Friday, October 23, 2009

US doesn't like Canadian copyright laws.

In the Canadian Press article Canada deserves spot on U.S. naughty list due to lax copyright laws, the author suggests that the US ambassador to Canada doesn't like Canadian copyright laws, and is not shy about saying so.

It's not really a secret however. The US, driven by entertainment industry lobbyists, has been at us for years to make our system like theirs.
What they are missing however is that in Canada, there is less power in the Lobbyist camp and more power in the people. The People don't want US style copyright laws or at least don't want to be dictated to by a foreign country.

Make no mistake, our copyright laws need revision (in progress) but they need to reflect the needs and wants of the People in this country, not the US.
So, to the US ambassador, By all means tell us about your system, we'd be happy to take the ideas from it that are useful, but we'll discard the points that we, the People, don't like about it.

If you don't like it, well, we all have to suck eggs now and then.


Friday, October 16, 2009

Apple OSX Security FAIL

More than once now, I've managed to get OSX to require me to log in, but allow me to access the machine behind the login prompt.

I have been unable to explicitly reproduce it at will however, and so I would like help from the people out there to determine what exactly is going on, so we can get Apple to fix the problem.

Here is what I know of the problem:
  • Happens on Leopard and Snow Leopard (I'm currently running Snow Leopard 10.6.1).
  • enable: Require password "immediately" after sleep or screen saver begins.
  • enable: Use screen saver "Word of the Day" (mine is set for 5 minutes).
  • Allow screen saver to activate and move the mouse before the the Word of the Day screen saver is fully active.
What you should get if you are able to reproduce this is that the computer pops up a dialog asking you to log in to unlock the machine, however you have mouse access to your desktop, and if you check, you will be able to change security settings as long as they don't require keyboard input. The keyboard will be captured by the login dialog.

I managed to take snapshots of the last two times this has happened on my machine, showing that i was able to access the preferences dialog (I have smuged out personal info in the images):




If you are able to reproduce this, please let me know and what you did to reproduce it, particularly is you are able to do it at will.

By all means call apple about the problem if you can reproduce it. The case number I put in is: Apple Expert Case 139146232

Update: This has been submitted to bugreport.apple.com as issue # 7318689
Update: This appears to be fixed in OSX 10.6.2 as I have not seen any further occurrence.

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Google Street view in Toronto


Google street view is now live in Toronto.
Street view was delayed in Canada because our privacy laws have more depth than in the US.


Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Google place names in their own language

I just noticed a very cool feature Google Maps has added to their map views.

It seems the place names are now in english as well as the native language of the place.

This seems like a small thing, but gathering all that data and then rendering it for display on the map has a very cool aspect and it lets the rest of the world know that Google cares about the place you come from, even if you don't speak english there.