the week.

And with that, I’ve run out of things to listen to. While I’m on the subject, I may as well ask for more sites to track on my RSS reader. I’m a fairly picky reader; I don’t read a lot of the large blogs like Kotaku or Joystiq. I prefer small blogs, like 4 color rebellion or The Escapist, since they have this charm to them or reputable sites, like Ars Technica, since they’re usually not full of exaggerated opinion as bloggers are want to do. Also, I’m looking for gaming, technology, or design types of sites.

My response: No, no they are frigging not. They are not selling anyone’s personal data. If they are, they certainly don’t need the Development Platform.

“But amg programs that aren’t faecbook are accessing my datas!” you say. Well, it’s too bad that all of those people making angry Facebook groups, thereby sticking it to the man, aren’t as good at software development as they are at parsing through the Terms of Service to take quotes out of context.

The Facebook Development Platform is an Application Programming Interface. Wikipedia says:

An application programming interface (API) is a source code interface that a computer system or program library provides to support requests for services to be made of it by a computer program.

The software that provides the functionality described by an API is said to be an implementation of the API. The API itself is abstract, in that it specifies an interface and does not get involved with implementation details.

The API allows a program to make requests without having to know the details of the implementation. What does this mean? Well it means that using Facebook’s API, programs don’t need to have all of your private informations that you hold so dearly, since it can just make requests to the server and process everything without having the entire Facebook database on its machine.

I mean, hell, you need to log in for these programs to work. If Facebook is giving your information away, you have more to worry about than your silly little datas; they’re giving away passwords too! Oh noes! Security breach!

People really should actually read the API docs before accusing Facebook of criminal activity, because you all end up looking like retards to people who actually know what the hell they’re talking about.

In conclusion, Facebook users make me angry.

I’ve found Facebook very interesting for learning about people: what they do, what they’re interested in, the connections that you have, the places you’ve been, among other things. It can be very useful. However, there are some wrenches in that people throw into the system that effectively render the system completely useless.

There are a bunch of things that attracted me to Facebook, including the closed networks and the name policy. Closed networks prevents everyone on the Internet from learning everything about you and the name policy stops retarded names from detracting from the experience.

However, there are lots of ways to make Facebook retarded. One of those is obvious: groups. Groups on Facebook right now are awful. While “For Every 1,000 that join this group I will donate $1 for Darfur” is a good cause, it is a horrible group. “Grad Class of 2011″ is slightly better but redundant because unless you’re organizing something through that group, everyone knows when you’re graduating through the normal metadata. There are very few good groups and far too many retarded groups to make groups useful.

Another thing is the profile. I try to fill out my profile as accurately as possible, and this includes filling it out properly. When they ask you for music, movies, and the like, they’re asking you for your favourite movies and music, not your favourite movies and music and little side comments. Here’s a news flash: “David Crowder Band”, “DAVID CROWDER BAND :D LOLOLOL”, and “omg i love david crowder band they are the best in the world!” are not the same thing which defeats the purpose of being able to search by metadata. Why else do you think your music is listed in a comma-delimited list?

Finally, there are the crazy paranoid loonies who are demanding more privacy. Here’s a news flash: any semblance of privacy you think you may have in a place where you give out your information does not actually exist. There are two reasons for this. The first is that this is the bloody Internet where evil men lurk around the corner to steal your credit card number when you touch a computer. The second is that not sharing information runs contrary to the reason for establishing social networks.

The thing about social networks is like anything in life: you get as much out of it as you put in. Social networks are for establishing connections between people through their real life relationships or by meeting new people that have common interests. If you join Facebook and you have no pictures and no information about who you are save for your school and an e-mail address, you’re going to have no friends and find Facebook boring and useless.

Obviously, no one cares about any of this exciting analysis and Facebook will continue to be a place where you express yourself through retarded groups and by posting back and forth on each others walls as if it were some new, unique way to communicate. And the grand experiment that is social networking will fall flat on its face because ultimately, users are idiots.

So then there’s this bunch of users who think this is an invasion of their privacy. These are probably the same people who think Google is invading their privacy. Well here’s a tip I suggest for those privacy advocates: don’t put your information on the Internet if you don’t want someone to see it.

Facebook didn’t break into your house and steal your address and phone number and put it on their website, you put it on their website, so deal with it.

Why don’t you damn kids whine about the real invasions of privacy in our society?

They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck.

It’s a series of tubes.

And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

Personally, that isn’t that funny, but what he said before was proof that he didn’t know what he was doing.

There’s one company now you can sign up and you can get a movie delivered to your house daily by delivery service. Okay. And currently it comes to your house, it gets put in the mail box when you get home and you change your order but you pay for that, right.

But this service is now going to go through the internet and what you do is you just go to a place on the internet and you order your movie and guess what you can order ten of them delivered to you and the delivery charge is free.

Ten of them streaming across that internet and what happens to your own personal internet?

I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?

Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.

What does he expect, that an entire Internet would take five minutes to get to him?

