There’s a fantastic post on the LibraryThing’s blog about the Library of Congress signing a $3 million deal with Microsoft to develop their new website with Microsoft’s Silverlight plug in. The catch is that libraries will need to also have Microsoft hardware and software to access the LoC website.

Casey Durfee writes:

Once you’re locked in to the entire Microsoft stack, you pretty much can’t change a single piece without completely redoing your entire IT operation from top-to-bottom. When the free deal expires or you need new servers, you end up having to buy new Microsoft licenses and software. It’s like giving somebody a kitten for a present — they’ll still be paying for and cleaning up after your gift 10 years from now.

Free as in kitten indeed.

Loosely related story: when I bought my laptop in the Fall I was adamant that I would be getting rid of Vista, even though it would void the warantee on the laptop.  The screenshot software that I like only runs on Windows and OnState Skype runs on Internet Explorer.  So, I’m going to need to learn more about Linux than I thought I would.

*meow*

CIHR Café Scientifique and UBC Centre for Health Services and Policy Research present…

As Seen on TV!

Risks and benefits of direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs

Monday, March 3, 2008 – 7:15 – 8:45 p.m.

Junior Ballroom, Sheraton Wall Centre

1088 Burrard St. Vancouver

Should prescription drugs be advertised like breakfast cereal?

Three quarters of adults will fill a prescription this year, at a cost of nearly $25 billion. The use and cost of medicines may increase significantly if manufacturers are allowed to advertise prescription drugs directly to consumers as they do in the United States.

CanWest MediaWorks is challenging laws that prohibit direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) in Canada. Come discuss important questions with leading experts.

What is known about the effects of DTCA: What justifies the ban on advertising? What can we learn from other industries? How would DTCA affect the doctor-patient relationship?

Admission free; RSVP required by Friday, Feb. 29

rsvp@chspr.ubc.ca or 604-827-4472

Arrive early! Discussion starts

at 7:15 p.m. sharp. Refreshments served

Please circulate widely to friends and contacts, especially general public/community members who might wish to take part

Panelists:

Dr. Barbara Mintzes

Assistant Professor

UBC Therapeutics Initiative

Dr. Rick Pollay

Professor Emeritus (Marketing)

Sauder School of Business UBC

Dr. Andrew Wilkenson Q.C.

Partner, McCarthy Tétrault, Vancouver

Former Deputy Minister

British Columbia Ministry of Economic Development

Dr. Alan Katz MB CHB, MSC, CCFP, FCFP

Family Physician

Associate Professor

Departments of Family Medicine and

Community Health Sciences

University of Manitoba

Moderator:

Dr. Colleen M. Flood

Scientific Director,

CIHR’s Institute of Health Services and Policy Research

Canada Research Chair in Comparative Health Law and Policy,

University of Toronto

Check out civicaccess.ca.

From the website:
Welcome to Citizens for Open Access to Civic Information and Data, a group of citizens which believes all levels of government should make civic information and data accessible at no cost in open formats to their citizens. We believe this is necessary to allow citizens to fully participate in the democractic process of an “information society.”

They have a mailing list - I’ve joined!

Thanks to Peter Suber on Open Access News for the tip.

Finland’s initiative to block access to child porn sites is also blocking over 1,000 legitimate websites — including one belonging to a vocal critic of Finnish censorship.

The initiative is the result of a law passed in 2006 to filter foreign sites containing child porn. Finland’s national police force maintains a secret list of sites that contain, or link to, content that they consider to be child porn. When they find a site, they add its IP address to their list — thus blocking, not only the offending site, but also any other sites on the same web server. (For more details, check out this excellent overview of the censorship process.)

“But that’s Finland,” you’re thinking. “Who cares about Finland?”

Alas, much the same thing happens in Canada. Project Cleanfeed manages a list of sites that it classifies as child porn. The list is kept secret from the general public, but the major Canadian ISPs — Shaw, Telus, Rogers, Bell, MTS Allstream, SaskTel, and Videotron — all use it to filter your Internet access.

There are all sorts of problems with the project. The group that manages Project Cleanfeed has a good reputation, but as Cory Doctorow has pointed out, secret lists are ripe for abuse. (Remember, the Finnish police are using a very similar process to block a vocal critic of their censorship practices.) There is an appeal process, but it’s overseen by the same organization that blocked the site in the first place, and you can’t appeal if you don’t know that your site is on the secret list.

The ISPs’ participation also sets a bad precedent, since it means that they are acting as monitors of site content, rather than as neutral common carriers. And if they’re already blocking some types of content, what’s to stop them from blocking other types of content? In fact, as I understand it, by violating their own neutrality, they may be legally liable for their failure to block other types of illegal or objectionable content. For those of us who support net neutrality, this is obviously of some concern.

(I wrote about Project Cleanfeed in more detail on my personal blog back in 2006, when the project first got underway.)

The provincial government’s internal Internet filter is affecting ordinary Internet users in Tahsis, a small community on Vancouver Island.

An attempt to visit a pornography site, for example, would return a red screen with a British Columbia logo and a “** WARNING **” message: “This connection has been refused. The Internet site you are attempting to access has been designated by a web classification service as containing material that contravenes the BC Government’s Internet usage policy.”

The warning linked to a page that said, “Users must not access Internet sites that might bring the public service into disrepute or harm government’s reputation, such as those that carry offensive material.”

The local ISP is blaming the problem on “crossed wires” somewhere. Apparently, the ISP’s Internet connection is routed through the government’s network (presumably because Tahsis got Internet access through a provincial government rural broadband initiative). The filter is being incorrectly applied somewhere along the way.

According to the article, the same problem once affected the nearby town of Woss. It took six months to get the filter removed.

I remember scratching my head, scrunching up my face, and muttering “I don’t get it” to myself when I first heard of Cory Doctorow making his books available for free download under a Creative Common’s license. He explains why he does this best in his own words:

I believe that we live in an era where anything that can be expressed as bits will be. I believe that bits exist to be copied. Therefore, I believe that any business-model that depends on your bits not being copied is just dumb, and that lawmakers who try to prop these up are like governments that sink fortunes into protecting people who insist on living on the sides of active volcanoes. Me, I’m looking to find ways to use copying to make more money and it’s working: enlisting my readers as evangelists for my work and giving them free ebooks to distribute sells more books. As Tim O’Reilly says, my problem isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity. Best of all, giving away ebooks gives me lots of key insights into how to make money without restricting the copying of bits. It’s a win-win situation.

Neil Gaiman will be doing a similar thing. Go and vote for what book you would like to access online for free.

Radiohead got a lot of press for releasing their newest album, In Rainbows, as a legal DRM-free download, allowing customers to decide how much they wanted to pay for it. This reminds me of the Australian restaurant, Lentil as anything, that allows customers to decide how much they want to pay for their meal.

Rhizome cafe in Vancouver has adopted this idea for a dish. Beside the box where you put your money is a description of the philosophy behind the lentils. There are a list of questions like: what is the value of eating in a place like Rhizome?, what is the value of the work that has gone into growing, transporting and preparing this dish, what is your economic situation? what does it feel like to participate in a system where food could be made available to everyone in a community?

I like Doctorow and Gaiman’s creativity in breaking from models that rely on DRM and exploring new distribution models. Who knows, I might even start reading science fiction.

BC will be piloting a new, RFID chip enhanced driver’s licence that could be used in place of a passport to cross the Canada-US boarder (CBC, Globe and Mail). The RFID chip would have citizenship information, a photo and status to legally cross the boarder. The biggest privacy concern appears to be US boarder guards being able to access information from the RFID chip (like driving history) and that information being stored by the US government on their servers.

John van Dongen, Intergovernmental Affairs Minister dismissed these concerns by stating:

They do not access medical records. They do not access driver’s records. They do not access fines, tickets, penalties. They do not access accident history. None of that information is of any interest to the border agencies in either country.

I have had some nightmare boarder crossings into the US. I’ve been asked about personal information that is not related to my citizenship or eligibility to enter the US.  My partner was interrogated because the boarder guard made a data entry error and pulled up the wrong file. I do not trust the US government, or its employees. This has become worse since 9/11.

I also have concerns about the RFID technology being used.  While I heard on the radio that a metal sleeve would be issued along with the enhanced driver’s licence so that people with RFID readers could not access information encoded on the card, I would like to know more about about how the BC government is helping me protect my personal information.  Some librarians and privacy advocates have had concerns about RFID implementation in libraries.  I think the stakes are much higher than being able to track who checked out certain items of interest.