This is as gold as Bush’s “Internets”.

Our phone line is messed up and the first thing I said was “call Bell.” Of course, my dad didn’t listen to me, and attempted to fix the problem. So I went on the Internet and found out you can test the line through the demarcation point. We find that we don’t have one. But, my dad has the brilliant idea of cleaning it. That solves the problem. For a few hours.

So this goes on and off again for the next couple of days until cleaning it didn’t work anymore. So now, we have to wait until Friday to get the phone line uncrapped. So now, we get to live with crappy a phone line for twice the time it should’ve taken to get it fixed properly.

The moral of the story is that if you’re not a Bell technician, don’t fuck around with phone lines. And we can replace Bell technician with the appropriate professional (hence why they’re called professionals) and phone lines with the trade of said professional. And especially phone lines. We’re screwed if we had to call 911, wouldn’t we?

Free Healthcare

Healthcare in Canada was born in the 1980s. It was pioneered by Tommy DouglasApparently, he’s been voted The Greatest Canadian by CBC. Healthcare and the NDP are nice, but they aren’t that great. There are plenty of people I would put before him, including Trudeau, Pearson, Terry Fox, or even Wayne Gretzky., the Premier of Saskatchewan in the 1960s and the first leader of the NDP. During his time as premier, he implemented the first public healthcare system in Saskatchewan. It covers the cost of most medical procedures, regardless of financial barriers.

The issue here is between everyone having the right to quality healthcare, regardless of the cost, and the right for those who are willing to pay for higher quality to be able to do so. In recent years, the quality of service has gone down a bit, with waiting times being extended. The proponents of the privatization of healthcare have been saying that the current system is limited in efficiency.

Being a lefty, I’m obviously against any tiering or privatization of the healthcare system. I know, I know, wait times are atrocious and the system has been terribly inefficient recently. The problem I have with privatization is that it won’t necessarily solve the problem.

Think about it: if you have the money you can pay for prioritized access (basically) to doctors and hospitals and care. But if you don’t have the money, you’re still screwed. You still have to wait with the rest of the poor people. Privatization only benefits those with the money. Whatever relief that brings to the system is miniscule, as rich people tend to be those with the least demand on the system as well as being the smallest proportion of our society.

Also, it sets precedent. If you start tiering the healthcare system, that could be the first step into more and more privatization until we completely privatize the system like the States. That is a very dangerous direction to take.

Net Neutrality

In the past few months, some large American telecoms have proposed a tiered Internet system. What this means is that sites and programs would pay for prioritized use of the pipes. So if Google wanted to be faster, or more prioritized, they would pay for it. Meanwhile, you and I trudge along slowly. The rationale behind this is why should the telecoms have to pay for maintenance of those pipes while companies like Google make money without having a share in maintaining those pipes.

This isn’t limited to corporations. The telcos can also prioritize types of traffic, so if the RIAA were to pay a bit, they could shunt all peer-to-peer traffic down to low priority. The telcos can shove Internet telephony and keep it down. With network tiers having already blocked each other’s traffic over a fight, this doesn’t seem too far out there.

At the heart of the debate is the principle known as Network Neutrality: the idea that the network should be neutral with regards to what travels on it. For instance, if you get broadband from AT&T, network neutrality dictates that AT&T should provide you with a free and mostly unfettered Internet experience (there will always be provisions against questionable behavior). It would be wrong, for example, if the company blocked access to DirecTV’s web site, or if they used network monitoring software to block VoIP calls, or worse yet, charged you extra for them. There are considerable fears that the broadband companies will grow envious of new Internet-based services such as VoIP and streaming media, and look to get in on the action. And they will. It’s only a question of how.

Network Neutrality is a fundamental freedom of the Internet. Not only that, we are paying for Internet access already. Not only will we have to continue paying for our access, we won’t get everything equally. Take higher bandwidth services for example. They produce a greater strain on the network. In theory, it doesn’t sound that bad, until you realize that they are trying to control what you do with your connectiont that you are paying them for.

Tying the two together

Both Network Neutrality and Canadian Healthcare both have something in common so far. They are completely neutral. They don’t care who you are or what you’re using their service for. Everyone is completely equal. There is no way you can pay for better service.

The corporations are trying to change that. A lot of people assert that if they have the money, they should be able to purchase a higher quality of service. That’s the basis of capitalism and the free market. If there’s competition, then prices should automatically regulate themselves.

Of course, we should all realize by now that practice never follows theory completely. Healthcare should be affordable for all if there is sufficient competition going around. A look at the States tells us how good that’s doing. I remember reading an article on an average family, just like one of ours, that had to file bankruptcy so they could afford medication and treatment for one of their children.

We forget that corporations have no obligation to the public and the betterment of society. Their only goal is to make as much money as possible and they are accountable ultimately to their shareholders. And we are proposing that we should hand over control of our healthcare and the Internet over to them.

I don’t think it’s a particularly wise choice to be giving corporations such power over the most critical infrastructure of our society.